Orson’s Shadow
–Kenneth Tynan on Orson Welles
It’s the spring of 1960, and British drama critic and would-be impresario Kenneth Tynan has an idea. He’ll arrange for his friend Orson Welles to stage the London premiere of Eugene Ionesco’s Paris hit Rhinoceros as a vehicle for Sir Laurence Olivier. America’s most innovative and controversial director and England’s greatest and most famous actor working together for the first time–what could possibly go wrong?
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Yet Olivier agrees to the project proposed by Tynan, who’s anxious not only to help Welles but to win the post of dramaturge at Olivier’s soon-to-open National Theatre. Olivier is a superstar, but he knows he can’t rest on his laurels. His Henry V may have been the cinematic equivalent of Winston Churchill’s morale-boosting radio speeches during World War II, but after all Churchill won the war and lost the next election. Postwar audiences are flocking to a new kind of theater that Olivier barely understands–the kitchen-sink realism of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker and the existentialist absurdism of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. Rhinoceros, he thinks, might be a perfect follow-up to his successful appearance in Osborne’s The Entertainer. Even more enticing, Rhinoceros will feature Joan Plowright, Olivier’s costar in The Entertainer–and his lover, whom he hopes to marry as soon as he can divorce his manic-depressive wife, Vivien Leigh. (Plowright and Welles are old friends, it turns out: she played a black cabin boy in Welles’s otherwise all-male London stage version of Moby Dick.) So what if Welles has a troublesome reputation for unreliability and a penchant for gimmicky productions whose technical effects overshadow the actors? (The title Orson’s Shadow refers to a lighting effect in Moby Dick in which Welles’s shadow loomed on a scrim.) If Welles doesn’t work out, Olivier can always fire him.
But if Tynan’s role in the story is historically inaccurate, it nonetheless has the ring of poetic truth. Tynan was a close friend of Welles, whom he considered a sort of father figure (to Welles’s disconcertment), and of course he was an adviser to Olivier, who did appoint him dramaturge for the National Theatre when it opened in 1963. Moreover, Pendleton’s portrayal of Tynan as sickly and stuttering, impudent and passionate, starry-eyed and deviously manipulative is right on the mark. For the first act and a half of Orson’s Shadow, Tynan makes an apt narrator-observer of the Olivier-Welles conflict. He’s our onstage surrogate, the little man holding his own in the company of quarreling giants: “everybody’s adviser…and nobody’s boss, not even my own,” as Tynan once described himself. Only he’s more articulate than we could ever be, which makes him a perfect storyteller. “I thought if they’re capable of greatness they should bloody well achieve it,” he says in Pendleton’s play about his famous friends. “What I see now is that they’ve done anything of any worth at all is a miraculous achievement, because they are, in fact, insane.”
The success of Orson’s Shadow depends in large part on the leading actors, who must convincingly re-create characters familiar from innumerable film and TV appearances. Director David Cromer has cast the show brilliantly, then guided the players skillfully through performances that transcend mere impersonation. John Judd (the ferocious Roy Cohn of Cromer’s Angels in America a couple of seasons back) is an uncanny Olivier: with his grayed hair and graceful, slightly oblique deportment, he perfectly captures the elegance, self-dramatizing insecurity, animal alertness, and pervasive sense of guilt that characterized the minister’s son who became England’s greatest classical actor. Jeff Still, heavily padded under his high-collared black shirt and suit jacket, is too short for the towering Welles, and his voice (except for an offstage voice-over at the top of the show) lacks Welles’s ripe, booming resonance; but he effectively suggests the man’s piercing intelligence and nagging frustration. Lee Roy Rogers is beautiful and terrifying as Leigh, not the fiery beauty of Gone With the Wind but the slightly faded yet still lovely Leigh of Ship of Fools–“as feminine as magnolia blossoms, as dangerous as a viper, as complacent as a cat, and as richly stunning as a Sargent portrait,” as Chicago Sun-Times critic Eleanor Keen described Leigh when she brought Duel of Angels to the Blackstone (now the Merle Reskin) in the fall of 1960. Sarah Wellington’s pert, girlish Joan is a vivid reminder of the smart, sexy youngster Plowright once was. Dominic Conti is excellent as Sean, the outsider who finds himself dragged into his elders’ power struggles. And David Warren’s sickly, stuttering Tynan strikes just the right balance between bossiness, obsequiousness, curiosity, and distress as he watches his pet project spin out of control. Jennifer Keller’s period-perfect costumes enhance the actors’ extraordinary performances, while Mark Loman’s minimalist set and J.R. Lederle’s shadowy lighting aptly suggest the bare spaces of a backstage tragicomedy as theatrical as anything put before a paying audience.
