by Simon Callow
The Five Kings company now began rumbling ominously. Press interest in the crisis was keen, provoking a Welles Problem piece in the Washington Daily News. Under the headline THEATRE GUILD AND WELLES MAY PHFFT, IT’S REPORTED, Katherine Hillyer wrote: ‘Not only are certain members of the Five Kings company growing more allergic to 23-year-old director Orson Welles every day, according to reliable report, but the puff-faced prodigy is also in hot water with the Theatre Guild, sponsors of the production … backstage ruffs are constantly being raised when Welles turns what the actors call prima donna, and they growl that while insisting on long rehearsals he offers little constructive advice.’24 Her report doesn’t stop at reporting company discontent, however. The whole world was obviously fed up with Welles. ‘Meanwhile outsiders speculate on how long the beetle-browed youngster can keep delivering the goods in public. Some, while admitting it is wishful thinking, believe he will burn out by the time he is thirty, if not before. Others looking carefully at his exciting arrangements in the theatre listlessly predict a succession of rose-beds for baby to grow old in.’ Hillyer had no doubt that he’d be around for ‘a long, long time. And legendary stories will flourish until as many odd activities are attributed to him and as many amusing anecdotes piled up around his English bull-doggish head as there are about Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker combined.’
She understated. Meanwhile, the show moved to Philadelphia. If Boston had been a nightmare, Philadelphia was the apocalypse. The Chestnut Theatre was in every way unsuited to the production. With company morale at its lowest, the actors were told that the theatre, never intended for large shows, had no dressing rooms for them. They had to use an adjacent theatre, taking a bridge to get them back into the Chestnut. The technical staff, equally exhausted after working all day and all night, found on arrival that the stage had a rake, which meant that they had to construct an anti-raked floor on which to put the turntable. Moreover the fire curtain was far upstage, which meant that the turntable had to be moved deeper, too; which was not only bad for sight-lines, it was a huge undertaking. Finally, when the turntable had been placed on its anti-raked floor and pushed twenty foot further upstage, it was plugged in; nothing happened. The theatre’s electric current, it transpired, was not compatible with that required for the turntable, which duly had to be hand-cranked by a crew of two dozen audibly grunting and cursing stage-hands. It was of course very slow, with consequences the opposite of those in Boston: instead of falling off the stage into the audience’s laps, the actors were left stranded in the middle of the stage, having run out of text. Eventually a converter was found; too late, too late.
A number of these problems – the rake, the current – should have been anticipated. The responsibility for this was, strictly speaking, neither Welles’s nor Houseman’s, but the technical director’s: Jean Rosenthal’s. In the prevailing madness, with the levels of exhaustion that she was having to cope with, it’s hardly surprising that she slipped up. Langner had told her at the very outset that touring the set of Five Kings was impossible; simply making it work in each venue was an enormous task. To have to start all over again with each move must have been pulverising. Philadelphia’s critics were less indulgent than those of Boston. ‘The occasion consisted of a lot of Shakespeare, a lot of actors, a lot of revolutions of the merry-go-round stage,’25 wrote J.H. Keen in the Philadelphia Daily News. ‘But for all of that, the presence of Franchot Tone, the sin-ema actor, in the audience caused more of a stir on the shady side of the footlights than most of the goings on on the sunny side … as a stage colossus, it is something to gape at as one might at a prehistoric creature brought back to life. But as an entertainment, it has something to be desired.’
More sober critics were even less encouraging. Sensenderfer of the Bulletin felt that the production was at best ‘only a gigantic Shakespeare vaudeville … the company assembled performs earnestly though without particular inspiration. Welles himself is a fat and repulsive Falstaff with a greasy make-up and a voice like thick brown gravy. His humour is heavyhanded and his wit slow.’26 For Schloss in the Record ‘its weakness appears to be in the blood – a condition indicated by a lack of stride and eloquence in its higher-pitched scenes and a certain juiciness in its comedy.’27 The problem, Schloss thought, lay with Meredith and Welles himself, both fatally miscast. ‘Orson Welles’s Falstaff hits nearer the mark than Meredith Prince. But it suffers from understatement. Mr Welles’s great success with last year’s modernised Caesar perhaps led him to essay Falstaff in a more realistic and casual mood than, say, Maurice Evans did last year.’
