Rab C. Nesbitt was my Holden Caulfield. At least I'm assuming he was. I didn't get past page two of Catcher In The Rye. But "Scotch and Wry" – a compilation of sketches Dad had on VHS, starring Rikki Fulton and Gregor Fisher who would go on to play Nesbitt – was something I'd watch religiously, meaning not necessarily understanding all of it. When Fisher got his own sitcom in 1988 it had my full attention. Beautifully scripted by Ian Pattison, the fourth episode of "Rab C. Nesbitt" particularly, "Holiday", was a revelation. What a journey this speech goes on, digging and digging until we're out the other side. I remember thinking: "Oh wow, comedy can also do this?" I would have been thirteen.
But what had I meant by "this"? Well, now I've spent a couple of days revisiting King Lear, I think I have a clearer idea. This was the same time as my first acquaintance with Lear and Othello, two surprisingly entertaining and downright funny Great Works of Tragedy. I can see Rab's unaccommodated ranting at the Universe striking a similar chord. More compact than Shakespeare too. Comedy also equals tragedy minus time.
"... and on this." Different Play, Act III Scene 4
After the surprising delights of Peter Brook's seventy-three-minute-long 1953 King Learyesterday, I decided to revisit Gerolamo Lo Savio's extravagantly-hatted, fourteen-minute-long silent 1910 version from the BFI collection Silent Shakespeare, posted at the top.
In looking that up I discovered an even earlier, thirteen-minute-long, German-subtitled version from 1909 credited to the Vitagraph Company of America, so I thought I'd post that too.
Comparisons are invidious, but what else are we going to do?
The most surprising thing both versions share is an absolutely stand-out Oswald. Goneril's servant, it's a small but satisfying role, whose job both literally and narratively is to just turn up and be a dick. Above is the Vitagraph version, fully understanding the assignment as he bounds out and tells everyone to eff off. Below is Lo Savio's. I remembered the 1910 version having excellent facial hair and helmets, and I was right. Just look at him there on the left. This Oswald may not have received the promotion to chief antagonist Brook gave him in 1953,
despite this 1910 version also cutting the subplot, but he definitely gets the outfit hardest to ignore, against stiff competition too.
That's Kent in the middle, gobsmacked by his cheek. Required by the plot to disguise himself as a servant by simply shaving, Kent looks very underdressed in this company. The shorter 1909 version not only keeps the suplot, involving Edmund and Edgar – YAY! – but also devotes a whole scene to Kent shaving. He gets to keep the moustache too. In the following scene, having picked another fight with Oswald, Kent is sentenced to the stocks. That's Oswald behind him leaping for joy. What a dick.
Compare this scene to the 1910 version. Again, excellent helmets. But...
These guys really do not know how to put someone in the stocks.
In general, as gorgeous as this later, hand-tinted version looks, it does come across as a bit of a shambles compared to Vitagraph's effort: Like many blockbusters, a lot more time and care seems to have been spent on it in post than during the actual shoot. Here's the 1910 version's storm scene...
... minus the storm, because we're filming outside on a clear day because it's 1910. Feigning madness without a script is also quite a big ask, especially when you're missing the rain and thunder that's meant to push you over the edge, so after quite a lot of faff with a cloak, Ermete Novelli's Lear tries to fix this narative lapse by punching a rock and going Ow.
Again though, it was 1910. Cut the film some slack.
Let's compare this to Vitagraph's earlier 1909 version...
Oh okay! Sure! If you want to go the traditional route, I suppose you could always bring out a backdrop, run a shower in front of the camera and scratch lighning flashes directly onto the film, but...
Okay no, this is clearly much better. But aren't you just rushing everything if you have to include the subplot? Only providing a series of tableaux vivants? What about later, when Lear is discovered lost to his madness but drifiting in and out of a state of revelation? (Sorry, SPOILERS... that's a joke of sorts, but actually if you don't know King Lear, there will be spoilers coming.) Here's the Vitagraph:
Having kept the subplot, this Lear also keeps its full complement of witnesses: Lear flanked by the banished and debased Edgar, and Gloucester, the father who banished and debased him, blinded now by allies of the son he promoted. Here's the 1910 version:
Having lost both the subplot and the blinding of Gloucester, and of course the storm – but having definitely hurt his hand, let's not forget that – Ermete Novelli now improvises some "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" business with a broomstick, abandoning the narrative pretty much entirely before shuffling off stage right with a cry of whatever the Italian is for "Wheee I'm a witch, byeeee!"
