Orson Welles, Vol I (78 page)

The verdict was unanimous: the show was too long and too incident-packed. The inherent difficulty for Welles in working on the show was that if he addressed the first problem – the length – he compounded the second: the relentlessly episodic text. Each scene was already passing too quickly to be savoured. Shorten a scene, and it would be over before it had begun. By
the end of the Boston run he had managed to cut the show down to two acts, to be played in three and a half hours. This was still too long, both for audiences and in terms of overtime payments to stage-hands (who earned, in a figure quoted in the press, an enormous $5,700 for the sixth week of onstage rehearsals), and there was no marked gain in focus or narrative coherence. The show moved to Washington,
where the headlines were more affirmative (
FIVE KINGS IS VITAL, LIVING DRAMA; FIVE KINGS IS DRAMA OF UNIQUE DESIGN
). But the financial position was desperate. The revised tour schedule (Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago) had been abandoned; only Philadelphia remained. His relationship with the Guild hung by a thread. The costs of the show were increasing by leaps and bounds, having already exceeded
the original $40,000 budget by $25,000, and the returns at the box office were unremarkable. Welles himself (having taken a cut in salary to $150) had poured thousands of his own dollars into the show in Boston and was now desperately trying to raise money by any means he could. (The one person who offered
to invest in the show was his friend Toots Shor; Welles refused to let him risk his New
York restaurant. A show is just a show, after all, but a
restaurant
…) Unsuccessful in his efforts, he attempted to release what was left of his father’s legacy, not due until May 1940; Dr Bernstein was adamantly opposed, nor would the bank contemplate it.

The
Five Kings
company now began rumbling ominously. Press interest in the crisis was keen, provoking a Welles Problem piece in the
Washington
Daily News
. Under the headline
THEATRE GUILD AND WELLES MAY PHFFT, IT’S REPORTED,
Katherine Hillyer wrote: ‘Not only are certain members of the
Five Kings
company growing more allergic to 23-year-old director Orson Welles every day, according to reliable report, but the puff-faced prodigy is also in hot water with the Theatre Guild, sponsors of the production … backstage ruffs are constantly being
raised when Welles turns what the actors call prima donna, and they growl that while insisting on long rehearsals he offers little constructive advice.’
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Her report doesn’t stop at reporting company discontent, however. The whole world was obviously fed up with Welles. ‘Meanwhile outsiders speculate on how long the beetle-browed youngster can keep delivering the goods in public. Some, while admitting
it is wishful thinking, believe he will burn out by the time he is thirty, if not before. Others looking carefully at his exciting arrangements in the theatre listlessly predict a succession of rose-beds for baby to grow old in.’ Hillyer had no doubt that he’d be around for ‘a long, long time. And legendary stories will flourish until as many odd activities are attributed to him and as many
amusing anecdotes piled up around his English bull-doggish head as there are about Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker combined.’

She understated. Meanwhile, the show moved to Philadelphia. If Boston had been a nightmare, Philadelphia was the apocalypse. The Chestnut Theatre was in every way unsuited to the production. With company morale at its lowest, the actors were told that the theatre,
never intended for large shows, had no dressing rooms for them. They had to use an adjacent theatre, taking a bridge to get them back into the Chestnut. The technical staff, equally exhausted after working all day and all night, found on arrival that the stage had a rake, which meant that they had to construct an anti-raked floor on which to put the turntable. Moreover the fire curtain was far
upstage, which meant that the turntable had to be moved deeper, too; which was not only bad for sight-lines, it was a huge undertaking. Finally, when the turntable had been placed on its anti-raked floor and pushed
twenty foot further upstage, it was plugged in; nothing happened. The theatre’s electric current, it transpired, was not compatible with that required for the turntable, which duly
had to be hand-cranked by a crew of two dozen audibly grunting and cursing stage-hands. It was of course very slow, with consequences the opposite of those in Boston: instead of falling off the stage into the audience’s laps, the actors were left stranded in the middle of the stage, having run out of text. Eventually a converter was found; too late, too late.

A number of these problems – the
rake, the current – should have been anticipated. The responsibility for this was, strictly speaking, neither Welles’s nor Houseman’s, but the technical director’s: Jean Rosenthal’s. In the prevailing madness, with the levels of exhaustion that she was having to cope with, it’s hardly surprising that she slipped up. Langner had told her at the very outset that touring the set of
Five Kings
was
impossible; simply making it work in each venue was an enormous task. To have to start all over again with each move must have been pulverising. Philadelphia’s critics were less indulgent than those of Boston. ‘The occasion consisted of a lot of Shakespeare, a lot of actors, a lot of revolutions of the merry-go-round stage,’
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wrote J.H. Keen in the
Philadelphia Daily News
. ‘But for all of that,
the presence of Franchot Tone, the sin-ema actor, in the audience caused more of a stir on the shady side of the footlights than most of the goings on on the sunny side … as a stage colossus, it is something to gape at as one might at a prehistoric creature brought back to life. But as an entertainment, it has something to be desired.’

More sober critics were even less encouraging. Sensenderfer
of the
Bulletin
felt that the production was at best ‘only a gigantic Shakespeare vaudeville … the company assembled performs earnestly though without particular inspiration. Welles himself is a fat and repulsive Falstaff with a greasy make-up and a voice like thick brown gravy. His humour is heavyhanded and his wit slow.’
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For Schloss in the
Record
‘its weakness appears to be in the blood –
a condition indicated by a lack of stride and eloquence in its higher-pitched scenes and a certain juiciness in its comedy.’
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The problem, Schloss thought, lay with Meredith and Welles himself, both fatally miscast. ‘Orson Welles’s Falstaff hits nearer the mark than Meredith Prince. But it suffers from understatement. Mr Welles’s great success with last year’s modernised
Caesar
perhaps led him
to essay Falstaff in a more realistic and casual mood than, say, Maurice Evans did last year.’

If Welles read his own notices this is perhaps the point at which he
might have thrown the paper across the room. Schloss embarked on a detailed and for Welles excruciating comparison of the two actors. The Evans Falstaff laughed, to a degree, with his audience. ‘Welles’s Sir John, however, seldom
came across the footlights to dig anyone in the ribs with his picturesque bawdiness. The lines were deliberately speeded-up and underplayed, in the interest, we suppose, of “modernising” the part. In Fat Jack’s famous mock-heroic speech about honour, for example, a speech of broadest humors, Welles rattled the lines off as if he were mumbling a shamefaced catechism. The result was a sodden and witless
Sir John. It is a little painful to report thus on one of the most brilliant young men in our theatre, especially since his performance had its moments … it appears that Mr Welles either understudied or mis-studied his part.’ Schloss allowed Welles the touch of pathos that others had discerned: ‘on the credit side, however, was the note of tragicomic pathos, a nice touch and … a new one of
considerable plausibility and merit.’ The
Inquirer
didn’t mess around: ‘To compare Orson Welles’s Falstaff to Mr Evans’s Falstaff, John Emery’s Hotspur to Wesley Addy’s Hotspur, Burgess Meredith’s Prince Hal to Winston O’Keeffe’s Prince of Wales or Mr Welles’s coarse-keyed direction to the electrifying direction of Margaret Webster would be as unconscionable as it would be unkind.’
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Better
reviews might have given the show a chance, however slight, of surviving. As it was, it was on the most unreliable of life-support machines. Closure of the show on the Saturday after the notices had appeared instead of completing its allotted two weeks was narrowly but embarrassingly averted only by a passionate plea from the astonishingly named Mrs Favorite, Philadelphia representative of the Guild,
who feared letting down her subscribers. The paper reports her public statement: ‘with her distress of last week turning to a deep and bitter burn, Mrs Favorite said the Guild would consider another Orson Welles effort only “if he comes forth with something worthy of the Theatre Guild.”’ There was a flicker of hope that Martin Beck might transfer the production as a World’s Fair – ‘summer show,
that is’ – attraction, then Lee Shubert was mentioned. ‘According to latest reports, the Guild doesn’t care what happens to Mr Welles, Mr Meredith and the
Five Kings
, as long as nobody wants any more money from the Guild.’ Their last formal communication with the Mercury was being presented with a bill from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel covering repairs to chandeliers, Venetian blinds and other items
‘which our confreres, in the exuberance of their youth, had demolished’. Langner seemed as drily amused by
this episode as by the entire experience, though determined – needless to say – not to repeat it (‘After you and Orson Welles, no more geniuses,’ he told Robert Lewis as he sacked him from
The Time of Your Life
). ‘In spite of all the drawbacks, this contact with youth provided a refreshing
interlude, and if any of us were complacent before the episode, we were shaken out of it by the time
Five Kings
was packed up and sent to the storehouse to await that day, yet to come, when Orson Welles will revive it.’

