Orson Welles, Vol I (34 page)

The one departure from normal practice is to be found at the beginning of the play:
OLIVIA’S APARTMENT:
‘This can be simply set on a shallow stage; perhaps a plain row of drapes.’ Then, rather sensationally, Feste is heard off, singing ‘Come
away, come away death’ from Act II, scene 4. The curtain rises on him, followed by Orsino and the court. That’s quite a big directional decision, already. There’s no explanation of why he’s there, or where he goes. Perhaps Welles saw a production in which this happened and was impressed. This is almost the only instance of a reordering of the text in
Everybody’s Shakespeare
. There are, however,
interesting and revealing additional comments. In the introduction to
The Merchant of Venice
, for example, he writes, in explanation of his interpretation of Shylock’s character: ‘personally my guess is that Shakespeare wrote the play for just what it is usually made – a story of craftiness outwitted and true love triumphant … it was an age of intense self-righteousness among the Christian nations.
The American Indian could be tortured and enslaved with the blessing of God if he was first “converted” … to the average patron of the Globe it was essentially noble for a Christian to act with diabolical cruelty to a Jew … just a Boy Scout doing his good turn daily. But Shylock must be
MERCIFUL.
And a million high school students must learn the speech and recite it without laughing.’

There is a flicker here of the beginnings of Welles’s liberal political views. He has not yet politicised
Julius Caesar
, not specifically, anyway. ‘It was inevitable that Shakespeare would dramatise the assassination of “the foremost man of the world …”’ He adds in some extracts from Plutarch and in doing so becomes uncharacteristically schoolmasterly: ‘compare each incident in the two versions
and gain a new appreciation of the Dramatist’s divine power with words.’
‘WHAT’S IN A NAME?’
he asks. ‘Commentators say the play is misnamed.
Brutus
should be its title … I disagree
… the personality of Caesar is the focal point of every line of the play.’ The stage directions tell us that
‘CAESAR
is richly robed; a majestic figure, kingly and dignified. His handsome, almost feminine face is oldish
and cut with wrinkles, but the eyes are clear and steady and the mouth is firm.
CASSIUS
a thin, keen-eyed, active man.
MARCUS BRUTUS
is a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual.’ All of this is of interest in view of his subsequent, sensationally successful production of the play. Despite a change of period, his essential view doesn’t seem to have altered.

The illustrations
to
Caesar
are of exceptional quality. The looseness of the togas makes for sketches of great fluidity, especially in group scenes, which are often brilliantly composed. The setting for ‘Friends, Romans and Countrymen’ is an especially striking composition, with a huge shadow of Antony on the wall behind him – a configuration that seems to look forward, not to his famous stage
Caesar
but rather,
if anything, to
Citizen Kane
. Surprisingly, Welles suggests ending the play with Antony’s ‘Mischief, thou art afoot, Take thou what course thou wilt’, to avoid all those awkward battle scenes, an extraordinarily radical proposal which gives a glimpse of the editorial ruthlessness he was later to employ to such effect. Somewhat whimsically at the end of the edition proper, he quotes a favourite
poem: Eugene Field’s ‘With Brutus in St Jo’:

Oh happy times when sounded in the public’s rapturous ears

The clink of pasteboard armour and the clash of wooden spears!

O happy times for Jack and me and that one other supe

That then and there did constitute the noblest Roman’s troop!

– an instance of his fondness for old theatrical lore, in which he was steeped. His informed
affection for it never left him, a nostalgia for what he’d never known, an entirely mythical golden age of actor-laddies: outrageous hamming, occasional flights of glorious inspiration, camaraderie, competition, upstaging and all-round outlandishness. They were actors then! is a theme which recurs throughout his life, the theatrical equivalent of the Merrie Englands with which he associated Grand
Detour and other haunts of his youth.

