Charles Laughton (47 page)

His preparation consisted as much, therefore, of work on himself as on the part. He co-opted Elsa Lanchester as his assistant and adviser; together they delved the depths. ‘The strain had become very heavy but exciting for both of us. He had become Lear. He couldn’t sleep at night, not because he was thinking of the words but because he was tortured. Lear was always with him.’ They found a thread in the play which perfectly expressed the yearning for resolution central to Laughton and Lear: ‘The extraordinary connection and repetition of references to water, climaxed by the great storm scene. It was like an outburst of tears, that storm, because there are so many references to water – water animals, rivers, dolphins. It was like a collecting of water behind the eyes and then the storm comes and the tears, and
then
tears for the terrible death of Cordelia at the end. So we restudied the water theme. We were learning to stretch the water and the tears so that it would be contagious to the audience, a building up of overflowing sorrow, the pressure of tears.’ They spent some time, during this preparation, in Hawaii, in touch with the natural world which so dominates
Lear
, surrounded by mountains, caught in storms, cut off by floods. And Laughton entered there on the island into a most strange and poetic friendship. Lanchester’s moving account reads: ‘His name was Passio. He was a dancer the like of which I have never seen. His dancing and his gestures were beautiful, but he would rarely come out to be seen … Charles by his kindness and gentleness, reached the boy’s spirit and helped Passio to dance for a small group … on a moonlit night on the beach. Passio danced! He used flaming torches that licked around his whole body and seemed to become part of him. He was the moon and the moonlight on the sea, and it was just the most extraordinary experience that I’ve ever known.’ Filled with all this, they returned to Los Angeles, where Charles amazed Elsa by buying some peyote: ‘‘I want to get as far into the character of Lear as I can.’ (Later, rather proudly, he reported no effect.)’

Leaving America for England, Laughton told Terry Sanders that he was going to play King Lear. ‘But I shall fail, of course.’

The Stratford season, a somewhat spurious 100th anniversary season (‘A few people might have done a bit of Morris dancing on the walls a hundred years ago, and said a couple of speeches from
As You Like It
,’ said Albert Finney), was the end of Glen Byam Shaw’s régime, and he’d assembled an astonishing group of actors and directors to mark it. Paul Robeson would play Othello with Sam Wanamaker as Iago, Tony Richardson directing; Edith Evans would play the Countess in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of
All’s Well That Ends Well
; Olivier would play Coriolanus, and Charles would play Lear and Bottom. It was a grand flourish which celebrated and brought to a conclusion a very honourable tradition at Stratford initiated by Barry Jackson, brought to glory by Anthony Quayle, and sustained by Byam Shaw: that of the big guns, spending an ill-paid summer playing the parts they would have no chance of doing anywhere else. The director-designate, Peter Hall, was about to effect the transformation Quayle and Shaw knew must come about: the institution of a permanent company, exploring the canon in a systematic and thematic manner, and keeping themselves alive to contemporary resonance by performing
new
plays as well. This tradition has now itself been replaced by a new free-for-all no longer sustained by a star system. The Jackson–Quayle–Shaw régime begins to assume the patina of a golden age.

In 1959, to judge by the contemporary press, Laughton was the biggest of the big guns; or perhaps he was the greatest novelty. ‘
Laughton to play Lear
’; ‘
Charles Laughton to Star as Bottom and Lear
’; ‘
A Star-studded Stratford: Shakespeare with Laughton, Olivier, Robeson and Edith Evans
!’ The headlines can only have filled him with more fear, but it is an interesting indicator of the extent of his fame. The first night of
The Party
had been mobbed. Enid Bagnold, with whom he experienced a brief, intense friendship during his English sojourn, noted this.

His glamour included a touch of the conjuror: an element that needed police cohorts to protect him from crowd-adoration. His ‘fame’ fascinated me. I know one or two great actors, but they are protected in the street by a quality of invisibility. Laurence Olivier especially. Charles’s fame in a mob would take the Duke of Windsor at the height of the Abdication to equal it. His unique ugliness plus the film of
Henry VIII
got him spotted. Spotted in a way that gave him claustrophobia. Old ladies swarmed, holding out pencils for autographs. Women pushing prams swivelled the four wheels towards him. Here on the Village Green tourists nudged each other and walked nearer, as he hurried into the car. It frightened him, he hated it, but he wouldn’t have been without it. It was his honey and his cross.

His performances at Stratford would certainly not be protected by a quality of invisibility. For a man sometimes accused of cowardice, it was an extremely brave thing to do. He had not appeared in a classical play since 1933, over twenty-five years; and when he had done, he had been slated. He had not worked within the English profession, except for the odd, unsatisfactory interlude of
The Party
, for twenty-five years, either: he had no idea how his colleagues, and, in some cases, contemporaries would receive him. He was offering himself for inevitable comparison with, in Edith Evans and Laurence Olivier, two of the giants of the modern classical theatre. (A third giant, Gielgud, was absent, and had, as it happens, originated the suggestion that Laughton be invited to Stratford.) The strength and confidence he had acquired in America had come largely from his authority as a teacher and his authority on text; here that did not apply. Here he was an actor among actors, many of whom had much greater experience than he in playing these texts. He was tackling a part that was widely
held
to be unplayable. But above all, he was going to attempt to do justice to his lifetime of meditation on what he held to be the supreme statement about human life.

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
Laugh
ton 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 to 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.