Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  An artist’s every word is an expression of a social attitude; and I cannot agree with M. Ionesco that these expressions are always less original than political speeches or pamphlets. An artist must confirm the values of his society; or he must challenge them. Giving, as he does, such emphasis to the wholly personal in art, to the individual, the unique, M. Ionesco surely knows better than to look for sanctuary among the authoritarians . . . He cannot hope to smuggle his own private world into a world where privacy is a crime, where the sovereign individual is an outlaw. He throws himself – frigidly aloof, proudly inviolable – on the mercy of the partisans of freedom . . . many freedoms everywhere are under siege, and all of them – including M. Ionesco’s privilege to shrug his shoulders at politics – were, at one time or another, political achievements. It is not ‘politics’ which is the arch-enemy of art; it is neutrality, which robs us of the sense of tragedy.3

  Welles elegantly articulates the argument against the apolitical stance. It is interesting, however, to note that, despite his lifelong interest in and commitment to politics, Welles’s position as an artist is closer to that of Ionesco than that of Tynan. In his films, Welles had most eloquently presented the ‘wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias’; he too had shown how ‘the whole history of the world has been governed by these nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly’. Touch of Evil is drenched in a sense of lacrimae rerum, life’s essential sadness, as was his stage production of Chimes at Midnight and as, supremely, his celluloid reimagining of it would be; no political action will alleviate the tragedy of a Quinlan or a Falstaff. Welles’s profound melancholy was at odds with his commitment to political solutions. It is, of course, striking that his own – rather spasmodic – political activity was, with rare exceptions, unilateral and highly subjective.

  It was in early October of 1959 that Oscar Lewenstein first approached Welles about the possibility of directing Rhinoceros, which had not yet been either published or performed. It was Ionesco’s third full-length play; he had written it first as a short story, and then in November of 1958 he read the third act of the play in a public performance at the Vieux-Colombier Theatre in Paris. A radio broadcast of this, translated by Derek Prouse, went out on the BBC Third Programme in August 1959, by which time it had been promised, first to the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf, then to Jean-Louis Barrault for production at the Odéon-France Theatre. Lewenstein, having secured the English rights, invited Barrault to direct the play in English at the Royal Court Theatre, immediately after the French production, with the extraordinary American comic-turned-actor Zero Mostel in the central role of Bérenger; Mostel had just had a big success in London playing Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Night-town. Barrault expressed huge enthusiasm for London and for Mostel, but for reasons unknown it proved impossible for him, so Lewenstein approached Welles. But Welles did one of his vanishing tricks. ‘As you know,’ Lewenstein wrote to Ionesco, ‘it was supposed that I was going to meet Orson in Paris whilst I was over there, but not for the first time Orson succeeded in disappointing me. Despite the arrangement we had made to meet, I found that he was out of Paris when I should have been meeting him.’4 As this sort of behaviour could always be expected of Welles, says Lewenstein, he has decided to offer the play instead to the noted British director Tyrone Guthrie, again with Mostel as Bérenger. Guthrie hesitated, so the net was cast wider, with Ionesco’s approval, to include the most interesting directors of the day: Peter Brook, Joan Littlewood, Michel Saint-Denis and Peter Wood – and Welles came back into the frame again. After Guthrie turned it down, Brook was the front-runner, but he finally, reluctantly, turned it down at the end of November; Lewenstein then offered it to Welles, his original first choice, and Welles accepted.5 Lewenstein drafted an agreement just before Christmas 1959, by which he and Wolf Mankowitz would find two-thirds of the capital, Welles the remaining third. Mostel would play Bérenger and rehearsals would begin on 21 March 1960; this would be a commercial production, in the West End.