Everybody’s Shakespeare
was well reviewed. Chicago’s Krock and Brentano store filled its Wabash Avenue window with a special display, including originals of Welles’s drawings. This brought publishers with offers; Hill and Welles chose Harpers ‘for its prestige and also its willingness to let our school shop continue the manufacture. It
was a foolish choice.’
Fortunately Harpers sold their school business to McGraw-Hill, who kept selling the texts, in various guises, till the mid-seventies. ‘No other school texts have ever approached that record of longevity,’ wrote Hill with justifiable pride. The credit for their excellence belongs equally to him and to Welles, a lasting monument to their extraordinary relationship. It was Roger’s inspiration,
and its spirit is that of the Todd school’s revolutionary attitude to learning. But Welles’s sense of theatre, the wit and point of his drawings and the articulate enthusiasm of his approach make
Everybody’s Shakespeare
one of the outstanding achievements of his entire output.

It was pioneering work, and must have turned on generations of schoolchildren to Shakespeare as he really is, making
the plays seem fun without undermining them in any way. This, more than many more celebrated aspects of his output, arriving modestly in the world, stayed the course quietly and unassumingly. The ‘tributes’ quoted in an early reissue, though quite possibly fabricated by McGraw-Hill’s publicity department, are not misleading: ‘That our boys are actually buying copies for themselves is evidence of
its appeal … I believe these texts will revolutionise the teaching of Shakespeare … I find my students reading them for fun and that is indeed an achievement.’ If they have finally been superseded, in presentation and in theatrical reference, their spirit remains infectiously attractive.

It was not, however, going to pay the rent. Although he wasn’t out of pocket as a result of the Woodstock
Season, he had no capital of his own. Dadda was no doubt as reluctant as ever to hand over Welles’s patrimony to him, and he now had a girlfriend to entertain. So when Guthrie McClintic approached him to rejoin the company for a New York run of
Romeo and Juliet
, he must have been privately grateful. Gratitude may quickly have turned to rage when he realised that he was not being asked to repeat
his Mercutio, but to move sideways – downwards, in fact – to the role of Tybalt. McClintic later offered differing reasons for this demotion, and they are both quite credible: that he wanted Brian Aherne to play Robert Browning (as he had done some years before) in the planned revival of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, and Aherne’s terms for doing so were to be allowed to play Mercutio; and that
‘Orson’s extreme and obvious youth in such an important part might make certain other members of the company appear older than they should’,
³⁸
which is perfectly feasible (the representations may have come from Rathbone – who had just returned from Hollywood where he
played Mr Murdstone in
David Copperfield
, as uncommon a double with Romeo as can be imagined). It must have been humiliating for
Welles, a blow to his self-esteem, particularly after the summer’s triumphs, but he had little choice. He needed the money, and he wanted a New York opening; so – despite his lack of enthusiasm for McClintic’s approach to Shakespeare – he accepted the part.

In fact, in the interim, McClintic’s approach had completely changed to something much closer to that of
Everybody’s Shakespeare
. In his
book
Me and Kit
, he describes in compelling detail and with great frankness the evolution that he and the production underwent. Disappointed with what he had done the first time round, but unable really to put his finger on what was wrong, he overheard one old lady say to another, on seeing the Capulets’ tomb: ‘I knew it! When the curtain went up on this show I knew it would have a bad end.’ This
crystallised for him what was wrong with his approach: he was presenting the play as a solemn drama whose outcome was never in any doubt, instead of telling the story the way Shakespeare had written it, in all its breathless variety. His first move, having already scrapped Woodman Thompson’s lumbering design, was to commission Jo Mielziner, with whom he had just worked on
Yellow Jack
, to provide
new ones: ‘I told him of my newly conceived decor: light, gay; hot sun, hot passions; young, swift.’
³⁹
Mielziner, taking his inspiration from Giotto’s paintings ‘with their high colour and total lack of sophistication in their story-telling … beautifully organised within the master’s great sense of design – design not for decoration but in order to give expression to the story he was imparting’
⁴⁰
produced a decor that was absolutely fluid and at the same time shockingly real – ‘ending with a marvellous dark Capulet tomb … Paris actually needed a torch – one couldn’t tell which tomb was Juliet’s …’
⁴¹
The new costumes, in which they rehearsed to learn how to move in this new world, were equally dazzling to behold and full of individual character – except, it appears, for Katharine Cornell’s.
‘She seemed a person apart – more a star than one of the girls.’ Exactly the effect that most leading ladies of the period – or perhaps any period – would have actively sought. Dyspeptic with frustration, as was his way, McClintic approached one of the girls in the ensemble, told her to ‘go into Kit’s dressing room and divest herself of her charming frock and then told Kit to put it on. It was
perfect.’ Cornell’s two rejected dresses had cost between them $1,000; the one she wore, $85.

