Charles Laughton (15 page)

Marius Goring watched every performance that Laughton gave during that season: he attributed the overwhelming impact of Angelo to Laughton’s mastery of close-up technique, which he somehow adapted to the theatre. This is what Agate was describing when he wrote: ‘whenever the actor comes to anchor to deliver his soliloquies of torment the house falls into a hush the like of which is rarely heard in our theatre.’ Obviously this performance was, like his William Marble in
Payment Deferred
, phenomenal. ‘It is a terrifying piece of work,’ said Darlington. The greatest tribute came from Lilian Baylis. She never missed a performance of the Isabella-Angelo scenes. Sitting in her stage-box, frying her sausages, she whispered to Marius Goring as he passed by for an entrance: ‘There are lots of things I don’t like about that man – but I don’t want to miss a minute of this.’

A number of factors were involved in the achievement of this tour-de-force. Firstly, without doubt, he discovered a deep identification with Angelo: repression, hidden desires, cruelty. ‘In moiling and toiling over the conflicting forces in Angelo, Charles actually seemed to clear up a kind of hangover that he had within himself, probably caused by religious upbringing and the war,’ wrote Miss Lanchester in 1938. (In 1982, in her autobiography, repeating the sentence, she deleted the last clause.) Secondly, the part is a relatively short one. He was able to concentrate his energies and sustain the massive emotional intensity without having to drive the play. Agate wrote: ‘Continuing his backdoor attacks upon the Shakespearean drama, Mr Laughton has now promoted himself to that side-entrance which is Angelo.’ Thirdly – and I am inclined to rate this very highly – he had time for preparation. Elsa Lanchester notes that he and John Armstrong had been talking about ideas for a production of the play for a long time, even down to cuts in the text and design possibilities. It had been germinating in his mind for nearly three years, in fact, and he had filled out every corner of the role with intense feeling. The tasks he set himself as an actor were enormous; he needed time for the imaginative connection to possess him completely.

And how did he speak ‘the beautiful words’? ‘Mr Laughton’s voice has not yet acquired the full resonance for blank verse’ said Agate; but it’s more than simple resonance that blank verse needs – it’s a sense of pulse, an ability to sustain line-endings, an awareness of alliteration and assonance. As it happens, however, Angelo’s utterances are so tortured and tortuous, the line – and the syntax – is so broken up by
emotional
and mental twistings and turnings, that it is sometimes hardly verse at all.

So the great Laughton
v
Bard match was still unfought.

Agate concluded his account of Charles’ Angelo thus: ‘This performance whets the appetite which, after once more tantalising it with that dreary codger, Prospero, Mr Laughton promises presently to satisfy with his first attack on the real stuff – Macbeth.’

The dreary old codger – ‘that endless chunnerer’ – Agate was a thesaurus of abuse when it came to Prospero – ‘that enchanting bore’ – his exasperated dismissal of
The Tempest
and its central character was more common then than now – was played by Laughton as ‘deriving snowily from Blake, Devrient’s Lear, Michelangelo’s Noah, M. Boverio’s Noe, possibly Noah himself, and certainly Father Christmas. But alas, he made the old boy perform his hocus-pocus with a naughty little twinkle in his eye …’

Quite clearly, Laughton, and Guthrie, and just about everyone connected with the production, were all at sea. The Permanent Setting was off into the dock again, being replaced by a decidedly arid landscape, devised, James Mason darkly suggests, by Laughton himself and John Armstrong, who had imposed his surrealist tendencies on the set, at the expense of either atmosphere or reality. (Agate: ‘an almost bare stage sparsely furnished with logs constructed out of pink Edinburgh rock, an igloo or wigwam made out of raffia as used by Miss Cicely Courtneidge for her production numbers, and three screens similarly fringed.’) The Ariel songs were ‘steel-furniture ditties’. The costumes, also by John Armstrong, ‘succeeded in making the handsome actors look ugly and the ugly actors look funny,’ according to Guthrie: his own direction, he admitted, was ‘at once feeble and confused’.

The only positive comments about the production from any quarter are for Roger Livesey’s Caliban (‘a delicious monster compounded of Frankenstein and Petroushka’) and Elsa Lanchester’s Ariel. ‘May I be forgiven for saying that until Miss Elsa Lanchester the part of Ariel has never been acted? … So impalpable to sight is this Ariel that his body seems to offer nothing to human glances. You see through him … in short, it is a lovely performance of exquisite invention.’ The flying rig by means of which she was to have entered and left the stage was cut, but the performance still survived. And yet, during rehearsal she had been completely mystified by the part: ‘I sat with Guthrie for hours, trying to interpret one great long speech that was very confusing. It was a little like learning ten alphabets in Greek backwards.
Guthrie
simply said he didn’t know what the speech meant either.’ Guthrie wrote: ‘The only good thing was Elsa Lanchester’s Ariel, weird and lyrical in a balletic style which was at odds with everything else in the production and which better direction would never have allowed.’

