Orson Welles, Vol I (63 page)

Welles was also ruthless about the delivery of the text and the sharpness of the cues: ‘it was going lickety-spit all the time,’ according to Arthur Anderson. Around and beyond the drilling was horseplay. Welles, unencumbered by the need to participate in the action, installed himself at his table in the stalls with a constant running buffet from Longchamps in front of
him, roaring out instructions and mock abuse as he chomped his steaks and muffins and swilled brandy. The particular target of his comic rage was the stately Marian Warring-Manley, known to Welles as
Marian Whoring Boring Manley. Her appetite for food was as large as Welles’s and he delighted to torment her, gorging demonstratively as she watched him. ‘We thought she would the as she watched him.
“Orson, just one strawberry!” she’d beg. “Get away from me you whore! Whore!” he’d cry, as he wolfed another mouthful. It was’
¹⁷
recalled Norman Lloyd, ‘fun,
wild
fun.’

You can’t, of course, please all of the people all of the time, and the atmosphere of bawdy hysteria, awash with anecdote and jest, was not to some people’s taste. Whitford Kane, in particular, was enraged by the waste of time
and the avoidance of proper rehearsal as opposed to mechanical drilling. Vincent Price was angered above all by Welles’s capriciousness over rehearsal schedules. After waiting on one occasion two hours for him to show up, Price walked off and had lunch. But his anger was tempered by Welles’s charm – ‘he was an enormously likeable oaf’ – and by his talent. ‘He was the best director I ever had –
I still say that. He gave you wonderful things to do.’
¹⁸
Chubby, too, despite his reservations about Welles’s approach to comedy knew that he was being wonderfully served: ‘The way our script was arranged I seemed to be the catalyst … it was all very flattering to me.’
¹⁹

Unlike
Julius Caesar
, the production offered no transposition, no concept. It was fairly straightforwardly Elizabethan in
period, a simple setting of wooden towers to create the various locations; three curtains divided up the stage to make interiors. Sam Leve maintains that the design was a reworking of his setting for
The Song of the Dnieper
(1936) at the Yiddish Art Theatre which Welles had seen and liked, admiring its use of untreated surfaces. ‘Our settings are simple – what I call “factual”,’
²⁰
Welles told
Helen Ormsbee. ‘That is, everything you see is exactly what it purports to be. We don’t paint a piece of canvas to look like wood – we use wood itself. No paint or artificial colouring appears in the sets. There is no deep, occult reason for that; it is just that we want to keep the homespun feel of the piece.’ Brecht hovers again; his great designer Caspar Neher, with his passion for the textures
of lived life, would have approved. Welles was clearly in no mood to acknowledge any input of Leve’s; in the Ormsbee interview from which the above comment is taken he attributes both costumes and scenery to Millia Davenport. The costumes were particularly successful. Welles gave her a more or less free hand, only stipulating that codpieces should be prominent, the first time they had been seen on
the American stage. This proved a fatal temptation to Francis Carpenter, who couldn’t resist rubbing his against fellow actors’, causing gasps at matinees.
Chubby Sherman found a more tasteful use for his codpiece: ‘he had,’ said Davenport, ‘the most revolting triangle of shoe leather – absolutely unmanageable – tied on with thongs, which kept coming undone. He spent his entire time onstage keeping
himself decent. It was the most adorable thing anyone had seen.’
²¹
Inventing, in her own words, ‘a paraphrase of authentic period dress’, she experimented with unconventional materials – ironing board covers, for example, and brightly coloured laces. The women were straightforwardly costumed; men were stratified by class, Lords being ‘sober, dark, and dignified’, while the shoemakers were clad
in varieties of woollens. Andrea Nouryeh reports that Davenport, in order to focus Welles’s attention, left the hands and feet off figures on her designs, ‘knowing that he’d not be able to resist completing them, and would thus be obliged to look at them’.

