Orson Welles: Hello Americans (69 page)

In the event, most of the reviewers of the stage production were charmed by the accent; it added colour and, they felt, aided comprehension.
The whole production, in fact, was acclaimed to the very rafters. Welles had rehearsed most of his leading actors in Hollywood (only the Lady Macduff, Joyce Barlow, was from Utah), spending the last few days of the three-week rehearsal period integrating the local actors and staging the show in the massive Kingsbury Hall of the University of Utah. As usual, in these circumstances, his
ability to galvanise a group of people, his sense of showmanship and his instinctive response to a particular space and to the specific individuals at his disposal resulted in a semi-improvised piece of spectacular theatre, here given special excitement because he was working with the community. It was the sort of thing – less considered, less detailed, but equally electric in its impact – that Max
Reinhardt had done in Salzburg: a kind of sophisticated folk theatre, attended by the whole town (or as near as dammit). It was, said Governor Herbert Maw, ‘the greatest thing that ever happened to Utah’,
³
which certainly puts Brigham Young in his place.

Salt Lake City was ablaze with the particular excitement that only Welles could engender. ‘His sense of theatre,’
⁴
Jeanette Nolan told the distinguished
Welles scholar, François Thomas, ‘exceeded our wildest dreams. And the first night in Salt Lake City was a magical event from the first minute.’ At the beginning of the show the auditorium was plunged into darkness. Even the
EXIT
signs were extinguished ‘against the regulations, but there were plenty of things against the regulations’. Welles had covered the doors completely so that no one knew
how to get out, which reinforced the feeling of mystery. Then, from the very back of the theatre, almost inaudibly at first, the sound of bagpipes was heard. There were six of them, hired locally. ‘They came down the steps, then out of the theatre, reaching the road still playing, and it was the only thing the audience heard until they stopped,’ Miss Nolan continued. ‘A mood of menace was established,
adding to the thrill. And just as they finished playing, when they came down to the battlements again, there was a huge explosion in the orchestra pit,
and
a great green phosphorescent flame leaped out of it, out of which ran the witches. The audience roared. It was a truly terrifying entrance.’ Above the witches were masks, designed and indeed painted by Welles, atop fifteen-foot-high poles,
painted black. Later in the play, when the witches came down to the heath again, ‘the auditorium was plunged into blackest darkness again and the masks suddenly lit up above the spectators’ heads. People went mad and screamed.’

Gladys Goodall, the critic of the local rag, reported that ‘last night’s show was about as much as the normal emotions can take’.
⁵
Variety
, present at the ‘preem’ (
Variety
-speak for first night) of what it called ‘Shakespearian stand-by
Macbeth
’,
⁶
described it as ‘Welles from curtain to curtain – and good Welles. It’s a Welles production, a Welles adaptation, a Welles directing job – and a Welles interpretation of the title role. It’s pretty hard to find anything wrong with any of them.’ The paper added: ‘the audience … notorious for its ability to sit on its hands
… did everything but cheer at the final curtain, and gave the cast six curtain calls, almost unheard of here’. They had been held rapt for the just over ninety minutes to which Welles had cut the play, twenty minutes longer than the gramophone version, but nearly an hour shorter than most productions. In addition to the cuts and arrangements, Welles had ensured maximum fluidity by minimising scenery
and effecting transitions with light changes; the lighting plot was confined to side light and front spots, with no footlights or general wash. ‘The Wellesian stage settings and lighting effects,’
⁷
said the
New York Times
, ‘were impressively eerie, though at times the darkness was slightly overdone.’ Miss Goodall describes the setting: a dynamic line of stairs that swept from extreme right upstage,
ending in a circular spread at left centre; the stage built out over the footlights; stairs going down into the orchestra pit. The six bagpipers were augmented by trumpets and drums playing uncredited fanfares and marches. This style of production – swift, spare, epic – became something of a norm in the nineteen-seventies and eighties; its contrast with contemporary productions must have been
great. ‘No lily-wristed, well-combed Shakespearean players paraded through endless scenes of sweet impressionism in this version,’ wrote Goodall. Lady Macbeth’s entrance in her first scene, she reports, descending the grey-black cloth-covered stairway, was ‘hair-raising’.

