Orson Welles, Vol I (43 page)

The press reaction the following
day was, for
Macbeth
at the Lafayette, no longer crucial. The show was already the most enormous success. For Welles and Houseman, it mattered a great deal. They both had reputations to make. All the first-string critics had attended the first night (one of them asking not to be seated next to negroes), and for the most part, they were enthusiastic. While regarding the whole event as a curiosity
from a Shakespearean point of view, they could hardly fail – simply as reporters – to acknowledge the excitement engendered. Every single notice, good or bad – there were no indifferent ones – makes you long to see the show. Brooks Atkinson of the
Times
, a friend of the Project, was saddled by his sub-editor with a headline which bore no resemblance to his copy. It is a good indication of the
degree of racism, both latent and blatant, that informed most of the notices:
MACBETH OR HARLEM BOY GOES WRONG.
He starts (as perhaps Welles did) with the witches’ scenes. ‘They have always worried the life out of the polite tragic stage: ship the witches into the rank and fever-stricken jungles of Haiti … raise the voices until the jungle echoes, stuff a gleaming naked witch doctor into a cauldron,
hold up negro masks in the baleful light – and there you have a witches’
³³
scene that is logical and stunning and a triumph of the theatre art.’ He admired Nat Karson’s costumes and settings, and Feder’s light. ‘They have turned the banquet scene into a ball at a semi-barbaric court, heralded it with music and crowded it with big, rangy figures dressed in magnificent court array. Put that down
in your memory-book as another scene that fills the theatre with sensuous, black-blooded vitality.’

His (more or less) innocent racism is revealed in every phrase.
‘Jack Carter is a fine figure of a negro in tight-fitting trousers that do justice to his anatomy.’ Then Atkinson turned to Carter’s performance. ‘He has no command of poetry or character … Edna Thomas has stage presence and a way
with costumes, and also a considerable awareness of the character she is playing. Although she speaks the lines conscientiously, she has left the poetry out of them.’ This is an assertion which is constantly made about Welles, his productions, other people’s performances in his productions, and his own performances: that they lack poetry. There seems to be some truth in it. He had a passion for
verse, but he wanted to eliminate Poetry from the classical theatre, considering it an obstacle to the life in the plays, a veneer that needed to be stripped away. And yet he was no realist. He wanted the majesty without the poetry, the tone without the music. What he offered instead was Orchestration; colour and sound, largely devoid either of meaning or of melody. ‘Since the programme announces
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare, it is fair to point out that the tragedy is written in verse and that it reveals the disintegration of a superior man who is infected by ambition. There is very little of that in the current Harlem revival,’ wrote Atkinson. But, he concluded enticingly enough, ‘as an experiment in Afro-American showmanship the
Macbeth
merited the excitement that rocked the Lafayette
last night. If it is witches you want, Harlem knows how to overwhelm you with their fury and phantom splendour.’

Burns Mantle in the
Sunday News
had much the same message, less attractively expressed: ‘This is not the speech of negroes, nor within their grasp … with the spoken lines, though they are modestly and sensibly spoken, the coloured
Macbeth
becomes a good deal like a charade.’
³⁴
The
costumes, generally admired, were also held to be somewhat fantasticated. ‘Extremely vivid, though a bit bizarre,’
³⁵
wrote Richard Lockridge in
The New York Sun
. ‘They are prodigious, running wild-eyed through the rainbow and being of such strange shapes that one can only guess that Nat Karson, who did them, was one time frightened by a costume ball … Macbeth’s costume is like a football player’s
outfit, with great padded epaulets; Duncan’s crown madly sprouts feathers.’ Percy Hammond, in a notice which was less a review of the production than an expression of personal affront at being unable to file his copy on time, took the anti-Federal Theatre Project line. ‘The production is only as interesting as could be expected – one of your benevolent Uncle Sam’s experimental philanthropies …
an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling … the actors sounded the notes with a muffled timidity
that was often unintelligible … the personnel of the Negro Theatre is magnificent in its titles and numbers. It contains, one learns from the playbill, a managing producer, a casting director, a stage manager with four assistants etc, some experts in voodoo chants, and a superintendent of the chorus to
say nothing of the ticket takers, the ushers, the press representatives, and as pathetic an orchestra as ever misunderstood the wood-winds, cat-guts and brasses. Despite the competence of this large army of Federal officials
Macbeth
could not get its curtain up until 9.30 p.m. – so I, as a punctual reporter, had to desert the performance before Miss Thomas, as Lady Macbeth, walked and talked in
her sleep. The
Macbeth
of the Negro Theatre and the WPA is as interesting as can be expected, a unique example of the New Deal’s friendly processes.’
³⁶
This dyspeptic irrelevance cost the critic dear; according to legend, either Welles or Asodata Horton were particularly incensed by its tone, and conveyed their displeasure (crying, perhaps ‘who will rid me of this meddlesome hack?’) to Abdul,
the show’s witchdoctor, who then stayed up all night cursing Percy Hammond with a particularly virulent chant. His notice appeared on the Tuesday, he took ill on the Thursday, and was dead by Sunday. Gratifying though this story is, its veracity may be doubted. As Sam Leiter points out, there were far worse notices than Hammond’s – though critics should note that nothing is more calculated to render
homicidal the person criticised than a refusal to engage with the work done, instead of some external factor; liked or loathed, it should be the work that is reviewed, nothing else. Perhaps Percy’s notice and his sad, if apocryphal fate, should be conveyed to all critics at the outset of their careers.

The few black critics were enthusiastic, without gushing. They saw the event in a different
light, of course. The militant journalist Roi Ottley wrote in the
Amsterdam News
: ‘In
Macbeth
the negro has been given an opportunity to discard the bandana and burnt-cork casting to play a universal character … we attended the
Macbeth
showing, happy in the thought that we wouldn’t again be reminded, with all its vicious implications, that we were niggers.’
³⁷
More simply, Errol Aubrey Jones in
the
New York Age
wrote: ‘Hallie Flanagan and Phillip Barber must have felt proud for their protégé after it all was over. We were. The theatre lives again! Hurrah!’
³⁸
– an important vote of confidence from the community.

Mainstream critics felt impelled to return to the subject. More or less reversing his original judgement, Brooks Atkinson in his weekly round-up declared that the production
was not
Macbeth
: ‘it turns out to be a colorful and rousing voodoo show … an amusing show
shop lark.’
³⁹
This word keeps cropping up: ‘amusing’. Unexpected in a review of
Macbeth
; rather refreshing, though it is scarcely intended as a compliment. Many of these notices represent, in fact, the reverse side of American anxiety about Shakespeare. Now they’re worried that they’re enjoying it too much.
John Mason Brown in the
New York Post
offered
A FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF THE WAY IN WHICH ORSON WELLES FAILED TO DEVELOP AN INTERESTING IDEA
.
⁴⁰
The piece makes some interesting points about the production, and about Welles: ‘In a moment of inspiration, Mr Welles apparently saw the three weird sisters of Shakespeare’s text not as fantastical hags lurking in the shadows of a Scotch heath, but as
mumbo-jumbo agents of a fearful witch doctor in the jungles of Haiti. The next step in his thinking … was to imagine a Macbeth who would be appropriate for these witches; who would be subject to the spell of black instead of white magic; in other words, a sort of Brutus Jones Macbeth, whose heart would quicken to the beat of voodoo drums.’ This is exactly what most critics claim to have seen. Not
according to Mason Brown.

‘Unfortunately,’ he continued, ‘Mr Welles seems to have lost his nerve just when he needed it most … he has introduced a few fairly tame voodoo scenes into a wretchedly cut and stupidly altered version of
Macbeth
that, in spite of being acted by an all-Negro cast, is still laid in Scotland … it is merely a conventional production with unconventional features which
is less well acted than are most indifferent Shakespearean revivals of the same traditional sort.’ The concept, Mason Brown is saying, is merely a gimmick. ‘One wonders why Mr Welles lacked imagination enough to adapt the language of the play to the locale he had selected for it and the actors who were to speak it. It is not the absence of orthodoxy but its presence that one objects to in this
Macbeth
.’

This was the sticking point for the hostile critics: they would, they imply, have liked it better if it hadn’t been called
Macbeth
, and if the actors hadn’t used Shakespeare’s text. Equally, they would have been happy if Welles had held classes in the iambic pentameter and produced a troupe of medal-winning verse speakers. The point is that the Negro Unit (that is to say Houseman,
and, behind him, Hallie Flanagan) wanted to make a bold statement of intent: black actors, they were saying, will be confined neither to folkloristic tweeness nor to Broadway slickness (both offering stereotypical views of black performers) but will create something thrilling and bold which will rival anything that the white theatre can offer. The
works of Shakespeare, part of the store of common
culture, provided a useful starting point.

