Deconstructing Charlie

Charlie Chaplin remains a cherished comic icon of the twentieth century. His comedy fused arsenic-laced slapstick and emotion. Chaplin could knock off a rich man’s hat whilst winning the affections of the man’s pretty daughter. Under his spell almost anything was permissible. His stab at institutions and authority and his often indecent burlesque, were allowed no other comedian of his time. In his book Charlie Chaplin, Theodore Huff validates the comedian’s universal appeal: “[Chaplin] worked out a common denominator of fun and feeling that accords with something in every age, class, and race of people, the world over … Chaplin is universal and timeless.” By challenging the myth surrounding Chaplin, the A.R.T. production of Charlie in the House of Rue reevaluates this perception.

To understand the myth surrounding Chaplin, we must first look into his origins. Chaplin, like many early screen actors, began his career on the vaudeville stage. These vaudeville clowns continued the comic routines (lazzi) of the commedia dell’arte. Chaplin got his first breakthrough at the age of 18, when he joined vaudeville impresario Fred Karno’s comedy troupe. Working for Karno gave Chaplin the opportunity to develop and perfect burlesque, slapstick and pantomime techniques that would later prove useful in Hollywood. With its roots in mime, commedia‘s predominantly visual humor adapted itself easily to the silent screen. Chaplin employs commedia-derived visual gags with unique imagination. In The Gold Rush, Chaplin treats a boot as a meal. The shoe laces become spaghetti; the nails, bones; the sole, a filet. In The Pawnshop, Chaplin performs a virtuoso stunt with an alarm clock. His gesticulations manipulate our gaze, transforming the clock first into a heart and then a sardine can.

In the commedia tradition, the clown’s place is to question authority and attack vice. Chaplin repeatedly mocks figures of authority in his films. In The Count, the policeman, the symbol of law and order, is the butt of the comic’s jokes. Chaplin’s persona, a scruffy tramp with the hint of a gentleman about him, delineates his critique of society. Charlie’s classic outfit, the dilapidated suit, draws a visual parallel between rich and poor. The base elements of comic farce contrast with moments of courtly parody. In The Immigrant, Chaplin finds himself in a fix whilst trying to impress a beautiful girl. In gentlemanly fashion he invites her to lunch, only to find he has no money. When a wealthy artist offers to pay the check, Charlie continues absurdly to follow the codes of polite behavior, refusing the offer. Reverting to a scavenging tramp, Charlie finally manages to pay by recycling coins left by the artist as tip for his own food. In Making a Living, Chaplin plays an impoverished fop. The dual elements of discerning gentleman and opportunist tramp meet in his character. During the course of the film, Chaplin bums change from a man and then steals his girl. Significantly, Charlie achieves more of his aims and desires when in touch with his trampish side, than in his attempts at mannered, correct behavior. In championing the tramp over the gentleman, Charlie rejects the accepted values of society, thus radically breaking away from the conclusions of traditional comedies, where subversive elements are brought back into line.

Chaplin constantly subverts the status quo in his films, both by snubbing authority and attacking the mundane dehumanizing toil of the work place. In Easy Street, Charlie plays a gopher on a film set. With great dexterity, he sets about creating havoc, preventing actors and crew from a productive day’s labor. Modern Times portrays the damaging effects of factory life, where the daily grind turns Charlie into a cog in the machine. Significantly in The Gold Rush, Chaplin becomes rich overnight not by hard work but by luck. As Charles Musser concludes in his essay “Work, Ideology, and Chaplin’s Tramp,” “the ethic of hard work and honesty – the entire system of values espoused by society – is lampooned.” Chaplin occupies a mythical place in western culture, but like many icons, the origins of his legendary status have become distorted. As Musser argues, the common critical view of Charlie as a universal clown could be seen as an effort to bowdlerize Chaplin’s comedies, “to make his humor safe for that universal audience.” Instead of seeing the tramp as a threat to society, critics described Chaplin as “a little man buffeted by life.” Censorship has also affected our modern perception of Chaplin. Anxious to “clean up” Chaplin’s bawdy and inflammatory comedy, censors insisted upon editing the film texts, cutting scenes and inter-titles, rendering parts of films meaningless or bland.

The “little tramp” has become so deeply ingrained in our culture, that we have lost all sense of the anarchic germ of his humor. Society has even attempted to reintegrate him. Chaplin’s image has consequently come to represent values far removed from his own. Once Chaplin was an anti-establishment icon, a figure deeply afraid of the dehumanizing power of machines. But in 1986, Chaplin sported a clean suit, a tie and advertised the IBM personal computer on television. In his book Brave New Workplace, Robert Howard describes the television Charlie as: “a persuasive advocate for technology and for the corporation itself.”

At about the same time as Charlie became a symbol of capitalism, author Robert Coover made him the hero of his short story, “Charlie in the House of Rue,” the text on which the A.R.T production of Charlie in the House of Rue is based. A celebrated author and expert in multi-media approaches to text (Coover lectures on hypertext at Brown University), Coover approached his subject with a ruthless eye, “I wanted to see how Charlie would react if the world turned against him.” Coover deconstructs the most sacred part of the Chaplin legend. Plunging him into a postmodern world, Coover denies the Tramp control over his clowning. Coover plays with the idea of Charlie as a frozen anachronism, dislocated in time from his origins and beliefs. Thrusting Charlie into a world over which he has no control over the meaning of his image, the story examines the effects of this instability upon the icon and upon our current concept of comedy.

