Charles Laughton Page 5

  Perhaps the tendency of the reviews to praise the performance at the expense of the play may have had something to do with it. ‘To him alone, I think,’ said Theatre World, ‘lies the success of the play … his performance is superb … a little podgy man, childishly simple, possessing that dry sense of humour peculiar to the English, and above all that quality of accepting the most impossible situation with a sangfroid which is both the envy and the despair of all other nationalities.’ The little man was a Laughton speciality, here receiving its first outing. His choosing to do so via an impersonation of Arnold Bennett is truly surprising, even to the critic of Theatre World. ‘That this is deliciously amusing is not to be denied, but I am inclined to think that it detracts a little from the character of Mr Prohack.’

  It is a curious thing for Laughton to have done, but it worked. To what extent did he intend it as a send-up of the mildly pompous Bennett? If so, that was very bold – the twenty-seven-year-old tyro from Scarborough taking on the world-famous author. Again, he seems almost to have courted the sack. Did Komisarjevsky abet him in it? There was a streak of barefaced cheek in his character, but this was going to lengths. No, it seems more likely that this was the only way he could make the thing work. Bennett, in a letter to his coauthor, says that Laughton was ‘very bad and wrong at all the later rehearsals.’ The play is a quirky fable of capitalism; the man who inherits a half a million dollars is a genial, wry, breakfast-table philosopher, humorously bland. It may have been elusive for Laughton: no murk, no depths, no pressure within. And then, puzzling away at how to find this man in himself, he may have looked up in rehearsal and seen him staring him in the face. Authors are often very useful at giving clues to their own plays: not by explaining them, but simply by being themselves. Obviously, everything fell into place the moment he hit on the notion. It released him. ‘Any middling actor can be senile and grotesque; Mr Laughton, invited to parody one of his authors, presented a marvellously tempered portrait, which was truthful to look and twinkle, yet showed a good deal of the man behind these natural defences,’ said Agate. If you imitate the outer life of someone with sufficient connexion, you sometimes get an inner life for nothing; it just pops up of its own accord. ‘As a technical feat the performance was immense. Mr Laughton acted with his whole body, and when you thought that facial expression and vocal intonation were exhausted, eked out these means with legs analytical, elucidatory, rhapsodical. To see him lean back on a sofa and keep the wit going with fat calves and lean slippers as a juggler does a ball – this was acting. But I must be careful,’ Agate wisely concludes, ‘or I shall fall into a panegyric.’

  Theatre World, in its staider way, summed up: ‘It is a performance of exceptional artistry; one which at last lifts Mr Laughton to the front rank of actors.’

  At last. After eighteen whole months.

  Prohack brought Charles not merely fame (even notoriety): it gave him the central relationship of his life, with the pert, quirky young actress playing his secretary; Elsa Lanchester.

  She was 25, with a reputation for outrageous cabaret at the club run by herself and two friends, the Cave of Harmony. There she had given performances of ‘Please sell no more drink to my father’ and ‘I’ve just danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’, which had brought her great celebrity. Agate had singled her out on several occasions. Prohack, in which she played Laughton’s secretary, was part of a general move towards ‘legitimate’ theatre. Her interest in Charles Laughton was part of a move towards legitimacy of a deeper kind.

  ‘Outrageous’ is the inescapable word for Elsa Lanchester at this time: the consciously Bohemian, red-headed elfin child of almost comically radical Irish-Marxist-Suffragette parents, she had trained with Isadora Duncan (whom she loathed), taught dance at the age of 13, run a children’s theatre, posed for ‘artistic’ nude photographs, been a hired ‘co-respondent’ in divorce cases, and done snake dancing with the portly Ida Barr (‘Ida Barr? ’Ide a pub, more like.’) ‘I did not know for one moment that I had some sort of compulsion to be different,’ she writes.

  But she did know that the brittleness of her social and emotional life ‘was beginning to add up to despair within myself.’ So when she got to know Charles – slowly, shyly on both their parts – she saw that he might offer an escape route. The strongest intimation that this might be so came from the completely unstrained silence that fell between them at an early meeting. Her bright provocations and his self-conscious tortuousnesses fell away into speechless security. A symptom of deep friendship – but not necessarily of sexual and emotional relationship.

  This nonetheless followed. The relief of the new arrangement must have been overwhelming for Charles. A friend; a companion; someone to confide in; someone to lavish his attentions on – all complete novelties for him. She writes of the hours in bed at night, talking, talking, till dawn. Of his interest in her appearance. He took an active hand in selecting her wardrobe. She submitted because his eye was so good, even though his taste was far from what she would, till meeting him, have chosen for herself.

  She had to pass the test of meeting his mother (who had advised him never to marry an actress, or a red-head. Elsa of course was both). She did so by dint of making the old lady laugh.

  They lived separately for some while. She had an abortion. They moved to a flat in Dean Street, in Karl Marx’s old house (which must have pleased her parents, if not his).

  In other words, Charles was now in life. He was doing the things other people did.

  After Prohack, came his startling performance in A Man with Red Hair, the Hugh Walpole shocker, adapted by Benn Levy. Laughton’s last collaboration with Komisarjevsky, it is the first of his monster-villains. ‘His entrance is like the first whiff of poison-gas we were once familiar with. A thing so evil and malignant that it can paralyse one’s power to combat it by its apparent harmlessness, and yet so deadly if not grappled with at once. By what witchcraft Mr Laughton produces the effect, I don’t know.’ The critic of Theatre World, February 1927, knew how to enthuse. But his account is precise in its description of Laughton’s aims. To invoke that inner state – to bring that murk actually onto the stage – was his task. He was, then and later, uninterested in psychology. He was not interested (either for himself or his characters) in the why of human action; only the what concerned him. He wanted to show what human beings were, to offer the raw material: not to explain it. Twenty years later, this made him an ideal collaborator for Brecht. But it is dead against the drift of acting in the twentieth century, where ‘interpretation’, both in directing and acting, has been the watchword: what does this character’s behaviour mean? – not what is it? What is the play about? – never what is it?

  It is of course a priceless gift to critics, whose analysis of ideas is so far in advance of their powers of description.

  In a magnificent letter of rage at the inadequacy of her performance of Lady Macbeth (to Laughton’s Thane) James Bridie offered the following opinion to Flora Robson, one of the most radical statements about acting ever made: ‘You are to stop being psychological – you know nothing about it, and it is a very technical job – when you are acting, develop a reflex system that flashes out the effect without the process of thought coming into the business at all … your job is to flick Lady Macbeth through your soul faster than thought and explain what you did after, if you can be bothered.’

  Laughton was concerned to ‘flick his characters through his soul’, very much so. This method has a disadvantage over the interpretative method, however: it is very costly in soul.

  Hugh Walpole’s novel, and the play that Benn Levy made out of it, are exercises in Schadenfreude, literary experiments, explorations of how far one can really go. The situation is preposterous, the characters paper-thin, and the central, the eponymous, figure, Mr Crispin, is a contrived monster of sadistic revenge, scourging the world for his lack of beauty. But if he were real? If such a person really existed …? These are the
questions Laughton asked, and the resulting performance shook people to the marrow. ‘His performance was a danse macabre rendered by a human invertebrate, whose sagging flesh would somehow shape itself into all manner of harsh angles and gibbet-like postures’, wrote Ivor Brown in The Saturday Review. The Times said, ‘Mr Laughton’s acting we are bound to admire, but we owe an evening of something very near misery to its skill.’ St John Irvine, in The Observer: ‘a very gargoyle of obscene desires. The sheer ability of his acting cannot easily be estimated.’

