Charles Laughton (5 page)

Under
Acting
the report said, ‘Laughton is sometimes almost brilliant. He is handicapped and he knows it. He’ll persevere and prosper.’ And George Bernard Shaw, trustee of the Academy, had come to Gower Street to see scenes from
Pygmalion
, and went backstage to see Laughton. ‘You were perfectly dreadful as Higgins,’ he said, ‘but I predict a brilliant career for you within the year.’

After the graduation performance (apart from Sganarelle he played Falstaff, amongst others) he won the Bancroft gold medal, awarded to him by a distinguished panel of practising and renowned players: Irene Vanburgh, Henry Ainley and Allan Aynesworth. It was presented to him by Sybil Thorndike on June 6th; as he went to collect it, Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson,
acteur noble
supreme, was heard to murmur: ‘It’s unkind. He hasn’t a hope in hell of ever working, looking the way he does.’ In fact, he had taken the morning off from rehearsals of his second professional engagement in order to collect the prize; and within six months, he was playing a sizeable cameo opposite the most famous romantic actor of the day, in the West End, in a production by the most exciting director in England. After what must have seemed an interminable limbo of waiting for his life to begin, he was hurtling down the tracks.

First Work

CHARLES OWED HIS
first job to Theodore Komisarjevsky, who had worked with him on
commedia dell’arte
scenes at RADA, and who cast him as Osip in his production of Gogol’s
The Government Inspector
at the Barnes Theatre (Manager Philip Ridgeway, Business Manager Binkie Beaumont). Claude Rains was Khlestakov and he and the production were acclaimed. Charles’ debut was thus on 26 April, 1926. A few days later, he received his first review in a national newspaper: he was thought to be ‘good’, and he was spelt Loughton.

The Barnes Theatre, a converted cinema, had a high reputation and no money; one of the network of ‘little theatres’ that constituted
London’s
experimental theatres, a sort of Fringe
avant la lettre
, performing little known European plays in daring productions. West End actors like Claude Rains and Martita Hunt were quite willing to appear for next to nothing for a few weeks, particularly if the producer was ‘Komis’. Norman Marshall wrote: ‘I have seen nothing more lovely in the theatre than the stage pictures Komisarjevsky created on that cramped little stage at Barnes.’

It was extraordinarily lucky for Laughton that his first job should be with this brilliant, combative
homme du théâtre
, rather than some humdrum rep producer, or West End Stage Manager – a breed wittily despised by Komisarjevsky, inventor, or at any rate definer, of ‘Synthetic Theatre’: theatre in which all the elements of production merged, none dominating. His visual and stylistic audacity had startled the English public, and would do so even more in his Stratford Shakespeares; but he never forgot the significance of the actor: ‘the “inside” of an actor, call it “soul” or “consciousness”, or whatever you like, is a very complicated and delicate instrument. That instrument is what matters most on stage, and only an extremely sensitive and careful producer can play on it without hurting the freshness of the actor’s conception of the part and his own creation of it. The furniture, every detail on the stage, serve the same purpose as the sets, i.e., to suit the acting, and not vice-versa.’

Komis’ brilliance had been evident from the beginning when, in Russia, he had started his career in the theatre as a designer. When his sister Vera Komisarjevskaya parted ways with Meyerhold, she invited – commanded, more accurately – her young brother Fyodor to take his place, and he directed her and her company for some months with great success. He left Russia at the time of the Revolution, and then proceeded to dazzle Europe with his sometimes perverse audacity. The visual sophistication and sense of the expressive potential of theatre caused sensations wherever they were seen. His fellow-artists (and that is how he regarded them) were carried away, not only by the excitement of his ideas, but by his great personal charm – especially the ladies, many of whom he married (and many more of whom he didn’t: ‘Come-and-seduce-me’ was his nickname, according to John Gielgud). Innovative in everything he touched – the cinema interiors he designed for Sidney Bernstein’s Granada chain, and the auditorium of the Phoenix Theatre, are typically original fantasies – he was the last person in the world to be rigid in his notions of casting. Talent was talent. Laughton was clearly bursting with it, and he trusted him.

