Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The first great Elizabethan play

  THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

  The Magic of MACBETH The Humor of HORSE EATS HAT

  Salesmanship at its most ingenious: the result was an enormous success (it ran for 128 performances, having been seen by 80,000 people, including 3,600 standees), the most admired, with Julius Caesar, of all of Welles’s and Houseman’s work in the theatre. There was remarkable unanimity among the critical fraternity. The few dissenters either disliked or dismissed the play (Burns Mantle, describing the play as ‘nothing but a curio’46 went on to say that it seemed to him that ‘the people’s theatre would be better employed, considering the greatest good for the greatest number, in producing plays of timely significance … a modern play of social import … would have achieved far more in the way of clarifying and stimulating a puzzled people’s thought’) or they abhorred Welles’s techniques – ‘arty and ineffective’, said Gabriel in the New York American – but then he was Hearst’s man, and the Federal Theatre Project was high on his hit list. With unexpected vehemence, Edith Isaacs in Theatre Arts Monthly wrote that the acting, ‘including that of Mr Welles, is so bad that it is better without comment’.47 But these were rare. Most reviews vied with each other in praising the production, and describing its effects.

  ‘The prologue is spoken in complete darkness with only a lantern held up by the chorus to illuminate his face,’48 said the Catholic World, welcoming the play, evidently delighted to see important matters like the salvation of the soul once again under serious consideration in the theatre. ‘Then far away at the back Faustus is disclosed surrounded by his diabolic books … from the velvet shadows [of the stage] emerge the brilliantly costumed players, while spotlights illumine certain spaces … intimate scenes are played on the apron … Mephistopheles first is seen as gigantic horrible eyes which Faustus conjures into a human head.’ Brooks Atkinson (invariably crediting both Welles and Houseman with the production) wrote that they have ‘boldly thrust an apron stage straight into the faces of the audience and the settings reduced to a somber background of hangings. Modern stagecraft is represented by the wizardry of lighting; the actors are isolated in eerie columns of light that are particularly well suited to the diabolical theme of Doctor Faustus … the modern switchboard is so incredibly ingenious that stage lighting has become an art in its own right … when the cupbearers of Beelzebub climb out of hell, the furnace flares of purgatory flood up through a trapdoor in an awful blaze of light, incidentally giving the actors a sinister majesty. On an unadorned stage, the virtuoso light gives the production the benefit of one modern invention that is most valuable to the theatre.’49

  Feder (‘whose name,’50 wrote Stark Young, ‘seems one of the attendant spirits or demons of the piece’) was warmly and universally praised, and the scenic simplicity that the novel use of light had made possible was hailed by Atkinson in the Times as revolutionary and beneficial: ‘on the whole it is an invigorating thing to strip Elizabethan drama of all the gorgeous things that silently plague the acting … Project 891 has done us all a major service. By adding a little originality to a vast fund of common artistic sense it has shown us how an Elizabethan verse drama can be staged without becoming a formal ordeal … it is hoped that the Federal Theatre will stage some of the less familiar plays of Shakespeare in the same original and exhilarating fashion … after a brisk hour or so in the presence of Doctor Faustus … I am inclined to believe that our recent Shakespeare revivals have been on too large a scale for the good of the acting, and that the settings have been too imposing. They have competed with the acting.’ This revelation was an unexpected bonus of the FTP. ‘Being primarily an emergency labor enterprise with a good deal of artistic latitude, the Federal Theatre has an enviable opportunity to try some of the mad things that are forever whirling through the minds of restless rehearsal people, and the case of Doctor Faustus is an experiment that has succeeded brilliantly.’

  The acting was liked, but not acclaimed – apart, that is, from Harry McKee, the clown. ‘Harry McKee was the best clown I have ever seen in Elizabethan revivals,’ wrote Stark Young, ‘the brain really seemed to chase about with the lice he talked of. ’Jack Carter was acknowledged for his originality, but not for his technique. ‘He brings something to the part,’ said Young, ‘that the ordinary actor of the rant school might miss; he needs only to feel like troubling himself to study the vivid meanings written there.’ As for Welles, ‘he finds in the title role the opportunity for which he has apparently been waiting. He misses, perhaps, some of the music of the noble lines, but he gets resounding drama into them, and in the final scenes where he listens to the striking clock and waits to pay his soul to Lucifer, his acting has great emotional force.’ Many other notices spoke, not entirely enthusiastically, of his deliberate pacing and articulation. Atkinson: ‘Mr Welles has a heavy and resonant voice that takes possession of a theatre; as Doctor Faustus he gives a performance deliberate enough to be understood and magnetic enough to be completely absorbing.’ Stark Young had him speaking the poetry ‘far above average’ and credited him with ‘some veritable triumphs of reading, not least those passages that hang in the air by almost less than a thread.’

