by Simon Callow
Both are expensive. Houseman was increasingly disturbed by the outlay for this supposedly cut-price try-out. Not only was the stock and the editing facility expensive; his attempt to pay the actors no more than the ordinary theatre rehearsal money while they were filming failed, Equity demanding the standard rate. At this point, they discovered that Paramount had the film rights: when they did the play on Broadway, they would have to pay the film company. No sooner had they made that discovery, than they realised that they couldn’t even show it in Stony Creek: the projection booth in the little theatre wasn’t fire-proofed. So that was that. They couldn’t show the film; instead the actors had, overnight, to learn and fling together the beginning of Act One of the play – the exposition, always the hardest to learn and the hardest to play. The resident designer’s set went up, the most satisfactory element of the production, as it turned out: a surviving photograph shows a ship’s deck, square, with a ladder coming down from the poop deck, stage left; the ship’s funnels are visible. The impression is slightly cartoonish. Paul Bowles had written a score for small orchestra; this too was cut for economy’s sake, and Marc Blitzstein improvised an accompaniment at the piano. The show, inevitably, was chaotic and interminable, studded with occasional brilliantly rehearsed moments, Swanee among them.
After the disastrous first performance, there was a rather muted usual celebration. Once the actors had drifted miserably away, Welles, Joe Cotten and Kevin O’Morrison, the stage manager, took a few remaining would-be celebratory bottles of champagne and a copy of the script down to the harbour. After knocking back the champagne, O’Morrison told Andrea Nouryeh, ‘Orson opened the script and said, “What do you think of this page?” Joe would look at it and he would say, “Nyah,” and he would ask me, and I would say, “Nyah.” So he would take it and crumple it up. We went through the script this way, taking pages and throwing them out. Drunk as lords with no idea what we were doing.’17 This aleatoric method of cutting is one of Welles’s less well-known innovations, more Luke Rinehart than Max Reinhardt, but worth a try, perhaps. In the event it didn’t work. The audience hurled things at the stage during the remaining few performances. Later, Welles liked to think of the show as pioneering work – ‘the play and the film were too surreal for the audience. They couldn’t accept it. It was like Hellzapoppin, years ahead of its time,’18 he told Brady; ‘one of our best things, I reckon, but aborted’19 was how he described it to Bogdanovich – but the simple fact is that it was an utter shambles, a flop, and Houseman decided, in the teeth of tremendous opposition from Welles, that it would not go to the Mercury. Welles was later to return to the notion of mixing film with staging, both in The Green Goddess of 1941 and the celebrated Around The World of six years later. The important thing – for him and for posterity – was that he had found film. He now had the celluloid bug; it would never leave him.
For the present, however, he was shattered by the failure of Too Much Johnson: Houseman believes he secretly agreed with his cancellation order but that ‘he needed to play out the sabotage scene to salve his pride’. What followed was real: ‘he retired into his air-conditioned tent at the St Regis, where he lay in darkness for a week surrounded by 25,000 feet of film … convinced that he was going to die, racked by asthma and fear and despair.’20 Bill Alland was with him during most of that time and reported ‘the self-vilifications and the remorse for what he had done to those around him … for the cruelty and moral corruption with which he reproached himself.’ The failure was unendurable, a confirmation that all his inner voices, the ones spurring him on, and those others telling him that he was fundamentally worthless, were right. At times of crisis, his asthma always asserted itself, forcing him to bed where he would agonise, paralysed, in a state of primordial emotion. His self-accusations were terrifying to those who heard them, utterly negative and destructive. When the fit passed, he would throw himself with redoubled energy into food, drink, sex; he was now, only three months after the birth of Christopher, juggling numerous paramours. But as always, the best antidote for Welles was work. In this instance, the thing nearest to hand was the Mercury Theatre of the Air.
