Orson Welles, Vol I (76 page)

In short, he was everything that Orson Welles was not. Fifteen years older than Welles, the English actor had arrived in America to replace Basil Rathbone
as Katharine Cornell’s Romeo. He had been acclaimed for that, and for pretty well everything else he did. His Napoleon in
St Helena
, his
Richard II
and his
Hamlet
(favourably compared to Gielgud’s) were lauded to the heavens. It was when he played, to ever riper superlatives, the role of Falstaff (‘a part which Orson regarded,’
⁷
said Houseman, ‘as he did every great classical part, as exclusively
his own’) in repertory with
Richard II
, that Welles was goaded beyond endurance.
Five Kings
was, as Houseman put it, ‘a means of dealing a crushing blow to that English upstart’. It would ‘by its sheer magnitude … reduce Mr Evans once and for all to his true pygmy stature.’ It was not to be; Evans’s career continued unchecked. There followed a triumphant cockney Malvolio, then
Macbeth
with Judith
Anderson; with
Dial M for Murder
he became a boulevard star and a millionaire. His last great role was – a final slap in the face for Welles – a definitive Captain Shotover in
Heartbreak House
. Nothing, Peter Ustinov notes in
Dear Me
, rankles as much as the undeserved success of contemporaries; Evans’s career never ceased to bewilder and enrage Welles. For the purposes of
Five Kings
, this excess
of contempt had an unfortunate effect on the clarity of his thinking about the vast project.

Meanwhile, the publicity machine swung into action. The first task was to explain the resurrection of the Mercury. Herbert Drake (later Welles’s personal publicist) protested in his ‘Playbill’ column
in the
New York Herald Tribune
that reports of the Mercury’s death had been greatly exaggerated: ‘That
subdued muttering you hear these days is made by the disgruntled mourners over the Mercury Theatre’s bier who are being set on their ears by the renewed activity in that most stimulating of the current theatres.’
⁸
Five Kings
, he reports, ‘the much heralded and much disbelieved
Five Kings
’ is cast and ready to go into rehearsal. The Mercury is dead; long live the Mercury! Drake reports that the
details of the operation of the tour were being worked on; the problem was how to combine it with the radio operation. ‘John Houseman, partner and detail arranger for the soaring ideas of Welles,’ says Drake, in a phrase that must have delighted Houseman, ‘suspects that the company will give three matinees instead.’
Campbell’s Playhouse
was transmitted on a weekday; there could be no question
of ambulance ferries between onstage appearances. Something much more elaborate was being schemed. ‘Welles’s participation in the radio broadcasts will be by remote control. He will speed to the nearest large station and will recite his lines in tune with his unseen supporting cast here in New York.’ It was not enough that he was attempting to play one of the greatest roles in dramatic literature,
at the same time directing a company of forty-two players; not enough that he was attempting to forge seven sprawling plays into two coherent evenings in the theatre. He also had to be involved in lightning dashes to far-flung studios to record radio shows under the most peculiar circumstances. Had Welles attempted to swim the channel, you feel, he would have been performing his conjuring act at
the same time; had he played the ‘Emperor’ Concerto, it would have been while cooking lobster thermidor. It was part of the myth; people expected it. He rather liked it himself.

The press releases continued, stressing the scale of ‘the glamorous project’. ‘Never before has the entire series [of Histories] been coordinated for presentation in their historic sequence … probably one of the most
ambitious events ever to be undertaken on the English-speaking stage.’ Expected contemporary parallels (which required no pointing as the second European Civil War of the Twentieth Century grew daily more imminent) were avoided except in the most general terms; instead Houseman’s press release shrewdly played to the escapist longings of the American public in 1939. ‘Picture the interest we should
feel today seeing a trilogy giving the history of the House of Windsor, concluding, perhaps, with Edward VIII’s farewell address, and we can know why the histories were so popular in their own day.’ Aware of a need to prepare audiences for the epic quality
of the chronicle plays, he added that ‘only by combining them can an audience grasp both their historical significance and the development
of their characters as they move from play to play … Falstaff, Hal and Hotspur are three great characters, but in
Henry IV, Part I
they are both incomplete. Only when their scenes in Part 1 are succeeded by the ones in Part 2 do they really work their spell.’ This of course is true, and it is also true that there is a considerable amount of both parts of the play which does not directly concern
the three central characters. Welles’s approach to the text was, as before, that of an actor-manager; his cutting of it served above all to focus on the great roles and eliminate what was not essential to them. Moreover, he would be stealing a march over that fraud Evans, who never played Part 2, though even he had interpolated into Part 1 the Recruiting scene from that play.