  There is little sense in the notices of what Houseman and others detected in Welles’s performance: a feeling of personal identification. Paula Laurence said: ‘There were so many dark sides of Orson’s nature, his belief in evil forces, that suited Faustus.’51 Neither this, nor the intensity of his relationship with Jack Carter’s Mephostophilis, were remarked on. For Paula Laurence, ‘Jack Carter, that hostile, troubled, violent man, played Mephostophilis with a tenderness towards Faustus that was totally riveting and unexpected.’ Houseman, in describing the scenes between them, reveals his deep love of Welles’s work, his involvement in it, and his precise observation of it. In his account, one senses his eyes riveted on the stage, night after night. ‘Their presence on stage together was unforgettable: both were around six foot four, both men of abnormal strength capable of sudden, furious violence. Yet their scenes together were played with restraint, verging on tenderness, in which temptation and damnation were treated as acts of love. Welles was brightly garbed, bearded, mediaeval, ravenous, sweating and human; Carter was in black – a cold, ascetic monk, his face and gleaming bald head moon white and ageless against the surrounding night. As Orson directed him, he had the beauty, the pride and the sadness of a fallen angel … he listened to his last gasping plea for respite … with the contemptuous and elegant calm of a Lucifer who is, himself, more deeply and irrevocably damned than his cringing human victim.’52 Faustus’s sin was the terrible sin against the Holy Ghost: ‘pride and despair, inextricably linked, must be so called’,53 in Roma Gill’s words: the very combination that made Jack and Orson soul-mates.

  The private relationship of the two men seems to have lost some of its intensity. Partly this was because they were off-Broadway rather than in Harlem – Orson’s territory, not Jack’s. Welles no longer needed to prove himself, as a man or as a director. The screenplay of The Cradle Will Rock includes a curious exchange between the two:

  JACK CARTER

  Folks’II start thinkin’ that old rumour was true.

  ORSON WELLES

  What rumour? … You and me? Whoever believed that?

  JACK CARTER

  About me and your wife.

  (Orson stares at Jack.)

  JACK CARTER

  He’s so dumb he has to use both hands to find his ass.

  I wish it had been true. But now word’s out about your Jewish pal –

  ORSON WELLES

  Marc and me? … or Marc and Virginia?

  JACK CARTER

  The combination of your choice, Bubah.

  Some of the complexity of their relationship is suggested by this exchange; it must have informed their work onstage.

  Critical feeling emphasised that the play had been released to a new audience, and with it perhaps the whole corpus of Elizab
ethan theatre. Atkinson in his re-review of the production in the Times says: ‘By being sensible as well as artists, Mr Welles and Mr Houseman have gone a long way toward revolutionising the staging of Elizabethan plays.’ Robert Benchley, in his bright and breezy New Yorker way, seems to have hit the nail on the head, as he often did: ‘The old Marlowe opus trimmed for modern times – you would be surprised what a good show it makes. It seems like one of the best general entertainments in town.’54 The ‘trimming’ was substantial; the play ran for just under one hour and fifteen minutes. No one missed those sections of what was widely acknowledged to be a play of mixed inspiration – and indeed, authorship. It is interesting to note exactly how Welles cut and rearranged the play, a much more thorough reworking than the modest revisions of Macbeth.

  Taking the old play by the scruff of its neck, he fashioned it without inhibition to his own purposes. Its critical reputation, as a play, has never been high; it lacks unity of theme or tone. In the etymologically pedantic sense, it is a satire (satura, a medley). Veering from the sublime (some of the most sublime utterances in all of English dramatic literature) to the childishly prankish, it combines morality play with Renaissance tragic-heroic drama, and was the work of many hands, including Rowley and Bird, incorporating passages from contemporary works, both prose and verse, while the clown John Adams wrote his own jokes. Welles became, in effect, a posthumous collaborator. Not that he wrote any text – he never, in any of his adaptations, did that – but by omission and substitution, created a new play. The nub of this approach is that he didn’t interpret the text: he used it. His intention was direct effectiveness, abandonment of obscurity, and vivid juxtaposition of events. There was no political point to this (indeed, a handful of militants had cancelled their seats because the show lacked ‘a social slant’, prompting Hallie Flanagan to write to her husband: ‘I suppose they wanted Lenin’s blood streaming from the firmament’).55 Nor was there an intellectual, much less a philosophical, purpose. Immediacy was the only aim.

