Olivier (17 page)

That building, until the Old Vic had been patched up, was the New Theatre in London’s West End. Space for rehearsal was limited, so the company borrowed the National Gallery, which was standing empty pending the return of its pictures at the end of the war. Unfortunately this coincided with the arrival of the V-Is, the buzz bombs. To stand under the vast expanse of glass which roofed the Gallery while a V-I chuntered overhead cannot have been a soothing experience. Diana Boddington, the stage manager, claimed that neither Olivier nor Richardson ducked or flinched. If they did manage to keep up such an appearance it reflects great credit on them: Olivier remembers that they both went green and “wished we were back in uniform in a nice, comfortable mess”. They were spared, but most public meeting places in London were closed and at one point the Old Vic was one of only five theatres in London still open.
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Olivier could not indulge his temper with Richardson and Guthrie as he could with Mr Wanbon, yet at the time they were discussing the apportionment of roles in the first season he found himself consumed by barely concealed indignation. The plan was that, so far as was practical, he and Richardson would each play small parts in the production in which the other was starring: this would both help the spirit of ensemble and please the audience. But Olivier convinced himself that Richardson’s small parts were not nearly as small as his own. “My small part was so fucking small you couldn’t see it – it was the Button Moulder in
‘Peer Gynt’. I was on the stage for all of three minutes. And I resented it.” In “Arms and the Man” their parts were more or less the same size, but Olivier disliked playing Sergius and was convinced that Richardson had once more outmanoeuvred him. But the most profound grievance arose when Richardson and Burrell both insisted that Olivier, as his main role, should play Richard III to balance Richardson’s Peer Gynt. Olivier hated the idea, mainly “because that cunt Wolfit had made an enormous success only a year or eighteen months before. And I didn’t want to be compared with him because I knew bloody well the press would compare me ill with him because they adored Wolfit.” He protested that the part would be all wrong for him – he would play Richard II if they liked. They would have none of it: “‘Now, come on, old chap. We both think you ought to do it. We’re sure you’ll get through being compared with Wolfit alright!’ They could afford to be sure, couldn’t they? … I thought the other two were really piling on top of me in order to take down my position of popularity owing to being a film star, which Ralph certainly wasn’t … They thought it would be good for me not to do as well as Wolfit. They thought they’d got me where they wanted me.” Even Mr Wanbon could hardly have shown more paranoia. He voiced these thoughts – “thoughts”, perhaps, is hardly the right word – nearly a quarter of a century later. If he had felt so bitterly about it at the time would he not have continued to refuse to play the role? As it was, he gave in pretty quickly. The Old Vic’s first season was taking shape.
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Tyrone Guthrie does not seem to have taken much part in these deliberations, though he played an important role as director. Indeed, his rather nebulous supervisory role counted for little. At the end of the year Richardson and Olivier seem to have decided that they would be better off without him. “Do you mind leaving us alone?” they said. According to Olivier, Guthrie was exhausted and happy to shed the responsibility: “I understand. You want to be independent. Go ahead, I’m not necessary. No hard feelings!” Olivier deluded himself. Guthrie did indeed understand, but there
were
hard feelings. In due course he was to get his revenge.

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One of the plays Guthrie had directed was the Old Vic’s first production with Olivier and Richardson – “Arms and the Man”. Convinced from the start that Richardson had got the better part, Olivier as Sergius put up a lacklustre performance and won few laughs. When Guthrie nevertheless congratulated him on his performance, Olivier made it clear that he thought the part was a weak one and his own rendering of it still worse. “Why, don’t you like the part?” asked Guthrie. “Don’t you love Sergius?” “Love that stooge? That inconsiderable … !” “Well, of course, if you can’t love him you’ll never be any good in him, will you?” Olivier claimed that this was the richest pearl of advice that he ever received and that it transformed his acting. It took him a week to adjust to the idea, but “by the end of it I loved Sergius as I’d never loved anybody”. He learned to love Sergius’s faults, his showing-off, his absurdity, his blind doltishness: his rendering of the part was transformed. It is hard to understand why Guthrie’s remark came as such a revelation to Olivier. Had he not loved Coriolanus? Had he not loved Heathcliff? Perhaps it was not so much a new concept as a reminder. Olivier had dismissed the part with contempt and so had not allowed himself to establish any real rapport with the man he was portraying. It was not so much a matter of love as of intimate identification. Encouraged by Guthrie, Olivier got to know Sergius, absorbed Sergius, was absorbed by Sergius, became Sergius. In the provincial tour Richardson had secured far better notices, Olivier’s part had been almost ignored. When it opened in London, though Richardson still got more space, it was clear that two great actors were playing the principal roles and that both deserved attention.
