Orson Welles, Vol I (54 page)

Meanwhile, the WPA in order to prevent any use of FTP property in the commercial staging of the play, had sent its officers into the Maxine Elliott and smashed up the set. Johnston and Smith described it three years later in their most vivid
Saturday Evening Post
-ese: ‘The
formerly audacious left-wingers of the WPA turned out to be a lot of stuffed shirts under the skin. In their zeal to save America from the WPA theatre, the WPA sent an ax brigade to chop and smash their own settings in their own padlocked playhouse. Big glass pillars full of neon lights and the other expensive equipment of
The Cradle Will Rock
were destroyed in a Carrie Nation raid.’
²¹
Welles
resigned from the Project; Houseman was dismissed under a rule forbidding non-American citizens to be employed by the Works Progress Administration. Unit 891 folded overnight. It had, after all, been created entirely to provide an outlet for Welles’s creative needs, and was now redundant.

The whole incident is a curious one. Welles and Houseman having set out to create a company dedicated
to classical theatre, inaugurated their first season with a mid-nineteenth-century French farce transposed into a surreal Mid-Western romp, then, having proceeded to what was their legitimate business, an Elizabethan masterpiece, they lurched suddenly into a straightforward piece of agitprop, which, instead of simply taking its place alongside all the many other more or less controversial offerings
of the FTP became, due to a series of unforeseen circumstances – crisis within the project, crisis in the steel industry – a cause célèbre, which ended in Houseman and Welles defying the Project, and breaking away on their own. The journey from their original starting point was rapid and complete. But
The Cradle Will Rock
is entirely uncharacteristic of their work, together or apart. In particular,
what appeared on the stage of the Venice Theatre owed nothing to Welles. It was to evolve still further; further and further from the original conception. It is probable that had the production gone ahead as Welles planned it, it would have had nothing like the success it achieved. Lehman Engel wrote in
This Bright Day
: ‘Orson – serendipity at work – was never to be debited with this nightmare
production.’ What happened instead was that his name was more than ever linked with notoriety, never a bad thing, as far as Welles was concerned.

It may have winded him a little, privately, to realise that all that ingenuity, all that energy, all that inspiration was dispensable: the
show worked anyway. Better, in fact. There is a strange sense of Welles withdrawing, of no longer being needed.
The great director withdrew in the face of the primitive relationship between author and audience. He was, in fact, saved by the bell – as, perhaps, was Blitzstein, who said, speaking to the
Daily Worker
, ‘I can’t regard this work purely from the viewpoint of the artist – I believe firmly in what the play stands for and an audience of steelworkers represents a new public, wide-awake and extremely
critical,’ a perfectly Brechtian point of view. Welles’s approach, as expressed in his production, had it seen the light of day, was the opposite. It sought to overwhelm the audience with theatrical effect. Happy Blitzstein, saved from his director! In fact, Blitzstein had been delighted at every turn with Welles’s work (he was fond enough of him to dedicate the next piece – his radio play
I’ve
Got the Tune!
– to him), but
The Cradle Will Rock
is too slight a piece to have survived all the genius Welles was eager to lavish upon it.

Oddly enough, and with that insatiability for new projects that is characteristic of Welles at this period, he had begun rehearsing another piece of musical theatre at the same time as
The Cradle Will Rock
. Planned on a much more modest scale, and premièred
three months before it, the staging and presentation had almost presaged the final form of Blitzstein’s piece. This was Aaron Copland’s children’s opera,
The Second Hurricane
, libretto by Welles’s
Horse Eats Hat
collaborator, Edwin Denby: ‘Once in a while something happens, something exceptional. Have you ever had an adventure? Have you been a hero?’ The opera’s theme is the building of character
among a group of youngsters who have volunteered their services in flood crisis. Finding themselves marooned on a scrap of land, they give way to terror, quarrel, fight and eat the food reserved for flood victims. As their innate heroism asserts itself, however, they sing jazzy and patriotic songs, laugh and joke and generally come through with flying colours. With its representative cast of leading
characters – Gwen, Butch, Lowrie, Fat, Gip, Queenie, Jeff (who is black) – it’s a sunny version of the
Lord of the Flies
. ‘Denby and I,’
²²
wrote Copland, ‘had agreed from the start that all the stage business was to be simple and natural, and that we would keep before us at all times the premise that this opera was for American youngsters to relate to in their everyday lives and language. Orson’s
ideas for staging were original. The two choruses were onstage, and the orchestra was placed on a platform at the rear with the conductor facing the audience.’ In fact, once rehearsals for
The Cradle Will Rock
hit their stride, Welles handed the work over to Chubby Sherman who conscientiously executed his ideas.

