Charles Laughton (32 page)

But there were differences. The greatest difference was crucial: self-confidence. Through years of revilement and exile, Brecht never for a second lost faith in his work, nor in himself. ‘Do you know who I am?
I am Brecht
!’ he screamed at Luise Rainer, ‘and you are nothing.’ She was at that moment one of the most famous actresses in the world, and he was an unperformed and penniless emigré. This self-confidence of course extended to his sexual life, and must, indeed, to a large degree, have accounted for it. The confidence enabled a ruthlessness which often appeared in the guise of slyness or disingenuousness. All this was very different for Laughton. He was certain of nothing, not even his acting. Elsa Lanchester reflects that now Laughton’s films are being shown again on television, his performances
seem
much better than he considered them at the time. ‘It is sad that he always denigrated himself.’ Nothing was any good, neither when he was making the film nor when it was finished. Sexually it was worse. Never was he able to approach a man sexually without the expectation of rejection. He was plagued with feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

The balance sheet of difference and similarity serves as a prelude to a consideration of how it is that Charles Laughton and Bertolt Brecht, on the face of it radically contrasted artists, should have collaborated so happily. Who would imagine that Charles Laughton would be held up by Brecht as consummate exponent of his acting theory; or that the creator of Captain Bligh and The Hunchback of Notre Dame would say of Brecht: ‘I believe there is Shakespeare and then Brecht’? The matter is of interest in illuminating both Laughton’s acting and Brecht’s theory. Towards the end of his life, Brecht, impossible as ever to pigeon-hole, wrote: ‘My theories are altogether more naïve than one might think – more naïve than my way of expressing them might allow one to suspect.’ He was dismayed by the academic industry that had grown up around him, still more by the dreadful work it had engendered. ‘It must be due to my way of writing, which takes too much for granted. To hell with my way of writing!’ The long years of exile from theatre practice, coupled with an attempt to systematise the New Theatre which would make the New Society possible, resulted in a body of theoretical writing of great beauty and intellectual excitement, but of limited applicability. The terminology itself –
Verfremdungseffekt, Gestus, Epiktheater
– has thrown a sometimes impenetrable veil over the plays. It’s particularly interesting, then, that Brecht said of Laughton: ‘He didn’t need any kind of theoretical information about the required “style.”’ Laughton was a spontaneous Brechtian actor.

Brecht had admired Laughton’s work before he met him, especially his Captain Bligh and Henry VIII. He was very struck by the chicken-eating scene. It is, as it happens, a little sequence which contains a number of elements that might be described as Brechtian. The king, speaking about the decline of manners, greedily scoffs chicken legs, discarding the bones over his shoulder. It’s funny because of the contrast between what’s being said and what’s being done – the contrast draws attention to the incident, puts the speech in special focus. This is a classic
Verfremdungseffekt
– nothing to do with the mistranslated
alienation
(for which the German is
Entfremdung
),
Verfremdung
being the-making-strange, the-making-foreign, seeing in a new
way
, from a different angle. There does exist an English word for this, but it is unlikely to gain wide currency, even though it was coined by Dickens. ‘Mooreeffoc’, it is, and it’s simply the word ‘coffeeroom’ seen from the other side of the glass pane on which it’s written. In conversation Brecht gave another very clear notion of what we should perhaps just call
V
, as the German seems so formidable and unfunny: ‘in order to see one’s mother as a man’s wife we need V; this is provided, for instance, when one acquires a stepfather.’ In the case of the chicken-eating interlude we’re dealing with a
Gestus
; in Martin Esslin’s definition, ‘the clear and stylised expression of the social behaviour of human beings towards each other’; in Brecht’s own formulation, ‘a theatrical conception: what Garrick did when as Hamlet he met his father’s ghost; Sorel when, as Phèdre, she knew that she was going to die … it is a question of inventiveness.’ One might bring it even further down to earth and call it ‘business’ –
significant
business. This particular business in
Henry VIII
, like some wonderful shorthand, tells us that the king is a man of appetite; that notions of what manners are thought to be have changed over the centuries; that there is a class of persons waiting to pick up the royal débris. It’s memorable, it’s clever, it’s meaningful. The moment also fulfils the central requirement of epic theatre. Epic theatre, says Brecht, is where the spectators don’t cry out (in Needle and Thomson’s formulation) ‘“How true!” but “How surprising!”; not “Just as I thought!” but “I hadn’t thought of that!”’ Even fifty years after its première, when all social attitudes (to monarchy, for example) have transformed and the risqué elements in the film no longer shock, this sequence creates a frisson, catches the audience by surprise. And finally, but perhaps most Brechtian of all, it is definitely Laughton doing it. Remarkable though the physical transformation is, there is no sense of the actor losing himself, Stanislavsky-style, in the rôle, or placing a mask over his own face (something that Laurence Olivier was much inclined to do). We are not merely witnessing, we are being
shown
something. It is not being explained to us – we have no idea why the king behaves like this or what he feels about it – it is simply being dangled in front of us: ‘what about this, eh?’ Later, in Zurich, in his dense and sometimes abstract
Small Organum for the Theatre
, Brecht enunciated a principle: ‘the actor appears on stage in a double rôle, as Laughton and as Galileo; the showman Laughton does not disappear in the Galileo he is showing; Laughton is actually there, standing on the stage and showing us what he imagines Galileo to have been.’