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By then the Old Vic season in London had already begun with “Peer Gynt”. “A tatty, artsy-craftsy production,” Noël Coward thought it. “Larry wonderful, but only on for five minutes at the end.” Meeting Olivier in the Garrick a few months later, by which time “Richard III” had already achieved immense success, Donald Wolfit merely observed: “Liked your Button Moulder.” Olivier took this to be a calculated insult,
and so no doubt it was meant to be, but in fact, by a display of extraordinary virtuosity, Olivier did make his tiny part into something memorable and much commented on. It was still very much Richardson’s evening, however; and, until the third play, “Richard III”, very much Richardson’s season.
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This was the play that Olivier had wished not to do and which still filled him with dread. The shadow of Wolfit hung over him. He himself thought Wolfit’s treatment of the part “unspeakably vulgar, really bad and cheap and pantomime comic”. “‘Richard III’, Wolfit. Phew!” was the somewhat cryptic entry in his diary after he had been to see it. His own portrayal of the role was in part at least inspired by his determination to be as unlike Wolfit as he could contrive. But he could not escape the fear that he might fail. His friend and fellow actor John Mills was coming to the first night. He and his wife were surprised to get a message asking them to go round to Olivier’s dressing room half an hour before curtain up. They found him fully made-up and dressed. “I just want you to know that you are going to see a bloody awful performance,” Olivier blurted out. “The dress rehearsal was chaotic. I dried up at least a dozen times. It’s a dreadful production, and I was an idiot to let them persuade me to play the bloody part … Anyway, I just wanted you to know that
I
know. Also, I don’t give a damn. I’m past it.” Mr and Mrs Mills tottered across the road to fortify themselves with double brandies before the forthcoming debacle.
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There followed what Mills describes as “the most majestic and inspired performance I have ever seen”. Few performances can have had so many superlatives lavished on it. “The most theatrically overwhelming performance of the period” – J. C. Trewin; “absolutely terrific … even Binkie raved” – John Gielgud; “I think the greatest male performance I have ever seen in the theatre … He is far and away the greatest actor we have” – Noël Coward; “
il m’a donné la plus grande émotion théâtrale de ma vie
” – Albert Camus: one could fill pages with such commendations. Robert Stephens believes that, until the very last minute, Olivier had not decided how to play the part: it was only when his first entrance
provoked a roar of laughter because of his exaggeratedly grotesque appearance that he realised the part must be played as comedy. This cannot be the whole story: Olivier had concluded from the start that the relish with which Richard III gloats over his villainy was always going to contain a whiff of the ridiculous and that to enhance it by adopting what Alec McCowen called “a slightly spinsterish deportment and manner of speech” was bound to make the performance more coherent as well as more entertaining. But though his Richard III raised many laughs, they were uneasy laughs; it was Olivier’s achievement to be at the same time ridiculous and infinitely menacing. Never for an instant did the audience doubt that it was in the presence of unadulterated evil. Guthrie’s advice, Olivier claimed, “had inched its way under my skin. When I came to it, I loved Richard and he loved me, until we became one.” Melvyn Bragg has suggested that part of Olivier’s reluctance to take on the role might have been the fear that it would permanently sear him: “Henry V left him in some way forever heroic, might not Richard leave him malevolent?” Whether or not the thought entered Olivier’s mind, total immersion, night after night, in a hot bath of such steaming evil must at the best have been uncomfortable, at the worst positively dangerous.