The reviews were largely favourable. Some detected levels of theatrical sophistication
that may or may not have been present: ‘The fact that the orchestra in every-day dress sat behind the performance and that no scenery was employed smacked strongly of the Chinese theatre, as did the occasional use of simple props with practically all else left to the imagination …’
²³
More extravagantly, the
World Telegram
proclaimed that ‘there is here the suggestion of the Fokine staging of
Coq d’Or
’.
²⁴
It is somewhat surprising that it didn’t cross Welles’s mind, as he slaved over his epic production
The Cradle Will Rock
, that there might be a simpler, more striking way, but it took a fight with the government to point that way to him.

From the wider perspective of the Federal Theatre Project itself, the débâcle over
The Cradle Will Rock
marked, as Houseman said, ‘the end of
the honeymoon for the New Deal and the theatre’. Hallie Flanagan herself wrote that ‘it was more than a case of censorship. It marked a changing point of view in Washington.’ The Project’s magazine, which was often more drastically critical of FTP productions than outside critics, and though it was virtually self-supporting, was dropped, and its abandonment was a harbinger of a larger dismantlement.
‘Gradually the real reasons began to come out, not all in one conversation, but a little at a time. Was it true that the magazine was on sale in workers’
²⁵
bookshops? Wasn’t the editor … a communist? … Wasn’t there too much emphasis on poor audiences, too many pictures of squatters in Oklahoma and shirt-sleeved crowds in city parks – was this the kind of audience we wanted? We wanted our plays
to be good enough for any kinds of an audience, but our chief obligation was to people who weren’t able to afford other theatre-going. Wasn’t that still the idea? Or was it?’ This chilling account of the subtle turning away from the original ideals is Hallie Flanagan’s. The Project’s short, sensational life was nearly at an end. Within two years, in disturbing circumstances, it was on the scrap-heap
of noble dreams.

As for Welles and Houseman: ‘we had little to say to each other. Our immediate emotional response to the success of
The Cradle Will Rock
was the usual need, on both our parts, to prove that each of us could exist without the other.’
²⁶
Welles was some leagues ahead of Houseman in independence; his radio work had made him entirely secure financially, and it had given him another
artistic life, quite separate from Houseman. Radio ceased to be merely a source of income and had begun to fascinate him with its possibilities as a
medium. His radio work took a number of important strides forward in 1936 and 1937. From being an anonymous and much disguised voice for hire, he was cast in a regular role which made that voice nationally famous; and he started directing for the
medium. He had already, in the autumn of 1936, adapted, performed and directed a thirty-minute version of
Hamlet
(is there a character in the whole of dramatic literature for which he was less suited?). Under the aegis of Irving Reis’s Columbia Workshop, he then turned to
Macbeth
, which introduced him to one of his most significant collaborators, the composer Bernard Herrmann, although the collaboration
on this occasion was less than happy. Welles insisted on bringing into the studio a Highland bagpipe (Haiti having been left far behind), leaving Herrmann fuming at his podium in front of a redundant studio orchestra; the production as a whole was further vitiated by such musical cues as Herrmann was able to add to the all-pervading drone of the bagpipes being one behind throughout the
programme. This chaos was, of course, transmitted live. But Welles was beginning to turn his mind to the challenge of radio; shortly he would apply himself to it with his usual all-consuming intensity, and the results were appropriately startling.

