Theatre Review - Orson's Shadow

The centenary of Orson Welles’s birth has, rather unsurprisingly, been a busy year with numerous events celebrating the life and work of one of cinema’s most enduring figures. A retrospective season at the BFI has accompanied a theatrical re-release of Touch of Evil and an overdue Blu Ray release of Chimes at Midnight. Meanwhile the Southwark Playhouse has marked the occasion with a production of Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow.

Set in 1960 and struggling to hit his previous heights in Hollywood, Welles his taken his long-term ion piece, Chimes at Midnight to the Dublin stage in order to bolster financial for a film adaption. Whilst in Ireland he is approached by Kenneth Tynan who wryly suggests a creative collaboration with Laurence Oliver, on a roll following a successful turn in The Entertainer, and looking for a director for his next production, Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist parable, Rhinoceros. With Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh casting a shadow over the performance and Olivier’s future wife Joan Plowright complicating matters further, Orson’s Shadow depicts collision of two artistic titans, fuelled by equally enormous egos.

The legitimacy of its writing is one of those tantalisingly unanswerable conundrums. How much of what we see on the stage is true to life and how much is dramatic licence? Certainly, it’s not difficult to imagine Welles and Olivier locking horns, driven by their own disparate artistic ideals, but are their characterisations wide of the mark, or shrewd, knowing reflections of life? Possibly the best tactic would be to treat this as an utterly embellished refraction of history or a stylised version of it.

John Hodgkinson’s Orson Welles is a man tormented by the success of Citizen Kane, a movie that will forever be his, well, Citizen Kane. Unable to replicate his previous, monumental success and shorn of complete artistic control, he is a man hell-bent on regaining his former autocracy. There’s an Ahab-esque drive for, not perfection, but something near to it in Welles at this point; but it’s tempered with the sort playfulness you might not expect from a man whose alcohol intake was little short of heroic. Perhaps Hodgkinson fails to totally nail Welles’s unique, silky nasal tones but that seems like a tough criticism given how immediately recognisable and eminently difficult it is to replicate.

As Laurence Olivier, Adrian Lukis is a man undergoing something of a rebirth following the success of The Entertainer. Desperate to capitalise on it, but singularly attached to his own version of what makes his art great. Frequently undermining Welles as director, do I believe he was as difficult as the text suggests? Perhaps not, but then my own visualisation of the man is even more a house built on sand.

For a film fan, there’s much interest in seeing any version of Welles and Olivier being brought to life. One of the curious, enjoyable and often maddening qualities of Larry was his ability to look like he was simultaneously under-acting and over-acting at the same time. I’m not convinced Adrian Lukis as Olivier manages to quite replicate his very delicate movements, but I was nonetheless engrossed to see all that artistic drive incarnate upon the stage.

Orson’s Shadow is an interesting and engrossingly questionable interpretation of the greats of cinema and stage.