Charles Laughton by Simon Callow Read Free Book Online Page B

resembled a continental actor:
Ensemble Man
. His experience with Komis, a ‘continental’ director, if ever there was one, a
régisseur
, maybe gave him excessive expectations, too.
    Many people with whom he worked (Hitchcock, Guthrie) came to see him as an amateur; many more (Wilder, Siodmak, Preminger) felt him, on the contrary, to be fiercely professional in never settling for less than perfection. He himself rather defiantly embraced the word amateur: ‘It means lover, doesn’t it? I love my work.’ What is certain is that, though an actor of the greatest technical refinement, he never approached anything as a technical question. He seemed to view his roles not as problems to be solved or hurdles to be cleared but as challenges to self-knowledge: could he unlock the part of himself that would give meaning and life to the character?
    In this sense, he was either an amateur or an artist, according to definition. His every performance was an encounter with himself, a liberation of another subjugated part of his psyche. Only from that would the transformations occur – and they did, in astonishing profusion. Each one let another bit of Laughton out of the bottle.
    Simple ease of standing on stage as his skilful self was an experience of which he was innocent for many years. Simple ease in life came slowly too; in the twenties, in London, it was quite unknown to him. His family circle and friends from Scarborough recall a genial funster telling dreadful shaggy dog stories or doing ‘his voices’; but that was before the war. It’s significant that Osbert Sitwell had, only a few years later, found him to be playing the role of hotel manager.
    It was Komisarjevsky again who had cast Laughton as Arnold Bennett’s Mr Prohack. Bennett had gone into management with his mistress, Dorothy Cheston, Sidney Bernstein, and Komis. Sloane Productions, their company, had already staged
Paul I
, with Charles as Count Pahlen; this was Bennett’s first play for them, drawn from his novel of the same name, adapted in collaboration with Edward Knoblock. Not specially noted as a dramatist, Bennett, on the strength of his novels and, almost equally, his journalism, was one of the most famous figures of the contemporary literary scene. The novel had been a great success some years before; and the play skilfully presented its main plot, about an easy-going Treasury Official who inherits half a million pounds from an unexpected source, only to discover the disadvantages of great wealth, and the regrettable effects it has on his family. Faintly Shavian, slightly Wellsian, the fable is told with sprightly wit, inverting values and turning situations on their head to satirise any number of contemporary subjects. The play was bound to attract attention; Charles compounded this by playing Prohack, the whimsical middle-class Official, as, unmistakably, the author himself. The author was not amused, but London was. In fact, Bennett, though the decent box office receipts allowed him to put a brave face on things, never reconciled himself to the performance, thinking it, according to his diary, ‘vulgar’ and ‘bad’. In a letter, Bennett wrote that ‘Laughton as Prohack has been praised to the skies by the entire press, and in my opinion, over-praised considerably. I think his performance is rough, and it is certainly not a faithful representation of Prohack as we conceived of him for the purposes of the play.’
    Perhaps the tendency of the reviews to praise the performance at the expense of the play may have had something to do with it. ‘To him alone, I think,’ said
Theatre World
, ‘lies the success of the play … his performance is superb … a little podgy man, childishly simple, possessing that dry sense of humour peculiar to the English, and above all that quality of accepting the most impossible situation with a sangfroid which is both the envy and the despair of all other nationalities.’ The little man was a Laughton