To encounter such a luxury in one’s first job – to be playing moreover with gifted and creative actors wearing their stardom lightly, not pulling rank or flaunting their wealth – was an invaluable beginning. At Barnes, Komis cast him as Solyony in
Three Sisters
and as the ‘twenty-thousand-disasters’, Yepikhodov, in
The Cherry Orchard
. This performance was remembered by Alan Dent nearly forty years later: ‘I went round Bloomsbury telling everyone I had got to know about an astonishing, new, young, plump comedian I had just happened to see … I have never since beheld a funnier or more melancholy performance of this peculiarly difficult because intensely Russian character.’ And Ernest Short reported: ‘He makes the moonstruck clerk an unforgettable mixture of pathos and fun.’

Komisarjevsky played fairy godfather to Laughton during these first formative months, and when he came to direct Molnar’s
Liliom
with Ivor Novello, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, he cast Laughton in a small part – his West End début. But even better was to follow. The substantial part of Ficsur the pickpocket, ‘Liliom’s evil genius’, fell vacant during rehearsals. Komis promoted Laughton. For a while dissatisfaction was expressed by certain members of the cast. Komis indicated that if Laughton left, so would he. Both stayed, and Charles had a big success: ‘a most excellent piece of rascality from that promising actor, Mr Charles Laughton’, wrote the
Telegraph
. C. B. Cochran, the impresario, one of the biggest men in the theatre of his day, knew that the unknown lad playing the pickpocket was ‘the real thing’. Novello, on the other hand, (and perhaps he’d intuitively sensed this when he tried to get rid of Laughton), was dismissed as stagey and self-conscious. It was a clash of worlds. At that time, then, Laughton was the coming man.

Ficsur in
Liliom
is the first Laughton creation of which we have any account. To get the part right, he went down to the docks and studied pickpockets, for hours on end. Since at least the time of Lope de Vega, actors have been immersing themselves in the reality to which their roles refer. It makes for more interesting acting. It has nothing necessarily to do with ‘truth’, authenticity, or sociology. Firstly, you work so much better if you have a clear idea in your mind of what you’re playing; secondly, absorbing the sensations of a model for a character can release all kinds of things in you that can take you by surprise, and bear no resemblance to the original model. It’s a way of breaking the patterns embedded in your muscles and brain-cells.

Laughton was more interested in increasing the expressive potential of what he did than in naturalism; but he was also very concerned
to
show
something to the audience. Hence the somewhat ‘demonstrated’ nature of his acting. Hence also its brilliant clarity and economy.

The run of
Liliom
was short; but for Laughton it was straight on to the next one. At this crucial moment, he was given more or less continuous employment in a variety of parts, in a variety of theatres, with full metropolitan exposure. He could so easily have gone into rep, been typed, developed into a heavy, become conventional. Instead he was allowed to grow in ideal conditions. Edith Evans attributed her growth to not having followed the repertory route: ‘I should have caught all the tricks – the bad tricks of the provincial theatre of those days. I’d have picked them up quicker than anybody. I was very imitative indeed. And the Almighty saw fit to start me off with some of the best actors in London.’ So with Charles.

In his next role, his co-star (or rather star, because his part was not substantial) was the very Sybil Thorndike who, seven months before, had handed him his Gold Medal. The play was
The Greater Love
, by that distinguished proselyte of the new drama, J. B. Fagan. This play was not, however, of the new drama; it was the old drama, with a vengeance. ‘A jolly good play as a straightforward piece of non-educative romance’, as Sybil’s biographer, her son, John Casson, calls it; ‘a story of intrigue and “love will conquer all” set in pre-revolutionary Russia.’ From James Agate, it provoked a cascade of praise for Charles that, to any lesser spirits than Sybil and Lewis, who was directing, might have provoked a certain sourness. ‘And now,’ he says, in the middle of describing the third act, ‘I must pause to say something about that very remarkable young actor, Mr Charles Laughton. Mr Laughton has played, to my knowledge, only three parts in London – the clerk in
The Cherry Orchard
, the wastrel in
Liliom
, and now this Russian governor. To my knowledge, I say, but only because of the programme. In each part this actor has been at once superb and unrecognisable, achieving his differences not by inessential wiggery but by seizing the essence of the character and making his body conform. This is character-acting as the great and not the little masters of that art have always understood it. To watch this sleek, polite, overfed tyrant wake from eupeptic slumber to smile a possible assassin to exile in Siberia – that was to be told something authentic about Tsarist terror. Pleasures too refined and cruelties too barbarous were in the flutter of those sleepy eyelids, the modulations of the indolent, caressing voice, the slow-moving, velvet hands. Now I am not going to make a song about these three performances and proclaim Mr Laughton a great actor on the strength of them. But I will
say
this, that whenever he has been on the stage, my eyes have never left him, and that on Wednesday night his silent abstractions held more of Russia than all the other talkers put together. It was something of a disappointment,’ he concludes this ecstatic cul-de-sac in the main body of his review, ‘when one found the play’s
scène à faire
had passed this actor by.’ Not, perhaps, to the other actors.

