Orson Welles, Vol I (70 page)

No doubt Welles was stimulated but also perhaps awed by the reputation of the only previous New York production of the play, Reinhardt’s, with his German company. It had created a sensation.
‘I doubt,’ wrote R. Dana Skinner, ‘if any stage in this country has witnessed anything so impressive, so moving or so filled with magnificent vitality as the scene in the Convention.’
²³
The production was the supreme example of Reinhardt’s animation of the crowd, though this was achieved with consummate theatrical cunning. ‘The impression
of a tremendous plenitude and variety of life, the impression
of passionate movement, was obtained by lighting up only one small part of the stage at a time whilst the rest remained in gloom,’
²⁴
wrote Heinz Herald. ‘Only individuals or small groups were picked out in the spotlight whilst the masses always remained in semi-darkness, or even in complete darkness. But they were always there and could be heard murmuring, speaking, shouting. Out of the darkness
an upraised arm would catch the light, and in this way thousands would seem to be where hundreds were in fact. The principle of the rapid play of light and darkness was maintained throughout.’ It is doubtful whether Welles actually saw the production (he was twelve at the time) but it must have been a constant point of reference for him, especially since he had hired Reinhardt’s Robespierre, Vladimir
Sokoloff, to repeat his immensely admired performance for the Mercury. Since emigrating to America, the Russian actor had played a couple of routine parts in Hollywood, which was rather good luck, since he could barely speak a word of English.

He was in Hollywood when Houseman heard of his desire to return to the stage. His availability and interest seemed like an answer to prayer, since they
were having inordinate difficulty in casting the role of Robespierre. Coulouris had turned it down point blank, finding the play ‘turgid’ and the part ‘monolithic’. Nor was he inspired by the idea of Gabel as Danton. With this, Houseman must have been in sympathy. Whenever the play had been discussed in the past for inclusion in the Mercury programme, it was with the idea of Welles playing Danton.
The part of the great, flawed aristocratic friend of the Revolution, finally undone by his appetites, would have been a wonderful opportunity for him. Certainly it requires an actor of the utmost force to play the role; one who will be a counterpoint to Robespierre and St Just, spreading massively where they are tightly reined in. Dapper, incisive Martin Gabel was unsuitable at every level, and
Houseman argued passionately against casting him, despite having already offered him the part and him having accepted it. Welles had no desire to act in the show at all; reluctantly, he agreed to play the ice-cold fanatic St Just, another very curious casting stroke. Coldness was a quality hard for Welles to summon – vocally, apart from anything else. Depressingly, he agreed to play the part because
it was one ‘in which he could be replaced without damage’. None of the casting was easy; actors were drawn from the
Too Much Johnson
company (including Mary Wickes, and the ever faithful Joe Cotten) and from the pool of radio actors who constituted the Mercury Theatre of the Air. It must have been dismaying
to Houseman and Welles that the company which had auditioned 1,700 eager actors during
their first year, now found it hard to find three actors suitable or willing to play the leading roles in the first production of their second season. Either word was getting around – from Vincent Price and other disaffected actors – or Houseman and Welles weren’t trying very hard. It seems that they had rather expected the Mercury to be running itself by now; not that they would have to start all
over again, as Houseman laments.

Significantly, Welles had failed by the first day of rehearsal to adapt the long and sprawling play. He had simply and rather arbitrarily cut it to reduce its playing time. The script changed from day to day, as he tried to fashion some sort of coherent vision out of the material. Rehearsals took place in the theatre (now expensively dark, since the cancellation
of
Too Much Johnson
) on the very dangerous set that Welles and his designer Stephen Tichacek had devised. Once again, as in
Julius Caesar
, but much earlier – without benefit of rehearsal at all – the technical aspect of the show took over entirely. The central element of the design was an elevator, thirty foot by twenty foot. On either side of the elevator, there were two traps. There was a thirty-foot-wide,
two-foot-deep trench between the back wall and the elevator containing a pyramidal staircase on castors, very small at the top. When all of the traps were open and the elevator was dropped, the stage was, in Andrea Nouryeh’s words, ‘a treacherous system of gaping holes, catwalks, and scaffolding (connecting to the positions of the elevator) – the effect from balcony was of criss-cross
pastry on apple pie’.
²⁵
The potential for mishap was terrifyingly high, particularly since the light was highly directional, coming from below or from the side at strange angles, tending to dazzle and even temporarily blind the actors. They must have courted death every time they stood on the stage. Welles explained his intentions in a couple of paragraphs of
The Director in the Theatre Today
: ‘My conception of the play was such that the elevator seemed to me to represent, when it was raised, the constant threat. It was made like scaffolding because the republic of France at that time was an impermanent affair, and upon such existed the lives of these people, and it was made to look like a guillotine.’