This was Jeanette Nolan’s theatrical debut: despite nearly twenty years in front of the microphone, she had never ventured
onto a stage, or indeed in front of a camera. She seems to have taken to
it
like a duck to water. ‘Jeanette Nolan “of the radio”,’
⁸
said the
New York Times
, was an ‘excellent’ Lady Macbeth. ‘Her lines are delivered with intensity and intelligence,’ said
Variety
, ‘and her good looks enhance her interpretation.’ The rest of the cast was admired: Donal O’Herlihy was ‘swashbuckling’, ‘ex-screen moppet’
Roddy McDowall ‘sensitive’, the Mercurians, Sanford and Barrier, ‘strong’; ‘the local fillins’, however, were found ‘not to rate more than adequate’. Welles himself was held by the
New York Times
to have given ‘an unexpectedly conservative reading, indulging neither in melodrama or exaggerated moralising … his was an outstanding job of restrained and sustained acting’ – phrases not often used
to describe Welles’s performances. By contrast
Variety
spoke, approvingly, of his ‘flamboyant touch’, and had special praise for his audibility – no mean feat in that vast auditorium. Gladys Goodall, equally approving, was a little more sensuously responsive: ‘Mr Welles appeared not only to have been without sleep for months, he looked as though he needed a bath. He was unkempt, bedraggled in
a gross manner, and thoroughly haunted.’ The whole event was evidently a triumph of organisation, energy, goodwill and theatrical audacity, carried along on a thrilling wave of adrenalin. The fact that it was all preliminary to a ‘Republic picturization’, in
Variety
’s words, simply added to the excitement. ‘While Welles’s
Macbeth
production will never have the beauty of Mr Olivier’s
Henry V
,’
hat sharp observer Gladys Goodall commented, ‘it promises to be a parallel in effectiveness when it is made into a movie. The ghoulish effects,’ she added with sweet innocence, ‘will be intensified in motion pictures.’ The name of Laurence Olivier was to loom ever larger in the months and years to come in consideration of Welles’s film of
Macbeth
.

That was to come. The production in Salt Lake
City was a triumph for ANTA, exactly what their brief indicated. This noble organisation, whose board boasted such sovereign names as Brooks Atkinson, Rosamond Gilder, Raymond Massey, Guthrie McClintic, Gilbert Miller, Oscar Serlin, Robert E. Sherwood, Lee Simonson and Margaret Webster, had been convened, by Act of Congress, in 1935, as a tax-exempt, self-supporting People’s Theatre, yet another
outcrop of the New Deal, with the explicit remit of spreading theatre of quality across the classes and through the land. Due to various political machinations, ANTA had been dormant until 1945, and the new president of the organisation, the Broadway producer Vinton Freedley, was vigorously seeking to reactivate it. None of the board members, it must be said, were particular enthusiasts of
Welles
or his approach, but all of them were aware that he was as big a figure as the American theatre had ever thrown up. The Utah press acclaimed the Welles
Macbeth
in this light, roundly asserting that ‘ANTA has completed a project that typifies the type of work it is set to do for other university and community theatres.’
⁹
Helen Hayes, a prominent ANTA board member and current First Lady of the American
theatre, sent Welles a first-night telegram underlining the production’s significance for the organisation:
OUR APPRECIATION FOR ACCEPTING THE CHALLENGE AND PAVING THE WAY WITH MACBETH FOR A NEW AND IMPORTANT PHASE OF THEATRE.
¹⁰
She continued in terms that were exactly calculated to gratify Welles:
IF WE ARE SUCCESSFUL IN ENLISTING MORE ADVENTURERS SUCH AS YOU FOR THIS SORT OF ACTIVITY ANTA
’
S
PROGRAM OF ELEVATING THE THEATRE TO THE STATUS OF A NATIONAL FORCE IN THE LIVES OF ALL OUR PEOPLE WILL BE UNDER WAY BLESSINGS.