If Welles read his own notices this is perhaps the point at which he might have thrown the paper across the room. Schloss embarked on a detailed and for Welles excruciating comparison of the two actors. The Evans Falstaff laughed, to a degree, with his audience. ‘Welles’s Sir John, however, seldom came across the footlights to dig anyone in the ribs with his picturesque bawdiness. The lines were deliberately speeded-up and underplayed, in the interest, we suppose, of “modernising” the part. In Fat Jack’s famous mock-heroic speech about honour, for example, a speech of broadest humors, Welles rattled the lines off as if he were mumbling a shamefaced catechism. The result was a sodden and witless Sir John. It is a little painful to report thus on one of the most brilliant young men in our theatre, especially since his performance had its moments … it appears that Mr Welles either understudied or mis-studied his part.’ Schloss allowed Welles the touch of pathos that others had discerned: ‘on the credit side, however, was the note of tragicomic pathos, a nice touch and … a new one of considerable plausibility and merit.’ The Inquirer didn’t mess around: ‘To compare Orson Welles’s Falstaff to Mr Evans’s Falstaff, John Emery’s Hotspur to Wesley Addy’s Hotspur, Burgess Meredith’s Prince Hal to Winston O’Keeffe’s Prince of Wales or Mr Welles’s coarse-keyed direction to the electrifying direction of Margaret Webster would be as unconscionable as it would be unkind.’28
Better reviews might have given the show a chance, however slight, of surviving. As it was, it was on the most unreliable of life-support machines. Closure of the show on the Saturday after the notices had appeared instead of completing its allotted two weeks was narrowly but embarrassingly averted only by a passionate plea from the astonishingly named Mrs Favorite, Philadelphia representative of the Guild, who feared letting down her subscribers. The paper reports her public statement: ‘with her distress of last week turning to a deep and bitter burn, Mrs Favorite said the Guild would consider another Orson Welles effort only “if he comes forth with something worthy of the Theatre Guild.”’ There was a flicker of hope that Martin Beck might transfer the production as a World’s Fair – ‘summer show, that is’ – attraction, then Lee Shubert was mentioned. ‘According to latest reports, the Guild doesn’t care what happens to Mr Welles, Mr Meredith and the Five Kings, as long as nobody wants any more money from the Guild.’ Their last formal communication with the Mercury was being presented with a bill from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel covering repairs to chandeliers, Venetian blinds and other items ‘which our confreres, in the exuberance of their youth, had demolished’. Langner seemed as drily amused by this episode as by the entire experience, though determined – needless to say – not to repeat it (‘After you and Orson Welles, no more geniuses,’ he told Robert Lewis as he sacked him from The Time of Your Life). ‘In spite of all the drawbacks, this contact with youth provided a refreshing interlude, and if any of us were complacent before the episode, we were shaken out of it by the time Five Kings was packed up and sent to the storehouse to await that day, yet to come, when Orson Welles will revive it.’
Houseman had long ago accepted the inevitable: the show would never reach New York. But Welles was possessed of a sort of frenzied determination to get it there, somehow, sometime. Herbert Drake was encouraged to go to Philadelphia to keep the embers of interest alive. ‘The reports from the road,’29 he said, ‘have evoked the usual drama column reports of mutiny, sabotage and more ear
nestness in the battle scenes than required by the script, so this department went down to see what was brewing in what sounded like an exciting production.’ His report was independent enough to describe the production as it stood in somewhat unflattering terms: ‘the play ambles its way through its schedule each night, like its notorious character, fat Jack Falstaff, stewing and fretting, heaving its ponderous way over the mechanical hurdles that the very momentum of the tour perpetuates.’ Quite reasonably he continues ‘You cannot adequately rehearse such a large-scale enterprise when you have to move from town to town and when the platform is one of those enormous revolving affairs which cover the whole stage floor and when the totalitarian chief in charge is further burdened with the incubus of a radio programme. What the problem boils down to is to find the time for those rehearsals.’ After stating roundly that ‘Orson Welles himself has developed 80 per cent of a truly great Falstaff’, his parting flourish insists that Five Kings has ‘all the earmarks of his directorial genius. The boy wonder can still pull the rabbit-hearted Falstaff out of the hat if the theatre will accommodate itself to his unusual operating methods.’
