Orson's theatre work

[colwood]

Have any of Orson's theatre productions, particularly the Voodoo Macbeth or the Fascist Julius Ceasar, ever been revived, whether in the Broadway arena (Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway) or in regional theater?

[Jeff Wilson]

Moby Dick: Rehearsed and The Cradle Will Rock are sometimes revived, often by regional companies. I've read of a couple productions of Caesar that generally adapted its style, although I don't think anyone has mounted a note for note reconstruction of any of his work. Simon Callow did mount a production of Chimes at Midnight a few years ago, with himself in the lead, IIRC.

[mteal]

I remember reading a review of that Callow production of Chimes, which was somewhat biased in the sense that it didn't like the liberties that Welles had taken with the original plays. If memory serves me correctly, I believe Kieth Baxter played Henry IV.

[ToddBaesen]

From his interview comments it seems like theater director Jack Marshall in Virginia is a big fan of Welles theater work. Too bad his mandate for doing only American plays prevents him for attempting to revive any of the Shakespeare productions that Welles directed.

In any case, thanks to Leslie for the nice interview regarding the revival of NATIVE SON.

[ToddBaesen]

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Reading Jeff's post from 2001 about Simon Callow playing Falstaff was something of a shock to me, since MTeal suggested that Keith Baxter was also in the production.

I figured he must have been confusing the Welles movie with the play, but a little research confirmed that Keith Baxter was indeed in the production, playing King Henry IV, John Gielgud's old part from the Welles directed movie.

Simon Callow, plays Falstaff, while Tam Williams played Keith Baxter's role in the movie of Prince Hal. According to the Chichester 1998 Festival Season press release, the production was based on Welles script for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT and directed by Patrick Garland:

"The third play is a new production of Chimes at Midnight, conceived and arranged by Orson Welles, adapted from Shakespeare's Henry IV (parts one and two) and Henry V. Simon Callow, in his premiere performance in Chichester, leads the 25-strong cast. Callow, an accomplished stage and film actor, recently tried his hand at directing of Snoo Wilson's HRH in the West End. This is the first major presentation of Chimes at Midnight in over 30 years. It runs 11 August (previews from 5 August) to 5 September (1998)."

---

What a night in the theater that must have been!

I can't imagine anyone who knows and loves Welles's film of FALSTAFF not being impressed by seeing Mr. Baxter and Mr. Callow in a production based on a film by Orson Welles!

Paul Tayor of the UK INDEPENDENT, however, appears to have been less then thrilled. Here is his review of the play:


Theatre: "I know thee and I know thee not, old man."
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT at the CHICHESTER FESTIVAL

By Paul Taylor

13 August 1998

KEITH BAXTER played Hal in both the original stage version and the 1965 movie of Chimes at Midnight. In Patrick Garland's revival at Chichester, he impressively graduates from the role of the wanton, calculating Prince to that of Hal's careworn, sickly father, Henry IV. That route of promotion is itself perhaps eloquent about the themes of the piece.

Orson Welles's film adaptation of two of Shakespeare's Henry plays compresses them so as to throw even greater emphasis on the contention between Hal's two father figures - his blood father, the cold, controlling and oppressive King, and his surrogate father, the permissive, dissolute, witty Falstaff - for the love and soul of the young heir.

An actor who plays Hal in his youth is a good deal more likely to age into a Henry IV than into the fat knight, a process parallel to that in the play, where Falstaff is always fated to be just an essential enriching phase that Hal needs to pass through before accepting the humanly narrowing destiny of Kingship.

At Chichester, Falstaff is played by Orson Welles's biographer, Simon Callow, himself an outsize personality and fertile wit. The performance he gives here, though, is stronger on the fruity, booming bombast and the airy, charmingly self-convinced delivery of barefaced whoppers than it is on suggesting any deeper hinterland to the character.

As the title indicates, there's an elegiac thrust to the play which ends with the scene from Henry IV where the fat knight's death, babbling of green fields, is touchingly reported, just as Pistol, Nym and Bardolph are about to embark for the war in France. But even a piece specifically re-shaped as a celebration of Falstaff could afford to take a more candid look at his darker side than we get here.

The ugliness in his misdeeds is not allowed to complicate our appreciation of their comic outrageousness. We could be watching a scapegrace who had roughly the same moral complexity and capacity for reflection on his actions as Mr Toad.

And the nature of Falstaff's emotional bond with Hal is under-explored. When Robert Stephens played the character at Stratford as a more brooding, Rembrandtesque figure than usual, you kept seeing that Hal was the only thing that stood between Falstaff and a lonely, childless old age. This came out even in bantering moments.

Delivering these lines from Falstaff's famous eulogy on the virtues of drink, "If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and addict themselves to sack," Stephens voice broke on the first phrase, bringing firmly home the bleak fact that the soon-to-turn Prince Hal is the nearest person to a son he'll ever get.

Garland's fluently staged, but not very searching, production needs more subtleties of that order, particularly given the increased stress on this subject in Chimes.

Tam Williams, who boasts the looks and presence of someone who could make a packet fronting a Boyzone-type band, is a vivid, youthfully insecure Hal. For his headstrong rival, Hotspur, Tristan Gemmill has the right impatient, scornful charisma that makes such a meal of the character's speech impediment, it comes to seem like his determining feature.

There are attractive cameos in the play (especially from Sarah Badel as Mistress Quickly), but the production is too generalised.

Afterwards I overheard a Chichester matron greeting her friends. "Well," she said, groping for the right word. "That was rather, er, fun." And not much else, alas.

[Glenn Anders]

Todd: You might want to remember, too, the 1939 Welles/Theater Guild production of Five Kings, from which FALSTAFF is to some degree an adaptation (an adaptation of an adaptation, if you will). Welles, with no recognized son of his own, seems to have spent a lot of time reflecting upon being an inadequate son, being a protegee -- satisfactory and otherwise -- of various mentors, and being a sometime less than adequate mentor to others.

The theme might be a subject for exploration.

Glenn