by Simon Callow
And Dublin was always ready for a novelty. ‘It is astonishing,’37 wrote Pritchett, ‘to see how watchful Dubliners are of each other. This is said to be because Dublin is a village where everyone knows everyone else; certainly a rural ethos prevails. Every word uttered in the pub or at dinner will be repeated and added to; so that one is living in a web of gossip, usually with a malicious edge to it; you can see your friends eagerly alerted for it and you know they are teasing it out of you. Malice they love. It keeps their gifts alive, establishes their distinction, and sharpens what they most care for: their personality.’ That was what Orson most cared for, too. He took to the attention he received with almost indecent relish. Again, Micheál Mac Liammóir was on hand, observing and judging. ‘When the demon of showmanship was on him, he would be intolerable; something dark and brutal swept through him when a stupid audience surrounded him, and he would use them mercilessly, without shame or repulsion, blaring out his impromptu opinions and trumpeting his jungle-laughter as one tinsel fable followed another, and the circle of fish-eyes watched his antics spell-bound like children at a country fair … it was the shameful sight of Ariel borrowing the tatters of Caliban and wearing them with such naive complacency that made one blush and look away.’38 The note of disappointment sounds again. It was that public self that Micheál hated in Orson; in private he was someone else. ‘With theatre people he was at his best, good nature bubbling irresistibly out of him sweet as wild honey in a young bear’s paw. He was charming, almost invariably charming, and full of generosity, giving little parties for us all and suddenly asking for advice like a penitent child who has been fractious when there were strangers in the house.’39
Most of his time he was with theatre people, so this best side of him must have been frequently on display. He seems to have plunged into every available activity; as if his multiple duties at the Gate (especially in the Press Office) were not enough, he became Head of Design for an enterprise (‘an art-theatrish stock company quite distinct from the Gate’, he wrote to Roger Hill) run by, and starring, his chum William Sherwood. They played at the Peacock Theatre, the Abbey’s Studio, available for hire in the absence of the resident company. ‘I am kept in a state of perpetual sweaty bliss.’ Sherwood was an ambitious fellow, and the list of plays in the weekly repertory that he and Orson got on is impressive. Their first, Alice in Wonderland, adapted by Sherwood, called for twenty-two settings. It opened the day after Boxing Day, 1931, and was liked by The Independent. ‘The settings, designed and decorated by Orson Welles are attractive and appropriate … in the true spirit.’41 That stern judge, Joseph Holloway, was not so impressed: ‘The whole show gave one the idea of being hastily strung together and lacking in vitality …’40 which, if true, is not entirely surprising, since it was the day before the Gate opened Pádraic Colum’s Persian fantasia Mogu of the Desert, in which Orson had a small but crucial role. His productivity, possibly at the expense of excellence, was thus established at a very early age. He liked, in later life, to quote Chesterton’s remark that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly, but it is doubtful whether Chesterton intended an endorsement of sloppiness, rather an encouragement of attempting tasks beyond one’s apparent abilities. For Orson, it would seem, the sensation of being urgently occupied was often more important than the satisfaction of completing things to the best of his ability.
His season at the Gate was progressing interestingly, but perhaps not thrillingly enough for him. The Duke proved a hard act to follow. Ovations can prove dangerously addictive, and there was little in what came next that could provide them. Nor, it is reasonable to assume, did the directors of the Gate particularly wish to provide them. Theirs was a serious theatre, with radical aspirations. They had two leading actors, Edwards the character lead, Mac Liammóir the romantic, and their programme was to provide a blend of modern and classical plays, performed in a stimulating style. They were also trying to develop a company of actors who had a sure sense of style and a sure sense of themselves. In those terms, it would not only have been strange, it would have been disastrous both for the theatre and for Welles if they had sought to provide a series of vehicles for him. It is understandable that Orson should have regretted this attitude, but peculiar that so many of his biographers have also accused Edwards and Micheál of jealousy and spite in not promoting his career more spectacularly than they did. In the event, they handled the sixteen-year-old well and generously.
The press department (a.k.a. Orson Welles) continued to push him in the direction of journalists. Just before Jew Süss closed (it was extended for an extra week) the London Daily Express felt compelled
while on the subject of the Gate Theatre to mention the fact that after all we have the ‘bright boy’ of the American stage, Mr Orson Welles, with us until the end of the Gate Season, which is certainly good news, for … he has descended on Dublin and taken it by storm.42
Almost wearily he adds
As this young man’s amazing life and adventures are now everybody’s property I will not say much more; but when I hear him mention his trip alone across Manchuria, experiences in Canada, life in a barge on the Shannon, acting in California, painting in Connemara and the Aran Isles, I would like to give him a good shake and say: ‘How dare you have done all these things when you’re not even twenty years old. It isn’t fair when the rest of us lead such dull, prosaic lives.’
He may not have been the only person in Dublin who would like to have given him a good shake.
