Charles Laughton by Simon Callow Read Free Book Online

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