The transmissions had, of course, continued throughout Too Much Johnson: Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, The Thirty-Nine Steps, a triple bill including My Little Boy, Abraham Lincoln, Schnitzler’s Anatol (actually transmitted the Monday after the disastrous Stony Creek run). There were two more programmes out of the originally contracted nine: The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man Who Was Thursday, this last adapted, at his own insistence, by Welles himself. Welles having refused even to give it a dress rehearsal, it transpired during transmission that the show was clearly running at least thirteen minutes short. Houseman thrust various great novels into Welles’s hands; he read sections from them as a trailer for future shows, to the great admiration of studio executives, who naturally thought that the whole thing had been carefully planned. Welles never again attempted to adapt the show himself. (Says Houseman, in a memorably comic paragraph in Run-Through. In fact, the show as broadcast contains none of the improvisations described by Houseman, and seems perfectly to fill its allotted span. Either Houseman was thinking of a different show, or he was amalgamating a series of events to create an essence of the Welles experience. Another instance of the layers of fable that almost everything to do with the man seem to attract.)
The second show, a spirited Treasure Island, had fallen short too, and to fill in the time he improvised a little speech at the end which gives the sense of his charm and fun and elegance in gorgeous off-the-cuff word-spinning. Houseman said that Welles could make an impromptu speech to fit any occasion; this one is a winner: ‘I’d like you to meet Jim Hawkins, Jr. Our leading man is fourteen years old. Last season he made a really startling contribution to the stage history of Shakespeare’s plays. This was during the course of some experiments with the Mercury Theatre’s sprinkler system. As the consequence of what must certainly have been extensive research in the field, he caused it to rain, actually to rain, and copiously to rain where in more than three hundred years it has never rained in Julius Caesar before. It rained on Brutus, it rained all over Brutus in the forum, I was Brutus and I ought to know.’21 A perfect example of Welles’s rhetorical style … the rain, the rain, the rain … Brutus, Brutus, Brutus …
‘Now, as dramatic criticism,’ he continued, ‘I found this telling, and even final. And as a surprise item in the funeral scene I can assure you that the unexpected appearance on the stage of so many gallons of real water created in us all an impression that was almost overwhelming. Our popular leading man says he did it all with a match. I don’t dare think what he’ll do when he’s old enough to run for president, but meanwhile, no matter what happens to the plumbing, he can always work for the Mercury. As you’ve probably discovered he’s something more than a very gifted performer, and as I told you, he’s something less than fifteen. His name shall not be withheld. I refer to that fine old actor … Arthur Anderson. Mr Anderson is not new to the microphone nor the Mercury.’ Welles details Anderson’s work for the company, then throws in some comments on the other actors. You can feel his eye on the clock, spinning out his slender material to the point where it almost becomes disc-jockey burble. He starts to advertise the next show. ‘Next week we’ll offer you the most ominous and authentic click of the world’s most famous knitting needles, and Madame herself, Dr Manette, Sydney Carton, and the entire French Revolution, same time, same station. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. Charles Dickens! That is correct, that is absolutely correct! … Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.’ His voice rises to manic levels on ‘Charles Dickens! That is absolutely correct!’ He’s in the home stretch now. ‘There is at this moment a disturbance in the sub-control room and if it isn’t a tumbril it’s Arthur Anderson. It’s a good thing the program’s over. Good-night everybody. Thanks. Please write me the stories you’d like to hear … and good-bye till next week.’ The howl of long-suppressed l
aughter is almost audible.
The show itself follows the pattern, and maintains the standard, of Dracula. The narrative form was slightly different, becoming Moby Dick-like: the quest for Long John Silver. This form, a very useful one for radio, served him also well as a film-maker – a mystery, the central character only slowly discovered. Welles’s Silver is a far cry from Robert Newton’s more famous assumption: a sturdy, metal-voiced cockney, harsh and dangerous, but absolutely lacking the English actor’s insinuating charm. The much-lauded Anderson is excellent, clear and – thanks to his English mum – credibly British. At one point he stumbles over his script; this is the only fluff heard on any of the programmes, something of a miracle considering not merely that they were broadcast live, the rehearsals taking place in absolute chaos, but that Welles and many of the actors were heavily involved in, first, Too Much Johnson, filming and all, and then Danton’s Death. Neither Welles nor any aspect of the programme bears the slightest trace of the panic and despair which was engulfing the Mercury stage work, nor indeed the frenzied conditions in which the show was made. The show is confident, skilful, good-hearted. Treasure Island, as it happens, had been their audition piece for Campbell’s Soup, from whom they hoped to get sponsorship. Campbell’s didn’t like the show, so they carried on under CBS’s banner; the contract was renewed for a further ten programmes (no longer under the banner First Person Singular, which had never been given great prominence anyway).
