By RAY KELLY
Moby Dick – Rehearsed – Orson Welles’ two-act drama based on the Herman Melville seafaring novel – was brimming with talent when it opened in the spring of 1955. The London cast included not only Welles, but Kenneth Williams, Joan Plowright and Peter Sallis. The meaty role of Starbuck was given to Patrick McGoohan, who would achieve prominence in the 1960s with the television series Danger Man and The Prisoner.
Welles lauded McGoohan as “one of the big actors of his generation, tremendous, with all the required attributes, looks, intensity, unquestionable acting ability and a twinkle in his eye.” Speaking with Peter Bogdanovich for This is Orson Welles in 1969, Welles said that McGoohan “would now be, I think, one of the big actors of our generation if TV hadn’t grabbed him. He can still make it. He was tremendous as Starbuck.”
McGoohan, who passed on the role of James Bond in Dr. No and like Welles had a strong independent streak, went on to win two Emmy Awards and appear in such films as Braveheart, The Phantom and Escape from Alcatraz. He passed away in 2009.
In a four-part overview of his life for Woman magazine in October 1965, McGoohan recalled working for Welles a decade earlier.
“I still regarded the theater as the only serious way of making a living as an actor and went to audition for a part in Orson Welles’ production of Moby Dick, which he was staging for a limited run of three weeks. I walked into the Duke of York’s Theatre one Thursday morning.
A working light lit the stage, people were milling about the dim auditorium and towering overall was this enormous man with a big cigar and script in one hand, a megaphone in the other. I’m 6-foot 2 but, with his bulk of frame and personality, Orson Welles succeeds in impressing.
Someone shoved a script in my hand and I began to read. Mr. Welles, in one of his bad moods, glowered and said something sarcastic. I made terse suggestions as to what he could do with his opinions and started to walk out. A bellow of laughter and a booming shout followed me: ‘Come back here you…!’ He promptly offered me the largest part (next to his), without a reading. This began for me one of the most rewarding and exhilarating experiences I have known in the theater.
Compressing the scope of Melville’s seat epic into confined dramatic form, with the stage set as the swaying deck of a whaler in mid-Pacific, was a challenge in itself. Working with Orson Welles was a greater challenge.
He had chosen his cast from repertory and character actors. There were no ‘star’ names among us. We worked as a team and Orson drove us to find the exact force of the play, much as Captain Ahab drove his crew to find the white whale that had taken off his leg.
Larger than life, blasting directions through his megaphone, he bullied, persuaded, encouraged and led us through rehearsals. We sweated, tried, failed, and triumphed.
Though he had a dozen different, creative ideas a minute, he wanted ours, too. Anyone could make a suggestion, from the electrician to the leading actor – ‘Good! That’s a better idea than mine. Come on, let’s try it’…”
Exhausted from the pace of rehearsals, the cast mutinied one night and headed off to a nearby pub.
“Before we had time to order our drinks Mr. Welles was among us, ordering them himself and turning on such a force of personality that, actors as we were, we became a captive audience, helpless with laughter at his anecdotes and stories,” McGoohan recalled. Welles then slyly led the cast back to the theater and continued to work them until 5 a.m.
McGoohan and company first performed Moby Dick – Rehearsed on June 16, 1955 at the Duke of York’s Theatre. The play-with-a-play that finds a Shakespearean acting company rehearsing King Lear when the actor-manager, played by Welles, asks them to instead stage Moby Dick. The actors use their imagination to create the illusion of the whaling ship, the ocean, and the great white whale.
The play, and McGoohan’s performance, received positive reviews. Welles would later say he was “intimidated” by McGoohan’s stage presence, and critic Kenneth Tynan hailed his portrayal of Starbuck as “the best performance of the evening.”
Welles filmed 40 minutes or so of the production with much of the cast at the Hackney Empire and Scala theaters in London. Christopher Lee was brought in to sub for Sallis as Stage Manager/Flask. In his autobiography, Lee said that Welles referred to the Moby Dick – Rehearsed cast as “the most talented company I ever worked with.”
Welles hoped to sell the finished product to CBS’ Omnibus, which had presented an abridged version of King Lear directed by Peter Brooks and starring Welles in 1953. However, Welles was unhappy with the initial results and quickly abandoned the shoot, though McGoohan later recalled being impressed with the rushes, which sadly are now lost.
A year after Moby Dick – Rehearsed, Welles eyed McGoohan for a role in his New York stage production of King Lear. Biographer Simon Callow noted that McGoohan was impatient with the delays and likened himself to being treated as a puppet on a string. In the end, U.S. immigration declined to grant work visas to Welles’ British actors.
McGoohan found work in film and television with The Rank Organization in the late 1950s before Lew Grade approached him to play spy John Drake in Danger Man. He followed with the miniseries The Prisoner, which he pitched to Grade and wrote and directed several episodes. Fans of Welles’ adaptation of The Trial and McGoohan’s The Prisoner have noted similar themes in both.
Though the two men never worked together again, Welles continued to hold McGoohan in high regard.
Looking back three decades later on Moby Dick – Rehearsed, Welles was critical of his own performance as Ahab, telling biographer Barbara Leaming, “I have a feeling I didn’t play it very well, but I was enormously impressed by the actor who was playing Starbuck (McGoohan), and I kept thinking how good he would be in the part of Ahab.”
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