Charles Laughton (36 page)

Laughton’s performance was a bit of a poser for them. The reviews spoke, in their routine way, of ‘personal triumph’ and so forth. He was thought to be ‘an appealing figure’ but ‘over-zealously underplayed’. He is ‘honest and intelligent’, but there is a sense of their being cheated of those big moments that his name and the character’s would seem to promise. One review speaks of ‘the greatest and most restrained performance of his career’; even John Willett, years later, speaks of how Laughton ‘resisted the temptation to overact’. This
tells
us what the performance was
not
. There is little evaluation of what the performance was. Happily, Brecht, in his long and affectionate account of their work together, has left a detailed and analytical description of it; coupled with Berlau’s photographs, and a charming recording Laughton cut to relay the New York re-writes to Brecht, we can form a vivid impression of it.

His sensuous impact in the photographs is considerable. ‘He was able to unfold the great physicist’s contradictory personality in a wholly corporeal form … he had enough taste not to make any distinction between the supposedly lofty and the supposedly base, and he detested preaching.’ Brecht observes that, for Germans, thought must always be stripped of sensuality: ‘reason, for us, implies something cold, arbitrary, mechanical, presenting us with such pairs of alternatives as ideas and life, passion and thinking, pleasure and utility.’ Laughton’s great achievement in the rôle, his great originality, was to show intellect as an appetite: which is exactly what it was for him. His hunger to know, to understand, and then to teach, to re-communicate, was at the centre of his life. Eric Bentley, an enthusiast neither of the play nor of Laughton in it, wrote: ‘It is unlikely that anyone again will combine as he did every appearance of intellectual brilliance with every appearance of physical self-indulgence.’ ‘He could,’ Bentley says, in a review of another, later performance, ‘effortlessly portray a self-indulgent guzzler; second, he was able to seem an intellectual, even a genius. The
combination
of physical grossness with intellectual finesse was theatrical in itself and of the essence of Brecht’s drama.’ This ability of Laughton’s to seem a genius is a further function of his capacity to play great men, to ‘imitate’ them, as he says. It has something to do with the size of the screen upon which he was able to project his inner activity; but also the precise connection between his brain and his being. Bentley makes a very sharp point: ‘In regard to playing the intellectual, this too should be said. It is not done by playing intellect itself. It is done by making the characteristic attitudes of the intellectual live – emotionally. For instance, Laughton would always bristle when he talked with bureaucrats or businessmen: his Galileo was allergic to them. Conversely, when talking to his students he made it clear how much he got from their admiration of him.’ Bentley also draws attention to the contradictions Laughton was able to convey: he is a great teacher, yes, but he’s vain, too. He’s cunning and in need of money, but his congenital distrust of businessmen leads him to lose what they could give him. The audience is thus given no easy answer
to
the character, they are denied their moments of sentimental gratification (‘the great man surrounded by his adoring pupils,’ ‘the genius oppressed by shopkeepers’).

At the time, in order to promote Brecht’s work, Bentley praised Laughton’s performance in the highest terms (‘it is an astonishingly beautiful and instructive thing, and something different in kind from even the best thing one sees on Broadway’. He later had substantial reservations to make. ‘The way in which Laughton “stood out” from his part is not quite what the Brechtian theory bargains for. For it was through actorish narcissism that he kept aloof … actorish vanity allowed him to let the brilliance slide over into drawing-room comedy smartness. Narcissism prevented him from even trying to enter those somewhat Dostoievskian depths into which Brecht invites the actor of the penultimate scene.’