Welles saw the venture in much the same light; a programme note stated that Utah Centennial’s invitation to stage
Macbeth
in Salt Lake City’ offered an opportunity to test the effectiveness of the professional and the highly skilled amateur theatre working as a unit’.
¹¹
The dividing line between professional and amateur was one that Welles was always willing to smudge, as seen in the casting of all his films after
Citizen Kane
; more significantly, it expressed his genuine – though somewhat fickle – commitment to direct contact, on an educational basis, between the theatre and the community. He was also delighted to find a new framework with which to assert the
radical nature of his work; with the single unhappy exception of
Around the World
, he had only ever, after all, worked in what would later be called the alternative theatre. ‘While tonight’s production of
Macbeth
is not truly or entirely a Mercury production,’ the programme note continued, Welles revelled in the strict limitation of time imposed on the production, and the necessity of conducting
rehearsals both in Hollywood and Salt Lake City for an extremely short period and then fusing the two companies. ‘So pleased are Mr Welles and Richard Wilson his co-producer and partner in the Mercury,’ the note ends, ‘that they hope to make this a yearly venture.’ It might, indeed, have offered Welles a perfect opportunity for the continuation of his theatrical project; so confident was he that
he even announced the next production, ‘another great classic, seldom seen in the American theatre,
King Lear
’. The day after the first night of
Macbeth
, Bob Breen, ANTA’s executive secretary, eager to cement the relationship, wired Welles to suggest that he might like to take an ANTA-promoted show to the second
Edinburgh
International Festival the following year. Breen pursued Welles with ever-increasing
desperation for four more years, but the dream of Orson Welles at the head of an American National Theatre – an idea extant at least since his work with the Federal Theatre Project in 1936 – was doomed to remain just that.

The production ran for four days, with two matinées for schools thrown in. At the end of the week the company returned to Hollywood, and Welles and Dick Wilson began the
task of preparing for the film version. They had three weeks in which to make themselves ready for shooting. Whether the theatre run had bought them any real gains, apart from a certain familiarity for the leading actors with their roles, is to be doubted. Certainly the physical production was very different. The film’s epic sets, some of them monumentally high, were already under construction at
Republic during the short Utah run. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that his own designs were scrapped at the last moment before shooting began; on screen they are credited to Republic’s regular art director, Fred Ritter, but there is little doubt of Welles’s influence on them. They share with the stage production the sweeping staircase that had been so effective in Salt Lake City; inevitably the interiors
and the heath had no counterpart in the open-stage theatre design. A few surviving sketches in Welles’s hand show elements that were to become very prominent in the design: the leafless tree on the crag where the Weird Sisters are to be found, and which so evocatively hangs over the exterior sequences; and a costume sketch of the strongly characteristic Viking/Tartar helmets (‘soldiers behind
Macbeth/Misty silhouettes in thick
FOG,’
the sketch says). Most of the stage costumes had been hired from the Hollywood costume house, Western Costumes, and they were planning to retain many of them for the film. Welles paid a great deal of attention to revisions to the Utah costumes, and his typically witty and lucid memorandum to Dick Wilson on the subject is usefully revealing of his general
intentions, as well as being indicative of his close attention to detail and his practicality.

What is altogether unexpected is his concern for authenticity. Far from attempting to create, as he is generally held to have done, a kind of imaginary world, Welles attends scrupulously to specifics of period and location, relying heavily on a capitalised entity that he calls ‘Research’. Writing of
Duncan’s outfit – King Duncan, as he refers to him – he says, ‘Again I urge that we examine the old pictures of the fully-draped tartans that almost cover the body. It
is
a very noble effect.’
¹²
Lamenting the fact that in Salt Lake City, Roddy McDowall’s Malcolm looked like ‘the third page boy from the left’, Welles suggests that he should wear tartan of the House of Duncan. ‘Research should check
on this and we should be sure that the tartan we select will photograph near enough so as not to disturb the 422,000,000 Tartan-wearing Scotsmen.’ McDowall’s wig as it appeared in Salt Lake City is a disgrace, says Welles, ‘one of the most comical ever presented by any wig-maker to any actor … the bushiest hair since the House of Solomon or the House of David played baseball in the ’20s. Mr McDowall
is to be given a Prince Valiant Wig (for Prince Valiant see the Hearst Sunday papers).’ The costume for ‘Lord Banquo’ passes muster, though he too should be wearing tartan, but Macduff’s – all of them – have to be redesigned. ‘Mr O’Herlihy’s figure is an extraordinary one in that the man has a “pot belly” – no muscles whatever. Therefore his legs must not under any account be bared. He must
be heavily corseted, and his upper chest must be padded along with his shoulders.’ Welles knew whereof he spoke, since this was very much the procedure applied to his own body in
Citizen Kane
. He continues with brutal frankness: