Orson Welles, Vol I (40 page)

What was the purpose of this Negro Unit, Harlemites wanted to know. Was the Unit, provocatively taking up residence in the Lafayette, scene of the most successful attempt to create a permanent black company (where a wide range of plays had been attempted,
from
Othello
to
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
taking in on the way
The Count of Monte Cristo
and sentimental Yiddish comedy) intended to cater to a white audience or a black one? Would it preserve an image of black people as ‘handkerchief-headed’ savages, whether noble or mentally sub-normal, violent or comic, or would the slow slow process of legitimisation of the black profession be advanced?
Here and
there, hopeful signs were visible: since Charles Gilpin, a veteran of the Lafayette, had created the title role in
The Emperor Jones
, it had begun to be possible for the occasional black actor to be taken seriously. Robeson had continued along Gilpin’s path, as had others in the small outcrop of (mostly white-authored) black dramas, of which Dubose Heyward’s
Porgy
was the outstanding example.

As well as the perennial revues, such as the
Blackbirds
series, there were all-black versions of recent Broadway hits – Nicholson’s and Robinson’s
Sailor Beware!
and Hecht’s and MacArthur’s
The Front Page
, and the curious genre of the adapted folk-play, most famously Marc Connelly’s
In Abraham’s Bosom
(in which God’s first entrance is preceded by a cry of ‘here come de Lawd!’) and, more enterprisingly,
Paul Green’s
Roll, Sweet Chariot
, ‘a symphonic play of the Negro people’. Another striking Broadway drama of the late twenties had been
Harlem
, by a black author, Wallace Thurman, featuring a cast of sixty black actors and a lone white one. An ‘Episode of Life in New York’s Black Belt’ it was described in an admiring notice by George Jean Nathan as affording ‘a dozen and one vivid hints of niggerdom
at its realest’,
⁸
a phrase which fairly neatly sums up the situation of the black drama in the third decade of the century. Did black life exist, as far as the theatre was concerned, simply to be held up for examination by well-heeled white audiences, for amusement or gratifying shock? Was it better not to work in the theatre at all, rather than be subject to the squealing scrutiny so well parodied
by Ben Hecht in the late twenties: ‘My set has discovered something too marvellous for words. Negroes! Oodles and oodles of them! Big ones and little ones! Harlem, way this side of the zoo.’
⁹

Virgil Thomson helped to clear Houseman’s mind. When they had cast
Four Saints in Three Acts
with an entirely black cast, he reminded him, the only consideration in doing so had been aesthetic: voices,
movement, diction. There was no political statement involved; nor had they adapted the text in any way to make sense of the performers’ negritude. They found black performers more beautiful and more expressive. No more, no less. With this highly radical principle in mind, Houseman decided to divide the work of the Unit into two categories: ‘1. Plays by blacks, for blacks, with blacks. 2. Classical
plays, performed by black artists “without concession or reference to colour”.’ The former category he handed over to his black colleagues. They would open the theatre with an example of new black writing; the classical play, whatever it might be, would take more time to prepare. Without hesitation (though as far as he
knew he had only ever previously directed school productions) Houseman invited
Orson Welles to direct it. Without hesitation, Welles accepted the invitation.

The fact that most of his actors would have no experience whatever of blank verse, and that indeed many of them would have very little experience of acting, tout court, was only a further recommendation to him. His abhorrence of the polite approach to Shakespeare was absolute; rather complete ignorance than
that
. Professionalism per se had no appeal for him; he realised – as Houseman must have done – that there was no question of turning the Negro Unit into the Old Vic and that what was required were not tutorials in the iambic pentameter but leadership of a galvanising, inspirational kind. The only question was which play was best suited to the actors at his disposal. Houseman reports being roused at 2
a.m. by a telephone call from Welles passionately eager to convey the inspiration that Virginia – as a result of conversations with Francis Carpenter – had had: they must do
Macbeth
, and set it at the court of the early nineteenth-century Haitian Emperor Henri Christophe. Houseman was delighted, and Welles and Nat Karson set to work with passion, researching the period and the curious figure of
the gigantic Grenadian slave who had become an emperor. Leader of the Haitian forces of insurrection, he was first elected President, then, after a furious civil war, Napoleonically crowned himself. As Henri I, his vigorous rule was marred by avarice and cruelty; eventually his people revolted, and, cornered, he shot himself. The subject of Aimé Césaire’s great poem ‘La Tragédie du Roi Christophe’,
he is an extraordinary figure, not least in the mannered extravagance of his court, anticipating the excesses of the Emperor Bokassa in the Central African Republic; the parallels with Shakespeare’s hero are clear enough. For Welles the element in the transposition that really attracted him was that Haiti’s voodoo culture enabled him to make the supernatural scenes a credible centre of the play.

It is to be questioned whether this approach quite fulfilled Houseman’s and Thomson’s criterion of using black performers without reference to the colour of their skins, or ‘any other cultural factor’. It may be questioned, in fact, whether it constituted an interpretation of the play. What it is, essentially, is a
concept
: a way of doing the play which makes you think about it afresh. Concepts,
almost by definition, only apply to existing work, generally with a long performing tradition. They are by their nature corrective. What Welles wanted to do – what he always wanted to do in the earlier part of his career in the theatre – was to break the mould. He may, in his heart,
have longed to see Elizabethan productions of Elizabethan plays (that was certainly the message of
Everybody’s Shakespeare
, only two years before); but in practice, he felt he needed to shake off the performing stereotypes of recent tradition. Admiring above all the magnificently timeless performances of an Anew McMaster, and being strangely old-fashioned himself, in practice Welles felt compelled to use shock tactics to restore the immediacy of the texts. For the most part that meant taking an explicit and
monothematic line on a play, and that meant cutting and reshaping it to give it surface vividness at the expense of digging into its meaning and discovering its organic structure. It is this that made Mary McCarthy, most ruthless of his critics, say, in the late thirties, ‘Mr Welles has the idea that an Elizabethan play is a liability which only by the most strenuous showmanship, by cutting, doctoring,
and modernising, can be converted into an asset. Mr Welles’ method is to find a modern formula into which a classic can somehow be squeezed.’
¹⁰
The fact that generally speaking he realised his concept with electrifying brilliance deflected attention from the superficiality of the approach, and with concept, as opposed to interpretation, the execution is all. That said, electrifying brilliance
is not such a common commodity that it can be lightly dismissed; it cost him a great deal of effort and inspiration, and never more so than on this
Macbeth
.

The human material with which he had to work was varied in its abilities, but eager, enthusiastic, energetic, expressive and, especially en masse, emotional. There were no more than five professional actors in the company, which otherwise
consisted of a group of voodoo drummers assembled by the Sierra Leonian Asadata Dafora Horton (who had not so long before scored a Broadway hit with his show
Kyunokor
based on the courtship rituals of his country) and over a hundred individuals with more or less glancing relationships to one or other of the performing arts. Welles sought to shape them into a highly drilled troupe. What he had
in mind was almost choreographic – literally so in the case of the scene where Banquo’s ghost appears, which Welles had re-conceived as a sumptuous ball. Every scene was shaped and moved with dictatorial precision. Some of this work was handed over to an assistant, Tommy Anderson (‘I rehearsed them on a count of
ONE
move here,
TWO
move there’
¹¹
) but for the most part it was Welles, exhorting,
demonstrating, haranguing and generally risking his life. These Harlemites were not accustomed to being bossed around by preppy young whites (Brooks Atkinson described him at the period as being ‘a round-faced child prodigy who had almost
reached voting age’
¹²
) and from time to time he had to be gently taken aside by his Lady Macbeth (‘Orson, don’t do that; these people will take your head off’
¹³
) or have his Macbeth read the riot act (‘So get back to work! You no-acting sons of bitches!’ a speech that nearly provoked the riot it was intended to head off). But he was shrewd enough – uncannily shrewd for a middle-class twenty-year-old who had almost no experience whatever of working with black people – to temper his autocracy with fun and charm and crate upon crate of beer. (Himself he
fuelled with whiskey, until Virgil Thomson advised him that if you do that, ‘you fall’; whereupon he switched to white wine.) There was certainly no liberal crap in his dealings with the company; that might have been really offensive. He had the strength, wrote Houseman, ‘but also the kindness and loving patience – and a capacity for total concentration. He kept them going by the sheer force of his
personality. His energy was at all times greater than theirs; he was even more mercurial and less predictable than they were.’

