Orson Welles, Vol I (57 page)

‘It is impossible to be a great actor unless you deal with your audience,’ he writes. ‘You can deal with them contemptuously – but you must deal with them … a great actor is no greater than what he does to his audience.’ He seems not to admit of the possibility that the audience can influence the actor’s performance: that thanks to them he could transcend himself completely.
No. He says: the actor controls the audience totally, that’s what’s so great about it. Equally, he is saying that actors are born, not made, and that there is no system of work on oneself or one’s art that can produce great acting. ‘And there are no great actors in the theatre today.’

In their absence, who then is to control the audience? Why, the director, of course. Noting that the old-time
star went out at the same time as the director came in, he observes that ‘nobody has read the last chapter of the detective story and discovered that this old-time star did not go out. He merely sits in the fifth row and is the director.’ As a matter of fact, the old-time star was a director, too, like Irving or Tree; but the point is well made. The director is now the star. Welles rebelled against
this idea, while at the same time embodying it to a greater degree than anyone, perhaps, in the history of the theatre. The show was always the star in a Welles production. But Welles doesn’t really approve of ‘the director’ – the others, that is. He berates those ‘American, English and Continental directors of excessive eccentricities imposing their tastes and their inhibitions, their inordinate
love of various obscure theatrical elements, on an entire pattern of theatrical culture’. He believes that the director ‘so far has done more harm than good in exact proportion to his ability’. As elsewhere in this little booklet, Welles seems to be arguing with – and often against – himself, both as actor and director, mentally struggling to justify a gut instinct that
seems to him somehow wrong.
Great actors are
this
, he says, and then seems suddenly to wonder whether it describes him; directors shouldn’t be
that
, he says, and then wonders whether he hasn’t just described himself.

The Director in the Theatre Today
is a curious document: the work of an arrogant, talented young man, intoxicated with the power of his gift, dreaming of a theatre which would transcend everyday reality
and offer astonishing visions, it is fundamentally confused. He longs to be a great actor himself, but postulates a notion of great acting so exalted that no one, including himself, could possibly fulfil it. He clearly believes himself to be a great director, but disapproves of the very idea of directing as a feeble substitute for the great acting that should properly be holding the stage. He loves
great writing, but believes that that, too, is secondary to great acting – if only there were any about. This obsession with the Great Actor, or the Old-Time Star, seems (as, again, it did for Craig) to have a little something to do with a longed-for Father, the superhuman, lordly figure, whom one aspires to be. There is a lurking feeling that what he himself wants to be is not a director at all,
but an old-time star. If only one were an old-time star, people would respect one, one would be
someone
. Many years later, interviewed for the BBC by Leslie Megahey, he said, ‘I have a kind of personality which requires that I play certain kinds of parts, or I discombobulate the scene … there used to be a form, a division of actors in France, in the Comédie Française, who were called king actors.
And I’m a king actor, maybe a bad one, but that’s what I am, you see. And I have to play authoritative roles.’ He adds: ‘but Truffaut was quite right when he says about me that I show the fragility of the great authority, and that’s the thing I do.’

This comment of Truffaut’s is a dazzling aperçu, a key to all of Welles’s acting; his power, while undeniable, seems assumed, put on – like a
false nose – and thus vulnerable. It seems as if behind the king, there is a little boy rather desperately playing at being a king. Thus his portrayal of power comes to seem a critique of power: man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority. There is something unself-convinced, both about the role and the actor. It is doubly poignant; a kingly personage whose authority is questionable, played
by an actor whose own claim to greatness is not believed in by himself. He could only be, in his own eyes, a great actor, if he was to be an actor at all; and yet he feels shifty about making the claim. It is as if it were a reluctant and unsuitable destiny; like Barrymore, in a remark already quoted from an
awkward exchange with Peter Bogdanovich, he ‘played the part of an actor because that
was the role he’d been given by life’.
⁷
The notion of acting – great acting – as a burden he’d been born to, willy-nilly, is a common one with Welles.

