Theatre and film artist Orson Welles was a man of substance, both physically and artistically.

Many remember him as the wunderkind who wrote, directed and starred in the 1941 film Citizen Kane. Much later a portly hawker of wines on TV, Welles had lost his artistic status in the eyes of the public.

Orson’s Shadow, by Austin Pendleton, casts a light on a little-known facet of the man’s career, when he was hired to direct another legend, Laurence Olivier, in a production of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros.

“It was an amazing clash of titans,” smiles Christopher Stanton, who plays critic Kenneth Tynan, who brought the two men together.

“Tynan was a critic who felt that English theatre was awash with parlour dramas, romantic and stagnant. As an Oxford grad, he didn’t mind shaking up what he saw as a staid theatre community.

“Funny, cruel at times, not interested in past loyalties, he prided himself on being an honest critic who framed his arguments well, someone who would never compromise the clarity of his vision.”

But he had his own agenda in connecting Welles and Olivier. The latter had just finished a successful run in The Entertainer and was starting up Britain’s National Theatre; Tynan wanted to work there as literary adviser. With the consent of Welles, a man he admired intensely, Tynan approached Olivier with the idea that Welles direct Rhinoceros.

“The play looks at what happens when one ego, Tynan, puts two greater egos in a room together with the hope that something amazing will happen. Instead, there was a shipwreck.”

It’s not all due to the three men, though. Olivier was just ending his marriage with Vivien Leigh and taking up with the woman who’d be his next wife, Joan Plowright. All five figure prominently in Orson’s Shadow.

“The tradition holds that Welles was a caricature and Olivier the cool, untouchable performer,” notes Stanton, one of the forces behind Red Machine and soon to go on to Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, which plays Toronto in February.

“But in this play, Welles’s humanity is overwhelming. He’s constantly on fire, passionate and inspiring. As a result, whatever he touches tends to burn. He looks to the future, to great deeds he has yet to do.

“In contrast, Olivier is the blowhard classicist, a man who focuses on the past but is dragged into the future – performing a modern play like Rhinoceros, for instance – by those who know better than he what he needs.”

While the play is filled with bitchy banter, Stanton says it doesn’t work if played like cocktail party chat.

“The trick is to make the stakes clear and high. By the end, all the characters have been stripped bare; we see the roots of their various conflicts. Everyone’s future is on the line here, and they know it.”

jonkap@nowtoronto.com