The staging might possibly have worked, given time. What certainly did work (as in the film) were the battle scenes. Martin Gabel attended the show after Welles had done a substantial amount of re-rehearsal, and he described what he saw in an interview in 1985. It was evidently as fresh in his mind as when he’d first seen it: ‘Orson had a kind of No Man’s Land onstage, a painted canvas looking like churned earth over mounds, and in the centre he had a single, leafless tree … as they began fighting, the stage started to revolve, and the music came in to support the fight. They fought on this stage as the knights of old must have fought – up hill and down dale, fighting it out. As the battle became more intense, the revolving stage went faster, the music approached a climax. And then finally when Hal stabbed Hotspur behind a huge mound, you heard the death cry of Hotspur, saw the flashing blade. The minute he was hit, the music stopped, the revolve stopped, everything stopped. And then, slowly, the revolve was brought round and Hotspur gave his death speech, lying prostrate below the mound. It was an absolutely perfect piece of work.’30 Drake, too, was thrilled by the fighting: ‘the battle scenes are the best I ever saw on any stage … the scenes in which the Welles flair for spectacle is most adequately exhibited are the battles of Shrewsbury and Agincourt. He has exploding bombards, the usual banners and highly effective, if somewhat terrifying flights of arrows which fly across the stage and plink into the side drapes. Welles has ordered up the correct broadswords and bucklers, no pink-tea fencing for his princes and kings. They lay on with roundhouse swings and highly satisfactory clanging of claymores. The actor mortality will doubtless be high. The property room already had replaced more than a dozen broken swords, but it is worth the expenditure.’
Welles had concentrated on these physical scenes, as he always had, to the exclusion of psychological complexities. They could be made perfect; the complexities depended on the actor’s discovery for himself of some inner meaning. This was more elusive. Moreover, he was still uncertain of the whole; dwelling on manageable parts like the battle sequences was an outlet for his energy. In a passionate analysis of what had gone wrong – with the Mercury, with their relationship, with Five Kings – Houseman wrote to Virgil Thomson: ‘It fell on its face not through any difficulties of time or inadequate rehearsal, but because it was a half-baked, impure idea, in which size and “notions” took the place of love and thinking.’31 Jean Rosenthal wrote, more dispassionately but to equally devastating effect: ‘all of us on the production staff had a fine time working on it, but no excitement ever reached the audience, even through the stars who supplemented the company, like Burgess Meredith. That really marvelous production was boring – catastrophic from an audience point of view, appalling, really – in spite of extraordinary moments.’32
His passion for the show was intense and stayed with him, manifesting itself first in a stage show some twenty years later, then in a movie, both called Chimes at Midnight, and both (as the change of title suggests) concentrating more on the figure of Falstaff than on the political history in which he is a minor player. What was it about Falstaff that drew Welles to him? Not what attracted most actors of his period. The description of Maurice Evans’s approach is fairly typical of most actors’ conception of the character at the time: an aristocratic rogue, a lordly buffoon, over-fed, over-sexed, over the top – a comic figure, above all. Schloss, in his Philadelphia review, gave the standard line: Falstaff, to be Falstaff, needed ‘a belch, a wink, and a soupçon of ham’.
