by Simon Callow
Debate over his methods constantly raged amongst the company, though rarely to his face. Moody, sardonic Coulouris (who during breaks from rehearsals would throw tennis balls against the wall, muttering ‘Be a singer, be a singer! Don’t be an actor! Acting’s horrible’)9 openly challenged Welles, but he became, Jaques-like, a sort of licensed melancholic within the group. For the most part the actors worked happily at the service of Welles’s invention. Nor was he intent simply on imposing his ideas on them. Norman Lloyd reports Welles as saying, ‘I may not be able to direct actors very well, but once an actor gives me something, I know how to stage it.’ Lloyd himself fretted over the absence of any sort of methodology, feeling that the essence or the truth of the scene was sometimes sacrificed to effect; he was none the less delighted by the opportunities Welles’s staging afforded him. Welles’s instinctive sense of how to release an actor and a scene in physical movement was the equal of his English contemporary, Tyrone Guthrie, with whom he shared a revulsion for dealing with the inner life of the character, or indeed, of the actor. ‘Your problem!’ Guthrie would briskly tell his actors as they wrestled with difficulties of this kind; the phrase could just as easily have come from Welles.
The concomitant of this external, linear approach was that if the scene was effective, it succeeded; if it wasn’t, it was nothing. Welles struggled for weeks with scenes which resisted his best efforts; this process continued up to the very opening. One such was the scene in which Cinna the poet is killed by the mob. There was from the start a disagreement between actor and director over interpretation, Welles seeing the poet as a version of Marchbanks, all long hair and floppy ties, Lloyd, playing the part, seeing him rather as the sort of man who wrote letters to The New York Times, a prototypical liberal, brilliantly able to see both sides of the situation, congenitally incapable of deciding between them; Archibald MacLeish, in fact. Lloyd hoped to achieve, as he says, an ‘essence’. ‘I thought you could say “this is what it is to not take a position.”’10 Welles quickly gave in over the characterisation, because he was obsessed – ‘consumed’ is the word Lloyd uses – by an idea of how to stage the scene, a musical, a choreographic conception of how to show a mob destroying an innocent man. First of all he needed more lines than Shakespeare had provided, so, after experimenting with improvisation, he drafted in a few from Coriolanus; then he enlisted Marc Blitzstein to orchestrate the voices using a beating drum to indicate the rhythm. Welles rehearsed ‘this goddam chanting and boom boom boom’ for over three weeks. Sometimes Blitzstein took over; neither of them spent any time on the characters or the acting as such.
As for Welles’s own performance, it was a low priority. A stage manager stood in for him throughout rehearsals. The result was that by the time of the dress rehearsal, he had barely acted with his fellow players (which can scarcely have helped them in creating their own performances); nor, never having run the scenes himself, was he very clear about where he should actually be standing. No one knew where he would be coming from or where he would be going to and he was frequently shrouded in darkness. To add to the uncertainty, he was very shaky on his lines, having scarcely uttered them during rehearsals. Throughout his career, on film and on stage, he was never entirely in command of his texts. He was not a quick study and rarely had the time or the inclination to ensure that the words were so securely lodged in his memory that they would spring spontaneously to his lips at the appropriate moment. Fortunately, he had considerable powers of iambic improvisation, and could sonorously if meaninglessly coast along for minutes at a time until a familiar line would, to the relief of the actor who was waiting for his cue, emerge. Since he had not rehearsed the part of Brutus, he had of course no opportunity to explore the character, to experiment with his approach, or to open himself to anyone else’s view of his work. He had decided at some earlier time who Brutus was – who his Brutus was – and simply slotted it in to the production. Brutus, he said on several occasions, was above all intelligent (the character description for Marcus Brutus in Everybody’s Shakespeare reads: ‘he is a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual’). It was Welles’s belief that he had a special gift for playing ‘thinking people’: not, as he expressed it in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, ‘that they’re thinking about what they’re saying, but that they think outside of the scene … there are very few actors who can make you believe they think … that’s the kind of part I can play.’11
Happy the actor who knows his own gift. He has at least a chance, given a moderate amount of luck and a shrewd choice of work, of playing straight down the centre of the character to create a vivid and clear image of a particular human being. If he is struggling against type, to express things not in his personal experience or make-up, then he will almost certainly miss the core of the character, however interestingly he may embellish its surface. Though Welles was unquestionably intelligent, the most striking feature of his acting persona is not intelligence but power; he described himself, quite accurately, as ‘he who plays the king’. Curiously enough, his portrayals of ‘thinking people’ often lack intellectual conviction: what he demonstrates is thoughtfulness. Partly this stems from a lack of structure in his own thinking; mostly it derives from the simple technical fact of not having completely mastered the text, and thus the thought. Welles, instead of actually thinking, acts it. It would seem that what really drew Welles to the role of Brutus was not so much his cerebral nature, but rather his nobility: this dark, wild, immature, titanically possessed young man wanted to present himself as the very soul of dignity and responsibility. His method of doing so was – according to his own formula – simply to suppress the ignoble parts of himself. Easy.
This cavalier attitude to his own performance is partly explicable by absorption in other responsibilities; but there is a strong suggestion that he became involved in his other responsibilities in order not to have to immerse himself in his own performance. He didn’t want to evolve his performance; he didn’t want to talk about it, or to think about it. In Lehman Engel’s acute words: ‘His own performances happened suddenly for good or ill. They were or were not at the very outset.’12 In none of his utterances on the subject of acting does Welles ever speak of the work that goes into a performance. The assumption is that you can either play the part or you can’t; if you can, then that’s it: you play it. It is a complex matter: he seemed to want to be acclaimed for his acting, but not to have to work on it. He expected to be acknowledged as a major actor, while insisting that acting wasn’t a terribly important thing anyway.
His Brutus was barely glimpsed before the dress rehearsal. When the company were finally able to enter the theatre, the physical aspect of the production dominated totally. Every rehearsal was a technical rehearsal. Once the lights started to appear, Welles would move actors into their most effective groupings; he and Jeannie Rosenthal would spend hours moving the actors or the lights to achieve the images they were striving for. They were in a state of constant experiment, Welles improvising as more and more lamps appeared, Rosenthal trying to make possible what he wanted. Despite the advances in technology and the brilliant innovations of McCandless and Feder, the art of lighting was still an approximate one. Houseman maintains that only 50 per cent of cues plotted would materialise as envisaged. In order to combat this, Rosenthal invented a complex system for recording them which immediately enabled the Mercury to be more ambitious in terms of light than any other theatre. The theatre groups of the thirties were in the vanguard of the development of lighting design, not initially for aesthetic reasons, but from necessary thrift. ‘The idea, the actor and a pool of light to focus interest on the performing area were used to convey the essence of meaning as never before. These pools of light,’13 wrote Jean Rosenthal, ‘alone could create theatricality. Varied as directed, downward or angled from back or front, left or right, high or low, each position produced its own plasticity and pattern.’
This was very much the form of light identified with Welles’s
stage productions; as Rosenthal became over the remaining twenty-five years of her life the dominant lighting designer of the American theatre, her view of light predominated too. ‘Jeannie considered the most important lighting was lighting air, not scenery or people,’14 wrote her friend Lucia Victor. ‘The air in one of Jean’s shows vibrated with the emotion of whatever the particular scene was about.’ Welles’s view exactly. In order to achieve it in Julius Caesar, they needed an enormous amount of equipment which they didn’t always have; the only solution was to replug the lights three times during the (interval-less) performance. ‘Every elaborate effect had to be created by hand,’15 reports Andrea Noryeh. ‘Rosenthal stood on a catwalk to synchronise the counts for dimming two distinct spotlights. She tapped on one crew member’s shoulder with one rhythm and on another crew member’s shoulder with a different one.’
