speciality, here receiving its first outing. His choosing to do so via an impersonation of Arnold Bennett is truly surprising, even to the critic of
Theatre World
. ‘That this is deliciously amusing is not to be denied, but I am inclined to think that it detracts a little from the character of Mr Prohack.’
It is a curious thing for Laughton to have done, but it worked. To what extent did he intend it as a send-up of the mildly pompous Bennett? If so, that was very bold – the twenty-seven-year-old tyro from Scarborough taking on the world-famous author. Again, he seems almost to have courted the sack. Did Komisarjevsky abet him in it? There was a streak of barefaced cheek in his character, but this was going to lengths. No, it seems more likely that this was the only way he could make the thing work. Bennett, in a letter to his coauthor, says that Laughton was ‘very bad and wrong at all the later rehearsals.’ The play is a quirky fable of capitalism; the man who inherits a half a million dollars is a genial, wry, breakfast-table philosopher, humorously bland. It may have been elusive for Laughton: no murk, no depths, no pressure within. And then, puzzling away at how to find this man in himself, he may have looked up in rehearsal and seen him staring him in the face. Authors are often very useful at giving clues to their own plays: not by explaining them, but simply by being themselves. Obviously, everything fell into place the moment he hit on the notion. It released him. ‘Any middling actor can be senile and grotesque; Mr Laughton, invited to parody one of his authors, presented a marvellously tempered portrait, which was truthful to look and twinkle, yet showed a good deal of the man behind these natural defences,’ said Agate. If you imitate the outer life of someone with sufficient connexion, you sometimes get an inner life for nothing; it just pops up of its own accord. ‘As a technical feat the performance was immense. Mr Laughton acted with his whole body, and when you thought that facial expression and vocal intonation were exhausted, eked out these means with legs analytical, elucidatory, rhapsodical. To see him lean back on a sofa and keep the wit going with fat calves and lean slippers as a juggler does a ball – this was acting. But I must be careful,’ Agate wisely concludes, ‘or I shall fall into a panegyric.’
Theatre World
, in its staider way, summed up: ‘It is a performance of exceptional artistry; one which at last lifts Mr Laughton to the front rank of actors.’
At last. After eighteen whole months.
Prohack
brought Charles not merely fame (even notoriety): it gave him the central relationship of his life, with the pert, quirky young actress playing his secretary; Elsa Lanchester.
She was 25, with a reputation for outrageous cabaret at the club run by herself and two friends, the Cave of Harmony. There she had given performances of ‘Please sell no more drink to my father’ and ‘I’ve just danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’, which had brought her great celebrity. Agate had singled her out on several occasions.
Prohack
, in which she played Laughton’s secretary, was part of a general move towards ‘legitimate’ theatre. Her interest in Charles Laughton was part of a move towards legitimacy of a deeper kind.
‘Outrageous’ is the inescapable word for Elsa Lanchester at this time: the consciously Bohemian, red-headed elfin child of almost comically radical Irish-Marxist-Suffragette parents, she had trained with Isadora Duncan (whom she loathed), taught dance at the age of 13, run a children’s theatre, posed for ‘artistic’ nude photographs, been a hired ‘co-respondent’ in divorce cases, and done snake dancing with the portly Ida Barr (‘Ida Barr? ’Ide a pub, more like.’) ‘I did not know for one moment that I had some sort of compulsion to be different,’ she writes.
But she did know that the brittleness of her
Theatre World
. ‘That this is deliciously amusing is not to be denied, but I am inclined to think that it detracts a little from the character of Mr Prohack.’
It is a curious thing for Laughton to have done, but it worked. To what extent did he intend it as a send-up of the mildly pompous Bennett? If so, that was very bold – the twenty-seven-year-old tyro from Scarborough taking on the world-famous author. Again, he seems almost to have courted the sack. Did Komisarjevsky abet him in it? There was a streak of barefaced cheek in his character, but this was going to lengths. No, it seems more likely that this was the only way he could make the thing work. Bennett, in a letter to his coauthor, says that Laughton was ‘very bad and wrong at all the later rehearsals.’ The play is a quirky fable of capitalism; the man who inherits a half a million dollars is a genial, wry, breakfast-table philosopher, humorously bland. It may have been elusive for Laughton: no murk, no depths, no pressure within. And then, puzzling away at how to find this man in himself, he may have looked up in rehearsal and seen him staring him in the face. Authors are often very useful at giving clues to their own plays: not by explaining them, but simply by being themselves. Obviously, everything fell into place the moment he hit on the notion. It released him. ‘Any middling actor can be senile and grotesque; Mr Laughton, invited to parody one of his authors, presented a marvellously tempered portrait, which was truthful to look and twinkle, yet showed a good deal of the man behind these natural defences,’ said Agate. If you imitate the outer life of someone with sufficient connexion, you sometimes get an inner life for nothing; it just pops up of its own accord. ‘As a technical feat the performance was immense. Mr Laughton acted with his whole body, and when you thought that facial expression and vocal intonation were exhausted, eked out these means with legs analytical, elucidatory, rhapsodical. To see him lean back on a sofa and keep the wit going with fat calves and lean slippers as a juggler does a ball – this was acting. But I must be careful,’ Agate wisely concludes, ‘or I shall fall into a panegyric.’
Theatre World
, in its staider way, summed up: ‘It is a performance of exceptional artistry; one which at last lifts Mr Laughton to the front rank of actors.’
At last. After eighteen whole months.
Prohack
brought Charles not merely fame (even notoriety): it gave him the central relationship of his life, with the pert, quirky young actress playing his secretary; Elsa Lanchester.
She was 25, with a reputation for outrageous cabaret at the club run by herself and two friends, the Cave of Harmony. There she had given performances of ‘Please sell no more drink to my father’ and ‘I’ve just danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’, which had brought her great celebrity. Agate had singled her out on several occasions.
Prohack
, in which she played Laughton’s secretary, was part of a general move towards ‘legitimate’ theatre. Her interest in Charles Laughton was part of a move towards legitimacy of a deeper kind.
‘Outrageous’ is the inescapable word for Elsa Lanchester at this time: the consciously Bohemian, red-headed elfin child of almost comically radical Irish-Marxist-Suffragette parents, she had trained with Isadora Duncan (whom she loathed), taught dance at the age of 13, run a children’s theatre, posed for ‘artistic’ nude photographs, been a hired ‘co-respondent’ in divorce cases, and done snake dancing with the portly Ida Barr (‘Ida Barr? ’Ide a pub, more like.’) ‘I did not know for one moment that I had some sort of compulsion to be different,’ she writes.
But she did know that the brittleness of her
Similar Books