It is hard to imagine what more the potential sponsors had wanted: the programmes are direct, accessible, colourful, funny when appropriate and always lapel-grabbingly urgent, with Welles himself an irresistible master of ceremonies. They are neither highbrow nor lowbrow; their appeal is, literally, to all the family. A ten-year-old could enjoy them (and most of the stories, with the exception perhaps of Anatol, Schnitzler’s study of sexual compulsion, were children’s classics) but there is no condescension in the presentation. They exploit the medium fully, but without a trace of self-consciousness. The Mercury Theatre of the Air programmes embody everyone’s ideal of radio drama, projecting larger-than-life images onto our mental screens, plundering our own memories to tell the story. The most radical medium devised by man (nothing but disembodied voices and sounds; talking furniture, as the man said), its decline in the latter half of the twentieth century (with the honourable exception of the BBC) into a mere carrier of music and news is a shameful waste. Welles and his collaborators’ work in radio (now available on Compact Disc and cassette) is a great memorial to an exceptional art form, one whose influence remained central to his output.
With the radio shows, out of the chaos came something marvellous. Back at the Mercury, where, after a false start with Too Much Johnson, rehearsals for Danton’s Death were underway, chaos simply bred worse chaos. Things started uncertainly then rapidly descended into total confusion. For once, Welles had been unable to find a concept for his production. In Heartbreak House, the author had banned him from having one; here, he was simply unable to reach one. There are few unhappier human beings than a conceptual director without a concept. The truth is that he hardly knew why he was doing the play at all. It had been included in the season on the spur of the moment: Martin Gabel had thrown it on his and Houseman’s desk during one of the first of the Mercury broadcasts, saying how much he’d like to play Danton. ‘It struck us as a brilliant notion,’22 Houseman reports, ‘a contrast to the frivolity of Too Much Johnson and something we could sell to our politically minded theatre-party audience.’ The play is notoriously difficult to interpret, much less bring off. Dealing with the most stirring period of the French Revolution, it is strangely undramatic: almost an anti-play. A hundred years before Brecht (‘there are no great criminals, only great crimes’), the twenty-one-year-old Büchner, on the run from the Prussian police for political subversion, was concerned to de-mythologise the giants of the Revolution. ‘The individual just foams on the wave, greatness mere chance, the rule of genius a puppet-play, a laughable struggle with an iron law … it no longer occurs to me to bow down before the monuments and big-wigs of history. I cannot make virtuous heroes out of Danton and the bandits of the Revolution!’ This is an immensely sophisticated and elusive theme, one which, on the face of things, was a rather unexpected subject for Welles, with his post-romantic sense of fated personality, of good and evil, guilt and nemesis. The drama of the individual was at the heart of Welles’s approach; nothing could have been further from Büchner, whose incomplete masterpiece Woyzeck gave the drama its first real anti-hero, a man of no qualities, no interest, no personality in any discernible sense.
