Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  No wonder the impression he gave as he approached the Stratford season was one of fearful vulnerability. Fortunately he was not in the opening plays, Othello (moderately received) and All’s Well (in modern dress: joyously acclaimed), and his first part was Bottom. The great challenge was put off to the end of the season. It was an agreeable way to ease himself in; not that that was how he approached it. He had had a long relationship with Bottom, too, suddenly reading his lines to whoever would listen. ‘To hear him (unwarningly) change places with Bottom, having played his thickness with hanging lips and idiot delight …’, wrote Enid Bagnold. Some years before, Eric Bentley, chastising him for his evasion of the theatre, wrote: ‘One of the great moments in all my theatre-going was the moment when in a hotel room in Paris Charles Laughton read Bottom’s first scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We write about jaws dropping, but that is the only time I actually saw a jaw drop for sheer surprise and delight; it was the jaw of Charles Dullin. The portrayal of Bottom … was sublime; and not just sublime reciting, but sublime acting, sublime theatre.’ Jane Arden recalled the astonishing transformation that overcame him when he read the play to her five-year-old son.

  Peter Hall, the director of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, found that, ‘like all great actors, he sucked you dry’, but ‘he wasn’t hard to direct, providing that you just released yourself and threw everything at him that you were thinking and feeling’. He had ideas about everything – including a conviction that the play should be set in a kind of Japanese garden – but he eventually conceded the value of Hall’s preference for staging the play as a festive piece played in a great Elizabethan house. Laughton’s modernistic taste in Art led him at first to reject Lila de Nobili’s exquisite ‘gauzy, golden, sunlit world’, but his sense of the real world of these ‘Warwickshire craftsmen’ putting on their play for the local nobs, reconciled him to a specifically Elizabethan setting. All his joy in acting, uncomplicated by any burdens of great significance, and all his ‘questing, worrying mind’ (Peter Hall’s phrase), were released in rehearsals: ‘he was like some kind of mad dog that had come into the rehearsal room – a wet dog, too, shaking all over the place.’ He was not, thought Hall, selfish, but ‘I quickly found that wherever I put him, upstage, downstage, he’d dominate the proceedings because there was this vast wonderful moonlight face with these huge eyes; it was like a large mirror on the stage.’ His fellow actors, of whom Michael Blakemore was one, found him generous to act with, though perhaps more in the sense of taking than of giving (an underrated form of generosity in the theatre, but surely as great): ‘you felt him groping around the stage for other sensibilities to latch onto, to keep him afloat.’ Interestingly, Blakemore speaks of feeling that in rehearsals ‘he was evading the moment when he actually had to commit to a view of the scene.’ The more Laughton entered into a character or a play, the more agonisingly aware of the range of possibilities he became; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, it was evidently delicious agony.

  The production was well-enough received. It was held to lack poetry. The critics should have hung around; they’d heard nothing yet. Laughton was welcomed enthusiastically enough, though held, in some quarters, to be rather subdued. As ever, it was hard to believe that rival critics had attended the same performance. ‘It’s a Laughton performance’, squealed the Daily Mail, ‘with the emphasis on the laugh.’ ‘J.C. Trewin, dismayed by the loss of the ‘haunted night of the Athenian Wood, and of the gleaming moonshine of the verse,’ alluded to his one-time idol only briefly: ‘inspiration flashes only when Charles Laughton is recalling the wonder of the night’s dream.’ ‘Laughton,’ he continued, ‘is to act King Lear during August; he must regard his hempen homespun as a holiday exercise.’ Tynan was ruthless: ‘I confess I do not know what Mr Laughton is up to, but I am sure I would hate to share a stage with it. He certainly takes the audience into his confidence but the process seems to exclude from his confidence, everyone else in the cast. Fidgeting with a lightness that reminds one (even as one forgets what the other actors are talking about) how expertly bulky men dance, he blinks at the pit his moist, reproachful eyes, softly cajoles and suddenly roars, and behaves throughout in a manner that has nothing to do with acting, although it perfectly hits off the demeanour of a rapscallion uncle dressed up to entertain the children at a Christmas party.’

