Charles Laughton (48 page)

The film lasts 90 minutes, which means that the play is condensed into a little over seventy-five, to allow for an introduction by Laughton, and a glimpse of Peter Hall. Laughton was very much the presiding genius of the enterprise, having set it up in the first place. It was claimed that it would be seen by over 40 million Americans, and that it was the most expensive programme ever, up to that point, made for television. Directed by Fletcher Markle, it’s a very decent account of the production, revealing the loveliness of Lila de Nobili’s designs, and doing justice to all the play’s strata, though, for obvious reasons, the mechanicals get the best of it. As an historical document, the film is a delight, revealing the young Albert Finney (at Stratford at Laughton’s suggestion, and none too happy), the young Vanessa Redgrave in a performance so startlingly exaggerated that only a huge natural gift could have sustained it without self-consciousness, Michael Blakemore in a nose, Ian Holm supreme as Puck, which he would play again in Peter Hall’s 1968 film, and Mary Ure as a radiantly sensuous but human Titania. Laughton’s introduction is a fair sample of his persona as a cultural missionary, genial, humorous, reverent in short bursts (‘Who were you, Will Shakespeare?’). He glides down the Avon in a punt, he wanders through Ann Hathaway’s cottage, he strolls down Stratford High Street in the company of his brother-in-law, Waldo Lanchester, telling us how he had doubts about cramming
The Dream
into 90 minutes, until he looked up and saw the forest of TV aerials on the roofs of all the houses, and realised that if Shakespeare had been alive today, he would have tried to reach as
many
people as he could through the new medium. ‘Now don’t you sneer!’ he tells his ‘fellow-Americans,’ as, quite incongruously, he calls them. ‘There was a time when I didn’t dig him myself, but the more I read him, the more I dug him, and the more you dig, the more you dig, do you dig me, daddy?’ ‘Well, you must excuse me because I’ve got to go and put my make-up on and paint my beard and my hair ginger,’ he ends. Against all the odds, it’s patronising neither to Shakespeare nor to his ‘fellow-Americans’. In fact, it’s rather moving.

Bottom was a lull before the storm, an encore before, rather than after the main event. Now it was
Lear
at last. ‘At the first read-through,’ Michael Blakemore, who was playing Lear’s knight, says, ‘what was immediately apparent was that he would never really get the huge rhetorical passages, he couldn’t really do that, he didn’t have the machinery.’ He knew that, and had convinced himself that it wasn’t necessary; his understanding of
Lear
led him to focus his performance on the second half of the play. In a letter to a young fan, he had described his anguish in the dressing-room; how he ‘dreaded going through all the things Shakespeare had written: the terrible journey of Lear to his death.’ That was the key-note for him: not the fall from a great height, not the turbulent rage, but the stumbling progress towards death. During the run of the play, he was troubled by nightmares associated with the play. He got his cousin, Jack Dewsbery, a psychiatrist, to come to see the performance: ‘I went up to Stratford, and, for reasons which even now are unknown to me, I was struck by the very first speech he made in the play, in which Lear speaks of his coming death and of the need to dispose of his properties. I told Charles that was where I thought the trouble lay … I can only suppose that in some way his dreams had foretold the future, and that I had unwittingly put my finger on their meaning.’ Lanchester suggests, too, that his desire to take peyote indicated that ‘somehow there was little time to reach out and touch some unattainable goal in art’.

Rehearsals were unusual in that Elsa Lanchester was present throughout, sitting at a desk, text spread out in front of her, reminding him of what they’d decided during the preparatory period. Once again, Laughton was full of suggestions, which Glen Byam Shaw, a more malleable man than Peter Hall and less skilled at deflecting the more far-fetched notions, generally accepted, thus, according to a young actor in the company, destroying the production. ‘What would have been a grand old Shakespearian production was destroyed by Charles, bit by bit – a year’s work, dismantled. This
poor
weak producer Glen Byam Shaw would say to each of Charles’ suggestions, ‘You’re a genius!’ We watched with fascination.’ What Charles was striving towards was a visual equivalent of the monolithic, abstract delicacy of the painters Soulages and Manessier, both of whose work he collected and indeed examples of which he had with him in Stratford. It was this monumental simplicity that he sought on his frequent visits to Rollright, the Druidic remains nearby. With the younger members of the cast, he’d go up there at three o’clock in the morning, just trying to absorb that simplicity. It wasn’t the primitivism that he wanted; it was the same thing he found in his pre-Columban collection – something essential, maybe mandala-like. In the end, he did persuade Byam Shaw and Percy Harris, the designer, to cut away more and more, just as he tried to cut away more and more from his own performance.

