Word: laughton
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Playhouse 90 (CBS, 8:30-10 p.m.). Rod Serling's In the Presence of Mine Enemies takes place in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. With Charles Laughton, Arthur Kennedy and Sam Jaffe...
...late to be a Halloween goblin, too early to be a Christmas Santa. Actor Charles Laughton was trapped 'tween seasons with enough facial forestry to make a sensation at a woodchoppers' ball. Actually, he had let himself go to seed for a role as King Lear at Stratford-on-Avon's Shakespearean theater. Leaving London on a brief trip to Paris, where presumably he would roam incognito. Laughton muffled: "I'll be glad to get a lawnmower on this...
Even the thundering storm that heralds Lear's madness was muted in Laughton's performance. He played the scene almost in silence. The idea came to him, he says, during a hurricane-tossed Atlantic crossing. "Sitting in my cabin, I suddenly realized that in a storm you stop noticing the noise; as it stays at a high level, your hearing threshold falls. I tried out the Lear speech and heard it echo sharp and clear in my mind. That's the way it should be. The storm's inside Lear...
...critics agreed with Laughton's interpretation. The News Chronicle found him "not at all unlike a mixture of Charles Darwin and Longfellow . . . weak and frail and human . . . hardly ever majestic, towering or superhuman." But the Times thought "Mr. Laughton's performance a superb essay in stage pathos...
Whatever the critics think, Actor Laughton is convinced that his is Shakespeare's true Lear. With his wife, Elsa Lanchester, he studied the play in a facsimile of the First Folio all last winter, finally concluded that the author had scored it like music. Voice inflections, pitch, rhythms, everything seemed indicated by what would otherwise be pointless punctuation and irrational typography. "Elsa noticed it first, and I think she was the first to treat it that way. But it works! It works! Shakespeare tells you how to say every word...