social and emotional life ‘was beginning to add up to despair within myself.’ So when she got to know Charles – slowly, shyly on both their parts – she saw that he might offer an escape route. The strongest intimation that this might be so came from the completely unstrained silence that fell between them at an early meeting. Her bright provocations and his self-conscious tortuousnesses fell away into speechless security. A symptom of deep friendship – but not necessarily of sexual and emotional relationship.
This nonetheless followed. The relief of the new arrangement must have been overwhelming for Charles. A friend; a companion; someone to confide in; someone to lavish his attentions on – all complete novelties for him. She writes of the hours in bed at night, talking, talking, till dawn. Of his interest in her appearance. He took an active hand in selecting her wardrobe. She submitted because his eye was so good, even though his taste was far from what she would, till meeting him, have chosen for herself.
She had to pass the test of meeting his mother (who had advised him never to marry an actress, or a red-head. Elsa of course was both). She did so by dint of making the old lady laugh.
They lived separately for some while. She had an abortion. They moved to a flat in Dean Street, in Karl Marx’s old house (which must have pleased her parents, if not his).
In other words, Charles was now in life. He was doing the things other people did.
After
Prohack
, came his startling performance in
A Man with Red Hair
, the Hugh Walpole shocker, adapted by Benn Levy. Laughton’s last collaboration with Komisarjevsky, it is the first of his monster-villains. ‘His entrance is like the first whiff of poison-gas we were once familiar with. A thing so evil and malignant that it can paralyse one’s power to combat it by its apparent harmlessness, and yet so deadly if not grappled with at once. By what witchcraft Mr Laughton produces the effect, I don’t know.’ The critic of
Theatre World
, February 1927, knew how to enthuse. But his account is precise in its description of Laughton’s aims. To invoke that inner state – to bring that murk actually onto the stage – was his task. He was, then and later, uninterested in psychology. He was not interested (either for himself or his characters) in the why of human action; only the what concerned him. He wanted to show what human beings were, to offer the raw material: not to explain it. Twenty years later, this made him an ideal collaborator for Brecht. But it is dead against the drift of acting in the twentieth century, where ‘interpretation’, both in directing and acting, has been the watchword: what does this character’s behaviour
mean
? – not what is it? What is the play about? – never what is it?
It is of course a priceless gift to critics, whose analysis of ideas is so far in advance of their powers of description.
In a magnificent letter of rage at the inadequacy of her performance of Lady Macbeth (to Laughton’s Thane) James Bridie offered the following opinion to Flora Robson, one of the most radical statements about acting ever made: ‘You are to stop being psychological – you know nothing about it, and it is a very technical job – when you are acting, develop a reflex system that flashes out the effect without the process of thought coming into the business at all … your job is to flick Lady Macbeth through your soul
faster than thought
and explain what you did after, if you can be bothered.’
Laughton was concerned to ‘flick his characters through his soul’, very much so. This method has a disadvantage over the interpretative method, however: it is very costly in soul.
Hugh Walpole’s novel, and the play that Benn Levy made out of it, are exercises in
Schadenfreude
, literary experiments, explorations of how far one can really go. The situation is preposterous, the characters paper-thin, and the central, the eponymous, figure,
This nonetheless followed. The relief of the new arrangement must have been overwhelming for Charles. A friend; a companion; someone to confide in; someone to lavish his attentions on – all complete novelties for him. She writes of the hours in bed at night, talking, talking, till dawn. Of his interest in her appearance. He took an active hand in selecting her wardrobe. She submitted because his eye was so good, even though his taste was far from what she would, till meeting him, have chosen for herself.
She had to pass the test of meeting his mother (who had advised him never to marry an actress, or a red-head. Elsa of course was both). She did so by dint of making the old lady laugh.
They lived separately for some while. She had an abortion. They moved to a flat in Dean Street, in Karl Marx’s old house (which must have pleased her parents, if not his).
In other words, Charles was now in life. He was doing the things other people did.
After
Prohack
, came his startling performance in
A Man with Red Hair
, the Hugh Walpole shocker, adapted by Benn Levy. Laughton’s last collaboration with Komisarjevsky, it is the first of his monster-villains. ‘His entrance is like the first whiff of poison-gas we were once familiar with. A thing so evil and malignant that it can paralyse one’s power to combat it by its apparent harmlessness, and yet so deadly if not grappled with at once. By what witchcraft Mr Laughton produces the effect, I don’t know.’ The critic of
Theatre World
, February 1927, knew how to enthuse. But his account is precise in its description of Laughton’s aims. To invoke that inner state – to bring that murk actually onto the stage – was his task. He was, then and later, uninterested in psychology. He was not interested (either for himself or his characters) in the why of human action; only the what concerned him. He wanted to show what human beings were, to offer the raw material: not to explain it. Twenty years later, this made him an ideal collaborator for Brecht. But it is dead against the drift of acting in the twentieth century, where ‘interpretation’, both in directing and acting, has been the watchword: what does this character’s behaviour
mean
? – not what is it? What is the play about? – never what is it?
It is of course a priceless gift to critics, whose analysis of ideas is so far in advance of their powers of description.
In a magnificent letter of rage at the inadequacy of her performance of Lady Macbeth (to Laughton’s Thane) James Bridie offered the following opinion to Flora Robson, one of the most radical statements about acting ever made: ‘You are to stop being psychological – you know nothing about it, and it is a very technical job – when you are acting, develop a reflex system that flashes out the effect without the process of thought coming into the business at all … your job is to flick Lady Macbeth through your soul
faster than thought
and explain what you did after, if you can be bothered.’
Laughton was concerned to ‘flick his characters through his soul’, very much so. This method has a disadvantage over the interpretative method, however: it is very costly in soul.
Hugh Walpole’s novel, and the play that Benn Levy made out of it, are exercises in
Schadenfreude
, literary experiments, explorations of how far one can really go. The situation is preposterous, the characters paper-thin, and the central, the eponymous, figure,
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