It has been suggested that Laughton insisted on playing Prospero instead of the Caliban for which he was obviously intended (James Mason says this); Benita Armstrong reports that Charles wanted to play Caliban, but was prevailed upon as the leading man of the season to play ‘the old gentleman’ (Agate again). On balance, it seems likely that Charles might have wanted a rest from monsters, and wanted to tackle the extended and elaborate verse that Prospero speaks. But of all Shakespeare’s great characters, the usurped Duke of Milan is the least flesh-and-blood, the most schematised. There is a way of approaching the play and the character which sees
The Tempest
as a revenge play; or a working out of Shakespeare’s own bitterness. But Guthrie’s and Laughton’s conception – in so far as they had one – seems to have inclined towards a rather arid sort of pantomime, from which nothing fruitful could come for Laughton. Agate wickedly suggests that, having failed to achieve Pickwick’s benignity, he sought to make up for it as Prospero. ‘Mr Laughton’s failure is, however, more respectworthy than Sarah’s [Bernhardt in
Lucrèce Borgia
]. She was merely following her stock-line of fascination, while he purposely discards familiar face-pulling, mowing and gibbering in order to extend his range. This is extremely good for Mr Laughton.’

The Tempest
was extremely good for Mrs Laughton, too. As well as her biggest part in the season, it was ‘my most serious and important acting relationship with Charles to date … in
The Tempest
our performances were almost entirely interdependent.’

In
Love for Love
, Congreve’s Restoration comedy, their marriage saved large sections of the play being cut altogether. Somehow their matrimonial condition rendered the scenes between Tattle and Miss Prue, with their shameless
double entendres
, acceptable. Really
double entendre
is the wrong phrase, because their scenes together can only mean one thing. Miss Baylis and the Governors simply had to bite their lips and sit tight, because the production was an enormous success, gleefully staged by Guthrie, with Athene Seyler and Flora Robson as Mrs Frail and Mrs Foresight; three Liveseys,
père
and
deux fils
, as Sir Sampson, Ben and Valentine; and ‘a clever performance of the servant Jeremy by Mr James Mason.’

Laughton obviously had a little holiday with Tattle: ‘a delicious
figure
of fun and under-breeding, a mixture of wiggery and waggery, at once coy and servile, male yet mincing. This Tattle is a
Roi Soleil
about whom still hangs the barber’s shop of his probable upbringing.’ The photographs show another proto-Wildean figure, bustling with malice, which may have been quite a useful safety valve for him.

His next role, another Laughton-Lanchester number, was genuine Wilde: Chasuble in
The Importance of Being Earnest
. John Gielgud, in
Distinguished Company
, retails a fifty-year-old piece of gossip, namely that Guthrie initially cast Laughton in the part of John Worthing, but found him so unpleasant, that he persuaded him to play the Canon. There is no corroborative evidence for this. If it
was
Guthrie’s feeling, he might have been amused to read in the
Daily Telegraph
review that ‘there is no crime in the calendar of which I would not believe [Laughton’s Chasuble] capable.’ Agate found him ‘out of the right cruet.’ The revival was well enough liked, until all memories of it were effaced by John Gielgud’s later production with himself, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies: ‘in my opinion,’ wrote Guthrie, characteristically generous, ‘the highwater mark in the production of artificial comedy in our epoch,’ the only novelty of his own production being that ‘Canon Chasuble appeared to be the leading part: Charles Laughton in a devastating, brilliant and outrageous lampoon.’ It is hard not to suspect a strong element of anticlericalism in the performance, perhaps directed towards the incumbent of the stage-box, surrounded as she was by confessors and clerics of every shade.

Elsa was sharply reprimanded by Agate, feeling that Laughton’s ‘sacerdotal oil could not be said to blend with the vinegar of Miss Elsa Lanchester’s Miss Prism. This young actress was recently said by me to have given one of the most beautiful performances I had ever seen; she now gives very nearly, and I really think quite, the worst!’ ‘On the last night,’ she quite understandably writes, ‘I think I had a good cry when I got to bed.’

And so to the real stuff. With
Macbeth
Laughton was decisively stepping into the ring. The haunted history of the play still daunts would-be interpreters. As usual, the superstition is based on practical factors: the play was frequently revived because one of the shortest in the canon; haste leads to accidents. Moreover, the part of Macbeth, due perhaps to the loss of a rumoured missing act in which the actor might have had time to recover himself, is one of the most physically punishing of all the great Shakespearean roles. Exhaustion leads to
accidents
too. Interpretatively, too, the character’s Patton-like combination of soldierliness and poetic reflectiveness generally leads to the favouring of one element to the detriment of the other.

On every level, Laughton was at a disadvantage. Stamina, both vocal and physical, was his worst problem as an actor. Soldierly decisiveness was not in his scope; and though there was in his temperament a strong streak, in John Gielgud’s phrase, of poetic imagination, the lyric and meditative modes were alien to him. The vein in Macbeth that he might most easily have tapped, the supernatural horror, was denied him by Guthrie, who cut the witches’ scene. His programme note explained: ‘by making the three Weird Sisters open the play, one cannot avoid the implication that they are a governing influence of the tragedy. Surely the grandeur of the tragedy lies in the fact that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are ruined by precisely those qualities which make them great. All this is undermined by any suggestion that the Weird Sisters are in control of events.’ Clearly Guthrie, notoriously shy of emotion and sensuality in the theatre, was equally uncomfortable with the occult. His production was the very last thing that Laughton’s Macbeth needed to be: rational – or rather, rationalised.

When the play opened Laughton was the victim of one of those ritual outbursts of blood-lust which seems to seize the critical fraternity when, after months of balance and qualification and hesitation, they unanimously sense a sitting-duck, upon which they fall with naked fangs, licensed to kill. There is always something unedifying about the spectacle, even at fifty years’ distance, however bad the performance might have been: the unspeakable in pursuit of the unsuccessful. ‘Alas! he cannot, for the life of him, observe the niceties of the iambic convention. And alas! alas! he cannot, for the life of him, manipulate a trailing robe.
He trips
! There was an unfortunate moment in his Macbeth. The banquet scene – Banquo’s ghost. Mr Laughton’s squeak and scurry of fear, clutching his showy skirts, would have been more appropriate to the distraction of some Roman magnate of the decadence, a Trimalchi aghast at a rat or a mouse, rather than the superstitious terror of a murderer before the risen spectre of his victim. However, of all Mr Laughton’s performances at the Old Vic this season, his Macbeth is certainly the most interesting … He is not consistently exciting, but neither is he consistently dull. He never bores, though he might irritate, exasperate. He tends to a monotony of gesture and tone (he would be a great actor past question if he could keep his mouth shut).’ (
Sketch
).
Daily Telegraph
: ‘I am left
in
doubt whether Mr Laughton understands Macbeth at all.’ Harcourt Williams: ‘more the Sassenach tradesman.’
Daily Mail
: ‘I do not believe that Shakespeare intended Macbeth to be a petulant, sulky schoolboy … nor do I believe that he would have ranted and stamped his foot like a child of ten: he need not, I suggest, always have soliloquised on A flat and allegro vivace at that. I can find no textual evidence to support the idea that he looked in person like the bearded lady at Mitcham Fair.’ Agate: ‘Mr Laughton was never within measurable distance of any kind of grandeur, and his performance beginning on the ground knew no heights from which to topple.’

Agate at least concluded his notice of the performance: ‘if this means that Mr Laughton is not a tragedian, I cannot help it; he remains a great actor.’ To this balm, Laughton might have added: ‘None of the other Shakespeare roles Mr Laughton has played this season has seemed to stir his imaginative sympathy so deeply.’ (
The Times
). Little else.

After a performance, James Bridie wrote to his friend Flora Robson: ‘My dear Flora, I didn’t come back-stage to see you on Wednesday afternoon because I was genuinely heart-broken. It’s no use lying about it, I thought your Lady Macbeth wrong, wrong, wrong; lifeless, inept, even stupid … you acted Lady Macbeth like a schoolgirl in a Dalcroze school in love with her head-mistress. Do read the lines again before you go on, and get the horror of them into your soul … do you know that when you said the Raven itself was hoarse I expected you to follow up by saying when you had got the spare bedroom ready for Duncan you’d go up and rub the bird with Sloan’s liniment … you are an artist of the theatre and a clumsy amateur of philosophy. So is Tony. He is not as clumsy as you but he has it all wrong. He is one of the “planning,” “hard-thinking” brigade …’