With his principals, he rehearsed separately and more calmly. They were a powerful group: Edna Thomas as Lady Macbeth, Jack Carter, Macbeth; Banquo, Canada Lee, Maurice Ellis, Macduff; Eric Burroughs, RADA-trained, as Hecate, so often cut from the play altogether,
now placed in a pivotal position: ‘the charm’s wound up!’ was in Welles’s version the final line of the text. ‘I don’t know what this guy’s up to,’
¹⁴
said Burroughs, ‘but he’s a genius.’ Welles formed particularly close relations with Edna Thomas and Jack Carter. Thomas he treated with the deference due to a great lady of the theatre, and that is indeed how she was perceived by the company, though
in truth this owed more to her manner than to her career. A discreet and rather statuesque lesbian, she stood apart from the company, but had great authority, with which she endorsed Welles, a crucial support. Jack Carter, his Macbeth, was an altogether different character, ‘the most furious man I have ever known’, wrote Houseman. He was six foot four inches tall, had bright blue eyes, and ‘a
skin so light he could pass as white anywhere in the world, if he’d wanted to. He didn’t.’ His background was as swathed in myth as Orson’s – was he born in a French château, not knowing that he was a negro? Or did he really come from Harlem? Certainly he had a history of violence. Despite creating, to great acclaim, the role of Crown in
Porgy
and the eponymous
Stevedore
(one of the biggest hits
of the Theatre Union) he didn’t work much as an actor, instead making a living through underworld connections in Harlem. Everybody, according to Houseman, was nervous about how he would
behave in rehearsals. But: ‘From the moment at the first reading when Orson threw his arms around Jack, his eyes brimming with tears of gratitude and admiration, a close and passionate friendship had sprung up
between these two giants.’ ‘I always seduce actors,’
¹⁵
he told Barbara Leaming, ‘I make them fall in love with me.’ According to Houseman, ‘Orson spent a quarter of his radio earnings on loans and handouts to the company; a quarter on props etc; a quarter on meals; and a final quarter on Jack Carter.’

Carter needed a lot of help with his performance. His great gift was for living as dangerously
on stage as in life. He was weak vocally and without technical skills. Welles worked unceasingly and tenderly on his performance, which brought them even closer together. The frustration that Welles must have suppressed during this work is evident in the notes (
CORRECTIONS,
it says at the top of the page) that he dictated to Virginia on 3 April (the first night was 14 April).

Jack’s turn before
cross to steps should be fixed up.
¹⁶

First half of ‘If it were done’ speech needs fixing.

Cripples entrance cue must be settled on.

Cut ‘ughs’ of cripples

‘Hath been’ lost

Edna should have a look over shoulder as she crosses ramp.

Jack’s turn on ‘He has asked for me’ wrong.

Too long a pause before ‘When Duncan is asleep.’

Pick up ‘Would it not be received’ and ‘who
dare receive it’ more

Work on ‘I am settled.’

Fix Canada’s turn.

Jack should look more into air.

JACK, FOR GOD’S SAKE LEARN YOUR LINES, AND TAKE THE WEARINESS OUT OF YOUR BODY WHEN YOU GO UP STAIRS.

JESUS CHRIST
.

PACE
, pace

pace

pace

pace …

Christ – first half of scene needs
ENORMOUS
amount of work.

Jack too casual.

‘Stay there till we call’ – get
that move right, for Christ’s sake.

Jack not audible enough in ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’.

Phil –

Jesus Christ

God

damn

it.

Though he no doubt modified some of his comments in delivering them, these notes, hissed out in the stalls in the dark, give, to judge from other reports, a fairly good impression of Welles’s directing style. The precision of his staging is very clearly
revealed. He rarely dealt with ideas in his work with actors; what he loved was to engender adrenalin, then embody it in the physical life of the scene. This skill – also one of the supreme gifts of Reinhardt, though Reinhardt was more interested in psychology than Welles – was one of his greatest natural endowments as a director.