His next show for the Gate, The Dead Ride Fast, was a bizarre farrago by David Sears set in The House of Shame, where Fintan O’Driscoll, a Black Magician, wreaks terrible things with his Book of Knowledge; Welles played an American millionaire who happens to be passing by. Mary Manning in The Independent, liking his performance, wrote that he was a great acquisition to the Gate but that ‘he must not be given too many aged parts, as they keep him in a state of permanent semi-intoxication. We all want to see young Mr Welles without a wig!’43 Joseph Holloway grumpily dissented: ‘I didn’t like Orson Welles; his American accent on top of his big gruff voice was hard to understand.’44
Only Holloway read Holloway’s diary; Welles’s most enthusiastic notice was by far the most important, and the most widely read: Hayes in The New York Times again. Welles brought to his portrayal, America was told, ‘qualities of subtlety sufficient to make him mystically sinister without approaching the grotesque. Irish drama is reaching out,’45 said Hayes, ‘and Mr Sears has brought it far.’ Percy Robinson attempted to take it even further in the Gate’s next offering, The Archdupe, with its punning title about the Archduke Maximilian, Napoleon III’s puppet Emperor of Mexico. Hilton played the eponymous patsy; Micheál was Napoleon III. Again Welles (General Bazaine) played much older than his own age. He was settling into a line of parts for which his physique, his voice and his taste for broad characterisation largely achieved by intensive application of make-up well suited him: he was becoming, at the age of sixteen, the supporting heavy.
There was in the Irish Theatre in general and particularly at the Gate a dearth of such actors – those occupying the middle ground of the cast list, the solid underpinning of the play. These roles do not often bring glory to those who play them; General Bazaine in The Archdupe was no exception. Still, on the whole, his work was admired, though now critical voices were heard. J.J. Hayes remained steadfastly loyal, and did not fail to tell the readership of The New York Times that ‘at the première, the young American actor Orson Welles scored heavily … as the French general he succeeded in maintaining that balance which left in doubt whether Bazaine was a traitor or merely indolent and procrastinating.’46 Whatever the merits of the plays or the performances, Welles was certainly gaining solid experience; and he was working very hard.
The Archdupe closed on Saturday 5 December. The next day, before rehearsals for Pádraic Colum’s Mogu of the Desert started on the 7th, he managed to slip in a performance in a Sunday night production at the Abbey (his o
nly appearance on that stage): Somerset Maugham’s The Circle. It was an amateur production in which he had taken over the leading role of Lord Porteous at the last moment. ‘He had put most of the contents of his make-up box on his face in order to look sixty,’47 the producer recalled. ‘We had to scrape him off while the other actors waited at curtain-rise.’ The Independent applauded his ‘hirsute, cantankerous and rather simian peer’. Holloway, by now very suspicious of the young actor, was, on the contrary, highly critical: Welles, he said, was made up ‘with a pantomime head placed on square shoulders, and arms and legs that behaved like the penny wooden dancing masters where one pulled the string! He seemed completely out of the picture. His voice is gruff and his manner uncouth. He made quite a hit in Jew Süss as the rogue, the old Duke, as all his mannerisms suited the role, but in all his characters since he has only repeated himself till one is inclined to think him a grotesque instead of an actor.’48
In the 1970s, Welles, talking to the BBC, remembered the event in a different light. ‘My greatest success was at the Abbey, playing Lord Porteous in The Circle, who was a sixty-year-old man and I played such a terrible, hateful parody of an upper-class Englishman that the entire Irish public took me to their bosoms.’49 To compare the modest appreciation extended to the Sunday-night performance of The Circle with the blast of praise that greeted his Karl Alexander in Jew Süss is absurd; but Welles was by then intent on minimising the importance of the Gate Theatre in his life. ‘At the Gate,’50 he said, ‘I got less and less good parts and I saved myself by going over to the Abbey,’ which is scarcely less absurd. He had not ‘gone over’ to the still-touring Abbey Company, but simply played in a Sunday-night amateur production in their theatre while continuing to be a member of the Gate company. His next appearance for them was in Mogu, another example of the Gate’s inability to find new plays of distinction, a fact which Mac Liammóir’s ambitious design in the manner of Hafiz failed to conceal. Welles’s performance was itself a triumph of appearance over substance. His make-up was a marvel, involving, according to Mac Liammóir, ‘several pounds of nose putty, a white turban at least two and a half feet in diameter, and three-inch fingernails of peacock-blue and silver’.51 His work brought forth a double-edged comment from The Irish Times: ‘His performance is good enough to keep one still doubting’;52 they were still doubting.
