Charles Laughton (16 page)

Bridie’s extreme and passionate reaction to Robson’s performance was not shared by the critics, who ranged from mild lack of enthusiasm, to outright acclaim: ‘This was the right actress in the right part’; ‘… she took her chance magnificently.’

The first night was a bitter disappointment for Charles himself. According to Guthrie, he was longing to play the role, and full of interesting ideas. ‘At the dress rehearsal his performance was electrifying. His acting that night bore the unmistakable stamp of genius.’ These words – electrifying, genius – were not frequently in the mouth of Guthrie. He did not use them lightly. Fabia Drake was at that dress rehearsal, and confirms the impression. Dress rehearsals, of course, can be emotional, tired, affairs, in which, in the empty theatre, or just
surrounded
by a few friends, with the set, the lights and the costumes together probably for the first time, judgements can blur. And indeed, something wonderful can under all those special and peculiar circumstances, take possession; and then disappear the following morning. For whatever reason, ‘alas, he never again, except fitfully, recovered his greatness.’ (Guthrie)

In the unique case of
Macbeth
, we have a scrap of evidence with which to reconstruct the performance: Laughton and the company recorded for the BBC the end of the play (Act V, scenes 5—7) from ‘The Queen my lord is dead.’ Making allowance for whatever inhibitions the radio studio imposed, it is still a vivid document. The recording is in fact quite ambitious: as well as three or four principals, there’s a substantial group of soldiers, battles are fought, fanfares are sounded. It is reasonable to suppose that what we hear is a fair impression of how it sounded.

The first thing to note is Laughton’s first utterance: significantly, it is non-textual: a deep sigh on hearing of the death of the queen. It is strikingly expressive. ‘She should have died hereafter’ wearily spoken, with a heavy stress on
died
. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow …’ is soporific, the darkish brown voice monotonous, the cadences almost ecclesiastical. The messenger tells him that Birnam Wood is on the move: and he springs to life again with ‘Liar and slave!’ overlapping the dialogue, raging wordlessly. The subsequent ‘if thou speaks’t false’ is also lumpily measured. He exits with animation, however. Roger Livesey as Macduff enters, with a radically different manner of speech – the elongated vowels and deliberately struck consonants of an earlier epoch – but spirited. When Macduff and Macbeth meet, Laughton starts to laugh: a laugh which at first seems to be merely melodramatic, but becomes genuinely chilling when it suddenly stops at Macduff’s revelation of his Caesarian birth. In his final speech of defiance, Laughton for the first time uses the upper register of his voice, at the same time, rather engagingly, slipping into broad Yorkshire. The extract concludes with the twenty-one-year-old Marius Goring’s very clearly spoken Malcolm.

There is no question but that Laughton is not skilled at using verse expressively. He alternates between the monotonous and the untextual. On the whole, the performance
qua
verse-speaking is featureless and flat. He doesn’t take advantage of the medium, doesn’t draw energy or sense from it. For him it’s obviously a strait-jacket, from which he occasionally breaks to connect powerfully with a word:
‘nothing’
in ‘signifying nothing’ is memorably black, for instance.

He simply wasn’t at home in verse. Records from his later years suggest that he never really came to terms with it. Why? Hardly lack of intelligence. Certainly not lack of work; he was obsessed by work, never leaving a problem alone till he was finished with it. No: what he found difficult was adapting his responses to the beauty and power of words, which he so keenly felt, to even as easy and loose a shape as the more-or-less iambic more-or-less pentameter. He had an astonishing command of rhetoric, and, as Charles Higham usefully points out, the
tirade
: the art of building a speech from climax to climax. In film after film, he would fit a speech, whether it was the Gettysburg address or something from the Bible, into his performance, and it would be spellbinding. He was a master of phrasing, and colour – but he must bring these from within – every pause and hesitation, every change of gear, every new register, from within, in response to a sequence of impulses felt by him. He couldn’t get on the rails, preferring to make his own way down the middle of the tracks. By historical accident, it denied him access to the greatest roles in the English language, which happen to be in verse.

Laughton in verse, as the recording proves, was Laughton muzzled.