They must have been very surprised indeed, because, John Casson reports, during rehearsals, Laughton had seemed so inept that the author begged Lewis to sack him. ‘Dressed in revolting, untidy clothes, forestalling ‘hippies’ by some thirty years, he was, Lewis said, impossibly difficult to produce. He wouldn’t take direction, hardly knew a line, and even when he did he mumbled them … at the dress rehearsal it seemed as if all hope could be abandoned. It was not only insignificant, which wouldn’t have mattered; he was glaringly bad, which did. ‘Well, that’s it,’ groaned Fagan, ‘he’ll spoil the show.’ And in the event, he stole it.’ This is the first intimation of the ‘eccentricity’ and ‘self-indulgence’ which were to be Laughton’s hallmarks in rehearsal. He was certainly taking a big risk: for a young, only slightly known, actor to espouse unorthodox rehearsal procedures, and, perhaps even more damaging, unorthodox sartorial choices, was to defy the conventions of the entire theatrical establishment, which, in 1927, was to take on a mighty opponent indeed. As it happens, Sybil and Lewis, of all people, were the least hidebound; they probably felt sorry for him. But he obviously came very close to being sacked. Why did he do it, then? There’s no question that he was incapable of learning his lines or speaking them intelligibly. He was very hard-working, very intelligent, and always had ‘a voice’ (his cousins remember its beauty back in Scarborough). It would appear that he was trying for something unusual, something not apparently in the part as written, some – as Agate said – essence; something to do with oppression and cruelty; something Slavonic, too. The review suggests that he brought a strange sensuality, perhaps even sexuality, to the performance. That’s a very self-conscious-making thing to do. Perhaps he was trying to hide what was brewing inside, a little embarrassed by it. It’s very tempting, surrounded by high-powered and skilful performers simply to produce an efficient result so as not to hold everyone up, so as not to draw attention to oneself. Charles appears here to have taken the alternative escape route from anxiety: to have become secret with his work. That’s not very friendly or helpful to your fellow-players, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.

What Agate, ahead as often of his colleagues, saw was that
Laughton
was doing something new, or perhaps something very old. He was re-minting acting. Original in himself, his body and his voice, he had also spent long years observing and cogitating. He had a lot to say; his language was acting, and he spoke it like no one else.

West End Star

IN 1927, THE
year after he left RADA, Charles Laughton played seven featured roles in seven new West End productions: is this a record? Clearly, he was being recognised as something special. But the significant aspect of this phenomenal year is that the work was neither routine nor rubbish. The plays, including
Naked
by Pirandello and Euripides’
Medea
(again with Sybil Thorndike), and others, by lesser hands, were all challenging and interesting. And they all had a respectable amount of rehearsal time. By the seventh play of that year,
Mr Prohack
, by one of England’s most famous
hommes de lettres
, Arnold Bennett, Laughton, playing the title role, was fully established as exciting and individual, a hot tip.

He had thus escaped the English repertory system, the touring and fit-up companies, and a large part of what ‘being in the theatre’ meant to most actors. He had never had to get a play on in three days, never had to struggle to make sense of a walk-on part, never had to work in tenth-rate plays, playing cardboard characters. Nor would he ever.

It helps to explain some of his subsequent attitudes. His work had taken place among the aristocracy of theatre talent. He had had time and quality on his side. He had never had to submit to the harsh disciplines endured by most young actors. In a sense, he hadn’t needed them. He was obsessively hard working and took the theatre very seriously indeed. Laurence Olivier has vividly described the practical-joking, let’s-get-this-show-on-the-road feeling of his rep experience. This was quite alien to Laughton, by inclination or experience. But the positive side of it – the sheer stamina, quickness of decision, the ability to paper over the cracks – the theatrical equivalent of what makes English musicians the best sight-readers in the world – none of this was part of his equipment.