Update: Jesse Reiswig supplied us with information on staging dates for Twelfth Night. The May 3, 1932 edition of the Woodstock Daily Sentinel has a front page article about the Todd Troopers taking first place honors at a high school competition in Chicago. It notes that Joan Hill played the part of Viola in Twelfth Night in this 1932 production. Other credits are not included. As for the 1933 production, a June 21, 1933 front page article in the Woodstock Daily Sentinel states that a revival of Twelfth Night was to be staged on June 23, 1933 by former students. Orson Welles was out of the country from March 20 through June 15, 1933 and would have been in the U.S. at the time of revival.
By RAY KELLY
Freshly returned from the Dublin stage, teenage Orson Welles helmed a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with his mentor, headmaster Roger “Skipper” Hill, at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois.
Nearly 10 minutes of footage comprised of Welles’ 1933 production at his alma mater mixed with footage from a 1940 staging there was recently transferred to a digital file by Wendy Hill, granddaughter of “Skipper” Hill. Her cousin, author Todd Tarbox (Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, Marching Song: A Play), holds the copyright and graciously shared it with Wellesnet. (See the video below.)
“Twelfth Night is a blend of the 1933 version and a 1940 version. The opening minutes, Welles’ narration, the unfolding of the set ‘pages,’ and shots of actors performing in front of the sets are from the 1933 production. Some of the close-ups are from the 1940 production,” Todd Tarbox said. “‘Skipper’ combined the two in a promotional film shown to prospective students and parents. I’m hoping to find the remaining 1933 footage.”
Welles designed the costumes and conceived and created the storybook set for the 1933 production.
“My father, Hascy, was cast as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and my mother, Joanne, played Viola,” he said. “This production won first prize at the 1933 Chicago Drama Festival and was later performed at the 1933 World’s Fair, A Century of Progress Exposition.”
Wendy Hill said her father, Roger Gettys Hill, was cast as Sebastian in the production and can also be heard in the film’s opening introduction.
Audio for the 16mm film was recorded on a gramophone and the footage shot on a borrowed camera. It opens with Welles intoning: “Once upon a time, a long, long ago, there was a storm at sea, and a ship went down, and a beautiful girl and her twin brother rode out the waves and were cast up separately on the shining beaches of a strange land… This is Illyria, lady.”
He is briefly interrupted by “Skipper” Hill, who notes for the record, “This is Orson Welles doing the introduction.”
Welles continues, “Illyria, with a lovely countess in it, and a lovesick duke, with a bluenose butler, and a red-nosed knight, and more mad people I needn’t name, and ‘more matter for a May morning…’”
Biographer Frank Brady (Citizen Welles) was shown footage of Twelfth Night by “Skipper” Hill at his Miami home in the 1980s. Brady described what was screened for him that day as “perfectly preserved with rich color and quite professionally focused but without any camera movement, or pronounced flourishes or angles. It was simply shot from one point of view, perhaps from the middle of the tenth row of the theater: an amateur recording of the play on film rather than a piece of cinema.”
According to Todd Tarbox, the Twelfth Night footage has been kept by his family in a “sealed canister in optimal temperatures and has not been shown for decades.”
“It’s time to read again Welles and Hill’s Twelfth Night included in their collection of four of the Bard’s plays, Everybody’s Shakespeare, said Todd Tarbox, referring to the book the two lifelong friends published in 1934.
Welles and members of his Mercury Theatre would later record an audio performance of Twelfth Night for Columbia Masterworks as one of four Shakespearean records in 1939 and 1940. The other recordings in the Masterworks series were The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Macbeth.
The footage of the Todd School production can be seen below or viewed at https://youtu.be/fadbbEi_7OE
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