by Simon Callow
‘The Shoemaker’s Holiday is a glimpse,’ he continues, ‘of the kind of domestic drama that was popular at the very time Shakespeare was writing.’ Welles was no archaeologist of the drama, however; it was the curiously modern feeling of these old plays that fascinated him. ‘Of course, plays of the present are first in importance to audiences of the present. That is always so. But once you dip into the past there is no drama that can equal the Elizabethan for universal appeal, humanity and richness.’ Dekker’s play, first performed on the first day of the seventeenth century, brimful of uncontrollable life, interweaving the classes, with a plot loosely revolving around the advancement of Simon Eyre, the legendary Lord Mayor of London, is so human, so rich and so universally appealing, that it can be taken in many different ways. Rosamond Gilder found a parallel in modern life: ‘Simon Eyre is the prototype of all the lads who make good; the industrious apprentice who becomes Lord Mayor of London or President of the United States; the poor boy who earns a fortune but never forgets his friends;’ Eleanor Flexner, writing in New Masses found quite another: ‘The play is laden with sentiments for the times: a passionate democracy of the spirit, a hatred of wars, which tear families asunder, reverence for the men who toil with their hands, and an abhorrence for the fetishes of wealth and position.’11 Both are right; both are wrong. Welles, having read the report by his literary manager, Alexander Campbell, initially thought to emphasise the class conflict (which is plentifully present); instead, Andrea Nouryeh reports him as choosing to celebrate ‘democracy, brotherhood between the classes, and the rising power of the bourgeoisie’. This is without question the spirit of the play, even if the letter can be variously interpreted. In practice, what he made of it was something altogether different: a non-stop riot of gags.
His adaptation took as its spine, not the glorious, rambunctious Eyre and his rise to office, nor the machinations of the aristocrats, but rather the antics of Firk, Eyre’s apprentice. Welles had long sought a vehicle for Chubby Sherman’s comic genius, from as far back as the first planning sessions for Project 891; this, he knew, was it. Not only did he prune out large sections of text, considered either obscure or tedious, but he reshaped the dialogue to increase its comic possibilities. These devolved to a great extent on double entendres sometimes present in the original, sometimes not. A characteristic sequence is taken from the scene in which young Roland Lacey, in love with Eyre’s daughter, disguises himself as a Dutch cobbler, and is taken on as an apprentice. The incumbent apprentices quiz him. In Dekker’s text, Firk does all the questioning, as follows:
FIRK
And hark you, skomaker, have you all your tools – a good rubbing-pin, a good stopper, a good dresser, your four sorts of awls, and your two balls of wax, your paring knife, your hand- and thumb-leathers, and good St Hughes’ bones to smooth up your work?
Welles distributes the questions, and the laughs, among the apprentices:
HODGE
Hark you skawmakers, have you all your tools?
FIRK
A good rubbin pin, a good stopper, your four sorts of awls, and your two balls
LACY
Yaw, yaw
FIRK
Of wax
On this showing, Dekker and Welles might have been the script writers that the late Benny Hill was waiting for. Sherman noted that ‘All the groupings and firkings were like children’s12 horseplay. We were children saying dirty words.’ A great deal was made of the homonyms: firk/fuck and, stretching it a bit, firk/fart; firk is, it must be admitted, a rather Clouseauesque fuck. All this is not by any means alien to the Elizabethan mind, though it was only a fraction of it, and only a fraction of Dekker’s play.
Rehearsals were, even more than usual with Welles, a riot, interspersed with strict drilling. Lehman Engel describes his method. ‘He rehearsed with military discipline. He might laugh at something, then have an actor do a piece of business that he’d devised ten times until the actor knew it mechanically.’13 Arthur Anderson recalled one such moment: ‘One day accidentally Hiram ran into the curtain – he and Orson built a gag out of it. He always ran into the curtain. At the end of the show, he’s about to make a speech; the curtain falls on him.’14 Engel never heard Welles explaining a characterisation: ‘he moulded you. Orson only knew his own way and that was “Now everybody keep quiet and I’ll tell you what to do.” That was his only way of working. He simply didn’t know any other … The style of his Shoemaker’s Holiday depended on the precise machine-like interplay of movement, music, curtains and light. It was the director’s expression. The actors were his puppets … usually he demonstrated movements of hand and feet in precise detail, speaking the lines in precise time relationship to them. Then he would have the actors imitate him.’15 The results were brilliantly funny and effective, delighting most of the actors, but not, curiously enough, the comic star of the production, Chubby Sherman. ‘Welles was a choreographer. You’d turn here and go around there. This is where he and I fall out. I don’t believe you can choreograph a comic routine and make it comic in terms of movement alone – especially if there is nothing funny about it to begin with. We had a lot of “You go around in back of Norman. Norman goes back of you.” Being spaced around. Having to hold a position endlessly. You get cramps that way, not laughs.’16
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 t
aken 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 an
d 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.