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The effect on the rest of the cast was dramatic. Infected by the gloom of their leading actor, they had embarked on their first night in a mood of resigned depression; within a few minutes they found themselves caught up in a gale which bore them away to triumph. For Roger Braban, then only a boy and playing a very minor part, it was like being “a speck of dust on a carpet with a bloody great hoover coming at it”. Olivier exuded evil. The cast shrank from him. It was his voice as much as anything which gave force to his performance: “It is slick, taunting and enviously casual,” wrote Tynan, “nearly impersonal … pulling and pushing each line into place.” “The thin reed of a sanctimonious scholar,” is how Olivier himself described it. It was hard to believe that only a few months before that same voice had been urging on the English troops: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” It is perhaps his death, though, which lingers most tenaciously in the mind. Writhing like a
demented spider, arms and legs shooting out in fearful convulsions, seeking to bring down his enemies even though himself doomed, he performed what Harold Hobson called “a horizontal dance”. James Agate, harking back to Hazlitt’s celebrated description, says that this is how Kean must have done it. Olivier himself admits – or perhaps claims – that he took Kean’s performance as a model. In the case of Shakespeare he always found the legacy of the past particularly rich, sometimes oppressive: “Almost every bit of business that does occur to one makes one feel that it had been thought of before.”
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Within a few moments of the curtain rising Olivier knew that the audience was with him; by the end of the evening the theatre was permeated by “that sweet smell (it’s like seaweed) of success”. It was “a fabulous hit: the first time in my life I ever felt equally a junction of successful acceptance by public, critics and my colleagues”. He managed not to let it go too obviously to his head. At the end of the first run he was persuaded by Sybil Thorndike to make a curtain call. (“He needed much pressure as he modestly wanted to give the others
all
the credit,” David Boyle told Duff Cooper – an observation which suggests that Olivier’s histrionic skills were employed as much in dealing with his admirers as in playing the King.) His speech, Boyle went on, was “so simple and from the heart that it will be treasured by all who heard it”. Some exultation could have been forgiven him, but he had little time to gloat over his success. This was London in wartime. His cousin, Edith Olivier, went round to see him in his dressing room when the play had been running for three weeks or so. He was exhausted and could hardly speak, yet he was just about to go on duty “as a Firewatcher in the Theatre, in which he has to take his turn each week”.
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The most generous tribute came from John Gielgud. In 1939 his mother had given him the sword that Edmund Kean had worn when he played Richard III in the early nineteenth century. “It will be a nice thing to be handed on again to another young hopeful when I am too old to play Hamlet anymore,” Gielgud wrote in his letter of thanks. Olivier could hardly be described as a “young hopeful”, but Gielgud judged the
time had come to pass it on. He had the sword inscribed by a master of the trade – the man who had inscribed London’s tribute to Russian heroism, the Sword of Stalingrad – and charged Alan Dent with carrying it to Olivier in the New Theatre. He suggested Dent should “carry it on a tray, like John the Baptist’s head”. Such a gesture, towards a man who was not only a rival but in direct competition, was almost sublimely magnanimous. Olivier treasured the sword. He did not emulate its previous owner by passing it on to a young challenger but it was among the trophies that were processed up the aisle in Olivier’s Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey.
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As if it were not enough to have completed the film of “Henry V” and triumphed in “Richard III” within a few months of each other, Olivier now took on his first serious work as a stage director. He was reading every new play that came his way with a view not only to acting in it himself but also finding a part for Vivien Leigh. He was sent a new play by Thornton Wilder – an American dramatist whom Olivier knew, liked and thought well of. “The Skin of Our Teeth” was rambling, incoherent, brilliantly intelligent, provocative and enormous fun. Olivier would have liked to play the leading role himself, but he was fully committed at the Old Vic; the part of the maid Sabina, however, which had been played by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway, would, he saw, be a marvellous vehicle for his wife. Whoever directed it would have an unusually free hand, for Wilder had given no instructions of any kind. Olivier leapt at the opportunity. “I always encourage actors to invent like mad,” he claimed. This was a piece of self-deception. More often, he invented like mad on their behalf and expected them to follow his bidding. Roger Braban, aged twelve, found himself forced for financial reasons to leave school and go onto the stage. Olivier, who knew his recently deceased father, offered him the chance of playing a baby elephant in “The Skin of Our Teeth”. The boy looked dubious. Olivier then got on to all fours and cavorted around the floor in baby elephantine mode. “Can you do that?” Olivier asked. “Yes, but I don’t want to.” “Then why are you wasting my time, ungrateful brat?” He got the job all the same and was enormously
impressed by the trouble Olivier took to help him along the way. He had the pleasure of burying his head in Vivien Leigh’s skirts and was patted on the head by George VI when the King visited the theatre and went behind stage after the performance.
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