There was a third member of the team, poor downtrodden Sam Leve, and he made his contribution to the lighting (it was he, for example, who realised that the famous Nuremberg lights would only work if the actors brought smoke on with them, an effect achieved by stationing smudge pots in the wings). His claim, however, that the light-plot was his alone, executed to his prescription by Rosenthal, seems unlikely. He, Welles and Rosenthal all had strong ideas; Welles created an atmosphere where everything seemed possible. No one was tolerated who expressed caution or anxiety; neither time nor money were held to be acceptable limitations. But there was no master-plan. The whole thing, once the basic line had been established by Welles, was open to negotiation, and to happy accident. ‘One effect, spoken of as stunning and innovative, was a marvelous accident,’16 wrote Rosenthal. ‘During a dress rehearsal someone forgot to turn out the bald, overhead work lights – whose sole purpose is to illuminate the grid from which the scenery ropes and pulleys are suspended – and they continued to shine down during the blackout just before the orchard scene. The pattern criss-crossing the stage, conveyed an impression of ground beneath bare branches. Paradoxically in view of the hard thinking and planning I believe in, accident is often the source of inspiration.’ A similar happy accident had occurred with regard to the platforms. The original plan had been to pad the hollow platforms to stop them from amplifying the sound of the conspirators’ heavy boots; this plan was abandoned due to cost. The boots’ drumming sound, urgent and menacing, became one of the production’s most distinctive features. Welles’s ability to exploit mishaps remained one of his enduring traits. He was galvanised by them; the rush of adrenalin that they brought often redeemed what threatened to be dull work. Of course in October 1937 he was in no need of additional infusions of adrenalin; he was made of the stuff, and without even trying to, sent it pumping through the veins of anyone who came near him.
As far as the costumes were concerned, the production concept dictated uniformity. Welles’s friend Millia Davenport refused to work on the show: too dull, she said, for a costume designer. In the event, they hired a job lot of olive-green military outfits which had been used in Maxwell Anderson’s 1924 anti-war play What Price Glory? The conspirators wore gangster-like clothes. The fascist feeling was startlingly underlined by Marc Blitzstein’s score, a series of grinding processional interludes scored for a band consisting of trumpet, horn, percussion and Hammond organ, freely quoting Mussolini’s anthem, the ‘Giovinezza’, making Welles’s cheeky claim in interviews that he had intended no specific parallels rather hollow. In addition to his regular percussion, Blitzstein had somehow managed to locate a vast thunder drum constructed for the initial run of Chu Chin Chow, which was used to suitably shattering effect; at the other end of the scale, he composed a delicate Kurt Weill-ish lute song for Lucius to sing to Brutus, a setting of Orpheus with his Lute. There was, too, an immensely complicated and endlessly troublesome sound score devised by the radio producer Irving Reis, of the Columbia Workshop. Apart from simple effects (crickets, owls, railway trains) played on gramophones, sound in the theatre was virtually non-existent. Welles and Reis were experimenting with the sort of ambitious collages that radio engineers were starting to develop; the theatre’s speakers were not designed to cope with the levels of sound that the engineers provided, and piercing shrieks and incomprehensible rumbles were the only result.