  Meanwhile, the play had its world premiere in Düsseldorf, directed by Karl-Heinz Stroux; bleak and terrible, the production was an overwhelming, if disturbing, triumph, the play’s parable of the initially slow but rapidly increasing transformation of an entire community into rhinoceroses – the process of rhinocerisation, as Ionesco calls it – perceived as an unmistakable and deeply disturbing metaphor for what had happened in Germany only a quarter of a century before. The production presented the play, Ionesco said, ‘as a stark tragedy with no concessions’.6 Three weeks later Barrault’s production was unveiled in Paris and was equally successful, though utterly different in tone: to Ionesco’s great satisfaction, Barrault saw the play ‘as a farce and a fantastic fable’. The production was much lighter and airier than the German version, at least to begin with: ‘the town that first greets our eye is a veritable Dufy, bright and coloured and gay,’ wrote Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times. ‘Two long streets running away, past the town hall and the picturesque houses, into the romantic distance. Gradually the scene becomes more and more confined, more and more drab.’7 The acting was surprisingly naturalistic, allowing the gradual transformation of society to happen moment by moment, though the production was quite explicit about the Nazi metaphor, which was true, to one degree or another, of all the productions that soon took place all over Europe; no one in any of those countries could have seen the play without being forcefully reminded of their recent history.

  On the day of the play’s Paris premiere, Welles and Lewenstein received alarming news: Zero Mostel had been knocked down by a bus in New York, his leg crushed. ‘Both of us’, wrote Lewenstein to Mostel, ‘in the depths of despair at the thought that you might not be able to play in Rhinoceros.’8 Amputation was proposed. In the event Mostel kept his leg, but he was four months in the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York. Finally, Lewenstein wrote to him there, deeply regretting having to move on with the casting of Bérenger. ‘I therefore had to try to find an alternative and was lucky enough’, he says, slightly disingenuously, ‘to get Laurence Olivier for the part.’ If he was well enough in time, perhaps Mostel might be able to play the role of Jean, Bérenger’s best friend – the first character in the play to succumb to rhinocerisation?9 ‘ROLE SWITCH DISAPPOINTING’, cabled Mostel’s agent, ‘BUT ZERO WILL PLAY JEAN TO OLIVIER.’ On the strength of this astonishing package, Welles (who had just come to the end of Chimes at Midnight’s chaotic London rehearsals and was about to sail to Belfast) signed his contract with untypical alacrity. ‘Orson is designing the sets and working out some marvellous sound ideas,’ Lewenstein told Ionesco, ‘so that rhinoceroses can run all over the theatre.’10

  After his startling triumph there three years earlier with The Entertainer, Olivier felt that he owed the Royal Court a play, so it was agreed that Rhinoceros would start there, with suitable provisions for a transfer, any income from which would be deeply welcome to a more than usually cash-strapped Welles. The moment Olivier’s name was announced, sales at the box office at the Court went into overdrive; very soon, the small theatre was sold out for its four-week run. Welles, by now, was in Dublin, which is where Olivier came to see him for their little chat about the play. Ann Rogers picked him up at the station and took him for supper; then together they went to the Gaiety and saw Chimes at Midnight. Olivier was, said Rogers, ‘appalled. Not with the acting, not with the play, but that the whole production was so makeshift.’11 Welles had pulled out every stop on stage; so had the young actors. Olivier went backstage and chatted pleasantly to Keith Baxter and Alexis Kanner, the latter deeply anxious because Olivier had famously played a definitive Hotspur at the New Theatre during the war. The Chimes at Midnight fight was, Olivier said, the best fight he had ever seen on stage. Then he gave Baxter some helpful technical advice about his posture. ‘Larry,’ said Welles, laughing, ‘don’t start that actor-laddie s
tuff. You love giving actors notes guaranteed to screw them up.’ (In fact, Baxter found the advice very useful.)12 Olivier and Welles then posed a little for the cameras; the whole of the next day, ‘like two Garbos,’ according to the Daily Mail’s spies in Dublin, ‘Sir Laurence Olivier and the bulky Mr Orson Welles wanted to be very much alone. They locked themselves in an hotel suite and didn’t want to be disturbed.’13