When he later comes to on a cheetah skin we're back in the play, but the hand-tinters seem to have called it a day...
For both 1909 and 1910 Lears, the reconciliation scene with his banished daughter Cordelia is played as eccentrically as the madness scenes, meaning Vitagraph's William V. Ranous gets to keep his dignity, while Novelli, for whom that ship had long sailed, still gets to go noodly noodly, but in a happier vein than before. The Vitagraph version also provides a harpist for Ranous. I don't know if that made any difference to the accompaniment. Nice helmet bottom right too.
Here, of course, is where the story should end, and where, even with their tiny truncated running times, both versions show the strength of the play's final act. Vitagraph also manages to cram in a final fight between Edmund and Edgar, before somehow managing to rig a slowly setting sun over the final image of Lear grieving for his hanged daughter through disintegrating filmstock.
And I even stopped laughing at Novelli (put that on your poster!) There is nothing comic in him bringing on Cordelia's body, and while the 1910 version doesn't give us a sunset, it does manage an impressive number of distant extras to the left of the frame and a possibly fake bridge.
Unfortunately 1910 Lear's grief turns loopy almost immediately, and the film cuts just as it looks like he was about to get better.
Still, I'm very glad there was a record of whatever it was Ermete Novelli thought he was up to.
In 1953, over a decade before he would direct my Dad around a big white box in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a twenty-eight year old Peter Brook (looking justly proud, below right) was invited by New York based television host Alistair Cooke (below left) to direct a seventy-three minute long adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear for his show Omnibus, starring Orson Welles in perhaps his biggest ever nose.
My excitement at learning of this from the interview with Brook in the Welles documentary Magician was tempered only by my suspicion that, if the results of such an incredibly exciting collaboration had actually been any good, I would surely have heard of it before now. But – as with Welles' hour-long Hamlet – someone was good enough to put the whole thing on youtube, and I've now watched it, and it's definitely any good.
Here's the famous windmill scene.
King Lear doesn't actually have a windmill scene, but back in 1953 Peter Brook clearly hadn't yet been sold on the idea of theatre as an "Empty Space". Possibly influenced by his star, he decided to liven up the play's desolation with giant gears and shipwrecks. This looks unlike any Lear I've seen before, and that's always welcome.
Almost as interesting as the talent involved in this production is its timing. 1953 was the year Waiting For Godot had its world premiere, so Beckett's absurdist minimalism hadn't had a chance to influence interpretations yet, and this seems a very nineteenth-century apocalypse – broken rather than bare – with Welles providing a hearty, eye-rolling, utterly undiagnosable playing of Lear's madness to match it.
I pity the Fool.
"Orson suddenly took off with tremendous passion," Brook explains in Magician: "Television was the medium for great freedom, and experiment... Both of
us believed that you don't hang onto any idea, but the moment you've had
an idea, and you begin to try it, that leads you to think of something
else," which presumably is how we get to King Lear covered in seaweed and handing out starfish...
... which, by the way, I love! Lear "fantastically dressed in flowers", as per the stage directions, should look odd. Already then in his career Brook was adressing how to defamiliarise an audience to the canon, how to revitalise the oddness of its poetry. If this scene – one of my favourites in Shakespeare – is also a bit "one note" (and Welles seems to be doing more blind acting than Gloucester, who's actually meant to be blind) at least Lear-as-Oracle is not a note I'd heard played before.
Some of the production also looks stupid in a way that might not be intentional: here's a model shot of that windmill for example, and I can't tell if Lear's initial, pear-shaped, modernist clobber at the top of this blog is meant to be a nod to Ubu Roi...