Bentley is the only commentator of the slightest stature (apart from Brecht himself, to whom we must shortly return) to have offered an account of Laughton’s performance, so we must listen to him very seriously. However, there is a background to their relationship which Bentley freely admits by quoting a letter Laughton sent him in response to a request for an endorsement of his translations:

My dear Bentley, I owe you many apologies for not replying to your appeals about Brecht before. I believe him to be the most important living dramatist. At the same time, I have never been able to understand either yours or anybody else’s translations of his plays. As far as I have got is to be able to dimly see the great architecture. I also understand that you didn’t like my translation of
Galileo
so the situation between us is not an easy one. If I allow you to say, ‘I believe Bertolt Brecht to be the most important living dramatist,’ and if the general public is anything like myself, they will see my name stuck on something they cannot understand, which is somewhat of a black eye for me. At the same time I feel all kinds of a heel for not doing everything I possibly can for this great writer. I would certainly like to be a help, not a hindrance.

Suggestions, please, and very warmest personal regards

Sincerely yours

Charles Laughton.

This cautious, canny, sensible letter reveals its author on several levels. The tendency to squirm which it represents is wholly characteristic, but it must also be said with regard to Bentley’s translations (as opposed to his masterly exegetic writings), it is absolutely true. Laughton’s was the first, and for some time, until Willett and
Manheim
set to, the
only
version of a Brecht play which seemed like the work of a real writer, instead of a demonstration of certain theories. Laughton had laboured for two years to understand what Brecht meant, and to translate that into practice. Brecht himself was in no doubt about the value of their version. Interestingly, Laughton, in a postscript to the letter, says: ‘I feel the actors as a whole failed the great man miserably in our production.’ Does he include himself? He goes on to describe how he has formed a group of young American actors to train them ‘in the business of verse speaking and prose speaking … I am doing this solely with the aim of getting a company together that can play Brecht’s plays.’

The seriousness with which Laughton took the work is not in any doubt. It is
possible
, of course, that his ‘narcissism’ was so overwhelming that it surpassed even his devotion to the play, the other actors, and the ideal of the theatre. Brecht’s account of his performance suggests something very different. He records innumerable delicacies, subtleties and inventions all designed to reveal the man and the play:

Whenever Galileo was creative, L. displayed a mixture of aggressiveness and defenceless softness and vulnerability.

L. demonstrated how for Galileo learning and teaching are one and the same thing.

L. conducted the exchange with his friend at the telescope without any emphasis. The more casually he acted, the more clearly one could sense the historic night; the more soberly he spoke, the more solemn the moment appeared.

Vis-à-vis the court scholars who refuse to look through the telescope, what L. acted was not so much anger as the attempt to dominate anger.

L. was able, in a manner the playwright cannot describe, to give the impression that what mainly disarmed Galileo was the lack of logic.

Words cannot do justice to the lightness and elegance with which L. conducted the little experiment with the pieces of ice in the copper basin.

The way in which L. caressingly emptied his glass of milk while he said it was enchanting.

Perhaps what distressed Bentley was Laughton’s evident pleasure in what he was doing. Brecht himself approvingly quoted Laughton’s remark: ‘before you can entertain other people, you must entertain yourself’ and stated: ‘Egocentricity is fun for me if it is
expressed
vividly.’ ‘What the spectator – anyway the experienced spectator – enjoys about art is the making of art, the active creative element’ – another element of Laughton’s performance. Brecht and Laughton were so at one in their approach that the actor even outstripped his author by suggesting, as Bentley reports, that the lights in the auditorium should always be up because ‘in a “thinking theater” the actors need to see the audience’s eyes.’