  They had much to talk about. Both men were anxious about the play they were about to do together. Olivier, with his urgent desire to be abreast of the modern movement, felt that it was something he should do, though he had no clear idea of how to play the part, or indeed what it all meant. Welles perhaps felt he knew all too well what it meant, its message spelled out in letters a mile high. He was already out of love with the play, finding it empty at its core, but he needed the work. And, indeed, Welles was looking forward to working with his old chum Larry again (which they had last done on the radio in March of 1939 in a dashing Beau Geste). Notwithstanding their rivalry as Shakespearean film directors – a rivalry Welles felt much more acutely than Olivier, since it was Olivier whose films were acclaimed as masterpieces – they had parted on perfectly pleasant terms after Othello at the St James, despite Welles’s abandonment of the planned tour. A decade on, neither was perhaps in the best shape. Welles was frustrated and bored in equal measure by Chimes at Midnight, which had also made him no money whatever – in fact it had cost him a great deal; and there were no hopes of any potential film for him to direct. Olivier, for his part, had just completed a gruelling year of work in which he had played his famous Coriolanus at Stratford-upon-Avon while filming The Entertainer by day (in the course of which he had snapped his knee cartilage); straight after that, he had gone to America to direct Charlton Heston in The Tumbler, a creaky verse-play by his friend Benn Levy, which he had laboured over with typical energy and invention, but all to no avail: it had flopped spectacularly, closing on Broadway after four days. But all of this was merely the foreground to an intense private drama, featuring the irrecoverable collapse of Olivier’s deeply troubled marriage to Vivien Leigh and the rapid burgeoning of his love for Joan Plowright, both of which had to be kept from the ever-prying eyes of the press on both sides of the Atlantic.

  No doubt these matters were addressed during their day-long ensconcement in the Shelbourne Hotel (they didn’t even appear for meals, marvelled the Mail). But the really urgent question was: what were they going to do with the play? Welles had any number of ideas, the biggest of which was that he wanted to relocate it from France to England, an entirely understandable choice: setting it in France would have made it into a play about the French, suggesting that it was their problem, not ours, the exact opposite of what Ionesco had said in the Preface to the American edition of Rhinocéros. ‘To understand the fundamental problem common to all mankind,’ he said, ‘I must ask myself what my fundamental problem is, what my most ineradicable fear is. I am certain then, to find the problems and fears of literally everyone. That is the true road into my own darkness, our darkness, which I try to bring to the light of day.’14 However, there was a serious loss: clearly a great deal of the impact of the play when it was performed in Europe had been due to the continent’s history of mass hysteria, of contagious collective paranoia, of uniformed regimentation. Even when the play was performed on Broadway not much later, America’s recent history of McCarthyite collective hysteria informed the audience’s experience of the play. But there had been no such event in modern British history. Changing the setting to England risked distancing the story, of turning it into an abstract sort of parable; nonetheless they decided to go down that path, and Welles, working from Derek Prouse’s workmanlike translation, produced a script that was some way from Ionesco’s original, both in tone and in meaning.

  Welles also had ideas about the nature of Ionesco’s dialogue, which plays variations on conversational banality in a highly structured, almost musical way. Welles was impatient with this procedure, so he thought to enliven it by overlapping the dialogue, as he had done to such brilliant effect on stage in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Around the World, and of course, most famously, in Citizen Kane. He sought to create the horror of the play primarily through sound – a thousand versions of thundering hooves, plus other, abstract sounds, which would give the impression of mankind being dragged backwards through a hedge. Olivier deeply admired Welles as a director and was no doubt encouraged by this plethora of ideas, which would surely swiftly coalesce into a coherent production, the way his own always did – all the elements fixed so that they could be repeated and honed to perfection.