The publicity
generated considerable excitement, as well as a certain amount of good-natured joshing about the length of time the project had taken to materialise. Welles’s prodigiousness was now the subject of wry humour. A cartoon in
The New Yorker
shows him at his desk, a pair of scissors in his hand, a pot of glue at his side, hacking up the Complete Works while Shakespeare looks sternly on through the
window against a Manhattan skyline. The expression on his face is of a sort of childish intensity, his tongue slightly protruding from his mouth. The cast he had assembled was starrier than usual for the Mercury: his Hotspur was John Emery, Laertes to Gielgud’s Broadway Hamlet and, famously and disastrously, Antony to his wife Tallulah Bankhead’s Cleopatra. Hal was Burgess Meredith, hot from triumphs
in Maxwell Anderson, accustomed, therefore, to verse, but not to Shakespeare in which this would be his debut. Welles’s Falstaff would complete the central trio of characters identified by Houseman; but there was a fourth crucial piece of casting to be accomplished: Chorus.

Welles extended the function of the Chorus – who figures so prominently in
Henry V
, but not elsewhere – so that he became,
in effect, the historian Holinshed from whom Shakespeare had drawn so much of the detail of the play. The additional text was taken directly from the
Chronicles
. Welles’s first choice for the part was Thornton Wilder, who had recently scored something of a success as the Stage Manager in his own play
Our Town
; when Wilder demurred, Welles asked Robert Speaight, the English actor who had created
the role of Becket in
Murder in the Cathedral
, which he had toured in America. Morris Ankrum, an experienced Shakespearean director and actor, was to play Henry IV. There was thus great
strength at the top of the company. The rest of the actors were drawn from the usual pool: people from earlier Mercury shows like Edgar Barrier, Eustace Wyatt and George Duthie plus a handful of trainees and stage
managers (Dick Baer, Bill Alland, Dick Wilson); Lawrence Fletcher who had played the title role in
Julius Caesar
on the road; radio actors (Erskine Sandford, John Adair, Frank Readick); a number of rather vapid actresses, following the pattern Houseman had discerned at the time of
Caesar
; the vaudeville artist Gus Schilling as Bardolph; and Francis Carpenter, still screaming, still fiercely loyal,
still apparently indispensable to Welles. A more unusual piece of casting was that of James Morcom as Shadow. Morcom was the designer of
Five Kings
. In name only, of course. Welles’s adaptation was specifically intended to play on a set of which the essential element was a turntable. Morcom’s task was to make this scenic idea actually work. It defeated him; but then,
Five Kings
defeated everyone.

Lawrence Langner claimed to have foreseen the tragedy at the first demonstration of the model. ‘I was introduced to a young lady who showed me a large model consisting of a rotating stage carrying miscellaneous-looking structures made out of pieces of cigar boxes connecting into something that resembled a mediaeval city made of banana crates and painted dark brown. I remarked that it would
be quite impossible to tour the play, as it would take at least two days to set up this cumbersome scenery in a theatre, in travelling from one town to the next.’
⁹
This insight was swept away in the general enthusiasm inspired by the notion. Jean Rosenthal (the ‘young lady’ referred to by Langner) wrote later that ‘once again, Orson was startlingly lucid about what he wanted and how it should
look’. Two very attractive woodcuts by James Morcom give an excellent sense of the rough-hewn London that Welles wanted to put on stage: with its towering street scenes constructed out of bare wood (beech, birch and maple, cut into narrow slats), it was
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
on wheels.

The settings were contained on a twenty-eight-foot revolve, and were constantly to be replaced or reversed
during the action to create new locations. There were two sorts of scenes: those set in London (with the royal castle and the Boar’s Head tavern, a street running through centre) and those set on the battlefield, where mounds and hillocks were created by wooden ramps. There was in addition a small flight of stairs to give a second level in the tavern scenes, a wooden curtain and gothic screen
for playing scenes on the apron while the setting was being changed from behind, plus, more
informally, a traveller curtain, in front of which Speaight as Chorus/Holinshed would stand. And finally – crucially – there was the turntable, designed not merely to facilitate changes from one scene to the next but to create the effect, as Andrea Nouryeh describes it, of a travelling shot, the actors
seeming to pass through a moving landscape.