These defensive intellectualisations, which can have meant nothing to any but
an exceptionally alert audience, are unconvincing as an approach to staging the play. The only effect the scenery of
Danton’s Death
could have had on the playing was in creating a literal terror within the company – which it did. Had the actors rehearsed on
it for six months, and had they become so familiar with it that it became an expressive means for them, then perhaps something extraordinary
could have come out of it. But this too presupposes that Welles was able, or willing, to work on their acting itself, to help them to find a style with which to realise the play. There is total absence in Welles’s utterances on either acting or directing of any suggestion of the nature of the work the actors need to do: the exploration of the play’s style or of themselves. The director will look
after all that, he believes. In
The Director in the Theatre
, he says ‘If the director is an actor he can think up wonderful pieces of business.’ That was his notion of the job.

In
Danton’s Death
, he hardly had time for that: he was obsessed by the physical problems of the play, and left the actors to fend for themselves. He and Gabel had fallen out badly, and were, as Houseman put it, at a
stand-off. As for Sokoloff, who was deeply anxious about his accent and worked hard but unavailingly on it, Welles ‘had that awed and child-like respect which he showed for theatrical figures whom he admired’.
²⁶
He didn’t direct him at all. ‘Orson let him play his speeches exactly as he had played them for Reinhardt … the company used to applaud at each rehearsal.’ That was at the beginning, when
tempers were even. The applause soon died. Rehearsals went on to two, three or four in the morning, after which everyone was called for ten, when they would work with Marc Blitzstein on his score incorporating
Ça ira
, the Carmagnole and the original version of the Marseillaise which he had discovered in the Lincoln Center. He had written a deal of spinet music and two original songs, an
Ode to
Reason
and
Christina
, sung by Mary Wickes and Joe Cotten, with its lyric that must have come very easily to Blitzstein:

Mister Soldier, handsome soldier
²⁷

Mister handsome, handsome soldier

Play me mild, or play me rough

I just can’t get enough

He and Kevin O’Morrison also worked with the actors on the sound score Welles had requested: in effect a live soundtrack. Standing in
the wings, they would imitate crickets, the crying of babies, all the sounds of everyday life: an interesting idea, much in evidence in avant-garde work of the sixties, but in the circumstances of this production another bewilderment. The actors, totally exhausted and under-rehearsed, became resentful: there was
no overtime, so all their extra work was unrecompensed. Often the work they had done
was pointless, since Welles changed the script minute by minute and entire elaborately rehearsed sequences would be cut.

The pressure to change the text was not merely aesthetic; it was political, too. No doubt, as Houseman says,
Danton’s Death
had struck them as a promisingly political play; they could do a
Caesar
on it. Unfortunately, as they were soon to discover, the game of political
analogy is one that has to be played very carefully, especially in times of ferment. In this case, they only just got away with it. They were political amateurs, and had not thought through the explosive implications of the parallel with the revolutionary power struggle of their own times. Danton, Robespierre, St Just seemed unmistakable emblems of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, in one permutation or another.
The interesting resonance that this set up (and it is to be remembered that
Danton’s Death
, unlike
Julius Caesar
, was being played in period costume, and came with no explanatory subtitle like
Caesar
’s ‘Death of a Dictator’) was regarded by the left as a slap in the face; and in its present financial circumstances, the Mercury couldn’t ignore the solid audience base that the left-wing organisations
had provided for it. With Blitzstein as their negotiator, these organisations applied massive pressure on Welles and Houseman to dispel what they described as the ‘reactionary implications of the text’: a bad press for Revolution.