Whatever the critics’ cavills, the beau monde took up the show in a big way, as did theatre people (John Barrymore, Welles claimed, saw the show every night of its ten-week run). But its fame went beyond the theatre. ‘No event in the art galleries this week,’
⁴¹
wrote the
New York Times
Art Critic, ‘could hope to rival in barbaric splendour the transmogrification
of
Macbeth
by members of the Negro Theatre … the stage pictures at any rate constituted a sumptuous pageant of colour, form, pattern and movement, keyed to the pulsebeat of voodoo drums.’ Whatever the original intention, Orson Welles had staged a highly original and exciting event, an integration of light, sound, movement and decor which had an overwhelming sensuous and visceral impact, a barbaric
cabaret. The effect on its audiences must have been something like that of the Ballets Russes in Paris, 1911. Feder’s lights, in conjunction with Karson’s Douanier Rousseau backcloths, revealed ‘a tragedy of black ambition in a Green Jungle shot with such lights from both heaven and hell as no other stage has seen’,
⁴²
in the fevered words of a contemporary critic; the lights were co-ordinated
with the sound score and the stage action to a degree never before experienced by an American (or any other) audience.

Virgil Thomson invited Jean Cocteau, in 1936 making his trip around the world in eighty days, to the production. ‘Cocteau did not understand the constant lighting changes. His classical theatre mind found them distracting till he had seized their function in the spectacle
as contributing to the climate of violence … he perceived a Wagnerian aspect to the proceedings.’
⁴³
This is a precise perception: the totality of expression, the gesamtkunstwerk, of Wagner’s aesthetic, is exactly what Welles was after. It is hardly surprising, given his immersion in grand opera from his earliest years (it was the first form of theatre to which he had been exposed) that his work
should aspire to its condition. The integration of motifs – the aspiration towards the organic – is entirely Wagnerian. Reinhardt’s designer, Ernst Stern, who was in town to design (of all things)
The White Horse Inn
, left a vivid account of one instance of this: ‘When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth planned the murder, their plottings were accompanied by the background throbbing of the drums. It merged
naturally into the knocking on the door: “Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could’st.” Sometimes the throbbing was subdued, like the insistent throbbing of a guilty conscience, like a steady pulse-beat; sometimes louder and more insistent, according
to whether it conveyed the memory of past horrors or the suggestion of new horrible deeds to come.’
⁴⁴

The influence of
The Emperor Jones
was felt by many spectators, especially perhaps in this insistent use of drums. Welles, like many an artist, a Stravinsky or a Picasso, stole anything that was germane to his purpose. He was not, in fact, a great innovator at all; he was a great fulfiller. Pragmatic rather than visionary, he was supreme as a doer. Houseman felt that Welles had been initiated into the mysteries of the theatre.
If we say, rather, that he seemed innately to have an absolute mastery of the skills of the theatre – of its hokum, so to say – and all the whorish skills involved, a shameless, unabashed determination to give immediate gratification, it may be closer to the truth. It is an astonishing, an uncanny endowment, not liable to produce the greatest art, but still formidable. Not yet twenty-one years old,
Welles had it in him to be the greatest manufacturer of theatrical fireworks ever known. Mary McCarthy, unrelentingly pursuing him, wrote, two years later: ‘The Harlem
Macbeth
is now far enough in the past so that even those who enjoyed it can see that it was at best a pleasant bit of legerdemain.’
⁴⁵
Contemporary accounts suggest a different adjective; a staggering piece of legerdemain.

Cocteau,
plagued with doubts and reservations, finally abandoned his objections and allowed himself to submit to the spell wrought by Welles. ‘I like
Macbeth
and I like negroes. Where then is the gap? The voodoo violence of the witches’
⁴⁶
scenes stifles the plot of the tragedy. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become an American household in which Macbeth trembles and his wife wears the breeches. The terror of
the king haunted by Banquo’s ghost turns into negro panic in a cemetery, and I deplore the omission of the physician hearing the sleep-walking Queen’s confessions and also that the ghost does not occupy the throne at the ball that replaces the banquet scene. But what does it matter! The play’s the thing! The Lafayette puts on the sublime tragedy that no other theatre is playing, and negro enthusiasm
transforms the end, which is always somewhat confused, into a superb ballet of ruin and death.’ Mary McCarthy noting that ‘it is significant that our white culture has had to draw so heavily on the negro for the revivification of its classics’
⁴⁷
somewhat fancifully suggests that ‘as in the days of the Empire in Rome, it is the son of the freedman who believes most in the national past, and the
elite must depend on the feelings and energies of its ex-slaves to experience its own artistic inheritance.’ Certainly there was an explosive energy that came from the actors finally being allowed access to this supremely stimulating work; a
process comparable to the explosion of Jewish artistic activity once Jewish artists had been admitted to bourgeois society. This liberated energy was what
Welles and Houseman had begun to tap.