  After the prologue, with its Icarus image, Welles plunges straight in with Faustus’s first line: ‘Che sarà, sarà! What will be shall be!’ thus cutting Faustus’s restless consideration of the intellectual disciplines, and particularly of divinity (in which he detects an absolute fatalism). With this cut, Welles excises the man’s essential character and dilemma, reducing him – or enlarging him, as you will – from a questing intellectual to Everyman. The opening speech, recklessly cut about, makes little sense, completely transforming the original from its meaning, ‘metaphysics of magicians’ is so placed that it appears to refer to medicine, not to necromancy. The provocative phrase ‘Get a deity’ is rendered ‘gain a deity’. Substitution is rife, and it is not always clear why. Sometimes for euphony, sometimes perhaps to justify business. All this, of course, is perfectly Elizabethan practice; the two editions of Doctor Faustus are clearly the result of two different productions, in which the actors have recorded their own improvements.

  In Welles’s version, indisputably authentic Marlowe is hacked about just as much as any of the rest, partly due to an awareness of the limitations of the actors: the longer speeches are cut up and distributed among several voices; surprisingly, his own longer speeches are also altered and cut, at the loss of some remarkably fine passages. He cuts ‘Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth, Longing to view Orion’s drizzling look, Leaps from th’Antarctic world unto the sky, And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath’ starting the speech ‘Faustus, begin thy incantations.’ He moves all the astonishing exchanges of Faustus and Mephostophilis in their first interview (‘How comes it then that thou art out of hell?’ ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it’) to after the Seven Deadly Sins, and cuts ‘This word “damnation” terrifies not me’ – a sop to the Christian faction in the audience. From the soliloquy in scene five, astonishingly, he cuts

  Away with such vain fancies and despair

  Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub!

  and also

  The god thou serv’st is thine own appetite

  Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub!

  To him I’ll build an altar and a church

  And offer lukewarm blood of newborn babes!

  Too strong, presumably, for New York 1937. There are innumerable small changes to suit the production. Faustus agrees to give his soul to Mephostophilis immediately.

  MEPHOSTOPHILIS

  Tell me, Faustus, shall I have thy soul?

  FAUSTUS

  What says Lucifer thy lord?

  MEPHOSTOPHILIS

  That I shall wait on Faustus whilst he lives

  So he will buy my services with his sold.

  FAUSTUS

  Ay Mephostophilis, I give it thee

  which is undeniably exciting and moves things along, but loses out on Faustus’s insatiable curiosity, his maggoty intellect, and the haunting lines (admittedly in Latin) about the miserable denizens of hell loving company, so sardonically witty and bleak. Of course, Welles was tailoring the part to his actor. He cuts the spirits’ dance – rather crucial, one might have thought, to his dalliance with the spirits, culminating in Helen’s appearance. Inexplicably he changes the location of the place – Wittenberg, with its Hamletian associations – to Wertenberg (perhaps he was harking back to Jew Süss, in which he played the Duke of that principality). He cuts the long interview with Mephostophilis about the cosmos, including