He had imposed (deliberately?) a quite separate obstacle to his work: he had come to believe that Elizabethan typography was the clue to the stresses in the verse. Every time a capital letter occurred, it signified a stress. No arguments about the capriciousness of Elizabethan printers would sway him. It was holding him up terribly, as he struggled to wring significance out of prepositions and participles starting with, for example, a capital T, just because the printer had had a run on his lower case that morning and was obliged to use the upper one instead. Glen Byam Shaw appealed to Peter Hall to help him, but all in vain. ‘That was him – all knowledge, all experience was his field, and he would go off on mad crazes and many of them were crazy, but many of them were not.’

He was firmly in the grip of the iron iambic, as well: years in front of a metronome had bred in him an almost superstitious fear of offering any reading of a line which diverged from the rigid da
da
, da
da
, da
da
, da
da
, da
da
. So the audience got Howl HOWL, Howl HOWL, Howl. It says much for his emotional force that this was never noted by any critic.

Ian Holm, his devoted Fool (‘I felt I had to love this man’), observed in him a dread of exposing his performance, as if it were something so personal that it might perish. ‘Perhaps, like Glenn Gould, he wasn’t doing it for an audience.’ Blakemore reckoned that ‘of all the distinguished people we had that season, all the very distinguished talents, Charles in a way was nakedly the most an artist. You felt that the struggle constantly to achieve something fresh, something unrelated to fame or public acceptance, was going on there all the time.’

Laughton’s anxiety as the first night approached was quite unconcealed; he had a terrible shout-down with Byam Shaw in which he threatened to walk out unless a certain actor was removed; Byam Shaw resisted. According to Glen, the dress rehearsal was wonderful; Elsa thought the reverse, and rushed backstage to tell him so, to accuse Charles of using all his old mannerisms, and betraying their work together. ‘Charles shouted back at me that I was a killer. He said you’ve ruined it! I’ll never do it now, it’s hopeless. You’ve killed everything!’ On the first night, Blakemore looked into his eyes: ‘it was like a lot of birds flying round a cage in panic … He started badly and did not recover till the last third.’

‘
CHARLES LAUGHTON IS NOT A GREAT LEAR
,’ the
News Chronicle
triumphantly informed its readers. There had been a few boos from the gallery, too, but in fact, the performance was received with respect by the majority of the audience and the majority of the press. The consensus that generally develops between the extremes (in this case represented by, on the one hand, the
News Chronicle
and, on the other, surprisingly, Milton Shulman in the
Evening Standard
: ‘
A BRILLIANT LEAR – BY ANY TEST
’) said that once the unmajestic opening and the vocally weak storm scenes were over, the performance began to bite, until, at the end, it became deeply moving. ‘Mr Laughton’s performance,’ according to
The Times
, ‘is a superb essay in stage pathos. Only at the very end does it attain the level of high tragedy.’ Absurd, these Beckmesser-like awardings of points in the categories! How many points for kingship? And for pathos? Four for tragic demeanour, not bad. Pity about lacking the all-important bass notes … still, he looked old. Some reviews give more detailed accounts of what actually happened, of what kind of experience was generated, interesting clues: ‘Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’ is not a blow struck at his kingly authority. It is a kind of shock that occurs as a dream slides into a nightmare,’ said
The Times
. W. A. Darlington, in the
Telegraph
, identified the pathos in the reading as coming from ‘the slowness with which Lear comes to comprehend what a wiser father would have known from the beginning.’ Young Bernard Levin, not yet shorn of his illusions, wrote: ‘In the opening scenes, he bases his rage against Cordelia firmly on disappointment, not shaky caprice, so that when he begins to repent of his decision, the terrible sadness of ‘I did her wrong’ catches at the heart and stings the eyes even before his madness sweeps our sympathies before it. And how moving and eloquent in this scene is the gesture with which Lear, tucked into a square, high, barbaric throne, turns to each of his daughters in turn to
hear
their protestations of love … if he does not bring humanity up to the level of the gods, he most marvellously brings the gods down to earth, so that when he cries to them not to let him go mad, his passion and pity come down among us, and move us all the more.’

