Orson Welles, Vol I (20 page)

The press department (a.k.a. Orson Welles) continued to push him in the direction of journalists. Just before
Jew Süss
closed (it was extended for an extra week) the London
Daily Express
felt compelled

while on the subject of the Gate Theatre to mention the fact that after all we have the ‘bright boy’ of the American stage, Mr Orson
Welles, with us until the end of the Gate Season, which is certainly good news, for … he has descended on Dublin and taken it by storm.
⁴²

Almost wearily he adds

As this young man’s amazing life and adventures are now everybody’s property I will not say much more; but when I hear him mention his trip alone across Manchuria, experiences in Canada,
life in a barge on the Shannon, acting in
California, painting in Connemara and the Aran Isles, I would like to give him a good shake and say: ‘How dare you have done all these things when you’re not even twenty years old. It isn’t fair when the rest of us lead such dull, prosaic lives.’

He may not have been the only person in Dublin who would like to have given him a good shake.

His next show for the Gate,
The Dead Ride Fast
, was a bizarre farrago by David Sears set in The House of Shame, where Fintan O’Driscoll, a Black Magician, wreaks terrible things with his Book of Knowledge; Welles played an American millionaire who happens to be passing by. Mary Manning in
The Independent
, liking his performance, wrote that he was a great acquisition to the Gate but that ‘he must not be given too many aged parts, as they keep
him in a state of permanent semi-intoxication. We all want to see young Mr Welles without a wig!’
⁴³
Joseph Holloway grumpily dissented: ‘I didn’t like Orson Welles; his American accent on top of his big gruff voice was hard to understand.’
⁴⁴

Only Holloway read Holloway’s diary; Welles’s most enthusiastic notice was by far the most important, and the most widely read: Hayes in
The New York
Times
again. Welles brought to his portrayal, America was told, ‘qualities of subtlety sufficient to make him mystically sinister without approaching the grotesque. Irish drama is reaching out,’
⁴⁵
said Hayes, ‘and Mr Sears has brought it far.’ Percy Robinson attempted to take it even further in the Gate’s next offering,
The Archdupe
, with its punning title about the Archduke Maximilian, Napoleon
III’s puppet Emperor of Mexico. Hilton played the eponymous patsy; Micheál was Napoleon III. Again Welles (General Bazaine) played much older than his own age. He was settling into a line of parts for which his physique, his voice and his taste for broad characterisation largely achieved by intensive application of make-up well suited him: he was becoming, at the age of sixteen, the supporting
heavy.

There was in the Irish Theatre in general and particularly at the Gate a dearth of such actors – those occupying the middle ground of the cast list, the solid underpinning of the play. These roles do not often bring glory to those who play them; General Bazaine in
The Archdupe
was no exception. Still, on the whole, his work was admired, though now critical voices were heard. J.J. Hayes
remained steadfastly loyal, and did not fail to tell the readership of
The New York Times
that ‘at the première, the young American actor Orson
Welles scored heavily … as the French general he succeeded in maintaining that balance which left in doubt whether Bazaine was a traitor or merely indolent and procrastinating.’
⁴⁶
Whatever the merits of the plays or the performances, Welles was certainly
gaining solid experience; and he was working very hard.

The Archdupe
closed on Saturday 5 December. The next day, before rehearsals for Pádraic Colum’s
Mogu of the Desert
started on the 7th, he managed to slip in a performance in a Sunday night production at the Abbey (his only appearance on that stage): Somerset Maugham’s
The Circle
. It was an amateur production in which he had taken over
the leading role of Lord Porteous at the last moment. ‘He had put most of the contents of his make-up box on his face in order to look sixty,’
⁴⁷
the producer recalled. ‘We had to scrape him off while the other actors waited at curtain-rise.’
The Independent
applauded his ‘hirsute, cantankerous and rather simian peer’. Holloway, by now very suspicious of the young actor, was, on the contrary, highly
critical: Welles, he said, was made up ‘with a pantomime head placed on square shoulders, and arms and legs that behaved like the penny wooden dancing masters where one pulled the string! He seemed completely out of the picture. His voice is gruff and his manner uncouth. He made quite a hit in
Jew Süss
as the rogue, the old Duke, as all his mannerisms suited the role, but in all his characters
since he has only repeated himself till one is inclined to think him a grotesque instead of an actor.’
⁴⁸

In the 1970s, Welles, talking to the BBC, remembered the event in a different light. ‘My greatest success was at the Abbey, playing Lord Porteous in
The Circle
, who was a sixty-year-old man and I played such a terrible, hateful parody of an upper-class Englishman that the entire Irish public
took me to their bosoms.’
⁴⁹
To compare the modest appreciation extended to the Sunday-night performance of
The Circle
with the blast of praise that greeted his Karl Alexander in
Jew Süss
is absurd; but Welles was by then intent on minimising the importance of the Gate Theatre in his life. ‘At the Gate,’
⁵⁰
he said, ‘I got less and less good parts and I saved myself by going over to the Abbey,’
which is scarcely less absurd. He had not ‘gone over’ to the still-touring Abbey Company, but simply played in a Sunday-night amateur production in their theatre while continuing to be a member of the Gate company. His next appearance for them was in
Mogu
, another example of the Gate’s inability to find new plays of distinction, a fact which Mac Liammóir’s ambitious design in the manner of Hafiz
failed to conceal. Welles’s performance was itself a triumph of appearance over substance. His make-up was a
marvel, involving, according to Mac Liammóir, ‘several pounds of nose putty, a white turban at least two and a half feet in diameter, and three-inch fingernails of peacock-blue and silver’.
⁵¹
His work brought forth a double-edged comment from
The Irish Times
: ‘His performance is good enough
to keep one still doubting’;
⁵²
they were still doubting.

The play failed and the run was curtailed, the company immediately plunging into yet another new play,
Death Takes a Holiday
by Walter Ferris, from an Italian original. Welles had a more substantial and more glamorous role in this, giving his second Duke of the season: Duke Lamberto who escapes Death (in the guise of the Russian Prince
Sirki: Mac Liammóir, of course) thanks to the love of the dreamy Grazia.
The Irish Times
finally started to come off the fence about the young actor: ‘Mr Orson Welles did much to satisfy those who have had doubts of his possibilities.’
⁵³
Immediately
Death Takes a Holiday
opened (in January 1932) rehearsals began for
Hamlet
, with Mac Liammóir in the title role, one for which he became famous. Welles
was the Ghost and Fortinbras. In his spare time (which was considerable: the two roles together occupy about ten minutes of stage time), he designed Jules Romains’ play
Dr Knock
for Sherwood’s Peacock Players; his work was admired by
The Independent
for the ‘hints at Cézanne in his modernist treatment of the landscape’.
⁵⁴

Hamlet
was an enormous success for the Gate. They needed one. Produced
by Hilton Edwards in what would now be regarded as a straightforward manner, it was for the time revolutionary in eschewing heavily realistic scenery and in its swift, conversational style. Mac Liammóir went against tradition by playing Hamlet like a man communing with himself; Edwards had used light to speed the action from one location to the next, so that the play was released as the mercurial,
ever-shifting dramatic poem that it is rather than the series of historical tableaux favoured by the Victorians and Edwardians. In the general glory, Welles was frequently singled out: particularly for his Ghost: seldom, said
The Irish Press
, ‘can the Ghost have been more movingly portrayed’.
⁵⁵
Even that old curmudgeon Holloway acknowledged that ‘Orson Welles made the speech of the Ghost almost
human as well as awesome.’
⁵⁶
No doubt he was able to invest the figure of the dead father with a singularly personal urgency. ‘Remember me!’ It was a good note on which to go out. He did a final design for the Peacock Players (
The All Alone
) and then took off for London, on his way home.