... or just a very bold opening statement, in harmony with Welles seeing how fat he can make himself. It's not a look that lasts however. Lear's travelling clothes in Act Two are a lot more traditionally Tudor, and he wears them well. Has his nose gotten smaller? Or is that just distortion from however this was recorded (presumably pointing a film camera at a television screen)?
Perhaps the most Wellesian thing about this adaptation, as with his radio Hamlet that ditched Ophelia, are the massive cuts: a whole subplot, including the characters of Edmund and Edgar. Now if you don't know the play. you don't know what you're missing, but rewatching King Lear at the Globe earlier this year, surrounded my students, I was struck by just how much those two specific characters had attracted me to the play when I was thirteen. Despite Alistair Cooke refering to the subplot in his introduction as "the bane of every schooboy" for most teenagers, I suspect nasty brother Edmund's sexy-and-he-knows-it performative villainy, and nice brother Edgar's self-shunning, self-scarring, world-building self-abasement are the biggest revelations of any first encounter with the play. And the trouble is, if you lose them, what you're left with is quite hard to care about for quite a while...
Util the Fool comes in, and then it's anybody's guess. Centuries ago, productions of the play would cut the Fool completely, a creative decision heavily mocked in the twentieth century despite the huge number of twentieth-century productions that still seemed to have no idea what to do with him. The tenor of the times appeared to be to either make him a dirty old man – safe, but senseless, as Lear refers to him as "boy", and in many not necessarily wholesome ways the Fool is also a surrogate for Lear's youngest daughter – or have him played as fey, but not outrightly camp, so any jokes about "holding your peace" or having "nothing in the middle" fall absolutely flat while all the extras are instructed to laugh uproariously in that way that makes people hate Shakespeare forever. And for a while, this production does seem that.
But then the Fool climbs under a table and starts issuing heckles unseen, and that got my interest. And then Regan snogs her servant Oswald, and that really got my interest: In Edmund's absence it seemed this previously no-account jobsworth was now to be promoted to the role of suave ladykiller and commander of an army, despite losing a fight to a middle-aged Kent in Act Two. In better news, although we lose Edgar, this production keeps his alter-ego "Poor Tom", played here by the artist who introduced a teenage Welles first-hand to Expressionism and the Theatre of Cruelty at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and who would later be the Iago to his Othello: Micheál MacLiammoir...
Poor Tom is actually served very well by being presented as a character in his own right: this production isn't scared to spend its precious running time dwelling
on the rich backstory and personal mythology that Edgar for some reason made up for him, and one can enjoy lines like "Nero is an angler in the lake
of darkness" coming out of nowhere, without having to worry about Edgar's "process" behind such startling invention. It's also great to see Welles' Lear in awe of a wretch played by Welles' mentor.
Another nice piece of staging I'd never seen before: the show's final scene takes place in Lear's throne room, the same space as the opening scene. Well played then, everyone, considering. Sure, Welles doesn't always remember his lines, and his moustache blows off in the storm scene, but that's what happens if you use real wind. Enjoy...
Today we had two performances of Love Goddess, I didn't trip up once, and that requires a bit of upper body strength, so
I'm afraid I'm now a little too tired to do anything more than just
fob you dear unatendees off with some more Orson Welles content. Here are a couple of stills from Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, directed by Chuck Workman (do you think he's American?) I saw it last night and I'd like to think that, for all the ways I don't look like him, Welles would have killed for a big old nose like mine.
One of the joys of Magician, for me at least, is the number of clips I now recognise from my own youtube research, as previously posted on this blog, and the wealth of guests Workman presents to provide commentary on this material is also breathtaking: not only Simon Callow and Peter Bogdanovich, not only Richard Linklater, Julie Taymor, Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese, not only Welles' last "companion" Oja Kodar spilling tea gloriously from the Vila Welles on the Dalmation Coast – although I'm pretty sure that, in a rare slip-up from Workman, this...
