by Simon Callow
Yates readily signed up for the Welles project, agreeing a budget of $880,000 – not large by contemporary standards, but adequate for the planned twenty-three-day shoot. Welles’s own salary for directing and acting in the film was $100,000; as with his contract for The Stranger, any overspend was to be deducted directly from his salary. Feldman would be the executive producer, while Dick Wilson – good, solid, long-suffering Dick – would be the associate producer. It was not, at that stage, to be billed as a Mercury Production, though there would be many Mercury players in it; the company that Welles and Feldman had formed had the somewhat deadly title of Literary Classics, Inc., a name that would surely have made the younger Orson Welles shudder.
The project turned out not to be King Lear, or a new play, but Macbeth, a play with which Welles was exceptionally familiar. It had been one of the texts in the Everybody’s Shakespeare series, which – at the age of eighteen – he had edited and illustrated in conjunction with his former headmaster and loving mentor, Roger Hill; in 1947 his edition was still in print and in regular use in the classroom. Macbeth had also been his first collaboration, at the age of twenty-one, with John Houseman, then head of the Negro Theatre Project; his all-black, voodoo-haunted version of the play, a kind of barbaric cabaret set in the eighteenth-century Haiti of Jean-Christophe and performed in Harlem, had electrified New York; on the road, when Jack Carter, Welles’s brilliant but erratic Macbeth, had failed to show up for a performance, Welles had taken over the leading role at a moment’s notice. More recently, again playing the title role, he had recorded a seventy-five-minute version for CBS Records, which had enjoyed some success.
The play’s dark world, a vortex in which unnatural forces weigh in on the characters from outside and violent and destructive impulses well up from within them, had compelling attraction for Welles, with his almost Manichaean view of human life. As early as in his play Bright Lucifer (written when he was sixteen) he had shown a keen sense of the presence, not to say the omnipresence, of evil: ‘There’s evil on this earth!’ cries the central character, Eldred, the self-described ‘bitch-boy’, filled with malevolent hatreds and fully conscious of his occult powers, a transparent and more than slightly disturbing self-portrait of its young author. ‘In holy days, men fought it – there were charms and chants and bells and books and candles, and good men fought for good. But now they don’t believe! Vampires fatten, werewolves range and witches go unburnt … thicker and quicker flows the force and title of evil. Strong with a million years’ momentum, since the great flaming fall when all the hosts of Lucifer showered down out of the sky. like comets … they are – everywhere … there – there, behind you!’ Welles liked to claim that his hated grandmother had dabbled in black magic, and he was conscious of having certain intuitive powers himself, telling Peter Brook in the nineteen-fifties that as a young actor on the road, trying to make a few pennies, he had set up as a fortune-teller, employing all the usual corny devices to trick people into revealing themselves. He achieved some success at it, until one day he started to experience accurate intimations of the past (often of a tragic nature), at which point he swiftly decided to pack the whole thing in; it was too hot, he felt, to handle.
For Welles, the supernatural was not an imaginative conceit; he was powerfully and alarmingly aware of its reality. In his Harlem Macbeth he employed African drummers to play the witches, encouraging them to use authentic voodoo chants; these sections of the production were genuinely disturbing. Famously, when the critic Percy Hammond gave the production a tepidly condescending review, the drummers, egged on by Welles, chanted against him through the night; the next day he was taken ill and within days he was dead. Welles returned to this area in his first production for Unit 891, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, where he gave full rein to his sense both of black magic and of illusion. In Bright Lucifer the ravings of Eldred – who, by the end of the play, has become a devil – seem to echo Marlowe, rendering his exalted rhetoric grotesque. Immature an jejune though it is, Bright Lucifer has the power to disturb; the horrors have a certain force. The adolescent Welles knew something about guilt, about despair and about evil: ‘The whole world will be your haunted house,’ Eldred screams at his guardian, ‘devils don’t [die] – I won’t. The evil that we do lives after us … my demon will never die.’ The malign and uncanny aspect of Macbeth, which has made it a universally known byword for ill luck in the theatre, had great weight for Welles. He told Peter Bogdanovich that ‘when you do that play it has a really oppressive effect on everybody. Really, it’s terrifying – stays with you all day. The atmosphere it generates is so horrendous and awful that it’s easy to see how the old superstition lives on.’ This sense of dread, added to the play’s profound study of power’s corrupting attraction, is strongly present in the Mercury recording for CBS.