The start of Coover’s story fulfills our expectations of a typical Chaplin scenario. Charlie in his “gentleman-tramp” persona finds himself in the House of Rue, a luxurious mansion with gleaming floors, sparkling chandeliers, and countless doors leading to endless rooms. The depiction of the upper-class world into which Chaplin’s tramp figure stumbles is familiar to us from such films as The Idle Class, where the luxurious surroundings act as the perfect foil for rough slap-stick and social commentary. Feeling quite at home among the chandeliers and suits of armor, Charlie begins his comic-anarchic routine, “challenging a hat tree to a fight” and skidding gleefully on the polished floors. After setting his comedy act in motion, Charlie spies a lady to woo and begins his endearing Casanova routine.

Our expectations are soon undercut as Charlie rapidly loses control over both his comic gags and his audience. The beautiful woman ignores his advances, standing forlorn and sad on the balustrade. When he throws roses to her, they bounce off her dress and ornament the head of a wall-mounted deer, whose antlers begin “to look like rose bushes.” A doleful old man sits in the library, oblivious to Charlie’s game of “playing up to the rich man.” In the kitchen, a bald man slurps soup sullenly, not noticing that he is the butt of Charlie’s burlesque. Charlie’s attempt to lampoon the upper classes fail. His most well-loved and finely-tuned routines fall on deaf ears. With no one to play off, there is no audience to play to. The jokes turn against Charlie, as does our laughter. Perhaps for the first time in the history of the Chaplin legend, the audience laughs at him and not with him.

But when the floors revolt against him, Charlie experiences a complete loss of control. Following a drinking-gag in the library with the old man who doesn’t even notice as Charlie repeatedly exchanges his empty glass for the other’s full one, the sodden tramp reels out into the hallway. Not only does Charlie tilt, so too does the room. The floor tips to a steep angle, sending the unfortunate tramp sliding backwards into the clutches of the dour-faced bald man in the kitchen. Even the props we recognize as standard features of a Chaplin scene conspire against him: the potted plant, emblematic of wealth and prosperity, the soup bowl, signifying the poor man’s need to eat, and the clocks, symbolizing the monotonous structure of time in the mechanical age, all resist incorporation into Charlie’s gags, refusing to illustrate his world view. As everyday objects such as soup bowls and clocks shatter around him, Charlie’s very existence is called into question. At the end of Coover’s story, comedy gives way to horror. A grotesque maid attempts to castrate Charlie in the bedroom. He escapes only to face the ultimate impotence: his inability to stop the beautiful lady from hanging herself. In a last, valiant attempt to save both comedy and the lady, he summons up all his best routines, only to bump accidentally into her, sending her to her death. In another scene in the library, Charlie wipes the old man’s tearful eyes, only to see them drop out of his skull. In a final scene, Charlie, reduced to a heap of blood and tears, finally sinks to the floor in disbelief and anguish. The myth of Charlie has been more than deconstructed; it has been disemboweled.

The combination of live performance and multi-media in the A.R.T. production of Charlie in the House of Rue has the potential to reassemble the shattered icon from the fragments of the past. Chaplin’s comedy grew out of a fusion of theatre traditions and the new medium of cinema. The A.R.T. production explores points of intersection between the stage, screen, and Coover’s story. Coover’s unstable text seems tailor-made for the stage. Because Charlie’s adventure in the House of Rue is written as a series of stage directions, the text acts as a detailed performance guide for actors and director. At one level, the text suggests actions, as in the gory “Charlie, dabbing still at the old man’s eyes, knocks one of the eyeballs loose.” But Coover’s text also conjures up vivid images for a director to play with, such as the lurid “He … gropes his way in blind panic to the door … the walls turning soft as flesh.” Director Bob McGrath’s challenge lies in realizing these ideas on stage.

In terms of bringing the worlds of silent cinema and the stage together, McGrath and his collaborators specialize in working with film, music, and slides. When Robert Brustein first became interested in doing a project based on Chaplin, Bob McGrath was the logical choice for director. McGrath’s two previous A.R.T. productions, Alice in Bed and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, were multi-media extravaganzas. In collaboration with designers Laurie Olinder and Fred Tietz and filmmaker Bill Morrison, McGrath’s art draws on the entire spectrum of culture.

Charlie in the House of Rue will test the limits of A.R.T’s technical abilities. The stage will be divided into areas by screens and turn-of-the-century film footage; as well as excerpts from Chaplin’s films will offset the action on stage. Despite the apparent complexity of combining all the different elements into a seamless whole, McGrath says “It all appears incredibly high-tech, but it really isn’t.” The main objective of the performance will be to “explode the myth of Charlie Chaplin through media references taken from a whole century of Chaplin idolatry.”

The fusion of early cinema and theatre will allow the audience to perceive Chaplin not as a single, unified whole or universal clown, but as a fragmented disparate set of signs, perhaps signifying nothing. Brustein identifies at least three levels to a late twentieth century understanding of Chaplin: “There’s the character that Charlie plays, namely the character of the Tramp, the actor Charlie Chaplin playing the Tramp, and then there’s the myth of Charlie Chaplin playing Charlie Chaplin playing the Tramp.” The A.R.T. production must negotiate a further layer on top of all that – A.R.T actor Thomas Derrah’s interpretation of the myth, refracted still further through Coover’s radical story. The manifold possibilities suggested by the A.R.T. production may enable individual audience members to select fragments of Charlie at will, reconstructing him to fit their own myths.

Or it could be that the staging of this silent film drives us in completely the opposite direction. Far from putting the legend back together, Charlie in the House of Rue may only underline the void between Chaplin and our own time. But if we are unable to reconstruct Charlie again from the disparate shards of his myth, we owe him this requiem mass in the late, dark hours of the twentieth century.

Chloe Veltman is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.