Charles Laughton (45 page)

Instead he succumbed to considerable pressure from a New York producer who wanted him to direct
Major Barbara
and play Undershaft. He turned it down at first, liking neither the play nor the part; but on reflection agreed, and did what people so often do in those circumstances: he tried to turn it into a play he did like. It was not the argument of the play that he disagreed with; it was the form. His experiments with poetic intensification and with narrated drama made him impatient with Shaw’s extremely straightforward dramaturgy. Firstly, he did what is rarely done with Shaw, not so much on grounds of lèse-majesté as of respect for craftsmanship: he re-wrote the play. In collaboration with Herman Wouk (Herman Wouk! Shaw’s shade must have been overcome with gratitude at
posthumous
collaboration with such a master of the drama) Laughton cut a scene here, merged another there, conflated the second and third acts, and ended the play on Barbara’s cry of ‘Glory Hallelujah!’ The intention seems to have been to deprive the play of its undercutting irony, which was felt by the co-adaptors to be anti-climactic. It is, if you’re thinking in terms of images, and messages. But Shaw was very careful to embed the dialectical reverses of his plays deep in their structure. Laughton’s next decision was to stage the play in a non-realistic manner, to heighten its expressive impact; to intensify the images. Here again, he was on dangerous ground, because Shaw made himself a master of the theatre of his day in order to stand it on its head. If you abandon the conventions in which he wrote, you no longer receive its inversion.

Laughton’s production was obviously a very striking account of a different play. The set, by Donald Oenslager, one of the outstanding American design minds of his day, consisted, of, to quote Brooks Atkinson, ‘a series of cubes that can be arranged in the shape of a living-room by liveried stage-hands’. Part of the reason for this was economy: the bulk of the budget had gone on an impressive effect for when Undershaft and company descend to the foundry. But whatever the intention, whatever the reason, it can surely have had only one outcome: the destruction of the illusion of solidity that is essential to Shaw’s purposes. The effect on the play’s rhythms, so finely calculated by the author (‘it’s music, it’s music!’ as he so often said) must have been disastrous, too. As for the acting, Laughton had cast it somewhat quirkily – Cornelia Otis Skinner as Lady Brit, Glynis Johns as Barbara, Burgess Meredith as Dolly Cusins – and then imposed on the actors a deliberateness of utterance (for reasons of intellectual clarity) of which he was the supreme exemplar, centre stage. ‘Most of the actors behave like well-bred ladies and gentlemen who have studied the craft of educating the public with serious homilies,’ wrote Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
. Only Eli Wallach and Richard Lupino – from Laughton’s original acting class – were exempted. Laughton himself was said to be ‘imposing in a style of thoughtful deliberation’ – the very thing to be avoided like the plague in Shaw. There was, say the reports, no discernible character in Laughton’s playing; he was simply an articulate presence – a much appreciated articulate presence, given an ovation and sometimes a standing ovation every night. But, said Atkinson, ‘This is not Shaw. It is not Laughton. It is a stand-off which nobody wins.’

Relations with some of the cast were unsatisfactory: Burgess
Meredith
walked out at one point; Glynis Johns was replaced by Anne Jackson a short while into the run. Richard Lupino remembers a baffled Sally Gracie, playing Rummie Mitchems, telling him that Laughton had told her to find the ‘key’ to her character. This she could neither do nor understand. A few days later, however, she’d cheered up: he’d given her the key. ‘And what is it?’ ‘He says she’s an old cunt.’ A distinctly un-Shavian insight.

Why did Laughton decide to do the play? Money? Yes, up to a point. He would have been handsomely remunerated, as both actor and director, but, then as now, he could have made a great deal more on even the trashiest movie. Pressure from the producer? This is not to be underestimated in his case: his fundamental passivity was such that enough determination from whatever quarter and he would submit. Pleasure in performing? Least powerful motive. Performing within the confines of a play seemed cramped after the freedom of the reading tours. (Alec McCowen, on Broadway in
The Matchmaker
at the same time, recalls attending a performance at which Laughton appeared on stage in his dressing-gown to urge the gala audience to their seats. ‘Shut up!’ he said, ‘and sit down!’ He then proceeded to delight them with poems, limericks and inspirational passages from the Bible. Somewhat reluctantly, according to McCowen, after about half an hour he allowed the play to start.)

The most powerful persuasion to do the play evidently came from a sense of duty, both to his own talent and to the theatre. It’s a rotten motive.

