That Vital Thing

Being in possession of a medium and a message

Orson Welles by Joseph McBride; Polanski, Orson Welles and If This Was Happiness by Barbara Leaming; Moby Dick—Rehearsed, The Cradle Will Rock and Les Bravades by Orson Welles; The Big Brass Ring by Orson Welles with Oja Kodar; and This Is Orson Welles by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich

The Golden Age of Radio was aptly named. I listen to very little new radio drama and that I do listen to is quite poor. Breathy overacting, excessive editing and coincidence, all of which detract from the sense that something is really happening out there in the world and you, the audience member, are just hearing it. Powerless to affect events; powerless too to avoid being affected by them in turn.

Orson Welles got into radio after he got into theatre. I would write more about the theatre: the lighting, the casting, the creation of the Mercury. But I would bore you and so I will not. Save to say that his version of Julius Caesar is a thrill even to read about eighty odd years later. His all-black Macbeth likewise. Too Much Johnson a little less so.

Welles got into radio after a youth and early adulthood doing theatre — including a stint in Dublin (exaggerated profoundly by Welles himself and by some of his biographers) and a tour of America with Katharine Cornell. When touring with Cornell and other Broadway greats, Welles reported repeatedly being asked by some hick in Middleofnowhere, Iowa, why on earth he was there. Because we want to entertain you, was an answer. But the public was not grateful. Just incredulous. Radio was more natural a way to reach many millions. It was the new mass medium. And the work of the Mercury Theatre in New York was already international news: Welles was on the front cover of Time as a very young man, playing Captain Shotover in his own version of Shaw’s Heartbreak House.

Radio was the natural extension. Welles had been The Shadow in 1938. ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’; ‘Crime does not pay!’ And so on. And he had done quite a lot of radio acting – anonymous and more nonymous. A wonderful mid-1930s adaptation of Les Miserables is fruit of that, as is a very famous radio play, Archibald MacLeish’s The Fall of the City. The stories about Welles flying around New York in an ambulance — which it was legal to hire in those days — studio to studio, only to be told as he reached the microphone that he was to play an eighty-year-old Chinaman and was handed a script for the first time live on air – they may be profoundly exaggerated. But Welles was box office and his theatre made many a splash.

So CBS made what its announcers said was an unusual, indeed unprecedented, step: of giving over a programme to a single theatrical company — the Mercury — each week for a number of broadcasts of the greatest stories ever written. And some of them really were quite lovely. The programme was first billed as First Person Singular, with an excellent conceit of narrating these stories vividly from subjective perspective — Welles’s basso profundo doing the narrating, quite naturally. After that, it became The Mercury Theatre on the Air and after that, accepting soup sponsorship, The Campbell Playhouse. And of course, it dramatised in 1938, before the call of Hollywood became inarguable, a version of The War of the Worlds of fame and some infamy.

Other plays I still recall with fondness. They began with Dracula, better than the book and possibly not even bettered by any subsequent film. The Man Who Was Thursday put me onto a very good thing and to Chesterton more broadly. Their Hell on Ice was excellent. Heart of Darkness, too. I’d never heard of Wickford Point and haven’t read it since, but I enjoyed the play. There was at least one version of The Count of Monte Cristo done by the Mercury that I loved.

Welles is possibly underrated as a writer, he who shared the Oscar for the writing of Citizen Kane. John Houseman claimed to have done everything as regards writing for the Mercury on the radio, and he might have been right – though I doubt it. And Welles the author deserves some credit. His script for an avant-garde adaption of Moby-Dick alone, unperformed in sixty or more years, is enthralling, as exciting as any play I’ve read. The Cradle Will Rock, an unmade movie about a real musical performed in the Great Depression, is less good – not beautifully refined. The Big Brass Ring has one or two intriguing moments, but they are, well, momentary.

Yet one can talk about Welles’s talents for adaptation: cutting Macbeth down to a lean picture in 1941 which is unjustly forgotten; turning King Lear into a 70-odd minute teleplay. Five Kings — his immense amalgam of Shakespeare history plays. These are great feats. See his Othello. Try not to be moved by Chimes at Midnight. Just you try it.

But I want most of all to talk about the radio. The joy of the medium. Think of it: the music, conducted live in the studio, building higher and higher, to a whirling, shrieking pitch, and the storm, the effects of the storm, wind machines and whistles and thunder sheets bringing the screaming gale into millions of living rooms. And atop it your voice, or the words you wrote or adapted, all of it building to an immense and shattering denouement. And it’s all real and all really live, and you must do it twice per night.

Life must have been good. It must have been very good indeed.