The company were reeling under the weight of all this additional input. The dress rehearsal is always a difficult moment in any production. The actors must desperately hang on to what they’ve achieved in the rehearsal room, and use the new elements to enhance and expand their work. The danger, especially in a non-realistic conception, is that they will be disorientated by the physical production, and sink under its weight. It takes some runs of the show for the actors to rise above all these new factors and turn them to their advantage; particularly difficult if the director, as in this case, is given to constant modification of every single aspect of the production. Some things suddenly became thrilling: Caesar’s death, for example, as he rolled down the diagonal line of conspirators till he came to Brutus, hanging on to his lapels, and gasping Et tu Brute. ‘The way they came up the ramp to greet Caesar was wonderful,’17 Norman Lloyd recalled. ‘Everybody had a real dagger: the lights caught them beautifully. Orson went upstage to stab Caesar. The first time we did it, Orson’s knife stuck in the stage and quivered. Jesus! it was unbelievable.’ But just as many things made no sense at all. In the prevailing confusion, Welles managed to fall fifteen foot off one of the platforms; miraculously, he picked himself up and carried on changing everything. Still there had been no dress rehearsal. Finally, it took place and was a desperate shambles. Welles found himself faced with a mutiny: Norman Lloyd refused to play the Cinna scene, the scene on which they had worked obsessively week in and week out, on the grounds that they had never really rehearsed it – not for its acting content. Welles acceded; at the first preview, to replace the scene, stage-hands wheeled a large brute light to the foot of the stage and shone it into the audience’s eyes. This – matinee – performance was an unmitigated disaster: the primitive sound system became completely unmanageable. At the end of the show there was no applause. Henry Senber, the press officer, went backstage, aghast and said to Welles ‘My God, we didn’t even get a curtain call.’ Quite understandably, Welles spat in his eye. Senber was about to strike him. Welles begged him to spit in his eye, which he did. Life went on.
The show, however, did not. The next few previews were suspended, while they set to work on solving their problems. Houseman, who, stealing time from his teaching schedule at Vassar, had been at Welles’s side, on his insistence, twenty hours a day during the entire period of technical rehearsal, kept calm, which is exactly what a producer should do. It is unlikely that his outward demeanour was an accurate reflection of his inner state. The Mercury Theatre had been in crisis since its inception, a bare six weeks before. By November 1st, the money initially raised had run out. At the box office, the cheaper seats were doing well but the carriage trade was resistant. The ticket agents were openly scornful of them as ‘amateurs’. The first investment had rapidly disappeared; only a fortnight before the official opening of Julius Caesar, Rosenthal and George Zorn presented Houseman with a union labour bill for $2,000 which he simply didn’t have. The reality of life away from the comfortable, labour-intensive Federal Theatre was made rudely apparent. Thanks to a chance meeting, Houseman was able to explain his plight to the playwright Clare Booth and her husband Henry Luce, proprietor of Time magazine: they chipped in $2,500, a bagatelle for them, the difference between life and death for the Mercury. Houseman’s old flame Mina Curtiss put in another thousand, and they were in business again. It all hung by a thread, though. Caesar must be a huge success, or the Mercury would fold as soon as it had opened.
These anxieties of Houseman were scarcely tempered by his relationship with Welles, or indeed the company. Typically, the actors were suspicious of and in some cases actually hostile to ‘the management’. He was perceived as financially stingy, and was, from time to time, quite prepared to cut the actors’ salari
es. The company joke was that they’d bring a horse into Houseman’s office. He wouldn’t mind, the joke went, he’d just persuade the horse to take a cut in its oats. Welles did nothing to explain his function or support him. Norman Lloyd, later a close friend, shared the general view: ‘In those days we never took him very seriously. We thumbed our noses at authority – and Jack was the boss. He lacked Orson’s charisma, he totally lacked confidence. He stuttered, he stammered. His English accent was against him because it made him affected; he wore a suit. We felt what’s he doing in the theatre? Little did we know that he was an essential part of Orson’s success.’18 Years later, Lloyd said to him, ‘You were scared to death in those days,’ to which Houseman replied ‘the fear was infinite.’ Teichmann describes him as living ‘in anguish, fear and righteous indignation’.19 Welles – ‘this creature, this Frankenstein that he had built’ – had taken over. ‘Orson hired press agents, Orson gave interviews, Orson was photographed, and Houseman was left there to run the operation.’ Goostie Weissberger was aware of Houseman’s desperate need of Welles. ‘He was the most insecure man you ever knew, terribly afraid of doing or saying something that would sever their relationship.’20