His next work was, happily, undertaken much more in a spirit of fun and relish. Billy Wilder, who had long admired him, asked him to play Sir Wilfred Robarts in his film of Agatha Christie’s
Witness for the Prosecution
, with – a droll touch – Elsa Lanchester as his vigilant nurse. He was surrounded by other old chums: Tyrone Power (his last film, though he was not to know it), Marlene Dietrich (who had delighted him by saying, in the early thirties, that she would rather play a love scene with him than with anyone) and Henry Daniell, his old sparring partner from
The Suspect
and
Captain Kidd
. The script, greatly improved by Wilder and Harry Kurnitz from the Agatha Christie original, is, despite interesting resonances from Wilder and Dietrich’s earlier collaboration,
A Foreign Affair
, hokum, but it is hokum played to the hilt, by no one more so than Laughton, who gives an effortless display of personality allied to technique. It is in a line of tetchy monsters, including Lord Horfield in
The Paradine
Case
, but it has more fun, more élan, and, at moments, more tenderness than he was wont to bring. It demanded nothing of him, and he gave it everything. There is, in the character, no deep note to be struck, but the surface is a brilliant contrivance, flashing monocle, illicit cigars and all. The relationships he creates with Dietrich and Power are clear and telling, though, perhaps inevitably, his best work in this regard is with Lanchester. She is less busily kooky than usual, and their games of cat-and-mouse are both real and funny. They were both nominated for Academy Awards for their work on the film; her second, only his too, after
Henry VIII
. Neither won. By rich coincidence, the Best Actor Award was won by Alec Guinness – for
Bridge on the River Kwai
.

Billy Wilder reports that Laughton’s spirits were of the highest during shooting, and that he was endlessly fertile in alternative readings of every line, full of suggestions on every aspect of filming, from costumes to camera angles, and, on a memorable and much quoted occasion, in such good humour that he volunteered to read all the parts for the jury’s reaction shots. ‘You don’t want to do this, Charles,’ Wilder told him; ‘it’s donkey work, the script girl can do it.’ But he insisted, and, says Wilder, it was an astonishing display, each character more like the actor who played it than the actor was himself. Wilder says he wanted to shoot the film all over again. This charming little story testifies both to Laughton’s superabundant pleasure in acting (except that it isn’t exactly acting: nothing depends on it, no one has paid to see it: it is release without responsibility) and to a certain more or less innocent desire for admiration – and why not? If someone picks up a violin and tosses off a couple of Paganini caprices just to be praised, praise them! Wilder was a wonderful audience, too. Exasperated by actors who could hardly say good morning without the aid of an acting coach (he hadn’t seen nothing yet:
Some Like It Hot
still lay in the future) he beamed at Laughton’s sheer skill. So would von Sternberg have done; Laughton was a different man, now, and the joy of Sir Wilfred for him was that he could lavish all he had learned on him. It made him feel very good; and it shows.

If there are aspects to the performance beyond that, they lie in the area of, firstly, decency – an elusive quality, but which Laughton wonderfully embodies, without a trace of sentimentality – and, secondly, Englishness. Sir William’s crustiness and eccentricity are quickly revealed by Laughton to be masking an extreme boyishness, an emotional immaturity which is not without charm. His confusion at Dietrich’s overpowering femininity, and the
Boys’ Own Paper
feeling
about his determination to save her and nail the guilty man, are peculiarly English in feeling, and add a touch of reality to a picture which is constantly threatened by the preposterousness of its events and characters.

Maybe the Englishness of the part kindled some nostalgia in Laughton. At any rate, he accepted an offer to direct and act in a new play in London, which he accordingly did in May of 1958. It was
The Party
, by Jane Arden. It was widely felt at the time that he wanted to associate himself, rather in the manner a couple of years earlier of Olivier’s appearance in
The Entertainer
, with the new wave of English writing, and it may be so. He may have felt that modern England was a very different place from the country he’d left behind; a different place, even, from the England of 1951, when he last acted here. There were all kinds of new waves going on: socially, theatrically, in painting, in writing. Class seemed to be breaking down, and it was no longer comic or pathetic to come from the provinces: perhaps it was even an advantage. He was excited to discover a painter like Alan Lowndes in Manchester, and an actor like Albert Finney (also Mancunian) in Birmingham. No doubt he thought
The Party
was another manifestation of the same movement; if he did, he was wrong.