  In the climactic scene of the third act, when Crispin has bound and gagged his victims, he reveals his soul: ‘You have laughed at me, mocked me, insulted me – you and all the world: but now you are mine, to do with as I will. An old, fat, ugly man, and two fine young ones. I prick you and you shall bleed. I spit on you and you shall bow your heads. I can say ‘Crawl’ and you will crawl, ‘Dance’ and you will dance. I, the ludicrous creature that I am, have absolute power over the three of you … I can do whatever I like with you … the last shame, the last indignity, the uttermost pain.’ Grand Guignol? Evidently. London was not unfamiliar with the genre: Sybil Thorndike had led a season of macabre, violent, spooky plays under that title at the Little Theatre some years before – but (as Sybil’s presence in the cast more or less guaranteed) they were supposed to be tremendous fun. This was something rather different. Earlier in the play, Crispin talks to his American visitor about his ‘philosophy of life: a little theory that my father handed on to me … my father used constantly to wonder whether it would be an entertaining experiment to cut my heart out. I think he eventually decided against it, however, on the grounds that it would mean the end of other and still more entertaining experiments … he stripped me and beat me till I bled. He wanted, he said, for my own good, to acquaint me with the heart, the innermost heart of life; and to understand life one must learn to suffer pain. Then if one could suffer pain enough, one could be as God. I went to Westminster School and they all mocked me – my hair, my body, my difference – yes, my difference. I was different from them all, I was different from my father, different from all the world, and I was glad that I was different. I hugged my difference. Different … different … different.’

  Here were obviously many points of contact for Laughton. Another was art: Crispin is an aesthete. As he talks, he picks up a Rembrandt engraving: ‘This is one of the most beautiful things of its kind that man has ever made, and I – am I not one of the ugliest things that men have ever laughed at? But do you see my power over it? I have it in my hands. It is mine. It is mine. I can destroy it in one instant (He tears it to shreds.) You must forgive my – my lack of reticence. It is just my little theory, you understand – to be above these things. – What would happen to me if I surrendered to all that beauty?’

  Laughton made all this that could so easily have been melodrama, real; so real, that there was a serious move by the London Public Morality Council to have the play stopped: ‘We are in possession of a volume of medical evidence that supports our view that the play should not be performed in public.’ Charles gave an interview saying that he couldn’t understand how it had passed the censor: ‘I can only conclude that he didn’t realise its nature.’ Nor, according to a piece he wrote in The Weekend Review a couple of years later, did the author. ‘My hero (or villain as you prefer) had been intended originally as a puppet twopence-coloured. I never dreamed that anyone could take him seriously. Laughton took him very seriously indeed, not for my sake or the play’s sake, but simply because he had the clay in his hands, and must add a pinch here, make a false eyebrow there, lengthen the nose, twist the mouth, knowing that as he did so, a created figure, waiting and long imprisoned, would be liberated and escape to the chimney pots like a ghost in Stravinsky’s ballet. Had the rehearsals continued another month, heaven knows what my Crispin would have grown to. Laughton works on his part as a novelist does on a novel or a painter on a picture, and he is at his best, as I believe Henry Irving was, when he has almost nothing to work on.’

  This magnificent account of the actor as creator only stops short of asking where the contents with which he endows the ‘almost nothing’ come from. ‘“It certainly will be a relief not to have to turn myself into a kind of psychological compendium every night,” said the man with red hair to the Daily Sketch. “No one has the stamina to go on playing such a part for long.” Charles Laughton, who made such a terrible figure in the title role of the play at the Little, took off his red wig. “The part attracted me, but it has been a terrific strain. At first it used to upset me thoroughly and make me all jumpy and although I have become inured to that by now, the interpretation makes such heavy demands upon one’s physical and nervous energies that I feel I must have a rest.”’

  The element that informed his Crispin in A Man with Red Hair was an element present in most of his performances: confessional. Laughton was always publicly owning up to something, usually something rather unpleasant. As he paraded his (to him) physically ugly body before the public, so he thrust his (to him) morally and emotionally ugly soul at them.

  This may have had a purging effect for him. As important, however, was its acknowledgement of an inner self, summoning repressed and shapeless desires and instincts out of the shadows and onto the stage. ‘They may not be very nice, but they’re mine!’

  The paradox is that by putting them on the stage, firstly, they become attractive, by the usual mechanism by which anything done with conviction on the stage becomes attractive, and secondly, they become less real.

  Also, Laughton was a wonderfully gifted actor. There was nothing raw about his work. The unshapely physique proved to be capable of mercurial movements – always a bewitching sight, the swift fat man propelled across the stage by the slim legs and dainty, well-formed feet later revealed in The Private Life of Henry VIII – and complete transformations; the voice, impaired by poison gas and bedevilled by easily inflamed tonsils, was not reliable, not up to all that its owner demanded of it, but it was resonant, with a range from cellos to trombones (no trumpets, nor ever would be. Double basses and even Wagner tubas later joined the band); an ear that was good without being great (fortunately for him: perfect mimicry is a terrible curse for a creative actor: no great actor has ever possessed it); and an instinct for phrasing, for handling the span of a speech and directing its energy towards the crucial words.

  Every review he received on the London stage singled him out for special mention, frequently describing him as the main and sometimes only reason for seeing the play. It’s hard to judge at this distance, but there is a possibility that Laughton’s performances were in the nature of solo efforts, devised during long and tortured hours of self-communion without the participation of his fellow-players, and delivered more to the audience than to them. It is possible that that is what the lonely, obsessed man did. The kind of relaxation that makes team-playing possible would have been hard for him to come by. There is a sense of this sometimes in the films. If so, it is a grave fault. Laurence Olivier’s advice ‘not to lose yourself in the other actors’ is wise, and courteous to the audience, but not to give anything to the other actors defeats them, you, the audience and the play. Few critics complained that Laughton had done that; there is, however, a single odd press report, in the Express, April 1928, which says: ‘The eulogy Charles Laughton has received has given great offence to the sacred ring into which talent finds it so hard to enter … most actors at rehearsals act for the producer, Mr Laughton waits.’

  1928 was as full as its predecessor. Apart from the Walpole run, Charles appeared for two nights in The Making of an Immortal, in which he played Ben Jonson to Sybil Thorndike’s Elizabeth I (we that are young shall not see such sights) and then, briefly, he incarnated, as the Americans say, Hercule Poirot (another delectable thought). ‘Of course it is Mr Laughton’s incomparably fine performance of M Poirot that will draw London to the Prince of Wales Theatre.’ The play was Alibi (based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), and it was produc
ed by Gerald du Maurier, who may have made some contribution to what ‘CBH’ in Theatre World described as ‘a piece of acting perhaps more finely polished … (than his Crispin) … his portrait of M Poirot is still more finished.’

  Hugh Walpole as it happens, describes his performance, in the same article in which he defines him as ‘not our finest actor, far from it … there are many who are, I think, in the general round at present finer actors. But he is our supreme creator’: ‘Alibi had a dreadfully bad first act, as clumsy and maladroit an affair as I can remember, but Laughton was terrific from his first entrance, not only in make-up – of which he is sometimes a master and sometimes not – but also in all the hints he gave you of his strange off-adventures. The plot that the detective had to unravel was less than nothing; he was never more thrilling than in the last act, when, his problem solved, with no beauty, no voice, no kind of charm, he made love to a pretty girl. The scene should have been revolting. You should have pitied the girl and agonised for her escape, but in truth you felt that she was fortunate to have a chance to live with so adventurous a spirit. She would find, you felt, everything bad and everything good in this man. She would have her shocks, she would have enchanting hours.’

  Nothing is recorded of Laughton’s encounter with his idol, du Maurier: except one fascinating anecdote retailed by Emlyn Williams. At the outset of the production, du Maurier asked him: ‘Laughton, are you a bugger?’ To which Laughton stammeringly replied: ‘N – no, Sir Gerald. Are you?’