Me, Simon and Orson Welles
By an odd coincidence, I’d been reading Simon Callow’s second volume of his Orson Welles biography when I was invited to a BAFTA screener of the new film, Me and Orson Welles, released here in December.
It’s a fascinating and very well acted movie, directed by Richard Linklater, which tells the story of a young high school student, played by Zac Efron, who gets caught up in Welles’s famous 1937 Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar and falls in love with one of the secretarial staff, played by Claire Danes, who is plotting her next career move.
The performance of Welles himself (the boy genius was twenty-two at the time) by Christian Mackay is quite astounding — gravid and authoritative, sensual and mercurial — but above all, this is a great film about the theatre.
Maybe Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York was more cinematically challenging in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrait of a disintegrating theatrical director entrapped in his own Pirandellian creation, but not since Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney “putting on a show” in Babes in Arms has there been such a purely enjoyable film about the theatrical process.
And British actors sare notably well fetaured. Ben Chaplin is wonderful as a doubting George Colouris, swept along on Welles’s ego as he nervously prepares to play Antony to the director’s Brutus; Eddie Marsan is John Houseman, Welles’s Mercury Theatre co-director; Kelly Reilly is a sexy Portia (you can just tell she’s slept with Welles, says Cinna the Poet) told to remove all her jewellery at the final rehearsal; and Leo Bill plays Cinna, brilliantly, like an anxious younger cousin of John Turturro.
Our own Dick Pope is director of photography, Jools Holland is responsible for the big band music and Janie Dee pops up in one little scene as Zac Efron’s mother.
But the main business is the recreation of this modern-dress Caesar, with its bare stage, daring lighting plot, backstage squabbles and notable mis-en-scene, for instance the assassination of Caesar as a human pass-the-parcel along a diagonal of daggers-drawn conspirators until he ends up in Welles’s downstage arms: “Et tu, Brute.”
One detail missing from the story, beautifully recounted in Callow’s first Welles tome, which has a whole chapter devoted to the production, is the intervention of the New York Post critic John Mason Brown suggesting they end the play with Antony’s eulogy for Brutus. And do you know what? They followed the critic’s advice!
For this was a “themes from” Julius Caesar, a cut-up Caesar, if not a cut-price Caesar, long before Charles Marowitz started re-packaging the Bard, but not long after several other modern dress, modern fascism, interpretations; Welles was no great innovator.
Many key characters were cut from the play, but no-one crucial. I nearly fell off my chair this morning when I read a review in the Telegraph of the RSC’s new Twelfth Night which makes no mention of Viola, or the actress who plays her.
How brilliant and radical that production must be, I thought to myself, until I saw that Richard Wilson was playing Malvolio; and that sounds like a surprise-free performance you can imagine in almost every particular before you see it.
Welles may have cut Lepidus and several other minor roles, and once left “To be, or not to be” out of Hamlet, partly to epater le bourgeois; but I doubt if he’d have cut Viola from Twelfth Night, even in the truncated form he produced as a student.
Another thing you get from the film is the manner in which Welles rode roughshod over his collaborators, rather like Brecht did, and, to a lesser extent, Ken Campbell.
These charismatic and impatiently proactive theatre makers saw nothing in the creation of their work, or in other peoples’ part in it, except the end result, so that even their own substantial egos are somehow subsumed in the greater cause.
In Welles’case, of course, as Callow makes so abundantly clear in his second volume, the cause was in actual fact an expression of the ego in the first place. But it is a fact that nothing stupendous happens in the theatre without such flagrancy. Or such a personality.