The changes required an outlay of $43,000. But the new scenery and costumes, though the most expensive elements in McClintic’s
new approach, were by no means the most radical. He decided to play a virtually full text, something almost unheard of on either side of the Atlantic. His delight in the play
he thus rediscovered is still touching, sixty years later: ‘how fine the play was when left intact and played with speed, energy, humour and honesty! What a good play it turned out to be when it wasn’t amputated … the events of the entire play take place in just 72 hours! Here was a drama of hot blood, high passion and exhilaration! Tragedy springing from recklessness – from youth’s fervour –
its refusal to turn back – to pause and reflect; had either one of the lovers stopped to think, there would have been no tragedy. This was no museum piece to be steeped in tradition. Its two-hours’ traffic must be breathless with headlong action, not an actor’s holiday – a play to be played as written.’
⁴²
Among the traditional cuts which he restored were ‘Gallop apace you fiery footed steeds’
(not played since Adelaide Neilson in the 1870s); all the vignettes of the preparation for Juliet’s wedding to Paris; the scene in which the Nurse discovers Juliet’s body; the one just before the finale in which Friar Laurence learns that his letter to Romeo was undelivered.

McClintic was not a particularly sophisticated man, nor a particularly clever one, but he knew when a thing was wrong.
He had applied himself diligently and dutifully to the task of tackling the great cultural monument, studying the variora, and all the promptbooks of previous productions he could get hold of: ‘all during the rehearsals of
Romeo
the menacing cloud of Shakespeare’s commentators hung over me – the dictatorship of tradition had imposed on me a boundary which I felt it treason to cross.’
⁴³
It didn’t
work. Instead of abandoning the whole thing, and endlessly reviving the shows which did work, he determined to get it right. The revelation, when it came, was blindingly, banally, simple: trust the writer. He discovered, as so often, that cutting, whether it be literary, dramatic or cinematic, is often a counter-productive exercise; that a restored work of art, though longer by the clock, often,
if the original is sound, feels shorter. And this principle of trusting the writer extended to the actors, as well. McClintic’s work always began and ended with them.

‘The actors must be made to forget that they are playing Shakespeare. That look that comes on the average actor’s face – what happens to his body – when he starts reading Shakespeare is something that has to be seen to be believed.’
⁴⁴
A great deal of what he now believed about Shakespeare was identical to what Welles the editor had recently proclaimed, and what Welles the director
would shortly practise: ‘Overlapping scenes – pace – kill applause,’ McClintic wrote, telegraphic with excitement. ‘No stilted pauses to let an audience be depressed by the fact that they are witnessing a Shakespeare production; warmth, gaiety –
JULIET IS THE SUN
! – and there must be no waits between scenes. I was staging an exciting new play by a man named William Shakespeare.’ Unfortunately their philosophical agreement was not matched by an improvement in their working relationship. All was not well in rehearsals: McClintic may have regretted ever offering the part to him. There was an explosion caused by Welles’s belief that he was
trying to teach him how to play Tybalt; McClintic was growingly convinced of his new approach, which clashed with Welles’s deep-seated certainty that he, Welles, knew more about Shakespeare than anyone living. He matched McClintic temperament for temperament: a dangerous thing to do.

McClintic was not the only one to find him difficult. Brian Aherne, the new Mercutio, wrote: ‘Orson seemed
friendly and good-natured about losing Mercutio, but secretly, I am sure, the actor in him could never forgive me. In the famous duel scene I often had the impression that he slashed at me with unnecessary venom and twice he broke my property sword off at the hilt.’
⁴⁵
A stage manager who had the temerity to chastise Welles for being late (an ingrained personality defect of his) had a teacup thrown
at him. Somehow or another, no doubt by means of extravagant acts of contrition, he managed to remain in the company, and in due course, set out with them on the brief pre-Broadway tour.