The only section of the play where Brecht expresses dissatisfaction with Laughton’s performance is in the penultimate scene, already referred to in Bentley’s criticism. ‘L. could not accept the playwright’s argument that there must be some
gest
simply showing how the opportunist damns himself by damning all who accept the rewards of opportunism.’ Interestingly, this famous scene, whose failure Brecht attributed to Laughton, was equally unsatisfactory when Ernst Busch, an actor of a very different colour from Laughton, played the part with the Berliner Ensemble in 1957. What both actors gibbed at was Brecht’s determination to condemn Galileo for his action – a sudden departure in the play which, as Bentley and other commentators have observed, seems to be as much Brecht’s revenge on the character he created for having somehow developed a life of its own as anything thematic in the play. As with several of his characters – Mother Courage is another – Brecht attempted to pull the carpet out from underneath Galileo’s feet; to put him in his place. Though Laughton embraced every other aspect of the theory, he drew the line at breaking the character completely. There must be continuity. As for Galileo’s despair,
pace
Mr Bentley, it was a job
stopping
Laughton from entering into ‘Dostoievskian depths’; he needed no encouragement. It would scarcely be emotional timidity that created his resistance, which is very clear on the gramophone record he cut to send as a sort of letter to Brecht before the New York opening. He and Losey and George Tabori had reworked the scene, using some of Brecht’s notes, to make the transition easier, but the re-working simply muddies it further. Laughton tells Brecht on the disc that he’s tried every other possible transition, but nothing except this one works; it is however, very clear that once he’s cleared the hurdle of ‘Welcome to my gutter, dear fellow scientist and brother in treason’, he becomes convinced, and the performance is very fine.

The play transferred to New York in the winter, a small theatre again, again sold out. Laughton did readings to try to raise money for a further transfer, but the amount needed was too great for him to raise singlehanded. He refused the offer of a management who
required
that they cut the carnival scene (one in which, Brecht notes, ‘Laughton had always taken a great interest,’ though of course he wasn’t in it) so the play closed after four weeks. Plans to take it to London also collapsed; discussions for a possible film, to be made in Italy, similarly came to nothing. So
Galileo
was over for Laughton. Brecht was by now in Switzerland, having given his famous testimony before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, in which he may be said to have run smoke-rings round his interrogators. He knew that the political climate made it impossible for him to stay any longer. On the day he left America, he noted in his work journal: ‘Meet Laughton a.m., who is growing a Galileo beard, and is glad that he requires no courage to play the part of Galileo. As he says: no headlines on me.’ As the subpoenas started flying, Laughton became very alarmed, and perhaps was glad to be rid of the dangerous play. As for Brecht, he had got what he wanted: a satisfactory American production of a play of his. He had stayed in America for two years more than he needed for just that. It was Laughton who had made it possible for him. He had been unstinting of time and money (his own tailor, to take one small example, had made Lodovico’s costume), and had given a performance which deeply pleased him. There had passed between them, too, a time of great stimulation and nourishment, their ‘
zweijähriger Spass
[two years’ fun].’ Laughton’s gain from it, in artistic self-respect and intellectual confidence, was enormous. There was a strong emotional thread to it, as well, something like hero-worship, a crush, almost. Whether one could go so far as to describe it as sexual in quality is doubtful, but both Brecht and Hans Viertel record Laughton reading stories from the Bible and certain scenes from Shakespeare of a decidedly homosexual flavour; Brecht notes that he read the parts of Osric, Jacques and the Clown in
Antony and Cleopatra
, ‘whom he wants to play homosexual.’ Laughton wanted to reveal his homosexuality to the man he admired so much. But Bentley, sharing with Ruth Berlau his disapproval of Laughton’s boyfriend being cast in the rôle of Andrea, wondered why Brecht said nothing: ‘Because,’ said Berlau, ‘this is a subject [homosexuality] that cannot be brought up with him.’ And again, ‘he was never accepted,
chez
Brecht, as what he was, a man trying to be honestly homosexual.’ It may be that the various ladies of Brecht’s seraglio wished to believe that their pasha was homophobic, but in his earlier years this does certainly not seem to have been the case, on the evidence of the diaries of 1920–22, and the early plays such as
Baal
.

Brecht wrote a very tender but by no means sexual poem for
Laughton
, which in its affectionate and celebratory tribute to the body which caused him so much misery, must have moved him deeply. The poem speaks of great intimacy.

Laughton’s belly

All of them, the way they carry their bellies around

You’d think it was swag with someone in pursuit of it

But the great man Laughton performed his like a poem

For his edification and nobody’s discomfort.

Here it was: not unexpected, but not usual either

And built of foods which he

At his leisure had selected, for his entertainment.

And to a good plan, excellently carried out.

Brecht wrote one last poem for Laughton. It is short and harsh: