(Editor’s note: Brice Stratford attended the European premiere of “Orson’s Shadow” at London’s Southwark Playhouse. It continues its run through July 25.)
By BRICE STRATFORD
LONDON – Austin Pendleton wrote Orson’s Shadow as, apparently, a semi-penance for badmouthing him to the press during the filming of Catch 22 (in which they both appeared). This two-week period was the only contact Pendleton had with Welles, and aside from tea with Vivien Leigh at a hotel in 1962 he’s met none of the other people who feature in his play.
It covers the period before and during rehearsals for Welles’ production of The Rhinoceros at the Royal Court in 1960, which starred Laurence Olivier and his soon-to-be third wife Joan Plowright. We explore Orson’s failing luck artistically, the nature of ego and performance, his own decline, as well as the decline of Olivier’s marriage to Vivien Leigh, and the rising affair with Plowright. The play is inspired by the historical events, and openly fictionalises them; Kenneth Tynan is depicted (a complete fiction) as not only responsible for the mounting of the play and the choice of the director, but as taking the role of dramaturge on the production, present for rehearsals.
Tynan (Edward Bennett) begins the play as narrator, and for me the production was at it’s best in these moments of metatheatricality, where the characters existed as themselves free from the confines of time and naturalism (specifically in the wonderful ending, which I’ll come to). Welles is introduced first by his disembodied voice, entering boldly whilst his oversized body remains off-stage, and the back-and-forth between Sean (Orson’s dogsbody assistant, a generally annoying character played by Ciaran O’Brien) and Tynan was handled well, with Welles too insecure to enter after a poorly received performance of his stage Chimes at Midnight in Dublin.
Welles is an extraordinarily difficult (perhaps impossible) character to play completely. The only man who could truly play it was Welles himself, and even then it cost him his life. His were such mellifluous personas, and he wore so many masks, weaved so many myths – the best (I think) that can be hoped for is to express an aspect of Welles, a version of him. This is something John Hodgkinson achieves. Vocally, he replicates Welles’ intonation, rhythym and style of speech perfectly – though (and this is no judgement on him) frustratingly his register is just too high; as Welles himself said, it’s a matter of dimensions. That great broad chest cannot be replicated, no matter how much effort is put into it during rehearsals. Physically too Hodgkinson does an excellent job of embodying the man, inhabiting his gestures, movement and gait exceptionally, and managing to make a difficult fat suit seem perfectly believable (though, I must say, I did miss the breadth of Welles’ shoulders); admirable work from both Hodgkinson and Simon Pittman, the Movement Director. Though it took Hodgkinson a little time to warm into the part, once he had done this was an excellent portrayal. At times the character did veer too heavily into impressions of the shallow (or not so shallow) public personas Welles created, but this was primarily down to script and not performance; furthermore, the difficulty of uniting those extraordinary public faces (“so many of me and so few of you”) not only with each other, but also with a real human version of the man and with the literal body of the performer, is something that really cannot be overstated. Welles, so larger than larger than life, is a mountain of a character to climb, more so than the others depicted, Olivier included.
Though my focus is obviously on Welles, this was no one man show. Adrian Lukis as Olivier was excellent – though an extreme and stylized character he was always a complete human being, never falling to empty mimicry. Louise Ford and Gina Bellman as Joan Plowright and Vivien Leigh, respectively, were especially good. Ford’s less mannered, more understated portrayal of Plowright perfectly reflected the new style of acting and of theatre that the character represents, and Bellman’s extraordinary moments of breakdown are a masterclass in taking a performance right to the edge, but never letting it fall. A particularly powerful and unexpected moment comes when Olivier asks Plowright about their first meeting (“we despised you”) – the silence that followed was like a slap to the face. Edward Bennet does a good, strong job as a young Kenneth Tynan, though at times I would have liked to see a little more sharpness, more acidity to him – his position in the play, however, makes this difficult. Though his coughing fits seemed at times a little forced, his performance in the final scene was beautiful, and his closing of the show is something I cannot imagine having been done better.
The play itself is an odd, interesting and vaguely unwieldy piece. Though it references the awkward expositionary devices inherent to such real-life dramatisations right from the start (and does so very well and very amusingly – Tynan the critic criticising the play that he’s a lead character in) it is still guilty of them. This sort of forced exposition (constantly recounting past notable projects, well worn anecdotes and quotations, all of it a little revisionist and collectively skewed) appears intermittently throughout, and really isn’t necessary. The strength of the play (any play) is in the human drama, not in the expression of biographical fact. This is a truth that director Alice Hamilton clearly understands; where the script allows her she has teased out intimate, honest depictions of the characters onstage, whilst also allowing them to play symbolic functions in a truly theatrical sense.
Pendleton’s script focuses too heavily on Olivier and Welles as they presented themselves to the media and as popular history depicts them, rather than Olivier and Welles as they actually were or might have been. Both crafted such tantalising public images that of course it’s tempting for any playwright to incorporate much of them, but in doing so the real depth of them both is sacrificed, and the play can only be the weaker for it. I was not a fan of the “Sean” character, an entirely expositionary entity who ran around after Welles, doing his bidding and helping scenes progress from A to B.
These criticisms are relatively minor, however. There is much of value in the play, regardless of the flaws, and the performances all contained images of greatness. If one has any interest in the people, culture and time that this piece conveys there is plenty to enjoy. Hamilton’s use of space and set is economical and impressive, her staging in the round giving the piece a grounded, intimate sense of storytelling that sits well with Welles’ own later style and approach. The final scene, in which Tynan, now omniscient narrator, tells each of the characters how the world remembers them, and what the rest of their lives produced, is so very touching. As he told Welles about the film he will makes of Chimes at Midnight, like an angel of mercy (“Orson, it’s beautiful”), a tear ran down my cheek. As he delivers the final lines of the play, in this tender atmosphere of nostalgia, of life and of loss, I found it impossible not to beat my hands together in grateful applause, along with all the rest.
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