No doubt Welles was stimulated but also perhaps awed by the reputation of the only previous New York production of the play, Reinhardt’s, with his German company. It had created a sensation. ‘I doubt,’ wrote R. Dana Skinner, ‘if any stage in this country has witnessed anything so impressive, so moving or so filled with magnificent vitality as the scene in the Convention.’23 The production was the supreme example of Reinhardt’s animation of the crowd, though this was achieved with consummate theatrical cunning. ‘The impression of a tremendous plenitude and variety of life, the impression of passionate movement, was obtained by lighting up only one small part of the stage at a time whilst the rest remained in gloom,’24 wrote Heinz Herald. ‘Only individuals or small groups were picked out in the spotlight whilst the masses always remained in semi-darkness, or even in complete darkness. But they were always there and could be heard murmuring, speaking, shouting. Out of the darkness an upraised arm would catch the light, and in this way thousands would seem to be where hundreds were in fact. The principle of the rapid play of light and darkness was maintained throughout.’ It is doubtful whether Welles actually saw the production (he was twelve at the time) but it must have been a constant point of reference for him, especially since he had hired Reinhardt’s Robespierre, Vladimir Sokoloff, to repeat his immensely admired performance for the Mercury. Since emigrating to America, the Russian actor had played a couple of routine parts in Hollywood, which was rather good luck, since he could barely speak a word of English.
He was in Hollywood when Houseman heard of his desire to return to the stage. His availability and interest seemed like an answer to prayer, since they were having inordinate difficulty in casting the role of Robespierre. Coulouris had turned it down point blank, finding the play ‘turgid’ and the part ‘monolithic’. Nor was he inspired by the idea of Gabel as Danton. With this, Houseman must have been in sympathy. Whenever the play had been discussed in the past for inclusion in the Mercury programme, it was with the idea of Welles playing Danton. The part of the great, flawed aristocratic friend of the Revolution, finally undone by his appetites, would have been a wonderful opportunity for him. Certainly it requires an actor of the utmost force to play the role; one who will be a counterpoint to Robespierre and St Just, spreading massively where they are tightly reined in. Dapper, incisive Martin Gabel was unsuitable at every level, and Houseman argued passionately against casting him, despite having already offered him the part and him having accepted it. Welles had no desire to act in the show at all; reluctantly, he agreed to play the ice-cold fanatic St Just, another very curious casting stroke. Coldness was a quality hard for Welles to summon – vocally, apart from anything else. Depressingly, he agreed to play the part because it was one ‘in which he could be replaced without damage’. None of the casting was easy; actors were drawn from the Too Much Johnson company (including Mary Wickes, and the ever faithful Joe Cotten) and from the pool of radio actors who constituted the Mercury Theatre of the Air. It must have been dismaying to Houseman and Welles that the company which had auditioned 1,700 eager actors during their first year, now found it hard to find three actors suitable or willing to play the leading roles in the first production of their second season. Either word was getting around – from Vincent Price and other disaffected actors – or Houseman and Welles weren’t trying very hard. It seems that they had rather expected the Mercury to be running i
tself by now; not that they would have to start all over again, as Houseman laments.
Significantly, Welles had failed by the first day of rehearsal to adapt the long and sprawling play. He had simply and rather arbitrarily cut it to reduce its playing time. The script changed from day to day, as he tried to fashion some sort of coherent vision out of the material. Rehearsals took place in the theatre (now expensively dark, since the cancellation of Too Much Johnson) on the very dangerous set that Welles and his designer Stephen Tichacek had devised. Once again, as in Julius Caesar, but much earlier – without benefit of rehearsal at all – the technical aspect of the show took over entirely. The central element of the design was an elevator, thirty foot by twenty foot. On either side of the elevator, there were two traps. There was a thirty-foot-wide, two-foot-deep trench between the back wall and the elevator containing a pyramidal staircase on castors, very small at the top. When all of the traps were open and the elevator was dropped, the stage was, in Andrea Nouryeh’s words, ‘a treacherous system of gaping holes, catwalks, and scaffolding (connecting to the positions of the elevator) – the effect from balcony was of criss-cross pastry on apple pie’.25 The potential for mishap was terrifyingly high, particularly since the light was highly directional, coming from below or from the side at strange angles, tending to dazzle and even temporarily blind the actors. They must have courted death every time they stood on the stage. Welles explained his intentions in a couple of paragraphs of The Director in the Theatre Today: ‘My conception of the play was such that the elevator seemed to me to represent, when it was raised, the constant threat. It was made like scaffolding because the republic of France at that time was an impermanent affair, and upon such existed the lives of these people, and it was made to look like a guillotine.’