  Laughton would never be able to satisfy Tynan whose predilection was for acting which bore the stamp of its maker, just as Tynan could never appreciate the great genius of Peggy Ashcroft, stemming as it did from an overflowing radiance of soul. Where was the interpretation? Tynan always wanted a scheme for things, and for all his great gifts, this limited his understanding of the actor’s contribution. Personal qualities often eluded him; he must always know what the actor was doing. Actors whose genius consisted in being, slipped through his net – unless they were a ‘turn’, like Bea Lillie, or Sir Ralph Richardson at the end of his life. Then he was full of appreciation. His review of Laughton’s Bottom is perhaps on the edge of this kind of appreciation.

  Fortunately, and uniquely, there is a filmed record of the performance by which one can judge it. It is not a complete guide to the performance, of course, because the whole pitch of playing is changed to accommodate the medium. Even detractors of Laughton’s stage Bottom grudgingly admit that on film he is glorious. The predominant impression is of energy – passionate, earthy energy – and appetite; but beside the physical energy is an enormous imaginative turmoil, so that Bottom’s desire to play all the parts comes not from arrogance or greed, but from sudden visions of himself in the various rôles. His melancholy, as he is denied the chance of giving life to his Thisbe or his Lion, is terrible, but valiantly borne. His London (-ish) accent gives great vigour and bite to his utterances; though it must be admitted that it is oddly at variance with either the mummerset of his fellow-players, or the Warwickshire of his avowed intentions. It also must be admitted that he somehow always finds himself at the centre of the action; whether Bottom or Laughton is responsible for this is all but impossible to say – they are indistinguishable. Except physically. Physically, this ginger-headed, ginger-bearded, apparent forty-year-old bears no resemblance whatever to the heap of flesh that had, no more than six months earlier, addressed the Roman senate, nor to the silver-haired patriarch who six weeks before had addressed the London press. The great paunch is there, encased in a cross-stitched smock, but the whole centre of gravity seems to have changed, and when, after the play scene, the duke calls for a bergamask, it is impossible to believe that the whirling, cavorting figure who leads it can be sixty, fat, and very short of breath indeed. Giles Gordon, as a young boy, was backstage during the interval to visit Cyril Luckham, who was playing Quince, when ‘I was vaguely aware of a large presence, like a mountain bear, a great, slow animal. He was vast. He seemed to spread, like camembert or brie, beyond the physical space he occupied … he shambled back into the wings, looking as weary as William Blake’s Ancient of Days … I took my place standing at the back of the stalls. Cyril was benign and gentle as Quince. Suddenly a young actor burst onto the stage, playing Bottom the Weaver. To this day, and I have seen many Bottoms, I haven’t seen a more youthful, energetic, lively, eager one. He can’t, that afternoon, have been a day older than seventeen. I didn’t, of course, need to look at the programme to see who played him.’

  The same power of imagination which rearranged the face and physique of Laughton possesses his Bottom, and renders his encounter with the fairy kingdom a thing of great poetry. He is accustomed to visions, so he treats this one with perfect naturalness. Most acceptingly he places his monstrous head on Titania’s lap, and greets the fairies with tremendous grave courtesy (and a sudden inexplicable access of mummerset vowels). His translation has left him with huge floppy ears and furry, cloven paws (a make-up devised by Laughton himself) which perfectly suggests the mid-point, half ass, half human, that he has become; these, too, he accepts with great expansive good nature. When he returns t
o his fellows, their joyous greetings seem wholly genuine and completely understandable. In the play scene, he sports a band around his head, acts with great bravura and dies with many a false death, jack-knifing up and down off the floor. In the final dance, he somehow embodies the true spirit of the Morris dance. It is not merely nimble but almost possessed.

