Orson Welles, Vol I (61 page)

Nathan had a more serious point to make in his
Scribner’s
piece on the production; hoping that ‘the hysterical critical endorsement’
³³
visited on its initial offering would not turn its head, he put their achievement in perspective. ‘For a similar employment of lights, let the critics be reminded of the productions at least twenty years ago of Linnebach and Pasetti in Munich.
As for a similar employment of platforms of different levels, let them be referred to the productions of Jessner and Pirchan in Berlin at about the same time. As for the bare walls, let them be prompted on the earliest productions of the celebrated Habima troupe. Good luck, Mr Welles and Mr Houseman, and don’t let ’em hear you chuckle.’

Mr Welles and Mr Houseman were, indeed, chuckling fit
to bust. The show was an enormous success, and so was their new theatre. The show’s triumph was absolutely associated with Welles’s name. Earlier productions at Project 891 and in Harlem had seemed to be somehow a joint effort (though no one was quite sure who had done what):
Caesar
was Welles’s alone. Jean Rosenthal wrote a slightly bitter little paragraph on the subject: ‘
Julius Caesar
opened
with tremendous éclat. Houseman explained, exactly how I have forgotten, that despite the incidental courtesies of the profession, it was important that Orson be given sole credit for everything. However, it did get around in the profession that Sam had designed
the scenery and I had done the lighting.’
³⁴
John Anderson had written at the beginning of his notice: ‘Let it be set down at once, without
“ifs” and “buts” of a niggling season, that this is the most exciting event in our theatre … it would have been a fascinating experiment even if it had failed. That it succeeds so splendidly is enough to blow the hinges off the dictionary. Since Orson Welles is the moving spirit of this new group, and this
Caesar
’s deeply affecting Brutus, his must be most of the credit.’ He was absolutely right:
Welles was the moving spirit: his was the audacious approach, his the ceaseless invention, his the adrenalising inspiration. As in any collective activity, however, no one person is responsible for the end result.

Collective achievement is hard to personalise. It is in the nature of the press and its hand-maiden, the press office, to simplify things, to seek and to some extent create larger-than-life,
uniquely gifted and effective individuals, to build them up even further – and then to break them, which makes an even better story. This was a process which found a willing ally in Welles. Six months later, in a
Time
magazine profile (
MARVELOUS BOY
), events surrounding
Julius Caesar
had become mythologised in the paper’s unmistakable prose: ‘After a succession of muffled death-rattles backstage,
the Mercury came to its first play’s first night. On November 11th it produced
Julius Caesar
. On November 12th the public was informed that Shakespeare’s five-act classic had: 1) been turned into a one-act cyclone, 2) on a bare stage, 3) in modern dress, 4) with modern meaning, 5) gone over with the loudest bang that Shakespeare lovers could recall. And decidedly First in Rome had been Director
Orson Welles for managing the entire production, Actor Orson Welles for making Brutus come alive in a blue-serge suit.’
³⁵
The ‘muffled death-rattles’ became a distant memory; it was as if everything had proceeded according to a preordained plan. Welles was interviewed and photographed everywhere; no paper could afford not to carry news of the latest phenomenon.

MR ORSON WELLES SAYS IT WAS
LIKE THIS
by John K. Hutchens was
The New York Times
’s contribution: ‘If they are still complaining around The Lambs club that actors no longer look like actors, they should be willing to settle now for Orson Welles. Mr Welles looks very much like an actor, which, indeed, he is. No hat covers his longish hair, he gestures when he talks and he smokes a pipe.’
³⁶
The
New York Post
(
ORSON WELLES,
WHO PUTS SHAKESPEARE’S ROMANS IN FANCY DUDS, DISCUSSES RUFFIANS PAST AND PRESENT
) was eager to describe his appearance, too: ‘Mr Welles looks the way musicians used
to look. He has the shiny Byronic brow, the clover-sniffing head-tilt, the flowing mane that trade-marked musicians until Mr Jascha Heifetz got a haircut and placed the profession on a business basis. It wouldn’t surprise you if from
a deep pocket of that cloak-like coat of his he produced a yellowed ivory and started piping a pastoral.’
³⁷
He was depicted in photographs as moody and intense; cartoons showed him bug-eyed and bizarre. His physiognomy was everywhere remarked on. Alfred Kazin wrote about it in
Starting out in the Thirties
: ‘Welles was so masterful that his face swelled and brooded over the empty stage like an
inflated goblin’s … he was more the actor than anyone else we had ever seen, he was the fat, ugly crybaby face that was yet the ultimate in stage Svengalis.’
³⁸

When the fascination with his physical shape and manner had been exhausted, reporters canvassed his views on life and art. He had this to say about
Caesar
: ‘I believe in the factual theatre. People should not be fooled. They should
know they are in the theatre, and with that knowledge, they may be taken to any height of which the magic of words and light is capable of taking them. This is a return to the Elizabethan and the Greek theatre. To achieve that simplicity, that wholesomeness, to force the audience into giving the play the same creative attention that a mediaeval crowd gave a juggler on a box in a market, you have to
enchant.’
³⁹
This is a very clear statement of an aesthetic position: very close, in some ways (the attention of the audience, the clarity and simplicity of the staging, the frankness of the theatricality), to that of Brecht, though naturally without the German’s political attitude. It seems however to bear little resemblance to the production of
Julius Caesar
that he had just directed, whose principal
impact as described was in sheer theatrical power engendered by the manipulation of light and dark and sound: in atmospherics, to be precise.

Whatever its philosophy, all eyes were now on the Mercury. At one level, there was fascination with the possibility of creating thrilling and visually breathtaking theatre at a fraction of the cost of a Broadway show. Fortuitously, Tallulah Bankhead
and her then husband John Emery had just attempted to stage
Antony and Cleopatra
; it had opened only days before
Julius Caesar
to a shower of abuse verging on derision. It had cost $100,000 against the Mercury’s $6,000. The comparison was lost on no one. ‘Strange things are happening in the theatre,’
⁴⁰
wrote Robert Benchley in
The New Yorker
. ‘Old-line producers have been shaking their heads sadly
at the way their expensive shows have been flopping right and left to the tune of a pretty penny … then along comes young Mr Orson
Welles who opens up the old Comedy Theatre and puts on
Julius Caesar
in modern dress and on a bare stage with nothing but lighting to make you think you were in a theatre (and of course, some help from the text). What happens? They are playing to standing room.’

They had, indeed, an enormous box office hit on their hands. This presented its own problems, or rather, temptations. The Mercury’s box office manager begged Houseman and Welles to hold off the next production (
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
) and extend the run of
Caesar
indefinitely (which current demand suggested was quite possible), or at least until they had accumulated a reasonable fund as a guarantee
against failure. They stuck to their guns. As usual, Houseman is startlingly honest about his (and Welles’s) motives. ‘We thought of the Mercury as an instrument of artistic expression and a ladder to fame and power. We had gambled and won: intoxicated with success, we were moving much too fast, with our own special kind of reckless, whirling motion, to stop for any reason, good or bad. To Orson
the prospect of coming to the theatre nightly for seven months to play the part of Brutus was abhorrent, just as it was impossible for me to think of myself sitting in my projection booth day after day with no other activity than to administer the stable and lucrative routine of a successful Broadway run.’ Instead of exploiting their hit, they announced a programme of expansions,
‘A NEW SORT OF
ENTERTAINMENT – NON-STOP CLASSICAL AT THAT’
announced the
Herald Tribune
, only two weeks after the triumphant opening of
Caesar
. Houseman is quoted as saying: ‘We want to operate seven days a week, because Welles and I feel strongly that the theatre is a growing plant and, at the same time, a social unit. To regard a theatre simply as a piece of real estate into which you slap a hit if you happen
to have one and show it eight times a week seems to us too low a view. The theatre will be a focus, we hope, for the literary, musical and theatrical life of a certain kind of audience in the city. We want the people to get in the habit of knowing that at the Mercury – no matter what night it happens to be – there will always be a good show at reasonable prices.’ The Mercury was setting the pace,
not simply in terms of the show they were presenting, but the whole concept of what the theatre might be. And they were here to stay: ‘He also admires films and would like to direct for the screen,’
⁴¹
Hutchens wrote in his profile of Welles. ‘But not for a while. You can count on him and Mr Houseman being Broadway managers for at least five years, because they have taken the Mercury Theatre on
a four-walls basis for that length of time. “We’ll still be there,” he said, “even if we wind up giving a flea circus.”’

T
HE ARTISTIC
directors’ reckless confidence transmitted itself to every level of the theatre. ‘George Zorn (the box office manager) grew resigned to the fact that he was working for a pair of madmen and made the best of it,’
¹
wrote Houseman. ‘In fact, this air of dedicated insanity came to permeate the entire organisation: from the
stage to the boiler room morale was ridiculously high during those first few months of our operation.’ In addition to rehearsals for
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, they created plans for their experimental Studio/Youth Theatre,
‘THE STUDIO OF THE MERCURY THEATRE. PURPOSE:
To establish a permanent apprentice group to the Mercury Theatre.
ORGANISATION:
To furnish the theatre with new talent … to be composed
of all the non-equity extras appearing in Mercury Theatre repertory.
FEES:
$150 for 6 months.
SPONSORS:
Antoinette Perry, Gertrude Lawrence, Katharine Cornell.’ Essentially, this was the framework for the Worklight Theatre described in their earliest announcements. Chubby Sherman was made head of the Acting Bureau, and a new play, David Howard’s
Dear Abigail
, announced as first offering. This
enlightened scheme existed more on paper than in reality. There were fitful rehearsals resulting in an apprentice production of
Julius Caesar
; work was done on Lope de Vega’s
The Well
, and
Abraham and Isaac
from the York Mystery Circle. In its lack of proper training, organisation, or structure, and its exaction of fees for what was in effect extra work, it is strikingly reminiscent of the ‘training
course’ accompanying the Woodstock Festival of three years earlier: a ruse, in fact. But even as a proposal, it was symptomatic of the brave new world of theatre that Houseman and Welles were conjuring up.

The one official production of the Worklight Theatre (‘which is designed to give auditions to unusual pieces that are homeless’) was a revival of
The Cradle Will Rock
, the extraordinary
commercial potential of which, in the wake of its sensational debut, had never been adequately tapped. (The press office made the most of this history, promoting it as
THE SHOW THAT MADE THE FRONT PAGES.)
Initially, after two Worklight Theatre performances, the show was
scheduled for four Sunday performances (part of the new seven-day policy) starting on 5 December; but it proved to have more
life in it than that, transferring on 3 January to the Windsor Theatre for a run of 108 performances (‘Suppressed by the government! Acclaimed by the critics! Demanded by the Public! Now on Broadway!’ screamed the handbills). This was, of course, the first time that the piece had been formally reviewed; it was greeted with nearly unanimous enthusiasm. ‘It is the best thing militant labor has put into
a theatre yet,’
²
according to Brooks Atkinson of the
Times
. Richard Watts Junior, another conservative critic, was as enthused: ‘A savagely humorous social cartoon that hits hard and sardonically and must be set down as one of the most interesting dramatic events of the season.’
³

In fact, the show was a rather different one from the astonishing improvised evenings at the Venice Theatre the
previous year. Those performances had little to do with Welles apart from his courage and showmanship in enabling them to happen. His design and with it his production had been scrapped; what happened onstage had simply happened, with fortuitous appropriateness. The attempt to preserve the form that had accidentally evolved at the famous first performance was not viewed with favour by the Musicians’
Union, which demanded that ten musicians be hired even if they didn’t play. This absurdity was calmly accepted by the pro-syndicalist composer, who even felt moved publicly to express his acquiescence in it. ‘I am in complete agreement with this ruling, and I resent any implication that by it or by our technique either the union or myself is overstepping the boundaries of our respective jurisdictions.
Marc Blitzstein.’ That he preserved a flicker of irony, none the less, is revealed by his response when an official approached him on the composition of his phantom orchestra. He asked for four cornettists, three flute players, and three trombonists. ‘That’s not an orchestra,’ the official protested. ‘That’s the orchestra I want to have not play my opera,’ Blitzstein replied.