His collaborators were getting wise to his foibles. He asked for a boat at the back of the stage, next to the burlap cyclorama; Walter
Ash, the stage manager, told him that Maurice Evans – for whom Welles then entertained, and still entertained, even fifty years later, absolute contempt – had used one in his
Hamlet
. There was no more talk of boats. Engel’s music (he had to write for exactly the same instrumental combination as Blitzstein had used in
Caesar
: ‘an entire score of duets for trumpet and horn with occasional percussive
folderol’)
²²
was planned as carefully as everything else. ‘Orson Welles virtually dictated the twiddles I composed for
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
. Often he tapped out rhythms for a particular spot and no less often described the quality of the melody and the number of measures needed. The production that resulted from this method was always one very definite idea made up of the scenery he had designed,
the play he had revised, the acting he had postulated in great detail, and the accompanying twiddles he had indicated. This was a very stimulating kind of theatre and it achieved exactly what its founder intended it to.’ Perhaps partly because he wasn’t in it,
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
was altogether more achieved than
Caesar
: a unified conception executed with great skill.

The showmanship didn’t
end with the production, either. Feeling that the cast needed contact with an audience as soon as possible, and perhaps distantly remembering Guthrie McClintic’s similar invitation on the tour of
Romeo and Juliet
, Welles invited the spectators of the last performance of
Julius Caesar
before the opening of
Shoemaker’s Holiday
to stay behind and watch the set being dismantled and the new one erected,
and then to attend a run-through of the show. The press office next thoughtfully alerted the newspapers.
‘Getting wind of the event through the Broadway telegraph, this reporter hastened over to the Mercury to see what was in this talk of institution of the double-feature system, and found a group of spectators grimly entrenched in their seats waiting for the promised show … the balcony returned
first and sat in the orchestra seats, driving the white tie and tails into the balconies. Seven ermine coats watched the Elizabethan comedy from an unaccustomed height and several hundred members of labor unions who had bought seats in blocks relaxed in the divans.’
²³

The curtain was up while the sets were changed, giving the audience a chance ‘to assimilate the strange fact that stage hands
invariably wear strange hats’. Marc Blitzstein’s Hammond organ played while they changed the set; larking about, they accidentally knocked over a large piece of it, narrowly avoiding killing several spectators. Chubby Sherman addressed the audience, telling them that for the purposes of the run they would be using the
Julius Caesar
lighting plot – ‘just imagine we’re beautifully lit.’ The show
that night was a riot. A couple of weeks later, the
New York Telegram
threw an interesting light on this episode: ‘The audience felt intimately connected with the actors when they heard calls of “Is everybody ready?” “Places please!” and “All right, let her up, boys!” But if only they had known that even these yells had been rehearsed with the cast earlier that evening, line for line. Quite a
showman, Mr Welles.’
²⁴

The very date chosen for the opening of the show was a piece of chutzpah: ‘If the Mercury Theatre’s courage needed any further proving it would be simply that it has picked New Year’s night for the official opening of
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
– as bad a theatregoing evening as the season affords. It has also set a flossy (for the Mercury) top of $4.40 for the occasion.’
Curiously enough, the show that night played to scarcely a laugh, making something of a mockery of Dekker’s dedication which Welles had appended to the play in place of the prologue: ‘Take all in good purpose that is well intended for nothing is purposed but mirth. Mirth lengtheneth long life, which with all other blessings I heartily wish you.’ As so often on such occasions, even as the actors
were wringing their hands and weeping into their gins at the disaster they had just perpetrated, the press was busily reporting unconfined hilarity. The critics had, for the most part, no idea what to expect, no previous experience of the play; their enchanted approval was evidently unfeigned. Welles’s audacity with the text seemed to cock a snook at academia, as well as putting Dekker to rights
– as if they’d been bored by him once too
often. ‘To
Julius Caesar
, a terrifying tragedy, now add an uproarious strip of Elizabethan fooling,’
²⁵
said Atkinson of the
Times
. ‘If there was any doubt after
Julius Caesar
that the Mercury Theatre is the liveliest drama household in town,
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
should dispel it, for the Dekker comedy is the funniest jig of the season and the new year
has begun with a burst of theatrical hilarity.’ The actors were praised over and over, none more so than Chubby Sherman: ‘a masterpiece of low comedy acting, a perfect blend of innocence, mischief and good-natured fooling, poised enough to address the audience without modern self-consciousness, and racy enough to kick Dekker in the pants when necessary’
²⁶
said the
Journal-American
, and it spoke
for virtually every review.