So he hadn’t learned to ‘speak’ – though his voice was immeasurably strengthened, and his range of expression enlarged, by the end of the season. In fact, he had done his ‘rep’: a large variety of parts, some within his scope, some not. There wasn’t the remotest possibility of his Prospero being anything other than a sketch; his Henry was neither here nor there; Tattle and Chasuble were fun, both for him and the audience; his Angelo was wonderful; and Macbeth was a disaster. A typical rep season, in fact. Unhappily for him, however, he wasn’t a young actor cutting his teeth in the provinces: he was a world-famous film star, and a phenomenon of the West End stage.

It was an extraordinary thing for him to have done, humble and naïve at once. If he wanted to do a classical play, he could so easily have approached a West End manager: any one of them would have leaped at the chance. He could have had a company of his own; could have gone into management himself. But no, he wanted to go to the Vic. Not for itself, as we have seen. Nor was it glory, in which he was already covered anyway, that motivated him; not for him the reasoning of the young Laurence Olivier, four years later, taking the same route: ‘To me, the Old Vic was the equivalent of the Old Bailey. Here
I
would be judged for my classical work. Here I would pitch my stand and stake my claim. Here I could ease my way into the skin of the theatrical serpent, the skin that had been worn by Burbage down to Irving and Barrymore. There it was, pressed between the leather binding with the name William Shakespeare on the spine. There it lay, waiting to be moulded, shaped, hurled in the air and back again.’ (
On Acting
). Laughton wasn’t in competition for ‘the mantle’; he didn’t compare himself with the great dead; his hero was Gerald du Maurier who would no more dream of playing Shakespeare than fly. What he wanted was to do the work, and to do it quickly. He was deeply conscious of his late start, and of his lack of serious background. The Old Vic was his crammer.

‘It is a real pleasure,’ wrote Guthrie in the middle of the season, ‘to work with such a marvellous band of enthusiasts. Several of the company are playing Shakespeare for the first time, and we have to work like niggers rehearsing the next play at the same time as we are playing the current piece. Fourteen hours out of the twenty-four spent in the theatre is an everyday occurrence.’ Rehearsals started at 9.30, they broke at 5 for supper, and the curtain went up at 8. After the show, according to Elsa Lanchester, many of the company would troop back to the Laughtons’ temporary service flat in Jermyn Street, where they would sit and eat sandwiches and drink and discuss the work till two in the morning. (Pure rep, again.)

Laughton didn’t lead the company, as it were, from the front. His attitude in rehearsal was entirely egalitarian. He was quite open about his problems with the work, and was, Marius Goring admiringly observed, willing to try anything, not caring a fig whether it made him seem foolish. – At a certain point in rehearsals of
Macbeth
, for example, he came in in a state of great excitement: ‘I’ve got it! I’m so sorry, I see it now: it’s a
Scottish
play: Macbeth must be played Scots.’ Guthrie: ‘Interesting idea, give it a try.’ After three days: Guthrie: ‘It’s no good Charles, worse than it was without, worth trying out.’ So Charles gave it up. (The problem, Goring added, was that Charles couldn’t do a Scots accent, anyway, it kept coming out Scarborough.)

The young actors were very excited by what they felt to be ‘the new acting’ that Laughton was essaying. Charles mumbled through the read-throughs, which was utterly unheard of, and greatly admired; and he never turned up with a finished performance. He was constantly exploring. Coupled with Guthrie’s approach, brisk and brilliant and irreverent both to the Board and the Bard, the company was heady with excitement. John Allen wrote that it was ‘far and away the most exciting time of my life. Every night we used to walk out of the theatre, and over the bridge, in a state of intense exhilaration. We felt we were making history.’

Flora Robson, as Laughton’s co-star, had a less happy time. Her relationship with Guthrie, formerly so close, seemed to have cooled, and she found Laughton impossibly difficult to act with. According to Kenneth Barrow: ‘Charles was a difficult fellow-player. He was a self-obsessed actor who could only relate to the audience. Flora was exasperated at the way he would always look slightly down stage of her, when the sense of the moment called upon them to be looking fully at each other.’ And she felt that he stole her inventions. He certainly seems to have stolen her thunder, and that may have been at the back of her complaints. His unbuttoned realism must have ill-matched her more restrained, plaintive manner. It must be admitted that Laughton seems not to have been willing to lose himself in another actor. But then few great actors are.

In every other sense, he was a most generous and lively, if occasionally despairing, man to have around. He offered wise advice to the younger actors (told James Mason to wipe off the treacle of make-up which was hiding and disfiguring his face) and was instrumental, through the Korda connection, in getting some of them their first film parts (Mason, Livesey, Goring). Agate records that ‘it was graceful of Mr Laughton to come forward and demand our applause for the three Liveseys,’ at the curtain call for
Love for Love
.

Elsa Lanchester, in
Charles Laughton and I
, writes: ‘During the season we said, “In years to come we shall look back on this as one of our happiest times.” We can do that now. We were aware at the time that we were enjoying ourselves, which is unusual.’

This did not, alas, apply to Laughton’s dealings with Lilian Baylis. Relations between them never much improved – at an early meeting in her office he chain-smoked and, she claimed, flicked the ash into her dog bowl. Then there was the matter of the
language
: my god this, my god that, he said. Are you praying or blaspheming, Mr Laughton? she asked, because we don’t like blasphemers at the Vic. He refused to be charmed by her. Despite her unseductive exterior, she was rather flirtatious, susceptible to and even encouraging of flattery, but Laughton simply refused to play the game according to her rules.

Things soured permanently when, at the end of the season, she presented Laughton with a bill for the expenditure on costumes not covered by the grant from the Pilgrim Trust. In view of more or less
sold-out
houses, he demanded to see the books and discovered, as he had suspected, that she had diverted funds into the opera and ballet budgets. He refused point-blank to pay a penny. In a letter to Guthrie at the end of the season, she wrote: ‘It would be good if Laughton realised how he went back on his promises, he must have each production new from beginning to end and he would get the money for this. Nothing was said about good or bad business, it was a different offer which we accepted and he had failed to carry out.’ Laughton was deeply angered by her belief that because he had made large sums of money in Hollywood, it was his duty to bail the Vic out.

After the curtain had fallen on the first night of
Macbeth
, that night to make the angels weep, he had sat slumped in his dressing-room, sick with failure, and she, garbed in her M. A. (Hon.Caus.) gown, had come backstage, allegedly to console him. She let out what Guthrie – who was present – knew to be a laugh of embarrassment, but which Laughton experienced as ‘a hyena-yelp of triumph’, caught him a ‘sharp crack across the shoulder-blades’ and said: ‘Never mind, dear, I’m sure you did your best. And I’m sure that one day you may be a quite good Macbeth.’ Laughton was convinced that she was still exacting her revenge for the Pilgrim Trust business. Richard Find-later is surely right, however, to attribute the remark to her lack of tact: ‘Lilian was a monumentally tactless woman whose olive branches often appeared like knobkerries.’

Laughton failed to find popularity with Miss Baylis’ ‘people’. They, like her, were not going to be impressed by stars, whether from the West End or from Hollywood. Their favourite was Roger Livesey, sweet, good-natured, unpretentious, and not within a mile of Laughton’s talent. He was cheered, applauded, laughed at, while Charles played to silence. The Mme Defarge-like leader of the stalwarts, a certain Miss Pilgrim, particularly plagued him: on one occasion she apparently collected his autograph at the stage door: in fact, he found he had signed a petition demanding the removal of Guthrie. Later, in
Love for Love
, she worked out his comic timing, and fiendishly killed every laugh by guffawing mirthlessly just before the end of the line. Houses, largely thanks to Laughton, were full. They wanted to see him, but somehow they never loved him.

The last night of the season was traditionally jamboree night, at which the audience acclaimed their favourites. ‘Good Old Nero!’ someone called from the gallery. ‘Why don’t you bring your wife up,’ another cried. ‘My friend,’ says Laughton, ‘a great many people have tried to do that, but they have not succeeded.’ The audience also
showed
their appreciation in kind, placing small gifts for each of the actors on the stage. Roger Livesey received eight, others five. Charles received two or three. Later that night, Elsa Lanchester informed him that he hadn’t actually been given any presents – anticipating an embarrassing situation,
she’d
bought a couple of gifts for him, wrapped them and put his name on them. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he allegedly remarked, on hearing of this ploy.