The play failed and the run was curtailed, the company immediately plunging into yet another new play, Death Takes a Holiday by Walter Ferris, from an Italian original. Welles had a more substantial and more glamorous role in this, giving his second Duke of the season: Duke Lamberto who escapes Death (in the guise of the Russian Prince Sirki: Mac Liammóir, of course) thanks to the love of the dreamy Grazia. The Irish Times finally started to come off the fence about the young actor: ‘Mr Orson Welles did much to satisfy those who have had doubts of his possibilities.’53 Immediately Death Takes a Holiday opened (in January 1932) rehearsals began for Hamlet, with Mac Liammóir in the title role, one for which he became famous. Welles was the Ghost and Fortinbras. In his spare time (which was considerable: the two roles together occupy about ten minutes of stage time), he designed Jules Romains’ play Dr Knock for Sherwood’s Peacock Players; his work was admired by The Independent for the ‘hints at Cézanne in his modernist treatment of the landscape’.54
Hamlet was an enormous success for the Gate. They needed one. Produced by Hilton Edwards in what would now be regarded as a straightforward manner, it was for the time revolutionary in eschewing heavily realistic scenery and in its swift, conversational style. Mac Liammóir went against tradition by playing Hamlet like a man communing with himself; Edwards had used light to speed the action from one location to the next, so that the play was released as the mercurial, ever-shifting dramatic poem that it is rather than the series of historical tableaux favoured by the Victorians and Edwardians. In the general glory, Welles was frequently singled out: particularly for his Ghost: seldom, said The Irish Press, ‘can the Ghost have been more movingly portrayed’.55 Even that old curmudgeon Holloway acknowledged that ‘Orson Welles made the speech of the Ghost almost human as well as awesome.’56 No doubt he was able to invest the figure of the dead father with a singularly personal urgency. ‘Remember me!’ It was a good note on which to go out. He did a final design for the Peacock Players (The All Alone) and then took off for London, on his way home.
We may take it as preposterous (as has been suggested by some of his biographers) that Welles left Ireland in a huff because he was not offered Coriolanus or the part of King Magnus in The Apple Cart. It is conceivable that he might have asked to be allowed to play some such huge play-carrying leading role (compared to which even the Duke in Jew Süss is a bagatelle), but he cannot have held out much hope. He had done well, wonderfully well, but as the reviews increasingly suggest, he was more of a phenomenon, an adolescent Roscius, than a member of the ensemble that Micheál and Hilton were trying to establish. Somehow, in order really to develop, he would need to start again, to wipe the slate clean of his freakish success, build his craft and his understanding. As it was, he was eager to leap onto the stage with half the contents of his make-up box on his face, putting on voices. It is to be doubted whether he had, in his heart, accepted Hilton Edwards’s sterling advice: ‘listen to yourself … you must see and hear what’s good about yourself and what’s lousy.’ It was very hard for Welles to develop. He preferred only to go further, which is not at all the same thing. Having rather splendidly got away with a couple of supporting parts, he now wanted to hurl himself at the great roles. If not physically, then technically, it is as dangerous for a young actor to take on those huge roles as it is for a singer. You will only get through them on tricks; and you will find it almost impossible to unlearn those tricks, especially if, as is likely, you will be acclaimed, simply for having had the courage. To be acclaimed for giving a good performance ‘for a sixteen-year-old’ is a bad precedent. It became hard for critics from this point on to assess Welles’s work on its merits. Already they knew too much about the person behind the work; there was always an element of special pleading, over and above it, an element of the phenomenal.
Dublin had spoiled him, to an extent. It is hard to imagine a city in the Western World – outside, perhaps, an Italian one – where he could find an audience so vocal, so parti pris, so excitable. He had thrilled them to the marrow, then of course both he and they wanted more thrills. Mac Liammóir watched him keenly, oddly perturbed by the sight of a unique personality and outstanding gifts somehow subordinated to a cruder, grosser, unrelenting other self: ‘of course it was said in Dublin that he never did anything half as good as the Duke again. It was, I think, untrue. Everything he touched took on a queer and gruesome magic, a misshapen and indescribable grace … through the turbulent vapours of his temperament there flows a broad river full of stars … all with Orson was theatre; the radiance that shone from him was the light never seen on land or sea, but invariably on painted flats and proscenium arches. He seldom, I think, noticed the wind in the chimney-tops, or the moon on the water, or the rain on the roof; seldom wandered in his mind to the shadows of the woods or tasted solitude on the mountain-tops; all in his world was bustle and authority, a laughing, easily fought battle in the heart of the traffic. He was born for success, big, rapid, and decisive; people excited him and beautiful things aroused his passion, but people and things must all be flung together and hurled into boxes and crates and swept away to make room for new ones at a moment’s notice, and he would sail through them all or cast them into the sea or shatter them into fragments and, sitting straddle-legged over the debris, start to work again whistling and laughing and all in the highest spirits.’57
And yet, months before, he had been lying on his back on the Isles of Aran, watching the moon and feeling himself part of a great lost civilisation. Dublin and the Gate and Duke Karl Alexander had been the drug that had hooked him for life, which is what he meant when he had John Houseman say of him (in his autobiog
raphical 1982 screenplay The Cradle Will Rock, never filmed):
In Dublin, when he started in the theatre he was just sixteen and claiming to be what he is now – twenty-two. In effect, this was a pact with hell; he sold his youth for grown-up glory. As a result of which we are inflicted with these flashes of that delinquent adolescence which he appears to have bartered away.58