Charles Laughton (6 page)

The lack of that experience was exactly mirrored by his temperament: slow to decide, physically energetic but lacking staying power,
almost
morbidly perfectionist. It is not the best state in which to approach the English theatre. He much more closely, in fact, resembled a continental actor:
Ensemble Man
. His experience with Komis, a ‘continental’ director, if ever there was one, a
régisseur
, maybe gave him excessive expectations, too.

Many people with whom he worked (Hitchcock, Guthrie) came to see him as an amateur; many more (Wilder, Siodmak, Preminger) felt him, on the contrary, to be fiercely professional in never settling for less than perfection. He himself rather defiantly embraced the word amateur: ‘It means lover, doesn’t it? I love my work.’ What is certain is that, though an actor of the greatest technical refinement, he never approached anything as a technical question. He seemed to view his roles not as problems to be solved or hurdles to be cleared but as challenges to self-knowledge: could he unlock the part of himself that would give meaning and life to the character?

In this sense, he was either an amateur or an artist, according to definition. His every performance was an encounter with himself, a liberation of another subjugated part of his psyche. Only from that would the transformations occur – and they did, in astonishing profusion. Each one let another bit of Laughton out of the bottle.

Simple ease of standing on stage as his skilful self was an experience of which he was innocent for many years. Simple ease in life came slowly too; in the twenties, in London, it was quite unknown to him. His family circle and friends from Scarborough recall a genial funster telling dreadful shaggy dog stories or doing ‘his voices’; but that was before the war. It’s significant that Osbert Sitwell had, only a few years later, found him to be playing the role of hotel manager.

It was Komisarjevsky again who had cast Laughton as Arnold Bennett’s Mr Prohack. Bennett had gone into management with his mistress, Dorothy Cheston, Sidney Bernstein, and Komis. Sloane Productions, their company, had already staged
Paul I
, with Charles as Count Pahlen; this was Bennett’s first play for them, drawn from his novel of the same name, adapted in collaboration with Edward Knoblock. Not specially noted as a dramatist, Bennett, on the strength of his novels and, almost equally, his journalism, was one of the most famous figures of the contemporary literary scene. The novel had been a great success some years before; and the play skilfully presented its main plot, about an easy-going Treasury Official who inherits half a million pounds from an unexpected source, only to discover the disadvantages of great wealth, and the regrettable effects it has on his family. Faintly Shavian, slightly Wellsian, the fable is
told
with sprightly wit, inverting values and turning situations on their head to satirise any number of contemporary subjects. The play was bound to attract attention; Charles compounded this by playing Prohack, the whimsical middle-class Official, as, unmistakably, the author himself. The author was not amused, but London was. In fact, Bennett, though the decent box office receipts allowed him to put a brave face on things, never reconciled himself to the performance, thinking it, according to his diary, ‘vulgar’ and ‘bad’. In a letter, Bennett wrote that ‘Laughton as Prohack has been praised to the skies by the entire press, and in my opinion, over-praised considerably. I think his performance is rough, and it is certainly not a faithful representation of Prohack as we conceived of him for the purposes of the play.’

Perhaps the tendency of the reviews to praise the performance at the expense of the play may have had something to do with it. ‘To him alone, I think,’ said
Theatre World
, ‘lies the success of the play … his performance is superb … a little podgy man, childishly simple, possessing that dry sense of humour peculiar to the English, and above all that quality of accepting the most impossible situation with a sangfroid which is both the envy and the despair of all other nationalities.’ The little man was a Laughton speciality, here receiving its first outing. His choosing to do so via an impersonation of Arnold Bennett is truly surprising, even to the critic of
Theatre World
. ‘That this is deliciously amusing is not to be denied, but I am inclined to think that it detracts a little from the character of Mr Prohack.’

It is a curious thing for Laughton to have done, but it worked. To what extent did he intend it as a send-up of the mildly pompous Bennett? If so, that was very bold – the twenty-seven-year-old tyro from Scarborough taking on the world-famous author. Again, he seems almost to have courted the sack. Did Komisarjevsky abet him in it? There was a streak of barefaced cheek in his character, but this was going to lengths. No, it seems more likely that this was the only way he could make the thing work. Bennett, in a letter to his coauthor, says that Laughton was ‘very bad and wrong at all the later rehearsals.’ The play is a quirky fable of capitalism; the man who inherits a half a million dollars is a genial, wry, breakfast-table philosopher, humorously bland. It may have been elusive for Laughton: no murk, no depths, no pressure within. And then, puzzling away at how to find this man in himself, he may have looked up in rehearsal and seen him staring him in the face. Authors are often very useful at giving clues to their own plays: not by explaining them,
but
simply by being themselves. Obviously, everything fell into place the moment he hit on the notion. It released him. ‘Any middling actor can be senile and grotesque; Mr Laughton, invited to parody one of his authors, presented a marvellously tempered portrait, which was truthful to look and twinkle, yet showed a good deal of the man behind these natural defences,’ said Agate. If you imitate the outer life of someone with sufficient connexion, you sometimes get an inner life for nothing; it just pops up of its own accord. ‘As a technical feat the performance was immense. Mr Laughton acted with his whole body, and when you thought that facial expression and vocal intonation were exhausted, eked out these means with legs analytical, elucidatory, rhapsodical. To see him lean back on a sofa and keep the wit going with fat calves and lean slippers as a juggler does a ball – this was acting. But I must be careful,’ Agate wisely concludes, ‘or I shall fall into a panegyric.’

Theatre World
, in its staider way, summed up: ‘It is a performance of exceptional artistry; one which at last lifts Mr Laughton to the front rank of actors.’

At last. After eighteen whole months.

Prohack
brought Charles not merely fame (even notoriety): it gave him the central relationship of his life, with the pert, quirky young actress playing his secretary; Elsa Lanchester.

She was 25, with a reputation for outrageous cabaret at the club run by herself and two friends, the Cave of Harmony. There she had given performances of ‘Please sell no more drink to my father’ and ‘I’ve just danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’, which had brought her great celebrity. Agate had singled her out on several occasions.
Prohack
, in which she played Laughton’s secretary, was part of a general move towards ‘legitimate’ theatre. Her interest in Charles Laughton was part of a move towards legitimacy of a deeper kind.

‘Outrageous’ is the inescapable word for Elsa Lanchester at this time: the consciously Bohemian, red-headed elfin child of almost comically radical Irish-Marxist-Suffragette parents, she had trained with Isadora Duncan (whom she loathed), taught dance at the age of 13, run a children’s theatre, posed for ‘artistic’ nude photographs, been a hired ‘co-respondent’ in divorce cases, and done snake dancing with the portly Ida Barr (‘Ida Barr? ’Ide a pub, more like.’) ‘I did not know for one moment that I had some sort of compulsion to be different,’ she writes.

But she did know that the brittleness of her social and emotional life ‘was beginning to add up to despair within myself.’ So when she got to know Charles – slowly, shyly on both their parts – she saw that he might offer an escape route. The strongest intimation that this might be so came from the completely unstrained silence that fell between them at an early meeting. Her bright provocations and his self-conscious tortuousnesses fell away into speechless security. A symptom of deep friendship – but not necessarily of sexual and emotional relationship.

This nonetheless followed. The relief of the new arrangement must have been overwhelming for Charles. A friend; a companion; someone to confide in; someone to lavish his attentions on – all complete novelties for him. She writes of the hours in bed at night, talking, talking, till dawn. Of his interest in her appearance. He took an active hand in selecting her wardrobe. She submitted because his eye was so good, even though his taste was far from what she would, till meeting him, have chosen for herself.

She had to pass the test of meeting his mother (who had advised him never to marry an actress, or a red-head. Elsa of course was both). She did so by dint of making the old lady laugh.

They lived separately for some while. She had an abortion. They moved to a flat in Dean Street, in Karl Marx’s old house (which must have pleased her parents, if not his).

In other words, Charles was now in life. He was doing the things other people did.

After
Prohack
, came his startling performance in
A Man with Red Hair
, the Hugh Walpole shocker, adapted by Benn Levy. Laughton’s last collaboration with Komisarjevsky, it is the first of his monster-villains. ‘His entrance is like the first whiff of poison-gas we were once familiar with. A thing so evil and malignant that it can paralyse one’s power to combat it by its apparent harmlessness, and yet so deadly if not grappled with at once. By what witchcraft Mr Laughton produces the effect, I don’t know.’ The critic of
Theatre World
, February 1927, knew how to enthuse. But his account is precise in its description of Laughton’s aims. To invoke that inner state – to bring that murk actually onto the stage – was his task. He was, then and later, uninterested in psychology. He was not interested (either for himself or his characters) in the why of human action; only the what concerned him. He wanted to show what human beings were, to offer the raw material: not to explain it. Twenty years later, this made him
an
ideal collaborator for Brecht. But it is dead against the drift of acting in the twentieth century, where ‘interpretation’, both in directing and acting, has been the watchword: what does this character’s behaviour
mean
? – not what is it? What is the play about? – never what is it?

It is of course a priceless gift to critics, whose analysis of ideas is so far in advance of their powers of description.

In a magnificent letter of rage at the inadequacy of her performance of Lady Macbeth (to Laughton’s Thane) James Bridie offered the following opinion to Flora Robson, one of the most radical statements about acting ever made: ‘You are to stop being psychological – you know nothing about it, and it is a very technical job – when you are acting, develop a reflex system that flashes out the effect without the process of thought coming into the business at all … your job is to flick Lady Macbeth through your soul
faster than thought
and explain what you did after, if you can be bothered.’

Laughton was concerned to ‘flick his characters through his soul’, very much so. This method has a disadvantage over the interpretative method, however: it is very costly in soul.

Hugh Walpole’s novel, and the play that Benn Levy made out of it, are exercises in
Schadenfreude
, literary experiments, explorations of how far one can really go. The situation is preposterous, the characters paper-thin, and the central, the eponymous, figure, Mr Crispin, is a contrived monster of sadistic revenge, scourging the world for his lack of beauty. But if he were real? If such a person really existed …? These are the questions Laughton asked, and the resulting performance shook people to the marrow. ‘His performance was a
danse macabre
rendered by a human invertebrate, whose sagging flesh would somehow shape itself into all manner of harsh angles and gibbet-like postures’, wrote Ivor Brown in
The Saturday Review. The Times
said, ‘Mr Laughton’s acting we are bound to admire, but we owe an evening of something very near misery to its skill.’ St John Irvine, in
The Observer
: ‘a very gargoyle of obscene desires. The sheer ability of his acting cannot easily be estimated.’

In the climactic scene of the third act, when Crispin has bound and gagged his victims, he reveals his soul: ‘You have laughed at me, mocked me, insulted me – you and all the world: but now you are mine, to do with as I will. An old, fat, ugly man, and two fine young ones. I prick you and you shall bleed. I spit on you and you shall bow your heads. I can say ‘Crawl’ and you will crawl, ‘Dance’ and you will dance. I, the ludicrous creature that I am, have absolute power over
the
three of you … I can do whatever I like with you … the last shame, the last indignity, the uttermost pain.’ Grand Guignol? Evidently. London was not unfamiliar with the genre: Sybil Thorndike had led a season of macabre, violent, spooky plays under that title at the Little Theatre some years before – but (as Sybil’s presence in the cast more or less guaranteed) they were supposed to be tremendous
fun
. This was something rather different. Earlier in the play, Crispin talks to his American visitor about his ‘philosophy of life: a little theory that my father handed on to me … my father used constantly to wonder whether it would be an entertaining experiment to cut my heart out. I think he eventually decided against it, however, on the grounds that it would mean the end of other and still more entertaining experiments … he stripped me and beat me till I bled. He wanted, he said, for my own good, to acquaint me with the heart, the innermost heart of life; and to understand life one must learn to suffer pain. Then if one could suffer pain enough, one could be as God. I went to Westminster School and they all mocked me – my hair, my body, my difference – yes, my difference. I was different from them all, I was different from my father, different from all the world, and I was glad that I was different. I hugged my difference. Different … different … different.’