  MEPHOSTOPHILIS

  Where we are is hell

  And where hell is, must we ever be

  FAUSTUS

  Come, I think hell’s a fable

  and Lucifer’s intervention, going straight to the comic scene with Robin (Chubby Sherman) to which he adds the scene with the Vintner, then plunges straight into the Seven Deadly Sins, each of whom is allowed only a line or two. After Lechery, Mephostophilis says, ‘Tell me, Faustus, how dost thou like thy wife?’ The audacity is breathtaking – is it brilliant? or cheap? – then, somewhat jarringly, has the conversation about Lucifer and hell – ‘What is that Lucifer thy lord?’ – from Faustus’s first encounter with him. He cuts Lucifer’s stupendous reappearance (‘Christ cannot save thy soul for he is just’) including his grim parting line – ‘Think of the devil and nothing else’ – and therefore the invitation to his infernal cabaret, the Seven Deadly Sins. The effect of this is also to lose the crucial theme of Faustus’s weakness for sensual diversions, something in which one might have expected Welles of all people to be interested. The Emperor, and the Duke, and the horse-courser are all cut, mercifully, and the scene of Faustus’s final night on earth is slightly trimmed; only Pythagoras’ metem-psychosis is cut from the final aria, neither Pythagoras nor the migration of his soul being part of the intellectual baggage of the average twentieth-century play-goer. The argument about substitution or omission of obscure phrases has been neither won nor lost; but we always lose something. Every generation of theatre-goers has had to learn the meaning of Macbeth’s ‘incarnadine’ and been the richer for it. As far as Welles was concerned, there was no argument: it was all academic humbug. The play was for the theatre; if the play-goer didn’t understand what was said there and then, everyone had wasted their time.

  All this is now very familiar practice. No Fringe or off-off Broadway company would think twice about merging characters, redistributing speeches, intercutting scenes. Even in 1937, it caused little stir. The assumption was that Welles had simply cut the boring bits. Far from it; he’s ruthlessly got rid of the gold and embellished the dross for reasons of pressing theatrical need. The celestial drama – the fight for Faust’s soul – is much less urgent and chilling in Welles’s version and Faust’s own mercurial nature, with its violent mood swings, is made much more stable and dogged – as suits a rhetorical actor. (A typical cut is ‘What walking, disputing, etc … But leaving off this, let me have a wife, the fairest maid in Germany, for I am wanton and lascivious, and cannot live without a wife’.) As so often, Welles’s approach harks back to an earlier p
recedent, and forward to something more modern. Welles’s way with Doctor Faustus recalls Henry Irving’s version of the same story, based on the Goethe play (but only just). Irving too used the existing text for his own purposes: to generate atmosphere and theatrical thrills in a series of set-pieces, and to provide a framework for his own unique gifts (he of course played Mephostophilis).

  Welles’s version is in the great tradition of actor-managerial theatre, the play used as a vehicle for the leading actor’s particular talents. But equally it is clear what his version is, in all its essentials: a screenplay, complete with intercutting, lightning transitions, dissolves, wipes and, in the use of the apron stage, an equivalent to the close-up. It succeeded triumphantly. Despite various sententious utterances, Welles was no theorist: he was a pragmatic operator, and Doctor Faustus worked, in exactly the way he wanted it to. Nothing that he subsequently did in the theatre – not even the famous Julius Caesar of the following year – was more completely achieved. The success was not necessarily in terms of the acting (which was, said Brooks Atkinson, ‘not sublime’) but in its total effect. For Paula Laurence ‘Doctor Faustus is the definitive Orson Welles theatrical production – it embodied all the things that were special to him: the sense of mystery, the sense of magic, and the majesty of his own gift as an actor … he played Faustus in a baroque style that illuminated the text.’56 Even Mary McCarthy, who had no intention of letting Welles get away with anything, acknowledged that ‘Doctor Faustus was truly successful, for here the formula actually corresponded in a way to the spirit and construction of the original, and one saw a play that was modern and, at the same time, Doctor Faustus.’57

  The new 85c-a-head audience that the Federal Theatre Project had brought into the theatre was agog. Welles himself said that ‘the audience was fresh. It was not the Broadway crowd … even less was it the special audience one has learned to associate with classic revivals. One had the feeling every night that people were on a voyage of discovery in the theatre.’58 Paula Laurence noted that ‘Faustus played to just people, you know – they were not intellectually prepared for the arguments. Orson knew how to grab them in the best ways.’59 Stark Young wrote that ‘the audience’s attention was such that I have not seen elsewhere in the theatre this year.’ In the WPA Audience Survey Report for Doctor Faustus, in March 1937, the OCCUPATIONAL CLASSIFICATIONS are instructive: PROFESSIONALS account for 284, including 134 teachers, 27 lawyers, 1 weatherman, 1 X-ray technician, 1 aviator; THE ARTS for 117 including 45 writers, 1 dancer, 1 puppeteer, TRADES for 45 including 5 domestics, 1 lifeguard, 1 milkman, BUSINESS for 63. There were 153 OFFICE WORKERS, and 192 MISCELLANEOUS including 134 students, 1 shopper, 1 travel agent.