Its author, Jane Arden, had spent her early life in Wales, went – at the age of fifteen – to RADA, and then fetched up in America where, in Greenwich Village, according to her programme notes, she spent her time ‘looking around, absorbing all I could – forming new ideas’. There she started writing, but decided she must come back to England because she could only ‘write out of her own background’. The play she wrote, far from dealing with contemporary Britain, is heated personal drama, by no means without talent, in fact having a dangerous unstable energy all of its own but which is somehow completely at variance with the setting (a London suburb) and the form – good solid two act drama, three scenes in the first, two scenes in the second, and a resounding curtain line for each. Later, Miss Arden went on to write a neo-expressionist piece,
Vagina Rex
, which is much more itself; not, admittedly, a very nice self, but bold and uncompromised. Laughton was obviously drawn to the life in the play; and indeed the central character, had he wished to fully inhabit it, would have given ample scope for his special gifts. But as a director he strove to do contradictory things with it: to create the illusion of domestic reality (as unnecessary here as it was essential in Shaw, where he sought to abolish it) and to heighten the poetic feeling. His approach was Ibsenite, while the reference should have been to Strindberg.

The whole notion of the play revolves around madness – Ettie, the daughter whose party is being held, is clearly, from the outset, unstable, capricious, heartless, functioning on more or less controlled hysteria. We learn that her father, an alcoholic and worse, is in a home of some sort, having let the whole family down. Her mother, a vapid, kindly woman, still in love with her husband, is planning to invite him back for the weekend. The violence of Ettie’s rejection of this idea is already unnerving; when he arrives, she cancels the party. By chance, he meets a potential boy friend of hers; he pretends to be merely a friend, and dispenses wise advice to the lad. Ettie’s cold contempt for him drives him back to the gin. Their
scène à faire
follows, in which we learn that their closeness is not based on mere similarity of temperament, but on some nameless – and unnamed – encounter, presumably incestuous.

It is, somewhat in the manner of Arthur Miller, a play about adaptation to the real world: the fallen idol who is the father takes refuge in fantasy and fabulism, enchanting the neighbours, inspiring love and despair in equal measure among those close to him. The father’s account of his treatment by electro-convulsive therapy, not yet, in pre-Laingian 1958, an issue, is painful to read. The play actually anticipates a great deal of mid-sixties drama on the subject of society’s imposition of conformity. The sense of madness in the play is very real; the author, writing to Laughton in the middle of the run, when he was still trying to extract re-writes from her, told him, ‘It is a story of the past, and I haven’t been able to make it a living reality: the real story of Ettie Brough and her father is not written because the author was afraid to write it.’ In fact, whatever the precise details of the relationship (‘Something, I am afraid,’ Laughton wrote to Oscar Lewenstein, ‘which should remain on the shelf in a medical library’), the strain and anguish attaching to it are perfectly clear. ‘I have been through so many evasions from her in the past, and retirings from this workaday world,’ Laughton continued to Lewenstein, ‘I cannot believe she intends to work at all, until I see some evidence of it.’ The struggle to turn life into art was never satisfactorily resolved in
The Party
. Author and director were in many ways similar characters, emotionally demanding, obsessive, depressive. ‘Extreme … attracted opposites … without any real orientation to the adult world, the social world … emotionally almost too childlike,’ were the words in which Jane Arden described Laughton after his death, but they could be a self-portrait. A few years later, having endured the extreme demands of her temperament for long enough, she killed herself.

It is hard to sense any of this from the reviews. The principal point of interest was the return of Laughton to the stage, and he was greeted with a great roar at his entrance on the first night. ‘I found it a fantastically moving moment when, after twenty-two years, a door on the New Theatre stage opened to let him back to London … all the lines of his body sagged. The man, we knew, was a failure, and a lonely, defiant, uneasy failure. We never questioned for a moment his past or his possible future. We accepted his cynicism, his remorse, his man-of-the-world wisdom. It was entirely a feat of absorption, one of those occasions when acting is so true and so complete that you do not think of it as acting.’ Thus J. C. Trewin, who had followed Laughton from his first performances in the twenties, and who was one of the most eloquent lamenters of his defection to Hollywood to become ‘an ordinary film actor’. Most of the other critics extended a welcome back: ‘it is good to have him back after his twenty-two years’ absence’ (
Tatler
); ‘a perfect piece of Charles Laughton to the last shrug and the most carefully wrung hand’ (
Guardian
). ‘He remains, in every way, tremendous’ (
Punch
). ‘Acting with every ounce of his considerable flesh, he fills in the details’ (
Daily Mail
). Only Tynan, in the
Observer
, went for the jugular: ‘Mr Laughton offers neither danger nor defeat, just an extravagant booby harmlessly letting off steam. On top of this, he plays the part in a
faisandé
Cockney accent, straight out of Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill cartoons. All of which,’ he mischievously concludes, ‘is fascinating, but nothing to do with solicitors, Kilburn or observable reality.’ The accent had caused comment even from Trewin; it is all part of Laughton’s doomed and misguided attempt to endow the play with specific detail. As for solicitors and Kilburn, these are the author’s contributions along the same lines, and they, too, are doomed, grafted on to a story which would have been better told in abstracts.