  The film lasts 90 minutes, which means that the play is condensed into a little over seventy-five, to allow for an introduction by Laughton, and a glimpse of Peter Hall. Laughton was very much the presiding genius of the enterprise, having set it up in the first place. It was claimed that it would be seen by over 40 million Americans, and that it was the most expensive programme ever, up to that point, made for television. Directed by Fletcher Markle, it’s a very decent account of the production, revealing the loveliness of Lila de Nobili’s designs, and doing justice to all the play’s strata, though, for obvious reasons, the mechanicals get the best of it. As an historical document, the film is a delight, revealing the young Albert Finney (at Stratford at Laughton’s suggestion, and none too happy), the young Vanessa Redgrave in a performance so startlingly exaggerated that only a huge natural gift could have sustained it without self-consciousness, Michael Blakemore in a nose, Ian Holm supreme as Puck, which he would play again in Peter Hall’s 1968 film, and Mary Ure as a radiantly sensuous but human Titania. Laughton’s introduction is a fair sample of his persona as a cultural missionary, genial, humorous, reverent in short bursts (‘Who were you, Will Shakespeare?’). He glides down the Avon in a punt, he wanders through Ann Hathaway’s cottage, he strolls down Stratford High Street in the company of his brother-in-law, Waldo Lanchester, telling us how he had doubts about cramming The Dream into 90 minutes, until he looked up and saw the forest of TV aerials on the roofs of all the houses, and realised that if Shakespeare had been alive today, he would have tried to reach as many people as he could through the new medium. ‘Now don’t you sneer!’ he tells his ‘fellow-Americans,’ as, quite incongruously, he calls them. ‘There was a time when I didn’t dig him myself, but the more I read him, the more I dug him, and the more you dig, the more you dig, do you dig me, daddy?’ ‘Well, you must excuse me because I’ve got to go and put my make-up on and paint my beard and my hair ginger,’ he ends. Against all the odds, it’s patronising neither to Shakespeare nor to his ‘fellow-Americans’. In fact, it’s rather moving.

  Bottom was a lull before the storm, an encore before, rather than after the main event. Now it was Lear at last. ‘At the first read-through,’ Michael Blakemore, who was playing Lear’s knight, says, ‘what was immediately apparent was that he would never really get the huge rhetorical passages, he couldn’t really do that, he didn’t have the machinery.’ He knew that, and had convinced himself that it wasn’t necessary; his understanding of Lear led him to focus his performance on the second half of the play. In a letter to a young fan, he had described his anguish in the dressing-room; how he ‘dreaded going through all the things Shakespeare had written: the terrible journey of Lear to his death.’ That was the key-note for him: not the fall from a great height, not the turbulent rage, but the stumbling progress towards death. During the run of the play, he was troubled by nightmares associated with the play. He got his cousin, Jack Dewsbery, a psychiatrist, to come to see the performance: ‘I went up to Stratford, and, for reasons which even now are unknown to me, I was struck by the very first speech he made in the play, in which Lear speaks of his coming death and of the need to dispose of his properties. I told Charles that was where I thought the trouble lay … I can only suppose that in some way his dreams had foretold the future, and that I had unwittingly put my finger on their meaning.’ Lanchester suggests, too, that his desire to take peyote indicated that ‘somehow there was little time to reach out and touch some unattainable goal in art’.

  Rehearsals were unusual in that Elsa Lanchester was present throughout, sitting at a desk, text spread out in front of her, reminding him of what they’d decided during the preparatory period. Once again, Laughton was full of suggestions, which Glen Byam Shaw, a more malleable man than Peter Hall and less skilled at deflecting the more far-fetched notions, generally accepted, thus, according to a young actor in the company, destroying the production. ‘What would have been a grand old Shakespearian production was destroyed by Charles, bit by bit – a year’s work, dismantled. This poor weak producer Glen Byam Shaw would say to each of Charles’ suggestions, ‘You’re a genius!’ We watched with fascination.’ What Charles was striving towards was a visual equivalent of the monolithic, abstract delicacy of the painters Soulages and Manessier, both of whose work he collected and indeed examples of which he had with him in Stratford. It was this monumental simplicity that he sought on his frequent visits to Rollright, the Druidic remains nearby. With the younger members of the cast, he’d go up there at three o’clock in the morning, just trying to absorb that simplicity. It wasn’t the primitivism that he wanted; it was the same thing he found in his pre-Columban collection – something essential, maybe mandala-like. In the end, he did persuade Byam Shaw and Percy Harris, the designer, to cut away more and more, just as he tried to cut away more and more from his own performance.