... is actually a picture of Vincent D'Onofrio – but even one of Orson's own former classmates (not a fan) and perhaps most surprisingly of all, again at least to me, Peter Brook, who also appears at the end of this trailer. I spent some of my time off today researching Brook's
collaboration with Welles further, but I'll probably present that tomorrow. And I thought it more sporting to embed the trailer than the whole documentary, but you can watch that here.
"Recently my secretary came to work one morning, and she said that her
little boy had come home from school the previous afternoon, had removed
his jacket, had thrown it down on the living room couch, and had said -
Mom, I feel like Charlie Brown... And all of a sudden it occurred to me,
after all these years: this is the purpose of Charlie Brown."
Back to the dawing board: here's more treasure from the BBC Archive, to honour what would have been Charles Monroe Schulz's hundredth birthday today. Buying old Peanuts paperbacks as a child, I felt let into an
unusally adult kind of comedy, at least as funny as, but more emotionally astute than the
anarchic, boggle-eyed output of British kid's comics, and the fact that this comedy's
protagonists were people my age was, in hindsight, incredibly important. It meant you didn't have to be adult to be human. Your
feelings were valid regardless, and not just something to be marked right or
wrong.
I actually miss the tone of these pre-junket-era interviews: "I think the one overwhelming reason why your work is so popular here in
England, where very largely we think of ourselves as being a
Post-Christian Society, is that here's a man who really knows how
terrible life is. Are you happy to be looked at in that way?" asks Peter
France of the author of Happiness Is A Warm Puppy.
The problem with trying to write a post a day while simultaneously performing in Love Goddess is not that there's a risk I'll run short of material, but that I'll never write about anything else. Here's yet more Orson Welles.
Welles by Welles
In 1955 the BBC invited Welles to record six fifteen-minute-long, occassionally illustrated, improvised monologues on the subject of his life thus far. These he used to – as he himself put it in episode two – weave theatrical legends, meaning a lot of "Orson Welles' Sketchbook" consists of anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes are pretty apocryphal, if not completely made up on the spot, and that's a tremendous shame really because the work discussed is so interesting in its own right. I'd love, for example, to hear Welles' account of the work that went into making his directorial debut in Harlem, but I've next to no interest in a tacky anecdote about a supposedly imported coven of witch doctors making cursed, goat-skin drums.
Or, as in episode above, I'd love to hear him discuss the influence his hoax-news radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" might have had on both the entire broadcast medium and his own later work ("Citizen Kane" famously opens with a fake news reel) but I'm less interested in the influence it might have had on John Barrymore's dogs... Welles would be so much more interesting if he didn't try so hard to be interesting, and the genuine achievement of "The Martian Broadcast" has been completely overshadowed by the legend of a country sent mad spun around it. Am I being a snob? He probably understood his audience better than I do.
And yet, even as he makes this shit up, Welles relates how "fed up" his company had been with the credulity of listeners to "this new magic box... So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of the machine... We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came from the tap."
It's just after Frank Capra who directed "It's A Wonderful Life" talks about Hobart Bosworth losing his upper jaw to a pill of dry ice he kept in his mouth to produce convincing breath for a movie set in the South Pole, that conversation turns to the subject of Harry Cohn: "At least that era is over," Dick Cavett suggests, as we now know completely mistakenly. But Capra, like Welles, was a fan: "If he could bully you, he didn't want you around, if you could stand up to him, he wanted you."
It's also possible Capra got on Cohn's good side just by being immensely successful, and Cohn got on Capra's good side by letting him know it. Also interviewed is Mel Brooks, who describes his own introduction to Cohn beautifully, watching him wheeled around on his back from messenger to messenger "like a piece of field artillery." Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich are there too, it's quite a line-up, although I've never seen Dick Cavett so watery and ineffectual, but Mel Brooks has some fun with that.
Cohn seems to have been as keen to be hated as Orson Welles was to be loved, I'm having a ball playing both without the aid of a cigar, and I cannot overstate how easy everyone is making it for me. Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth Musical returned to the Cockpit tonight. I'm a huge fan of this show. Come and join me. Tickets here!
