Orson Welles, Vol I (49 page)

The journalist Helen Ormsbee, who was often to write about Welles, came to interview him in the midst of all
this activity. Under a typical headline (
ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR AND NOT QUITE
22) she described the scene: ‘Orson Welles is a young man to delight the heart of the original Doctor Faustus, that legendary magician of the sixteenth century. For Welles practices the art of acting with the aid of strange processes. He appears and disappears on stage amid blinding flashes of light, he directs rehearsals
by talking into a machine that carries his voice wherever he wants it to; he knows his way about those resorts of necromancy known as broadcasting stations.’ Orson told her that ‘our aim is to create on modern spectators an effect corresponding to the effect in 1589 when the play was new. We want to rouse the same magical feeling, but we use modern methods … I think Marlowe would be delighted
… every production of our classics should make its own impact in its own way …’ Then his fascination with his new toy bubbled over: ‘the production’s greatest novelty is the use of the radio method of directing. It was a big timesaver. Whenever I wanted anything or anybody, I spoke into a microphone, and my voice reached the remotest parts of the building. People came running as if they had heard
Gabriel blow his trumpet.’ Another form of magic, giving delusions of God-like power proving equally insubstantial when the current is switched off. Perhaps this is what gave Feder his image of Welles as the Wizard of Oz.

Welles was keen to tell Ormbee about another of his innovations: a thrust stage, the first ever in a Broadway theatre. ‘The performer frankly admits that the audience is
present. Sometimes he talks to it, whereas with the picture-frame, the audience is assumed to be non-existent.’ Like the skilled magician he was, Welles loved to insist that there was nothing up his sleeve. This apparently Brechtian notion was not so much a verfremdungseffekt as a ploy to take the audience into his confidence, only to pull the carpet from under their feet. (He made a curious observation
about the apron stage, quoted by Richard France, which, like many of his sayings, is bewilderingly the opposite of the truth. ‘The apron causes the actor to use a larger manner and more voice than when he is separated from his listeners by the proscenium arch. The nearer you are the bigger you must
speak, to hold attention.’
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Gnomic remarks of this sort – he had, all his life, a weakness for
obiter dicta – make one wonder how much he really knew about acting. It may be that the thought is only half formed, released before it had reached its definitive meaning; it is certainly true that you need as much
energy
if you’re in close proximity to the audience, but you most certainly don’t need more voice, or a bigger manner. This is just wrong.)

The technical rehearsals were held after
the stage crew and the actors had gone home, leaving only volunteers (generally including Jack Carter, ‘girlfriends’, and Virginia) to stand under the lights while they were focused. There was much shouting, mainly by Welles and Abe Feder. Around four, hamburgers, milkshakes and brandy were brought in; they would break at 8 ‘because we couldn’t see any more, but also because Welles usually had
a radio call at nine … despite their satanic complication, I remember those unending electrical sessions with pleasure as a time when we were all very close together – in our work and in our lives.’
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Houseman well describes the pleasure of technical rehearsals when everything is practical, and things begin to happen before your eyes: effects dreamed of now actually being realised, others unimagined
suddenly occurring as if by divine intervention. Though often fraught, these sessions are the first real intimation of what it is you might all have been striving for. Especially if they run on into the small hours – in Welles’s case, the larger hours – there is great intimacy in the camaraderie of the team effort, everybody tiring together, surrounded by the debris of the production, empty
coffee cups and cigarette butts, all the usual rules of conduct in the auditorium suspended.

As Welles went off to his first radio job of the day Houseman would then go home to his girlfriend (who as it happened was born, Houseman does not fail to note, with appropriate irony, on the same hour on the same day in the same month of the same year as Welles) and they would make love, have breakfast,
and sleep; then he would go back to work again. To Mrs Leaming, this identity of the birth dates of his mistress and his partner is scandalous, proof positive of his unhealthy interest in Welles. To Houseman, it is entirely appropriate and agreeable, a symptom of the rightness of things at this period. He was – ten, or even fifteen, years late – living out his youth, through and with Welles.
This was the epoch of their greatest closeness, though never at any time was there anything remotely resembling harmony. As the first night approached, Welles became more tense and neurotic, ‘pathologically reluctant’ to expose his work to Houseman, whose judgement he trusted. The relationship
was always most strained when Welles was, as now, playing the leading role. ‘At such times, I became
not merely the hated figure of authority, to be defied and outwitted as I refused further delays and escapes, but the first hostile witness to the ghastly struggle between narcissism and self-loathing that characterised Orson’s approach to a part.’ After that he was welcome again.

‘It became my main responsibility to preserve him from exhaustion and confusion, to disentangle the essentials
of the production as he had originally conceived it from that obsessive preoccupation with insignificant detail in which he was inclined to seek refuge when fatigue or self-doubt had begun to wear him down.’ He
was
tired; dangerously so, kept going by tobacco and alcohol and pills. He could have taken a little time off from the radio shows, at least during the period of technical and dress rehearsals,
until the play had properly opened. If anything, he seemed to increase his workload, to flog himself on near to the point of collapse. ‘Welles’s dress rehearsals and previews were nearly always catastrophic – especially if he was performing. I think he enjoyed these near disasters; they gave him a pleasing sense, later, of having brought order out of chaos and of having, singlehanded, plucked
victory from defeat … suffering more than the usual actor’s fears, Orson welcomed and exploited … technical hazards as a means of delaying the hideous moment when he must finally come out onstage and deliver a performance.’ On one occasion, Welles, backstage, overheard two familiar voices: the painter Pavel Tchelitchew and his friend Charles-Henri Ford. He summoned Houseman, refusing to perform
unless they were removed. As they left, reports Houseman, ‘I could hear Orson’s voice from behind the curtain howling triumphantly of Russian pederasts and international whores.’

The first night was on 8 January 1937, and the audience had been well primed for the show by the advance publicity:

Salesmanship at its most ingenious: the result was an enormous success (it ran for 128 performances, having been seen by 80,000
people, including 3,600 standees), the most admired, with
Julius Caesar
, of all of Welles’s
and Houseman’s work in the theatre. There was remarkable unanimity among the critical fraternity. The few dissenters either disliked or dismissed the play (Burns Mantle, describing the play as ‘nothing but a curio’
⁴⁶
went on to say that it seemed to him that ‘the people’s theatre would be better employed, considering the greatest good for the greatest number, in producing plays of timely significance
… a modern play of social import … would have achieved far more in the way of clarifying and stimulating a puzzled people’s thought’) or they abhorred Welles’s techniques – ‘arty and ineffective’, said Gabriel in the
New York American
– but then he was Hearst’s man, and the Federal Theatre Project was high on his hit list. With unexpected vehemence, Edith Isaacs in
Theatre Arts Monthly
wrote that
the acting, ‘including that of Mr Welles, is so bad that it is better without comment’.
⁴⁷
But these were rare. Most reviews vied with each other in praising the production, and describing its effects.

‘The prologue is spoken in complete darkness with only a lantern held up by the chorus to illuminate his face,’
⁴⁸
said the
Catholic World
, welcoming the play, evidently delighted to see important
matters like the salvation of the soul once again under serious consideration in the theatre. ‘Then far away at the back Faustus is disclosed surrounded by his diabolic books … from the velvet shadows [of the stage] emerge the brilliantly costumed players, while spotlights illumine certain spaces … intimate scenes are played on the apron … Mephistopheles first is seen as gigantic horrible eyes
which Faustus conjures into a human head.’ Brooks Atkinson (invariably crediting both Welles and Houseman with the production) wrote that they have ‘boldly thrust an apron stage straight into the faces of the audience and the settings reduced to a somber background of hangings. Modern stagecraft is represented by the wizardry of lighting; the actors are isolated in eerie columns of light that are
particularly well suited to the diabolical theme of
Doctor Faustus
… the modern switchboard is so incredibly ingenious that stage lighting has become an art in its own right … when the cupbearers of Beelzebub climb out of hell, the furnace flares of purgatory flood up through a trapdoor in an awful blaze of light, incidentally giving the actors a sinister majesty. On an unadorned stage, the virtuoso
light gives the production the benefit of one modern invention that is most valuable to the theatre.’
⁴⁹

Feder (‘whose name,’
⁵⁰
wrote Stark Young, ‘seems one of the attendant spirits or demons of the piece’) was warmly and universally
praised, and the scenic simplicity that the novel use of light had made possible was hailed by Atkinson in the
Times
as revolutionary and beneficial: ‘on the
whole it is an invigorating thing to strip Elizabethan drama of all the gorgeous things that silently plague the acting … Project 891 has done us all a major service. By adding a little originality to a vast fund of common artistic sense it has shown us how an Elizabethan verse drama can be staged without becoming a formal ordeal … it is hoped that the Federal Theatre will stage some of the less familiar
plays of Shakespeare in the same original and exhilarating fashion … after a brisk hour or so in the presence of
Doctor Faustus
… I am inclined to believe that our recent Shakespeare revivals have been on too large a scale for the good of the acting, and that the settings have been too imposing. They have competed with the acting.’ This revelation was an unexpected bonus of the FTP. ‘Being primarily
an emergency labor enterprise with a good deal of artistic latitude, the Federal Theatre has an enviable opportunity to try some of the mad things that are forever whirling through the minds of restless rehearsal people, and the case of
Doctor Faustus
is an experiment that has succeeded brilliantly.’

The acting was liked, but not acclaimed – apart, that is, from Harry McKee, the clown. ‘Harry
McKee was the best clown I have ever seen in Elizabethan revivals,’ wrote Stark Young, ‘the brain really seemed to chase about with the lice he talked of. ’Jack Carter was acknowledged for his originality, but not for his technique. ‘He brings something to the part,’ said Young, ‘that the ordinary actor of the rant school might miss; he needs only to feel like troubling himself to study the vivid
meanings written there.’ As for Welles, ‘he finds in the title role the opportunity for which he has apparently been waiting. He misses, perhaps, some of the music of the noble lines, but he gets resounding drama into them, and in the final scenes where he listens to the striking clock and waits to pay his soul to Lucifer, his acting has great emotional force.’ Many other notices spoke, not entirely
enthusiastically, of his deliberate pacing and articulation. Atkinson: ‘Mr Welles has a heavy and resonant voice that takes possession of a theatre; as Doctor Faustus he gives a performance deliberate enough to be understood and magnetic enough to be completely absorbing.’ Stark Young had him speaking the poetry ‘far above average’ and credited him with ‘some veritable triumphs of reading,
not least those passages that hang in the air by almost less than a thread.’

There is little sense in the notices of what Houseman and others detected in Welles’s performance: a feeling of personal identification. Paula Laurence said: ‘There were so many dark sides of Orson’s nature, his belief in evil forces, that suited Faustus.’
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Neither this, nor the intensity of his relationship with
Jack Carter’s Mephostophilis, were remarked on. For Paula Laurence, ‘Jack Carter, that hostile, troubled, violent man, played Mephostophilis with a tenderness towards Faustus that was totally riveting and unexpected.’ Houseman, in describing the scenes between them, reveals his deep love of Welles’s work, his involvement in it, and his precise observation of it. In his account, one senses his eyes
riveted on the stage, night after night. ‘Their presence on stage together was unforgettable: both were around six foot four, both men of abnormal strength capable of sudden, furious violence. Yet their scenes together were played with restraint, verging on tenderness, in which temptation and damnation were treated as acts of love. Welles was brightly garbed, bearded, mediaeval, ravenous, sweating
and human; Carter was in black – a cold, ascetic monk, his face and gleaming bald head moon white and ageless against the surrounding night. As Orson directed him, he had the beauty, the pride and the sadness of a fallen angel … he listened to his last gasping plea for respite … with the contemptuous and elegant calm of a Lucifer who is, himself, more deeply and irrevocably damned than his cringing
human victim.’
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Faustus’s sin was the terrible sin against the Holy Ghost: ‘pride and despair, inextricably linked, must be so called’,
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in Roma Gill’s words: the very combination that made Jack and Orson soul-mates.