Welles explicitly dissociated himself from that view: in an interview in the Christian Science Monitor before the Boston opening he said ‘I will play him as a tragic figure. I hope, of course, he will be funny to the audience, just as he was funny to those around him. But his humor and wit were aroused merely by the fact that he wanted to please the prince. Falstaff, however, had the potential of greatness in him.’33 And the notices again and again comment on the pathos which he brings to the role. Thirty years later, he told Peter Bogdanovich, speaking of Chimes at Midnight, ‘the closer I thought I was getting to Falstaff, the less funny he seemed to me. When I’d played him before, in the theatre, he seemed more witty than comical. And in bringing him to the screen, I found him only occasionally, and then only deliberately, a clown.’34 Certainly, no one found him very funny in Five Kings – and Welles liked to be funny, as the joshing about on his radio programmes testifies. Though scarcely endowed with natural comic flair, he could certainly have made his Falstaff funny: there is every opportunity in the text. But he chose not to. Usually, with Welles, it doesn’t do to go too deeply into his performances; he brings his personality to them, adding superficial touches of colour: a nose here, an accent there, neither of which generally adhere too well. But Falstaff seems to have engaged him deeply, and the quality in the character that he instinctively relates to is his sadness.
Without delving too deeply into that inexhaustible character’s lineage and symbolism, from Silenus and Ganesha, through Bes of Egypt and Ilya of the Slavs to the Japanese Ondeko-Za, nor following Auden’s suggestion that he is both Lord of Misrule and ‘comic symbol for the supernatural order of Charity’,35 it is possible to say a couple of simple things about him: he is a drunkard, a trickster, a braggart, a womaniser, a gentleman and a charmer – and he is rejected by the person he loves most. It takes no trained psychologist to recognise the figure of Richard Head Welles in this description. There is a striking quotation from Niccolo Tucci quoted by Auden in his Falstaff essay, ‘The Prince’s Dog’, which is full of resonance for Welles and his father: ‘the death song of the drunkard – it may go on for thirty years – goes more or less like this. “I was born a god, with the whole world in reach of my hands, lie now defeated in the gutter. Come and listen: hear what the world has done to me” … he may be unable to distinguish a person from a chair, but never an unprofitable he from a profitable one. How could he see himself as a very insignificant entity in a huge world of others, when he sees nothing but himself spread over the whole universe.’36 Equally, it takes no great leap of imagination to understand why Welles engaged so intensely with the scene in which Falstaff is rejected by his surrogate son and former drinking companion: ‘I know thee not, old man.’
Welles must have been aware, too, that he himself was going, far faster and more furiously, down the same path that had ended in his father’s death at the age of fifty-five. Auden, in his essay, continues: ‘the drunkard is unlovely to look at, intolerable to listen to, and his self-pity is contemptible. Nevertheless, as not merely a worldly failure but also a wilful failure, he is a disturbing image for the sober citizen. His refusal to accept the realities of this world, babyish as it may be, compels us to take another look at this world and reflect upon our motives for accepting it. The drunkard’s suffering may be self-inflicted, but it is real suffering and reminds us of all the suffering in this world which we prefer
not to think about because, from the moment we accept this world, we acquired our share of responsibility for everything that happens in it.’37 Welles was all too acutely aware of suffering in the world; he did ‘prefer not to think about it’. Small wonder that he saw the character as tragic. Despite applying a mountain of padding made for him by the Firestone Rubber and Latex Company to his body and more mountains of make-up to his face, mere is every reason to believe that this Falstaff and both the subsequent ones (in Belfast in 1960 and in Spain, on film, in 1965) are among the most personal performances he ever gave. In 1939, everything in the reviews suggests that he had not found how to integrate what he felt about the character with the text itself, his own or that of the play. When he started shaping the text entirely round Falstaff, his vision of the character began to fall into place.
But it was a long way from 1939 to 1965. Houseman was somehow prevailed upon to announce, somewhat querulously, that as always intended the show would definitely be revived in the fall, with some cast changes. The reporter was unable to contain his scepticism. ‘Still, Welles would not accept defeat,’38 wrote Houseman. ‘The scenery – all seventeen tons of it – was shipped to New York, where it was held in demurrage for several days at great expense while Orson made his last desperate bids for backing. Finally, he was forced to have it unloaded in a theatrical warehouse, where it lay, with the rest of the Mercury scenery, piling up storage charges for the next twenty years. As a final token of defiance, Orson announced that he was retaining his beard and would not shave it off until he had appeared as Falstaff on a New York stage.’ (This was the beard that became notorious when he went to Hollywood.)