  He had imposed (deliberately?) a quite separate obstacle to his work: he had come to believe that Elizabethan typography was the clue to the stresses in the verse. Every time a capital letter occurred, it signified a stress. No arguments about the capriciousness of Elizabethan printers would sway him. It was holding him up terribly, as he struggled to wring significance out of prepositions and participles starting with, for example, a capital T, just because the printer had had a run on his lower case that morning and was obliged to use the upper one instead. Glen Byam Shaw appealed to Peter Hall to help him, but all in vain. ‘That was him – all knowledge, all experience was his field, and he would go off on mad crazes and many of them were crazy, but many of them were not.’

  He was firmly in the grip of the iron iambic, as well: years in front of a metronome had bred in him an almost superstitious fear of offering any reading of a line which diverged from the rigid dada, dada, dada, dada, dada. So the audience got Howl HOWL, Howl HOWL, Howl. It says much for his emotional force that this was never noted by any critic.

  Ian Holm, his devoted Fool (‘I felt I had to love this man’), observed in him a dread of exposing his performance, as if it were something so personal that it might perish. ‘Perhaps, like Glenn Gould, he wasn’t doing it for an audience.’ Blakemore reckoned that ‘of all the distinguished people we had that season, all the very distinguished talents, Charles in a way was nakedly the most an artist. You felt that the struggle constantly to achieve something fresh, something unrelated to fame or public acceptance, was going on there all the time.’

  Laughton’s anxiety as the first night approached was quite unconcealed; he had a terrible shout-down with Byam Shaw in which he threatened to walk out unless a certain actor was removed; Byam Shaw resisted. According to Glen, the dress rehearsal was wonderful; Elsa thought the reverse, and rushed backstage to tell him so, to accuse Charles of using all his old mannerisms, and betraying their work together. ‘Charles shouted back at me that I was a killer. He said you’ve ruined it! I’ll never do it now, it’s hopeless. You’ve killed everything!’ On the first night, Blakemore looked into his eyes: ‘it was like a lot of birds flying round a cage in panic … He started badly and did not recover till the last third.’

  ‘CHARLES LAUGHTON IS NOT A GREAT LEAR,’ the News Chronicle triumphantly informed its readers. There had been a few boos from the gallery, too, but in fact, the performance was received with respect by the majority of the audience and the majority of the press. The consensus that generally develops between the extremes (in this case represented by, on the one hand, the News Chronicle and, on the other, surprisingly, Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard: ‘A BRILLIANT LEAR – BY ANY TEST’) said that once the unmajestic opening and the vocally weak storm scenes were over, the performance began to bite, until, at the
end, it became deeply moving. ‘Mr Laughton’s performance,’ according to The Times, ‘is a superb essay in stage pathos. Only at the very end does it attain the level of high tragedy.’ Absurd, these Beckmesser-like awardings of points in the categories! How many points for kingship? And for pathos? Four for tragic demeanour, not bad. Pity about lacking the all-important bass notes … still, he looked old. Some reviews give more detailed accounts of what actually happened, of what kind of experience was generated, interesting clues: ‘Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’ is not a blow struck at his kingly authority. It is a kind of shock that occurs as a dream slides into a nightmare,’ said The Times. W. A. Darlington, in the Telegraph, identified the pathos in the reading as coming from ‘the slowness with which Lear comes to comprehend what a wiser father would have known from the beginning.’ Young Bernard Levin, not yet shorn of his illusions, wrote: ‘In the opening scenes, he bases his rage against Cordelia firmly on disappointment, not shaky caprice, so that when he begins to repent of his decision, the terrible sadness of ‘I did her wrong’ catches at the heart and stings the eyes even before his madness sweeps our sympathies before it. And how moving and eloquent in this scene is the gesture with which Lear, tucked into a square, high, barbaric throne, turns to each of his daughters in turn to hear their protestations of love … if he does not bring humanity up to the level of the gods, he most marvellously brings the gods down to earth, so that when he cries to them not to let him go mad, his passion and pity come down among us, and move us all the more.’