![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"Inspirational" Texts for the Day #3 & 4
Jan. 5th, 2009 01:23 pmI'd borrowed the first volume from a friend and read it, but not too deeply I think, when it came out. Callow does a bit more psychoanalyzing of Welles in the first volume, some of which may be a bit of a reach (but far less so than most biographers), but he's just as often on firm ground (it becomes very VERY clear that Citizen Kane is just as much, maybe MORE, an autobiography of Orson Welles as it is an examination of William Randolph Hearst).
I personally have been compared to Welles more times than makes me comfortable. Granted, I was inspired on a lot of his career path by Kane (like so many others) and my first "serious" film book was Charles Higham's The Films of Orson Welles (bought for me around 1977 by my dad in a small bookstore connected to the Bleecker Street Cinema, when we had gone to see a midnight double-bill of Modern Times and The Great Dictator but it was sold-out -- I still have the book, though it's coverless and falling apart).
Most of the time though, the Welles comparison seems to be because I do a lot of things, am portly, and have a deep voice.
That said, the more I read about him in Callow, the more I do feel a kinship with him, and an understanding, and often not in ways that make me comfortable. Reading Callow on Welles' failings can make me stop, reread a passage, and wonder, "Uh . . . is that me, too?" So two passages that I looked at over and over again are today's "Inspirational" texts, or maybe more "Warning" texts. There may be more from this book to come - I'm only halfway through my reread of it now.
In the section on the critical response to the "Voodoo Macbeth," -- and the reviews, even the good ones (of which there are surprisingly few for this landmark production), are astonishingly snobby, shallow, closed-minded, and racist -- Callow is able to make a damned good point about Welles' work by reading between the lines of even these silly reviews. As someone who sometimes regards my job (and general strengths) as a theatre director (and artist in general) as being more in the realm of "editor," "conductor," or "arranger/orchestrator" rather than "composer" or "creator," this brought me up short:
. . . This is an assertion which is constantly made about Welles, his productions, other people's performances in his productions, and his own performances: that they lack poetry. There seems to be some truth in it. He had a passion for verse, but he wanted to eliminate Poetry from the classical theatre, considering it an obstacle to the life in the plays, a veneer that needed to be stripped away. And yet he was no realist. He wanted the majesty without the poetry, the tone without the music. What he offered instead was Orchestration; colour and sound, largely devoid either of meaning or of melody.
Hmmmn.
No, not sure this is me, or anything I'm doing, but there's enough there that's close enough to make me have to look closer at what I think I'm doing, what I'm actually doing, and any gaps there may be in between the intent and the result.
A little while later, Callow discusses Welles taking on Marlowe's Faustus, a part I quite happily played myself almost 17 years ago. I've done my share of Shakespeare, but I've never felt quite as sympatico with Shakespeare's lines in my mouth as with Marlowe's (though I prefer the plays of the former CONSIDERABLY more). The only major Shakespeare role I've played was Hamlet, quite frankly in most ways an easier role than Faustus, and while I had all the internal work down on the man, I mean I KNEW my Hamlet as a person, inside and out, I could never really get the words out quite the way I wanted -- I knew the rhythms and cadences, the meanings and intents and WHAT I was saying, but the tone and timbre escaped me . . . I wanted (and needed) to be a brass instrument (a trumpet in Act Two; I'm not sure what in Act One, something more mellow, french horn maybe), and instead I was low strings or woodwinds. I got through it okay (by the last two performances of four) but it wasn't what I wanted to be there, or should have been.
When you have one of those voices that gets you noticed and complimented just for its natural tone, and which you are naturally skilled at using in a variety of ways, you can become overconfident that your voice can do ANYTHING (you may also at first, as I did, get tired of the compliments and try to avoid using "that" voice -- when I did Faustus the director had to keep pushing me to "use the beautiful voice!" which I had begun to regard as some kind of "cheat"; I grew out of that). Of course, without the proper work, a magnificent voice can't do things it wasn't built for (after Welles told Olivier that his voice would never be deep enough to play Othello, Olivier spent a year doing vocal exercises to lower it so that he could do just that). A virtuoso bassoonist, demanded to play a passage for trumpet, will probably give you something lovely and impressive to listen to, but just not correct.
So, yes, this passage also made me think . . .
. . . As far as the verse is concerned, Welles might have been born to play Marlowe. As a Shakespearean actor, he lacked access to the pressure of the verse, and to its breathtaking variety; intelligent and beautifully spoken though his performances of Shakespeare invariably are, he is inclined to fall into a sonorous, monochromatic mode. He lacks rhythmic flexibility. What he has is superb tone and a wonderful command of legato, perfect attributes for what has been called Marlowe's 'mighty line': great arcs of verse that soar and swoop, arias independent of character or situation. This essentially rhetorical writing suits him perfectly, and he fulfils it as few other actors of our time have been able to do, a notable exception being the late Richard Burton, another rhetorical actor. Both Burton and Welles when they play Shakespeare attempt to make him rhetorical; it soon becomes dull, as if a singer were to attempt to sing Mozart like Wagner. All the bubbling and varied life becomes subdued in the attempt to make a splendid noise. Marlowe was his man.
Again, hmmmmmn. Something to think about . . .