  Olivier went back to London. The casting process was conducted at long distance, but between the good offices of Laurence Olivier Productions (which now had 25 per cent of the action, as did each of the three other partners), Oscar Lewenstein and the Royal Court Theatre, a really splendid group of actors was assembled – distinguished stalwarts like fruity Gladys Henson; the great character comedian Miles Malleson; Alan Webb, veteran of many a Noël Coward production; brassy Monica Evans; and hatchet-faced Hazel Hughes. It was a very classy West End cast. There were two Moby-Dick veterans, Peter Sallis and Joan Plowright. When it became apparent that Zero Mostel was still hors de combat, they offered the pivotal part of Bérenger’s friend Jean, now anglicised to John, to Peter Sellers, already on his way to comic superstardom; when he turned it down – ‘it would have been wonderful prestige,’ he told Empire News, ‘but I couldn’t understand a word of it’15 – the great lantern-jawed Scottish comedian Duncan Macrae stepped up to the wire. There was even a refugee from Chimes at Midnight, Henry Woolf. Anne Cunningham had been promised a role, but, for obvious reasons, that role never materialised. As for costumes, set, light and sound – all those were to be in Welles’s hands.

  Time was now very short: as usual, there was no sign of any designs, so the Royal Court despatched one of its resident designers, Stuart Stallard, to Dublin, to elicit Welles’s ideas from him. Welles proved typically elusive, refusing to answer his phone, not responding to notes left at the stage door or at the hotel, until finally Stallard was tipped off that he was taking the air on St Stephen’s Green, which is where Stallard finally bearded him. In due course, as they sat together on a park bench, Welles reluctantly started to divulge his ideas; he and Stallard then repaired to the theatre, where they assembled some sort of a general idea of a set from bits of cardboard gummed together. The first act – a little French place in the original, with old men playing boules, all brightness and light – was now to be set in a pub (because what could be more English?) with a television set, on which the rhinoceroses would first appear. Welles had a very clear notion of the sort of light he wanted for the second act, when rhinocerisation starts in earnest: a great shaft of it in the centre of the stage, which presented its own design challenges. This second act, set in Bérenger’s office, would be sparse, with banisters leading down to a staircase, plus a few filing cabinets; and the last act bare, apart from the rhinoceros heads.16 The play has many technical challenges, not least the transformation of Jean/John into a rhinoceros in full view of the audience; these tricky problems were set aside for another day.

  Welles left Dublin on 27 March; rehearsals commenced at the Royal Court on the 28th. They began as farce, but more Keystone Kops than Franco-Romanian absurdist. A press photographer was discovered lying on his back in the upper circle of the theatre: he claimed to be a member of the Royal Court Theatre’s supporters’ club, taking a snap for his Aunt Fanny. ‘His and every one else’s Aunt Fanny,’ growled the press officer.17 The papers knew perfectly well what was going on between Olivier and Plowright, but they wanted photographic evidence. Rehearsals were immediately transferred to a secret location in a church hall in Maida Vale in west London. Not quite secret enough: early on, a young vicar passed through, murmured a ‘Good afternoon’ and then disappeared. Someone’s keen ears detected the click of a camera; the young man was discovered, Polonius
-like, behind an arras, his camera confiscated and the film exposed by Welles personally. ‘Go ahead and sue, you bum,’ he told the quaking parson-paparazzo. This mania continued throughout rehearsals; it was dark glasses and headscarf for Plowright, secret entrances for Olivier. A strict embargo was placed on interviews. The Express grumpily noted the secrecy, the ban on publicity. The cast, it claimed, was working around the clock, ‘driven, exhausted, by the driving, inexhaustible Orson Welles’.18 The Sunday Graphic carried an aggressively unpleasant piece by a reporter who had been baulked of his story: ‘The spectacle of two middle-aged gentlemen, one of them described as “the world’s greatest actor,” playing a silent hide-and-seek game with rhinoceroses round Sloane Square strikes me as being absurd. And somewhat pathetic.’19 The Graphic was affronted that Welles’s name was given equal billing with Olivier’s. The aggressively lowbrow News Chronicle equally contemptuously expressed its resentment of Olivier’s embrace of the avant-garde – ‘a stunt’, it said, ‘pathetic’ and ‘absurd’.20