This is the heart of the matter. Laughton delighted Brecht by two different answers to the question why he acted. One, quoted by Eric Bentley in his
Brecht Memoir
, was: ‘Because I like to imitate great men.’ It is the word ‘imitate’ that so pleased Brecht: an imitation is always a critique, a comment on the original. Laughton might have said: I like to become great men; or I like to forget myself by becoming great men. His choice of word was precise and intentioned. The other reply was the one Brecht made famous in his magnificent
Building Up A Part: Laughton’s Galileo
: ‘Because people don’t know what they’re like and I think I can show them.’ Brecht goes on to say ‘he had all sorts of ideas which were begging to be disseminated about how people
really
live together.’ That is no doubt true and no doubt Laughton did feel that he knew what people were like. That is not why he proved such a perfect vehicle for the Brechtian approach. His instinctive grasp of it stems from his relationship to himself, his critical account of himself. He was profoundly ill-at-ease in society, in his profession, even, perhaps especially, in his own body. He didn’t like himself, felt himself to be wrong, odd, unlovely. This is common with actors. The usual method, however, is to change oneself into someone one does like and display that (star acting), or keep escaping into different characters, and thus elude oneself. Laughton does something different. He knows what he’s like, and he painstakingly displays it. He doesn’t ask us to identify with it, because
he
doesn’t identify with it: he is the subject of his own demonstration. His performances never console nor do they sedate: we are moved by the naked truth of them, and by the courage and self-expenditure of the man giving them. In the best of them we are moved, like Brecht’s ideal audience, to cry out: ‘These things should not be allowed!’ His. attitude to what he is demonstrating is personal and often painful; the demonstration is passionate, passionate from a lifetime of observation and struggle. As it happens, his attitude, his stance, his viewpoint were not the same as Brecht’s – ‘in political matters he was indifferent (indeed, timid)’ – but the all-important thing as far as Brecht was concerned was that he didn’t want to drug the audience (as in the ‘culinary theatre’ he abhorred); he urgently wanted to tell them something they might not know.

Not to
prove
but to demonstrate; not to
explain
but to state the thing that needs to be explained; not to tie up the ends, but to expose the contradictions. This, as Brecht was at pains to indicate, meant no loss of warmth of emotion or reality, indeed, the more, the better: the thing being shown
must
be real. And the fact that he greatly admired
Laughton’s
acting is a guarantee that he wasn’t interested in anything dry or cerebral: flesh and blood, alive and real, was what he was after: but capable of change. Brecht was distrustful when ‘there is a complete fusion of the actor with his rôle that makes the character seem so natural, so impossible to conceive any other way.’ Laughton never suggested that; though he did draw short of any political solution. ‘We must find means of ‘shedding light on’ the human being at that point where he seems capable of being changed by society’s intervention.’ There the collaborators parted company. Laughton might have felt, with Kierkegaard, that ‘an artist cannot change society; all that he can do is to express that it is sick.’