The Party openly boasted of its success in the
Daily Worker
: ‘backstage at the Mercury Theatre … a three-cornered discussion is in progress … Orson Welles, Marc
Blitzstein and John Houseman, all concerned with the production of
Danton’s Death
. “If it isn’t changed, I’ll pull out the music.” “If it’s that bad politically, I’ll pull out the show,” replied Welles. Houseman agreed. So it appears that at the very time we were offering our critical suggestions in last Wednesday’s paper the need for correcting the reactionary implications of the play also suggested
themselves to the producers.’
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Trying to overcome the apparently insuperable physical problems of the production, not to mention getting the weekly radio show on the air, Welles and Houseman simply gave in to the (to them) obscure demands of the various parties and organisations with axes to grind. At the same time, Henry Senber issued a bullish press release: ‘The Welles production will make
it clear that it is a characteristic of Danton’s own personality and not a characteristic of revolution or revolutionaries which brings him to his decadence and fall … Robespierre will not be a snivelling fanatic but take on
his true stature of social revolutionary as opposed to the bourgeois reformism of Danton … the author does not take sides.’ This is scarcely the usual language of press releases.
It would be interesting to know who was dictating it. As a compromise, Houseman and Welles agreed to send out ‘one of their more philosophical actors’ to inform the audience that the play is ‘a recital of certain true events, that as in every good historical play certain historical parallels were more or less sure to be drawn, but that the play is not to be construed as sponsoring any political
philosophy or theory … what Welles and Houseman are up to is producing a show, not operating, as they had occasion to remark before, a cause.’ The organisation which had so fearlessly resisted government pressure when it was staging its labour musical, was obliged, in order to keep its financial base, to justify and to some extent censor its work on ideological grounds, something the FTP had
never required. Things were getting very sticky indeed.

Finally, Welles acknowledged that the script had been subject to so many changes, for so many different reasons, that it was necessary for him to deliver a definitive version. He cancelled rehearsals, and withdrew for thirty-six hours, finally calling the company together to read the new text, as they waited patiently, there was a howl
offstage: he had left it in the taxi. Search parties were despatched to recover it, without success. Rehearsals grimly resumed, using the old text, as the unending labour of hanging and re-hanging lights, rigging and re-rigging the elevator continued, Welles moved a cot into the stalls, lest he lose a single precious minute. In between manoeuvres, he would fall into a deep sleep.
ACTORS OFTEN
‘LIVE IN THEATRE’
²⁹
–
THIS ONE ACTUALLY DOES
was the headline of Helen Ormsbee’s report: ‘“You have to run as hard as this to stay in the same place,” the Red Queen told Alice. “If you want to get to the next square, you must go a lot faster.” That is about the way Orson Welles regards the preparations for
Danton’s Death
. “We’re compelled to work under pressure here at the Mercury. That is because
we must make up in intensity of effort what we lack in money. We can’t afford to take a show out on the road to whip it into shape; if we could, I’d be glad of it … for me as the director it means going without sleep and forgetting to eat.”’ In the light of the relays of triple steak sandwiches and bottles of brandy coming from Longchamps, the company may have found the last part of that sentence
rather funny, though it is to be suspected that their laughter had by now a hollow ring to it.

‘Once you start a production the momentum pushes everybody,’
he continued. ‘An actor can let himself be pushed by that momentum, but the director’s case is different. He has got to keep ahead of his routine … still, high pressure has its advantages. A play, taken out of script and acted, is a living
impulse. It has to reach the audience with all the freshness that is in the minds of the cast and the technicians, and you can’t bottle up that freshness too long.’ More hollow laughter. ‘Compared with pictures, work in the theatre is volatile. Picture directing is an exact science; stage directing is not. You can take two years to make a film and the portions of it that are finished and recorded
won’t deteriorate while the rest is being done. But the theatre is different; here a play is a living organism … that is why rehearsals can’t lag along indefinitely. The Moscow Art Theatre spends six or eight months getting ready for a play, but Stanislavsky had to devise his system to sustain that method.’ The Mercury actors, stranded on bits of unstable scenery, bleary eyed with sleep when they
weren’t dazzled by the lights, barely knowing which scene followed which, much less why, may have longed for the continuity and steady discovery of a Moscow Art Theatre rehearsal. The alternative, the path of adrenalin, adrenalin and then more adrenalin, seemed to be leading nowhere. But then Welles didn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for his actors’ work: ‘I haven’t great regard for present artistic
standards in the theatre. I’m sure our success only goes to show that the public don’t expect too much. But I’m convinced there are wonderful opportunities among present actors and one day we shall see really wonderful acting.’ How this might come about was never explained.