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French Accent. Besides playing in Don Juan, Charles Laughton staged and cast it. At first, he had trouble signing up Charles Boyer, who was afraid his French accent might make a hash of the long set speeches. "All right, Charles," said Laughton, "please recast the show for me and find someone else to do Don Juan." The delicate compliment did the trick. Says Laughton: "The public forgets that Boyer was a great actor before he ever became a romantic lead in movies."
Boyer is also a great hypochondriac. During most of the first tour, he kept constant check on his temperature with two thermometers. Sometimes he even sneaked one on stage, concealed it behind his hand and took his temperature between lines. Once, Agnes Moorehead threw him a sudden, unexpected cue, and Boyer had to sputter the thermometer out of his mouth before returning to his role of the Great Lover.
Laughton's most difficult problem, triumphantly solved, was the staging of Don Juan. The tours were a hopscotch of one-and two-night stands, often hundreds of miles apart. The stages were anything from a banquet hall to a fraternal temple. There was no use carrying elaborate settings or props; there might not be adequate lights or even a curtain.
For a time, Laughton fiddled with plans to bathe each actor in a pool of light, or to sit them on ladders with enormous trains of cloth. He finally settled for simplicity. Recalling the "drama" of intent musicians turning the pages of their scores as they play, he perched the actors on high stools, got four music stands and four outsized, green-bound scripts to place on each stand. There is no curtain. Laughton merely walks on stage, makes a few pleasant, informal remarks, and introduces the other players. They get on their stools, open their books, and the play begins.
What the audience sees is not really simplicity, however, but deep theatrical cunning. Only gradually—and sometimes not at all—do theatergoers become aware that the cast is acting, without seeming to act. "Every movement of the body, even the turning of the pages, becomes important," explains Laughton. "You mustn't move, except for a startling effect." As the tempo increases, an actor will slip from his stool and move to center stage in time for his big prose "aria." As theater-wise Director Jed Harris pointed out: "By appearing to read, but actually knowing their parts by heart, they make the whole thing come alive. In a theatrical production, the power of illusion would be much more difficult." Playwright J. B. Priestley, who saw the show in Brooklyn, was inspired to write the actors a new play. "I got excited about it. I saw that there was in it the basis of a new form. You couldn't call it drama—perhaps heightened debate or oratory."