He confessed to Harold Stagg in the
New Haven Ledger
only a year after he had started the Mercury: ‘I’ve given myself terrific parts in my plays. I’ve built myself upon big roles, and I’ve imposed myself on the public as a star.’ Welles tried
to make himself a great actor simply by playing leading parts one after another. That is not the way to do it; certainly not in the full glare of
The New York Times
. It is as if an amateur pianist, having a wide span and a nice touch, were simply to play all the towering masterpieces of the piano repertory one after another – not bothering to practise, not spending time studying the scores – all
on instinct and enthusiasm. As Virgil Thomson observed, he never gave his mind, let alone his heart, to his work as an actor. Did he want to be one at all? He still seemed unsure forty years later. ‘I was obsessed in my hot youth,’ he said on
Arena
, ‘with the idea that I would not be a star. And I was in a position to promote myself as a star and I should have. I should have gone back to New York
and played Hamlet and … as long as it was going I didn’t. I had this idea that I wanted to be known as a director and that was that.’ He seems to have been insecure about the idea of himself as a star, or even perhaps as a leading man. The idea of being a director – the big boss – somehow struck him as having more weight. Welles was constantly trying to give himself weight, solidity. He succeeded
beyond his wildest ambitions, and not at all: always feeling small, despite girth and glory.

The conflicting and highly emotional ingredients of his artistic agenda go some way towards explaining why, half-audacious modernist, half-archaic dreamer, reluctant totalitarian and self-doubting star, he created such an extraordinary impact in the world of the American theatre of the thirties. His
agenda was often irrational, and always explosive. Now, with his new theatre, he was poised to put it into effect.

He girded his loins and set about staging
Julius Caesar
in September of 1937. Just before starting work on it, and having polished off the last episodes of
Les Misérables
, he was asked by the same company, Mutual, to take over the leading part in the relaunch of their sensational
success,
The Shadow
. Hitherto the mysterious law-enforcer had merely narrated; in the new version, his adventures
were to be enacted. Moreover, he was now to have the supernatural gift of invisibility (hitherto he had merely lurked in, well, yes, the shadows). The final innovation was that he was to have a double identity. By night, the Shadow, who, ‘using sophisticated methods that may shortly
be available to regular law-enforcement agencies’, fights an unceasing war on crime, aided only by his sidekick, the lovely Margot Lane; by day, Lamont Cranston, young man-about-town. The character was a prototype for those subsequent split personalities, Batman, Superman and Captain Marvel; Welles was the first Cranston, but the fourth Shadow. Curiously, the famous opening sequence, with the Shadow’s
trademark, a bass chuckle (oddly sinister for a law-enforcer), and his endlessly imitated warning (under the sound of a whirlwind blended with Saint-Saëns’s welling theme from
Le Rouet d’Omphale
: ‘who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man? The Shadow knows … the weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay! The Shadow knows!’ was not his; Mutual preferred his predecessor’s rendition
of it, so one of Welles’s most famous performances – as well known and as closely associated with him in its time as the Harry Lime theme would be twelve years later – was actually given by Frank Readick, Jr.

Welles plays the wealthy young Cranston as rather leisurely and mild, with careless charm, in the more or less English accent then still synonymous with a private income; there is about
the interpretation a suggestion of silk dressing gown and cigarette holder:
this
was his Noël Coward performance. All his love of melodrama informs his performance of Cranston’s later ego, the Shadow himself. In a curious resonance for Welles, this other self was the result of ‘a youthful trip to the Orient’, where Cranston had learned ‘a strange and mysterious secret … the hypnotic power to cloud
men’s minds so they cannot see him’; the
real
him, in Welles’s case, perhaps. Jungians everywhere will raise a smile, perhaps a slightly serious smile, at the personification of one of the great analyst’s key concepts: the shadow is ‘that part of us we fail to know or see’ – which, if unacknowledged or denied, destroys us. Another resonance. Initially, the actor’s identity was kept secret – but
nothing to do with Welles could remain a secret for very long. It added, over the couple of years in which he played the role, to an irresistibly growing fame. But meanwhile, there was
Caesar
to prepare for his new theatre.

P
RESUMABLY IN
the belief that
his
eccentricities were not excessive,
his
love of obscure theatrical elements was not inordinate, and that
he
would not be imposing his tastes and inhibitions on theatrical culture, Welles began his work on
Julius Caesar
, withdrawing to the country just as Stanislavsky had to prepare his production of
The Seagull
in the opening months
of the Moscow Art Theatre. Once he had assembled his cast, he set off for New Hampshire to work both on
Caesar
and – a late addition to the repertory which Welles had realised would be a superb vehicle for the talents of his chum Chubby Sherman –
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
by Thomas Dekker. He returned two weeks later with edited texts, models and drawings for
Julius Caesar
which he presented to
his creative team: Jean Rosenthal as lighting designer, Sam Leve as set designer, Marc Blitzstein, composer.

His interpretation of the play was extremely clear, and, as we have seen, not particularly original. Not only had both Hallie Flanagan and Sidney Howard already separately suggested the idea of a modern dress, fascist
Caesar
to Welles and Houseman, but Arthur Schintzer, head of the
Federal Theatre Project at Wilmington, Delaware, had actually done one earlier that year, ‘a not-too-complimentary satire on premier Benito Mussolini and fascist Italy’, said the
Newark Post
. Schintzer had been inspired not by political purposes, but by the familiar FTP problem: having a number of veteran (male) vaudevillians on his hands, he needed a play with a large, largely male, cast.
Julius
Caesar
fitted the bill nicely. Realising that ‘these old boys would look silly in togas’, he decided to dress them in blackshirts and khaki. News of Delaware’s
Caesar
had not reached Manhattan, nor was Sidney Howard’s Collected Correspondence publicly available, so the idea seemed to have leaped fully fledged out of Welles’s brain. Questions of originality and authorship were to plague Welles
throughout his career, largely because of his insistence on sole responsibility for his own work and his increasing need to appear as an original genius, a quite unnecessary and largely unsustainable claim. In media as miscegenated as the theatre and
film, an original idea is the least of it: the realisation is all. The best idea in the world, poorly executed, is dead in the water; the real creator
is the person who can liberate an idea’s potential. And by that criterion, Welles had few rivals.

In the case of
Julius Caesar
, he served the idea absolutely, better, perhaps, than the play itself. His version of the text was heavily cut and rearranged: a performing version, and no mistake. During rehearsals, he continued cutting and rearranging; this process only stopped by Press Night. He
had come a long way from his resounding affirmation in
Everybody’s Shakespeare
: ‘one of the very wisest ways to play Shakespeare is the way he wrote it … he wrote it that way not because he didn’t know better but because he knew best.’ He had changed his mind about a number of things since that precocious essay. ‘What’s in a Name?’ he had asked then. ‘Commentators say the play is mis-named:
Brutus
should be its title … I disagree,’ he wrote. ‘The personality of Caesar is the focal point of every line of the play.’ By 1937, though he didn’t go so far as to propose changing the title, he had come to the conclusion that Brutus was very much the central figure of the play.
The Mercury
, the weekly bulletin that was in effect Welles’s mouthpiece, stated: ‘As those familiar with the play are aware,
Julius Caesar
is really about Brutus.’
¹
Welles himself added: ‘Brutus is the classical picture of the eternal, impotent, ineffectual, fumbling liberal; the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn’t know how and gets it in the neck in the end. He’s dead right all the time, and dead at the final curtain. He’s Shakespeare’s favourite hero – the fellow who thinks the times are out
of joint but who is really out of joint with his time. He’s the bourgeois intellectual who, under a modern dictatorship, would be the first to be put up against a wall and shot.’

He had concluded that the play was ‘about’ the anguish of the liberal in an age of dictators. This emphasis meant that a great deal of the political complexity of the play was sacrificed in order to focus on one man’s
dilemma. The version Welles fashioned by no means fulfilled Houseman’s claim for the production that ‘the stress will be on the social implications inherent in the history of Caesar and on the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surrounds a dictatorial regime’ or indeed Welles’s own claim at the same time that ‘it’s a timeless tragedy about Caesarism and the collapse of democracy
under Caesarism.’ Lepidus was axed entirely; Octavius and Antony downgraded, and the mob, so graphically individualised by Shakespeare, relegated to a largely choric function – in the text, that is.