These glimpses of the performance give some suggestion that there may have been something more to the performance than occasional moments struggling against huge technical incompetence; that the fruits of Laughton’s thirty years of red-hot searching of the play were worth a little closer consideration than the
News Chronicle
, for example, was prepared to give it. There are, after all, failures and failures. Beethoven’s last quartets are monumental failures by any criteria that existed before they were written; perhaps even now, they still rate as failures if you insist that the form should perfectly fulfil the content. Certainly if you approached Laughton’s Lear with a fixed expectation, namely that you would be thrilled to the very marrow by the spectacle of a crazy tyrannical king being turned against by his daughters, taking to the wilds where he goes completely mad, and the final dwindling into a sad old man, you would be disappointed. You would have loved the intense physicality of Laurence Olivier’s performance; John Gielgud’s performance lacked that, but his natural nobility would have made the first scenes acceptable, while there were immense dividends to be gained in his heart-breaking lyricism in the play’s second half. In a couple of years, though daunted by the strange, alien world of the settings, you would have recognised the brutish struggle of Paul Scofield, like a prehistoric animal facing extinction.

But if someone told you a completely different story, told you that
King Lear
was not about a decline, but an ascent, you would probably fail to understand the performance at all. It seems that Laughton’s understanding of the part was just such a breaking of the mould. The performance is lost forever, exists only in memory and a few scattered accounts. It’s a wonderful thing, then, for anyone trying to take Laughton seriously as an actor that a full account of it exists; one of the best accounts of any performance, and it was not written by a critic, or anyone connected with the theatre at all: the young man to whom Laughton wrote that the play was ‘the terrible journey of Lear to his death’, Ken Carter, a teacher. He offers a view of Laughton’s performance that makes sense of all the scattered insights, of what Lanchester has written, and of what seems probable, in the light of Laughton’s preoccupations.

Having seen the play Mr Carter wrote to his father who, unknown
to
him, sent the letter on to Laughton. Carter had cried intermittently, he said, all the way through. During the interval he could hardly speak.

And even now I am only half in this world. Laughton’s interpretation was muted – Lear was a small, bewildered man, who became terrific because he started as nothing. The storm emphasised the littleness of man, rather than man battling for all he was worth against the elements – a very gentle rain and occasional lightning flashes with the two puny figures in the middle of this. I can’t really explain; only a man with terrific strength and spirituality could dare to play Lear so restrainedly … this cherubic little man with more dignity and beauty of soul than one could have thought of.
Un homme ne vaut rien, mais rien ne vaut un homme
. Goodness, I wish you could have seen it. I’ve never been in a theatre before and heard people crying all round me. I don’t know how I had the strength to sit through it, it was so beautiful and harrowing.

Laughton and Glen Byam Shaw were both moved to read the letter. Laughton’s reply, written nearly a year later, contained an interesting self-observation: ‘It did not seem that the play
King Lear
had anything to do with my will. I found myself doing many things which I had not planned to do …’

Later, Ken Carter wrote an analysis of the performance.

The first two and a half acts were making ready for the wonders to come. It was a carefully grounded interpretation, craftsmanlike, with sound, solid preparation (the audience needed patience) … the scale, or arc, of his concept was so great that one could sense the death of this Lear right from the beginning. In the quest for unity, Laughton chose as the under-lying emotion bewilderment: a very curious emotion, little-explored.

Carter traces the bewilderment through the play, from Cordelia’s failure to pander to his wishes, to the Fool’s reproof of him, to the storm’s refusal to come to his aid, to the wonder of Cordelia’s selfless love, to his final bewilderment at her death.