The course of their relationship is charted in Brecht’s
Arbeitsjournal
, his work diary. Shortly after they met, Brecht showed Laughton one of his innumerable unperformed plays,
Schweyk in the Second World War
. Laughton fell for it, was ‘really enthusiastic.’ He read it out loud to Brecht, Eisler and Hans Winge. ‘We laughed uproariously. He understood
all
the jokes.’ The thought of Laughton in that particular part is mouth-watering. His grasp of the indestructible Bohemian would have been absolute. ‘He got
all
the jokes.’ Reading out loud, already a familiar mode of communication for Laughton, became central to his relationship with Brecht. ‘L. reads to us from
Measure for Measure
and
The Tempest
. He reclines on a white couch before a magnificent grandfather clock in Bavarian baroque, his legs crossed, so that his Buddha-like tummy is openly visible and reads out a short piece from a small book, partly like a scholar, partly like an actor, laughing at the jokes, occasionally apologising for not knowing lines … he reads the part of Caliban with feeling.’ On that occasion Laughton talked to them about how badly actors are treated in England: apparently his Bond Street tailor only agreed to make his suits if he kept it secret, otherwise he would lose his Tory customers. ‘You get no respect here,’ he said, ‘but you get money. Where else can an actor live like this?’ – pointing at the antique furniture, the park with lawn, and the Mexican heads of Medusa.

Barely three months later, in August 1944, as if to mock him, a large piece of his lawn slithered away into the ocean. Laughton immediately succumbed to apocalyptic intimations: it will be all over the papers, he’ll be a laughing stock, it’ll damage his career. He told Brecht that he was widely regarded as a ham, and feared not being able to make enough money, that he was old (45, in fact). Brecht in his journal observes that he looks old. As a sort of consolation prize, he showed
Laughton
the poem he had written for him: ‘Garden in progress’, a celebration of the flowers and statues so lovingly installed by the actor. It was at once his greatest comfort and the most direct outlet for his creativity – every plant had been chosen personally by him, carefully placed, and expertly bedded. The Mexican and pre-Columbian statues (Laughton was among the first serious collectors of these) were likewise positioned with infinite care. All this Brecht saw and celebrated in a poem of exceptional charm and perceptiveness:

Wherever one went, if one looked

One found living projects hidden

He told Laughton: ‘Your garden will be a myth based on a legend.’ In view of the calamity, he appended a last verse which completes and extends the images of the poem:

Alas, the lovely garden, placed high above the coast

Is built on crumbling rock. Landslides

Drag parts of it into the depths without warning. Seemingly

There is not much time left in which to complete it.

Laughton could hardly have failed to cheer up on receipt of the lovely Horatian poem; but it was only the first part of Brecht’s consolation: the second was the play
The Life of Galileo
, which Brecht now showed him for the first time. He had written it in 1938 at the suggestion of his collaborator, Ferdinand Reyher. Initially it was to be a film-script, but it quickly turned into a play, which Brecht provisionally entitled
The Earth Moves
; by the time he completed it, in 1938, in Denmark, it had acquired the present title. Brecht and Reyher had high hopes of an American production of it; in a sense it was always destined for Broadway, though in fact the first performance of this version took place in Zurich, in 1943. As early as 1942, though, Brecht had tried to interest his friend Oscar Homolka, now established in Hollywood, in playing Galileo, suggesting that he had written the part with him in mind; nothing happened.

By contrast, the moment he read it, Laughton knew he must do it; the rôle, the play, the subject all demanded it. But perhaps the most alluring prospect was that of active participation in the writing of the play itself. His sense of language was acute, but his own use of it dismayed him. ‘I just can’t get myself down on paper,’ he writes to a friend; ‘I just can’t put two words together on paper,’ he writes to Elsa Lanchester. In almost every one of the few letters he wrote, he says ‘Jesus, what a stinking letter I write,’ or ‘What a bloody awful letter I write. It reads simply bloodily.’ But perhaps in collaboration …

He spoke no German, and first read the play in Elisabeth Hauptmann’s
literal
rendition. A version of the play was then commissioned from two young MGM writers of Laughton’s acquaintance, Brainerd Duffield and Emerson Crocker; it was evidently satisfactory as far as it went, but he and Brecht decided that they should make a new version. In late 1944, they started the unique process of play-making which resulted in a radically new version of the play, and which dominated both their lives for nearly three years.