It is easy to see why not only Rosenthal and the technical staff but the actors too were excited by the concept. It offered an eventful fluidity far away both from the measured progress of set-bound productions and from the scenic anonymity of those which depend entirely on light to change the location. Moreover, the cinematic concept of travelling
sequences on the turntable (pioneered by Piscator and Brecht in Berlin) offered the possibility of something quite new – or perhaps something quite old, a reversion, as so often with Welles, to the Victorian theatre and its travelling painted-canvas panoramas which Wagner put to such extraordinary use in
Parsifal
. The difficulty with productions that are inextricably linked to machinery is, first,
that the machinery must work; and secondly, that the action must be rehearsed on it. Neither condition obtained on
Five Kings
. Rehearsals took place in a room in the Claridge Hotel which was much too small for the large company, even without the turntable. In the absence of that item, Welles found that there was little he could do in terms of staging, so he simply stayed away for a great deal
of the allocated five weeks. Richard Barr stood in for him – ‘much to the annoyance of Burgess Meredith. He was monumentally impatient with my twenty-one-year-old interpretation, but’
¹⁰
– unlike his boss – ‘I
did
know the lines.’ Denied the experience of Welles’s twenty-three-year-old interpretation, Meredith took to staying away as well (after one spree he telegraphed Welles, ‘Dear Orson, Where
am I? Buzz’); in fact, he and Welles frequently stayed away together. They had become soul-mates before rehearsals started, both in love with the idea of the actor as outsider, roaring their way through the night in various dives and various arms, both extravagantly moved by Great Art (Meredith took to his bed – whether alone or accompanied, history does not relate – on hearing of the death of
Yeats). ‘I was fascinated by the talents of Orson Welles,’ he said many years later in an interview, ‘and I joined him in
Five Kings
. We thought we’d combine our immortal talents, but we shared colossal disaster instead.’

The absence of both leading men from rehearsals (there was no question but that they were the stars of the show; the contract with the Theatre Guild bound both of them to
do two more shows
for the Guild) was a serious limitation; when one of them was also the director, it became crippling. When Welles did show up, he was never on time, and filled most of what was left of the rehearsal period with elaborate explanations for his lateness. Houseman noted his use of anecdote, no longer as a rehearsal technique, à la Guthrie McClintic, but as a work evasion tactic.
There were cycles of stories: ‘those vaguely based on truth … including encounters with Isadora Duncan in Paris … bullfighting … and the Glaoui. There was also an Oriental cycle … then there were fantasies that were invented on the spot out of sheer exuberance or to cover up some particularly outrageous piece of behaviour.’
¹¹
The anecdotal filibustering technique had another use, too: avoiding
surveillance by the Theatre Guild, representatives of whom would drop by from time to time to see how things were coming along. All pretence of rehearsal would be suspended, Welles would call for a bottle of whiskey, and the actors would sit round while he entertained. Eventually the Theatre Guild people would depart, none the wiser. Richard France notes that the Guild, among the shrewdest, most
experienced and effective operators in the American theatre was ‘inordinately willing to suspend their disbelief and abandon their usual procedures in the hopes of cashing in on the Mercury Theatre’s mysterious aura of success’.
¹²
This was unlike anything they had ever seen before; it might just work.

Welles’s one interest in
Five Kings
was staging it; without the turntable, he had no motive
to work. Indeed, one of the problems Welles had increasingly to face in the theatre was that, denied the enormous resources of the Federal Theatre Project, his method of working without any plan, without even any tentative moves, of depending on the inspiration of the moment and what the other actors and the setting could offer him, was totally impractical. Only a fully subsidised European State
Theatre could have provided him with what he wanted: the full set in the rehearsal room from the first day. So he stayed away, until the technical period, when he could really work on the set. Meanwhile the other actors struggled on as best they could. This was not very well at all. They were in the dark, despite all the preparatory work that had been done when the show was going to be part of the
Mercury’s New York seasons: all the research into the historical background, previous productions and past performances; all the company fencing lessons and martial technique classes (including special classes in cross-bow work). All this good work continued. But not only were the leading actors and the director rarely in attendance, there was no script. There had been
no read-through; no one
had seen the complete adaptation, for the good reason that there wasn’t one. Chubby Sherman’s joke to
The New York Times
that ‘one actor asked another actor in our bunch when we’d start rehearsing
Henry IV
. The second answered: “Oh, when Orson’s finished writing it”’ no longer seemed so funny.