Houseman had long ago accepted the inevitable: the show would never reach New York. But Welles was possessed of a sort of frenzied determination to get it there, somehow, sometime.
Herbert Drake was encouraged to go to Philadelphia to keep the embers of interest alive. ‘The reports from the road,’
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he said, ‘have evoked the usual drama column reports of mutiny, sabotage and more earnestness in the battle scenes than required by the script, so this department went down to see what was brewing in what sounded like an exciting production.’ His report was independent enough
to describe the production as it stood in somewhat unflattering terms: ‘the play ambles its way through its schedule each night, like its notorious character, fat Jack Falstaff, stewing and fretting, heaving its ponderous way over the mechanical hurdles that the very momentum of the tour perpetuates.’ Quite reasonably he continues ‘You cannot adequately rehearse such a large-scale enterprise when
you have to move from town to town and when the platform is one of those enormous revolving affairs which cover the whole stage floor and when the totalitarian chief in charge is further burdened with the incubus of a radio programme. What the problem boils down to is to find the time for those rehearsals.’ After stating roundly that ‘Orson Welles himself has developed 80 per cent of a truly great
Falstaff’, his parting flourish insists that
Five Kings
has ‘all the earmarks of his directorial genius. The boy wonder can still pull the rabbit-hearted Falstaff out of the hat if the theatre will accommodate itself to his unusual operating methods.’

The staging might possibly have worked, given time. What certainly did work (as in the film) were the battle scenes. Martin Gabel attended the
show after Welles had done a substantial amount of re-rehearsal, and he described what he saw in an interview in 1985. It was evidently as fresh in his mind as when he’d first seen it: ‘Orson had a kind of No Man’s Land onstage, a painted canvas looking like churned earth over mounds, and in the centre he had a single, leafless tree … as they began fighting, the stage started to revolve, and the
music came in to support the fight. They fought
on this stage as the knights of old must have fought – up hill and down dale, fighting it out. As the battle became more intense, the revolving stage went faster, the music approached a climax. And then finally when Hal stabbed Hotspur behind a huge mound, you heard the death cry of Hotspur, saw the flashing blade. The minute he was hit, the music
stopped, the revolve stopped, everything stopped. And then, slowly, the revolve was brought round and Hotspur gave his death speech, lying prostrate below the mound. It was an absolutely perfect piece of work.’
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Drake, too, was thrilled by the fighting: ‘the battle scenes are the best I ever saw on any stage … the scenes in which the Welles flair for spectacle is most adequately exhibited are
the battles of Shrewsbury and Agincourt. He has exploding bombards, the usual banners and highly effective, if somewhat terrifying flights of arrows which fly across the stage and plink into the side drapes. Welles has ordered up the correct broadswords and bucklers, no pink-tea fencing for his princes and kings. They lay on with roundhouse swings and highly satisfactory clanging of claymores. The
actor mortality will doubtless be high. The property room already had replaced more than a dozen broken swords, but it is worth the expenditure.’

Welles had concentrated on these physical scenes, as he always had, to the exclusion of psychological complexities. They could be made perfect; the complexities depended on the actor’s discovery for himself of some inner meaning. This was more elusive.
Moreover, he was still uncertain of the whole; dwelling on manageable parts like the battle sequences was an outlet for his energy. In a passionate analysis of what had gone wrong – with the Mercury, with their relationship, with
Five Kings
– Houseman wrote to Virgil Thomson: ‘It fell on its face not through any difficulties of time or inadequate rehearsal, but because it was a half-baked, impure
idea, in which size and “notions” took the place of love and thinking.’
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Jean Rosenthal wrote, more dispassionately but to equally devastating effect: ‘all of us on the production staff had a fine time working on it, but no excitement ever reached the audience, even through the stars who supplemented the company, like Burgess Meredith. That really marvelous production was boring – catastrophic
from an audience point of view, appalling, really – in spite of extraordinary moments.’
³²