The one aspect of the central character with which Welles fails to engage, either as adapter or actor, is perhaps the most famous: Macbeth’s poetic imagination, which almost prevents him from killing Duncan in the first place, and which subsequently robs him of any satisfaction from his attainment of the throne. Welles has consciously cut much of the most sublime, almost free-associating verse that expresses the falling apart of Macbeth’s mind, the whole of human life passing before him. His performance, in truth, is fairly rudimentary; recorded in 1940, just weeks before many of the actors (including, of course, Welles) went into the studios to start shooting Citizen Kane, it presents a straightforward approach, from a radiophonic point of view very far from the audacious experimentalism of the Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was intended as a teaching tool, and the scene numbers and stage directions are helpfully read out by William Alland. Some of the acting is arrestingly old-fashioned ( mostly from the non-Mercurians Fay Bainter, the now fifty-year-old Edwardian ingénue who plays Lady Macbeth, and Richard Warrick, the plump-toned actor engaged for Banquo, who sounds more like Macbeth’s grandfather than his companion-in-arms). The narrative is swiftly handled; the witches (men, by the sound of it, though they are uncredited) have a certain power, and Welles himself is vigorous, vocally refulgent and at times emotionally hysterical. Of the noted complexity of the man, there is little; nor, inevitably, is it possible to care for him, because we are not admitted into his inner life. What transforms the production is the remarkable and economic score of Bernard Herrmann, composed largely of fanfares and drum tattoos – the fanfares sometimes in slow motion, sometimes urgent, sometimes blaringly barbaric; the tattoos now on timpani, now on snare drums, now on woodblocks. Under almost the whole action they run, instilling foreboding, but also seeming to be the issue of Macbeth’s brain, alternately spectral and overpoweringly insistent. At certain moments of great intensity an almost abstract passage is heard, less a melody than a monstrous texture, a tense swelling of strings backed by woodwinds, suggesting the building pressure within the play and inside Macbeth himself. There is nothing specifically Scottish about the music, nor indeed about the performances.
Now, seven years later, Welles was returning to the play. While he continued to do battle with Harry Cohn and Viola Lawrence over The Lady from Shanghai, Welles prepared the Salt Lake City text using this adaptation as a basis, with some reference to his Everybody’s. Shakespeare cut. A great deal of the new arrangement of the text, however, was conditioned by a view of the play he had developed since making the recording, and which he best expresses in the prologue he wrote for the 1950 recut of the film:
Our story is laid in Scotland – ancient Scotland, savage, half-lost in the mist that hangs between recorded history and the time of legends … the cross itself is newly arrived here. Plotting against Christian law and order are the agents of Chaos, priests of hell and magic – sorcerers and witches. Their tools are ambitious men. This is the story of such a man, and of his wife. A brave soldier, he hears from witches a prophecy of future greatness and on this cue murders his way up to a tyrant’s throne, only to go down hated and in blood at the end of all.
It
is an interesting view of the play, though one for which there is scant evidence in the text. That by no means invalidates it: Shakespeare would not need to spell out what was commonly known or assumed by his audience; in fact, Welles was supplying a context for the play. It is derived from a perception of Shakespeare that strikingly anticipates some of the radical criticism of the nineteen-eighties, inspired by the work of the great Russian anthropologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. ‘Shakespeare was very close to the origins of his own culture,’2 Welles told the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma. ‘The language he wrote had just been formed; the old England, the old Europe of the Middle Ages, still lived in the memory of the people of Stratford. He was very close … to quite another epoch, and yet he stood in the doorway of our “modern” world.’ Welles would have embraced Bakhtin’s revelation of the persistence of the medieval into the early Renaissance period, his awareness of the pagan, the animistic and the ritual lurking only just beneath the surface of the seemingly rational world of the sixteenth century. ‘The main point of the production,’ he told Peter Bogdanovich,13 ‘is the struggle between the old and the new religion. These people are holding off not just the forces of darkness but the old religion, which has been forced underground.’ In order to clarify this interpretation, Welles created a character whom he called, on stage, the Friar, and on film the Holy Father; he pilfered the text of this figure from various other characters, including occasionally Macbeth himself.
Welles’s approach represents a continuation of his work on Five Kings, and is a very significant departure from his approach either to his first Macbeth or to Julius Caesar. There he used the texts to release the relevance of the plays – in the case of the earlier Macbeth by transplanting the play into an exotic and sensational context, which provided a credible environment for the ideas of witchcraft and of tyranny; in Caesar by creating specific modern parallels (in that case to fascism). With Five Kings, he started to talk about the author’s world and how best to convey a sense of it to a modern audience: stressing, in other words, not in what way the characters and their lives resemble our own, but how they differ from them. He showed no interest (now or at any point in the future) in Elizabethan stage conventions, but was increasingly gripped by the Elizabethan life-experience. Paradoxically, this radical approach made the productions inspired by it, including the Utah Macbeth, look more old-fashioned than his earlier productions had. The Utah settings – attributed to a local designer, but entirely according to Welles’s own conception – were essentially modelled on the spatial dynamics of the Harlem Macbeth, though they were their exact opposite in imagery: stark where the earlier production was lush, severe in line where the other had been turreted, battlemented and machicolated; the costumes belonged to the period of the eleventh century in which the historical Macbeth had his reign.
A further, apparently authentic touch was the decision to speak the play in Scottish accents, a notion that, Bret Wood suggests, had come to Welles as a result of his experience on his 1945 radio production of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, where all the actors had gamely pitched in with their approximations of that accent. As far as Macbeth is concerned, it would, of course, be impossible to reconstruct an eleventh-century Scottish accent and, if it were possible, it would be completely incomprehensible. Welles’s purpose in proposing its use was other: conscious of the difficulties experienced by most American actors, especially young ones, with Elizabethan verse, he convinced himself that a Scottish burr would compel them to speak more slowly and thus more intelligibly, while at the same time avoiding the twin curses of either a posh English accent – BBC, as Welles called it – or the actors’ own American accents, jarringly betraying their local origins. He himself, as it happens, had cultivated an accent for Shakespearean purposes that was perhaps an ideal medium for the language – neither locally American nor imitatively English; if anything, it had a touch of Irish in it, presumably acquired from his exposure to macLiammóir and his other colleagues at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where he made his professional debut at the age of fifteen. If there seemed a touch of the old school about it, that was scarcely surprising: in addition to Welles’s natural archaism – his courtly mode of address, his flamboyance as of another era – the diction and vocal manners that he had learned from macLiammóir were themselves a throwback to an earlier period, acquired by the Irish actor during his years as a child star in Beerbohm Tree’s company before the First World War (gramophone records of Tree clearly reveal the source of macLiammóir’s phrasing and vocal music). Naturally, for uniformity, Welles would himself be adopting a Scottish accent – or his idea of one. English actors have recently become much better at American accents, and American actors now regularly adopt flawless and geographically particular British accents, but 1947 was still the dark ages as far as transatlantic mimicry was concerned; Welles’s notion was a recipe for complete phonetic mayhem.
The cast he assembled for the stage show in Utah was very much the usual Mercury cocktail: stalwarts like Erskine Sanford and Edgar Barrier, radio colleagues like John McIntire and his wife Jeanette Nolan (the voice of, among many other contemporaries, Eleanor Roosevelt on The March of Time), some new blood (in this case the Dublin actor Donal O’Herlihy from the recently released Carol Reed movie Odd Man Out) and the young English-born actor, Roddy McDowall, late of Just William, How Green Was My Valley and Lassie Come Home). In addition there were a couple of semi-actor-factotums, like Bill Alland, who also stage-managed, and Brainerd Duffield, who had helped Welles with the adaptation, plus – as in the Harlem Macbeth – a large number of local actors and supernumeraries. The chances of any of them being able to achieve credible Scottish accents was slight, though it is also reasonable to observe that there would probably be few in a Salt Lake City audience whose ears were so acutely attuned to the nuances of British dialect that they would find any inaccuracies jarring.
In the event, most of the reviewers of the stage production were charmed by the accent; it added colour and, they felt, aided comprehension. The whole production, in fact, was acclaimed to the very rafters. Welles had rehearsed most of his leading actors in Hollywood (only the Lady Macduff, Joyce Barlow, was from Utah), spending the last few days of the three-week rehearsal period integrating the local actors and staging the show in the massive Kingsbury Hall of the University of Utah. As usual, in these circumstances, his ability to galvanise a group of people, his sense of showmanship and his instinctive response to a particular space and to the specific individuals at his disposal resulted in a semi-improvised piece of spectacular theatre, here given special excitement because he was working with the community. It was the sort of thing – less considered, less detailed, but equally electric in its impact – that Max Reinhardt had done in Salzburg: a kind of sophisticated folk theatre, attended by the whole town (or as near as dammit). It was, said Governor Herbert Maw, ‘the greatest thing that ever happened to Utah’,3 which certainly puts Brigham Young in his place.
Salt Lake City was ablaze with the particular excitement that only Welles could engender. ‘His sense of theatre,’4 Jeanette Nolan told the distinguished Welles scholar, François Thomas, ‘exceeded our wildest dreams. And the first night in Salt Lake City was a magical event from the first minute.’ At the beginning of the show the auditorium was plunged into darkness. Even the EXIT signs were extinguished ‘against the regulations, but there were plenty of things against the regulations’. Welles had covered the doors completely so that no one knew how to get out, which reinforced the feeling of mystery. Then, from the very back of the theatre, almost inaudibly at first, the sound of bagpipes was heard. There were six of them, hired locally. ‘They came down the steps, then out of the theatre, reaching the road still playing, and it was the only thing the audience heard until they stopped,’ Miss Nolan continued. ‘A mood of menace was established, adding to the thrill. And just as they finished playing, when they came down to the battlements again, there was a huge explosion in the orchestra pit, and a gr
eat green phosphorescent flame leaped out of it, out of which ran the witches. The audience roared. It was a truly terrifying entrance.’ Above the witches were masks, designed and indeed painted by Welles, atop fifteen-foot-high poles, painted black. Later in the play, when the witches came down to the heath again, ‘the auditorium was plunged into blackest darkness again and the masks suddenly lit up above the spectators’ heads. People went mad and screamed.’
Gladys Goodall, the critic of the local rag, reported that ‘last night’s show was about as much as the normal emotions can take’.5 Variety, present at the ‘preem’ (Variety-speak for first night) of what it called ‘Shakespearian stand-by Macbeth’,6 described it as ‘Welles from curtain to curtain – and good Welles. It’s a Welles production, a Welles adaptation, a Welles directing job – and a Welles interpretation of the title role. It’s pretty hard to find anything wrong with any of them.’ The paper added: ‘the audience … notorious for its ability to sit on its hands … did everything but cheer at the final curtain, and gave the cast six curtain calls, almost unheard of here’. They had been held rapt for the just over ninety minutes to which Welles had cut the play, twenty minutes longer than the gramophone version, but nearly an hour shorter than most productions. In addition to the cuts and arrangements, Welles had ensured maximum fluidity by minimising scenery and effecting transitions with light changes; the lighting plot was confined to side light and front spots, with no footlights or general wash. ‘The Wellesian stage settings and lighting effects,’7 said the New York Times, ‘were impressively eerie, though at times the darkness was slightly overdone.’ Miss Goodall describes the setting: a dynamic line of stairs that swept from extreme right upstage, ending in a circular spread at left centre; the stage built out over the footlights; stairs going down into the orchestra pit. The six bagpipers were augmented by trumpets and drums playing uncredited fanfares and marches. This style of production – swift, spare, epic – became something of a norm in the nineteen-seventies and eighties; its contrast with contemporary productions must have been great. ‘No lily-wristed, well-combed Shakespearean players paraded through endless scenes of sweet impressionism in this version,’ wrote Goodall. Lady Macbeth’s entrance in her first scene, she reports, descending the grey-black cloth-covered stairway, was ‘hair-raising’.