The only serious reservations expressed were from the left (John Gassner described the show as ‘a series of glittering fragments stuck in a matrix of obvious horseplay’,
²⁷
while Clurman thought the show ‘much less bawdy than androgynously. shrill’) and from the visiting English critic Ivor Brown, who was able, a little immodestly, to tell the readers of
The New
York Times
: ‘Bully boy Dekker is quite familiar to me.’
²⁸
Correctly noting that the play has three elements – ‘a kind of lyrical tenderness, a sweet opportunity for song and dance and a lot of rough, rude and roistering fun. In short, it is a three-Dekker sandwich’ – he accuses the Mercury of leaving out ‘the tender lettuce and give us only the strong meat’. He also abhorred the company’s tendency
to send Dekker up. ‘I protest against the habit of laughing with Dekker and at him simultaneously … yes, there is much rude mirth but the players are too obviously having their own fun. This is not the real
Shoemaker’s Holiday
. It is a Busker’s Night Out.’ For all his pedantry, he was perhaps right. The spectacle of actors, as described by Brown, alternately milking and tormenting a defenceless
old play is not always an attractive one. There’s a great deal more there, which could have been entertainingly and absorbingly revealed. But the bit of the play that Welles had decided to offer, he had done wonderfully well. Ninety minutes non-stop fun is not to be sniffed at.

Among American critics, at any rate, there was no doubt: the show was dazzling, the Mercury was ‘still the great
comfort of the theatrical season’
²⁹
and Welles – Welles was simply a genius. It was a brilliant calculation on the part of Welles and Houseman to follow
Caesar
so quickly with something utterly different. To do a fascist
Julius Caesar
in 1937 did not require a giant leap of imagination; indeed, Schintzer had got there first. To revive an Elizabethan City Comedy by a more-or-less unknown and almost
totally unperformed writer in New York is extraordinary enough; to have played it in more or less Tudor style and still have made everybody notice the modern relevance of it, is a sort of miracle. The production is less remembered because Welles wasn’t in it; it contributes nothing to his legend, to the
Guinness Book of Records
dimension of his persona. There was plenty of that to come; but in
terms of his work in the theatre, the reviews that he received for
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
were the best of his career. All the evidence suggests that it was also his best work.

For the Mercury, too, it was a triumph: a dazzling demonstration of versatility and a peak never recovered. The acting company was acknowledged to be stronger than that of
Julius Caesar
: ‘some of his current actors
have come to him from the ordinary marts of the commercial theatre – Kane, Price, Barrett, Warring-Manley – and it has done all of them good.’
³⁰
The theatre became fashionable – ‘pardon me for shoving, but I’m keeping my seat on this bandwagon before the subway crush, to hail
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, Tom Dekker’s jig-and-tale-of-bawdy, that represents another Mercury body blow to an anemic Broadway,’
thrilled
The Stage at Eve
– but serious analysis was forthcoming, too.

Atkinson in the
Times
said: ‘the general hope in this neighborhood is that the Mercury will become a permanent part of our theatrical life, giving the classics a sturdy hearing and perhaps developing new playwrights in time.’ Noting that ‘more repertory theatres have been destroyed by a hit than you can shake a stick at’,
he praises the Mercury’s remounting of
Cradle Will Rock
, and subsequent staging of
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, and playing of it in repertory with
Caesar
. ‘Although theatregoers have learned to let imposing announcements slip into one ear and out the other, there is every reason to believe that Orson Welles and John Houseman not only mean what they say, but have the ability to do it.’ They were being
taken terribly seriously; much was expected of them. ‘We’re all a little skittish now,’
³¹
Chubby Sherman told the
Times
. ‘We know our luck can’t hold. We’re expecting the deluge any moment, and when it does come we’ll quietly withdraw to the country for a while and do some quiet work. All our plays so far have been in the manner of stunts, and some day we’ll be producing a real play in which an
actor opens a door, a real door, walks in, sits down and begins to talk. And that’ll be the end of us!’ This was dangerously frank talk; his point about them being found out if they played a realistic play realistically may have had a grain of truth in it. The plays had been trimmed to their talents. ‘I don’t
think I’d better say any more about the Mercury. Orson will rap my knuckles.’