We may take it as preposterous (as has been suggested by some of
his biographers) that Welles left Ireland
in a huff because he was not offered
Coriolanus
or the part of King Magnus in
The Apple Cart
. It is conceivable that he might have asked to be allowed to play some such huge play-carrying leading role (compared to which even the Duke in
Jew Süss
is a bagatelle), but he cannot have held out much hope. He had done well, wonderfully well, but as the reviews increasingly suggest, he was more of a
phenomenon, an adolescent Roscius, than a member of the ensemble that Micheál and Hilton were trying to establish. Somehow, in order really to develop, he would need to start again, to wipe the slate clean of his freakish success, build his craft and his understanding. As it was, he was eager to leap onto the stage with half the contents of his make-up box on his face, putting on voices. It is to
be doubted whether he had, in his heart, accepted Hilton Edwards’s sterling advice: ‘listen to yourself … you must see and hear what’s good about yourself and what’s lousy.’ It was very hard for Welles to develop. He preferred only to go further, which is not at all the same thing. Having rather splendidly got away with a couple of supporting parts, he now wanted to hurl himself at the great roles.
If not physically, then technically, it is as dangerous for a young actor to take on those huge roles as it is for a singer. You will only get through them on tricks; and you will find it almost impossible to unlearn those tricks, especially if, as is likely, you will be acclaimed, simply for having had the courage. To be acclaimed for giving a good performance ‘for a sixteen-year-old’ is a bad
precedent. It became hard for critics from this point on to assess Welles’s work on its merits. Already they knew too much about the person behind the work; there was always an element of special pleading, over and above it, an element of the phenomenal.

Dublin had spoiled him, to an extent. It is hard to imagine a city in the Western World – outside, perhaps, an Italian one – where he could
find an audience so vocal, so parti pris, so excitable. He had thrilled them to the marrow, then of course both he and they wanted more thrills. Mac Liammóir watched him keenly, oddly perturbed by the sight of a unique personality and outstanding gifts somehow subordinated to a cruder, grosser, unrelenting other self: ‘of course it was said in Dublin that he never did anything half as good as the
Duke again. It was, I think, untrue. Everything he touched took on a queer and gruesome magic, a misshapen and indescribable grace … through the turbulent vapours of his temperament there flows a broad river full of stars … all with Orson was theatre; the radiance that shone from him was the light never seen on land or sea, but invariably on painted flats and proscenium arches. He seldom,
I think,
noticed the wind in the chimney-tops, or the moon on the water, or the rain on the roof; seldom wandered in his mind to the shadows of the woods or tasted solitude on the mountain-tops; all in his world was bustle and authority, a laughing, easily fought battle in the heart of the traffic. He was born for success, big, rapid, and decisive; people excited him and beautiful things aroused his passion,
but people and things must all be flung together and hurled into boxes and crates and swept away to make room for new ones at a moment’s notice, and he would sail through them all or cast them into the sea or shatter them into fragments and, sitting straddle-legged over the debris, start to work again whistling and laughing and all in the highest spirits.’
⁵⁷

And yet, months before, he had
been lying on his back on the Isles of Aran, watching the moon and feeling himself part of a great lost civilisation. Dublin and the Gate and Duke Karl Alexander had been the drug that had hooked him for life, which is what he meant when he had John Houseman say of him (in his autobiographical 1982 screenplay
The Cradle Will Rock
, never filmed):

In Dublin, when he started in the theatre he
was just sixteen and claiming to be what he is now – twenty-two. In effect, this was a pact with hell; he sold his youth for grown-up glory. As a result of which we are inflicted with these flashes of that delinquent adolescence which he appears to have bartered away.
⁵⁸

He had always aspired to the theatre; it was his dream and his goal. Actually experiencing it had made it, as it does for
so many people who make their lives in it, a focus and a release for all the many conflicting and sometimes intolerable aspects of his personality. It is both liberation and affirmation; one is no longer trapped inside one’s murky self, because one offers it to other people. The Gate was a particularly exhilarating experience for him because he had before him the example of theatre people who worked
in every branch of the craft: Micheál as actor, writer, translator, designer, occasional director, Hilton actor, director, lighting designer. And how they worked! These homosexual aesthetes were unendingly engaged in the nuts and bolts of their job, Micheál actually applying the paint himself to the sets he had designed, Hilton wrestling with the lamps that he so inventively deployed. They staged
a hundred plays in their first six years, every one designed by Mac Liammóir, many of them translated by him and three actually written by him. He and Hilton between them shared huge leading roles; Hilton took it upon himself
to create acceptable standards of discipline in a country notoriously easygoing. In his own words: ‘in reaction against the conditions it found at its birth, the Gate Theatre
was inclined to overstress the visual, the abstract, the international and the less naturalistic attitude to the stage. It tended also perhaps to over-discipline productions in contrast to the too-casual attitude that then prevailed.’
⁵⁹
This had a great influence on Welles; as did his deployment of light, and his belief in ‘the desirability of continuity, swift-moving scene changes, and the possible
elimination of intervals’.