Mork blogs well. At the end of every episode of "Mork and Mindy" he concisely reports back to Orson what he's learnt from the day's activities. I wish this blog was the same, but sometimes it's just going to be a link to some videos. Here's Alexei Sayle explaining how influential the show was to the British Alternative Comedy scene...
"It felt like being kicked down the stairs laughing."
When I heard the episode below – in which Mindy tries to interview successful comedian Robin Williams – mentioned on a podcast on my way to the Rosemary Branch theatre last night, I immediately looked it up on my phone, sat down on the closest bench and watched the whole thing. It opens strongly, with a surprise reference to Rula Lenska and almost exactly the same joke that opens Triangle Of Sadness(highly recommended), and closes with a scene of onscreen soul-spelunking to rival Peter Sellers on "The Muppet Show" telling Kermit he had his self surgically removed: Williams confesses to Mindy how difficult he finds it to say no. When Mork relays this predicament to Orson, the celestial overlord's having none of it.... "I thought all stars were rich, live in mansions, and drive big eggs..." Mork responds with a list of the dead, ending with John Lennon, to the low howling of wind and a slow fade to black.
The Art Department called these "Visual Notebooks" when they gave them out, as if a thirteen-year-old me was going to fill it with sketches of passers-by or bark rather than a page and a half of an unfinished Watchmen spoof. But here is all that remains of all that was started of something I seem to remember I called "The X-Ceptions". Also an obvious influence on these few frames is The Dark Knight Returns, and possibly The Killing Joke, which is why I'm dating this 1988 (and I appear to have thought that giving the Joker an upturned nose instead of a pointy one counts as pastiche). Having lovingly referenced these three core works however – note the wobbly lines around Pscychoe's speech bubble* – I seem to have immediately run out of ideas, so who knows what role in this dark epic "The Lilac Librarian", "Incy-Wincy-Splat" or whatever that Swamp-Thing-looking thing on the left were meant to have played? ("Doc God" I like.)
* Sure, I noticed that. But not the fact John Higgin's colours weren't totally boring. I think this must be why I got a B.
In my first night's sleep after being hospitalised for smoke inhalation in 2009 I had three very vivid dreams. I recorded the details of them as best as I could when I woke up, with illustrations, and here's one of them:
"The
freighter that picks me up from the Ice fow is manned by tall silver
men with long waterproofs, square heads but aquiline profiles, smooth
black dishes for ears and receding chrome spirals on the head. Maybe the
cube swivels to accomodate the face. Anyway a nice kind image. THE
GOOMB-MEN"
I don't know where I got the name "Goomb" from, but they stayed with me. I tried to put them in a Mitchell And Webb sketch later that year (it was never filmed, maybe I submitted it too late), and I was still contemplating casting them as saviours in some children's book or other until today, when I was knocked sideways to see this image pop up on pinterest:
This is a two-headed Martian from the Twilight Zone story "Mr. Dingle the Strong", an episode I have no recollection of ever seeing. Their heads aren't exactly cubes, and their ears aren't exactly dishes, and
their antennae aren't exactly spirals, but that's the Goomb alright, right down to their
cheekbones. The clincher for me is that, while I describe them as "silver" in the notebook, I actually dreamt them in black and white.
Emailing that sketch to Gareth Edwards back in December 2009, I wrote:
"Hopefully you might find some joy - far too late as it is - in
this sketch about aliens I mentioned ages ago, and then didn't write
because it seemed you had loads about aliens, and now have written
simply because it might turn out to be the very-odd-but-actually-useable
sketch I have so far failed to produce."
And now UPDATE (April 27th 2023) It looks like it might actually be used now! All hail the Goomb...
Here's Badphone immortalising the acting company of Love Goddess in the Cockpit's corridor of boiling pipes just before we all went on for the final press show tonight, which I think went beautifully. Left to right: Joey Simon, Almog Pail, Jane Quinn, Imogen Kingsley-Smith, and an unidentified admirer. I should now definitely sleep, but before I do here are a few more of Roswitha Chesher's beautiful photos of the show to help this week end as it began, with the unruinable harmony of lights in some fog.
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