"Orson's Shadow' at PTC (first review)

When theatrical geniuses collide

ROBERT ZALLER

In the fall of 1960, two of the great figures of 20th-Century film and theater, Orson Welles and Sir Laurence Olivier, were brought together by the critic Kenneth Tynan to stage Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at London’s new Royal Court Theatre.

Ionesco himself couldn’t have imagined a more absurdist plot. In the way of the immortals, the two men were rivalrous admirers of each other, but also titanic egos. Welles had no experience of French drama, and apparently detested Ionesco. Olivier, who hadn’t yet begun to play Continental types, felt even less sympathy for the theater of the absurd. Welles also believed, if we are to credit this account, that Olivier had been somehow responsible for “ruining” him in Hollywood. And both men were irritated with Tynan, who idolized them but couldn’t forbear criticizing them in print.

Still, since truth is far stranger than fiction, the venture actually came off, though with less than memorable results. The production, however, is not what interests playwright Austin Pendleton, but the unlikely collaboration itself. The inducement for Welles was, as always, money for his chronically underfunded film projects; while Olivier, written off as a Shakespearean who couldn’t do modern theater, was seeking to prove himself in the avant-garde. His attempt to make this transition was complicated by a more personal transition, for his long and tormented relationship with Vivien Leigh was coming to an end, and his new love and future bride, Joan Plowright, was to be his co-star.

Immense vitality, mercurial personality

We meet Welles (Wilbur Edwin Henry) first, in the dingy Dublin theater where he is ending a spectacularly unsuccessful run of Chimes at Midnight, his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Tynan (Joe Hickey), fidgety and stammering, makes a kind of feminine foil to the Rabelaisian Welles. Only when the scene switches to London and Olivier (Brent Harris) comes onstage do the proceedings take off.

Not only does Harris bear an uncanny physical, vocal and gestural resemblance to the middle-aged Sir Larry, but, more important, he projects Olivier’s immense vitality and his complex, mercurial personality, at once dominant and vulnerable. If there’s been a better performance on a Philadelphia stage this year, I’ve missed it.

Welles as Olivier’s foil?

The problem is that Wilbur Edwin Henry’s Welles, though credible enough against the feline likes of Tynan or his credulous gofer Sean (Derick Loafmann, in a role written for comic relief), merely becomes a foil himself to Harris’s tigerish Olivier. It’s not that the script doesn’t give him a fair shake, or the opportunity for a rant or two of his own; it’s simply that he can’t believably hold his own against his more formidable colleague. Were this a play about Olivier per se, and were Welles only another director trying to cope with genius, this would matter less. But we’re talking here about Orson; it’s he who gives the play its name, and, if we’re to take the title literally, it’s his shadow that enfolds its action. Henry is never quite raffish and rumbling enough to command the stage even while he has it to himself; once Harris steps on the boards, there’s no contest.

It is also true that Olivier’s personal drama provides most of the play’s interest once he enters. The long agony of his marriage to the unstable Vivien Leigh was coming to an end; but such marriages never do end, even in death. There is a remarkable scene in which Olivier, spurred by Welles and Tynan and seconded by the anxious Plowright (Rachel Botchan), attempts to break off the relationship by telephone, only to have the manipulative Leigh (Susan Wilder) wind up seeming to break off with him. Once Leigh herself appears on the scene, we simply forget everything but this Strindbergian duet as it plays out in all its erotic and emotional carnage.

Farewell to the P & P

Orson’s Shadow is the last production in the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s 25-year association with Plays & Players, which moves next season to the Suzanne Roberts Theatre on Broad Street. It has been well mounted with David P. Gordon’s partly open set, which exposes the marvelous brick wall that has formed the backdrop of so many PTC productions. James J. Christy has given the play a compellingly physical production, and if his leads are unevenly matched, he cannot be faulted for giving the better performer scope for his work.

The real Olivier is never likelier to be more compellingly realized. Although he was thoroughly and quite arrogantly conscious of his stature and success, at the same time he was never able to believe in it. That self-doubt was the key to his art, and to his relentless quest to embody himself in as many selves, both social and sexual, as possible. When the strains of the life he lived offstage became overwhelming, his unvarying response, as Pendleton gives it, was, “Let’s work!” If he destroyed himself, he did so creatively.

In contrast— Welles, the greatest film talent this country has yet produced— slipped gradually, and somehow deliberately, into the role of a tragic Falstaff. Genius is a hard bridle, however one wears it.



To read a review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read Steve Cohen's review, click here.