His opportunity came from Mutual, a company hitherto best known for its
Lone Ranger
series. Despite the disaster of his radio
Macbeth
, they asked
him to adapt
Les Misérables
as a seven-part series, which he embarked on immediately after the heroic events surrounding
The Cradle Will Rock
. In terms of adaptation alone, the huge complex sprawl of Hugo’s novel is reduced to three and a half hours of air time with great cogency and fierce narrative grip, simplified, but denied none of its resonance. Purely as a professional achievement, this
is breathtaking, more impressive than many of his more highly publicised feats. To take a thousand pages of text and effectively to convey its essence in brief episodes – to do so, moreover, using the medium at full stretch – is a skill that often eludes radio adaptors of many years’ experience; on what was virtually his first outing as a radio director, Welles at twenty-two produced a show that
could rival any by the most seasoned practitioner.

He had a strong personal response to the material: its theme of absolution was close to his heart, from the beginning of his career to its end. If you’ve worked out your punishment, are you absolved? Society says no, to Jean Valjean at any rate. ‘No man had ever touched him but to bruise him.’ Welles’s growing political awareness informed
both production and adaptation with intense compassion for injustice (he prefaces the series with the
novel’s epigraph ‘So long as these problems are not solved, so long as ignorance and poverty remain on earth, these words cannot be useless’). But beyond this, he demonstrated in his production three qualities indispensable in radio: ingenuity, intelligence and flair.

He had an instinctive
feel for the medium; he had been aware, from as early as his own plays,
Marching Song
with its military tattoos and
Bright Lucifer
, throbbing with Indian drums, of the power of sound in the theatre, having a highly musical sense of its effect on the action and its capacity for heightening dialogue; whole stretches of the Harlem
Macbeth
had been saved from monotony in this way. The medium of radio,
moreover, perfectly suited his temperament, both as actor and director.

It is a medium of technical solutions for technical problems: how do you suggest this aspect of the character, how do you evoke that landscape, how do you get from here to there? He was prepared to experiment with anything; in
Les Misérables
, in order to create life-like sewers, he dragged his crew into the men’s room,
where Ray Collins and Everett Sloane played their scene over a urinal. For both the actor and the director, the medium has less to do with feeling than with thinking. For the actors, clarity of phrasing and diction evoke emotion in the audience far more than if they had deeply felt those emotions; the task of the radio actor is to make the audience see what he’s talking about. As long as the story
and the images are clearly in the actors’ minds, their work is then uniquely available to improvement by externally induced intensity. Even in live broadcasting, there comes a point in the curiously unreal, hermetically sealed world of the studio when everyone engaged on the programme, standing around the microphone in their suits and spectacles, has to be galvanised into a sense of the urgency
of the characters and situations.

No one in the history of the medium has ever unleashed such tidal waves of adrenalin as Welles.
Les Misérables
is electric from start to finish his own gruff and very credibly aged Valjean leading the excellent group of actors (Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Martin Gabel, Everett Sloane, Chubby Sherman). His narration is afflicted with the solemn tremble with
which he liked to indicate sincerity, and makes no attempt to create anything like the tone of Hugo’s own narration, but it is personal and passionate, far from the manner of the studio linkman who would normally have filled in the plot. Years later, Welles was under the impression that he had experimented with first-person narration in this production; he didn’t. The narrator is not a character,
he is simply the voice of the author. The important
thing is that everything in the programme has Welles’s stamp on it. Already in
Les Misérables
Welles’s omnicompetence was being sold: ‘The distinguished young author, director and actor Orson Welles presents the story,’ says the introducer. No one else is credited – neither actor nor technician. This solipsism is as unrealistic on radio as in
the theatre; more so, perhaps: the technicians alone, especially before the development of the higher technology, were brilliantly skilful and resourceful. But there is no question, in this first of his major radio productions, of who is in charge. Within the small world of art radio, his name became one to take note of.