Olivier (32 page)

Osborne denies that he wrote “The Entertainer” specifically for Olivier: this tragicomedy about a seedy music-hall performer whose career was already declining from its never very considerable heights had been conceived and half written before the possibility of Olivier playing the leading role had even been considered. It was George Devine who persuaded Osborne to send over the first two acts for Olivier’s inspection. There were doubts on both sides. Osborne was afraid that Olivier’s fame would disturb the balance of the play, leading the audience to view it merely as a vehicle for his talents. Besides, would Olivier’s style of acting fit happily into the Royal Court? They were accustomed to something more homespun – as they saw it, more real, more feeling – than the scintillating but somehow heartless Olivier. Olivier for his part had doubts about what he saw as being the unpatriotic thrust of the play. Spiteful jokes about Eton – which Tarquin had so recently adorned – seemed to him in poor taste. His friends advised him that it would be a most misguided enterprise. “I must say that I formed the opinion that most of his friends were very stupid people,” Osborne observed waspishly. But in the end the Royal Court’s realisation of how valuable it would be for them to have Olivier on their stage and Olivier’s conviction that, like it or not, this was the new wave and he wanted to be riding on it rather than drowned under it, overcame all hesitation. “The Entertainer” opened at the Royal Court in April 1957, went into abeyance for four months or so to allow Olivier to tour Europe with “Titus Andronicus”, and then reopened at the Palace Theatre.
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Olivier’s original idea, based on his reading of the first two acts, had been that he should play Archie Rice’s father, Billy – a gruff, courageous
old-school patriot who would have come much more naturally to him than Billy’s doomed and pathetic son. He swiftly recognised, however, that Archie Rice was what the play was all about: in his fatuity, his fecklessness, his clutching at the coat-tails of a largely imaginary glory, he embodied all that Osborne thought was wrong with British society. “It comes nearer to the true concept of tragedy than any other modern play I have been in,” Olivier told a friend, “the original purpose of which, as laid down by the ancient Greeks, was to give the audience a good kick in the stomach and make it think again.” He based the music-hall activities of Archie Rice on what he remembered of the performances of Max Miller, though having to scale down Miller’s “incredible, masterly technique” to suit the abilities of his second-rate or even third-rate hero. To be a great actor playing the part of a bad actor must be uncommonly testing: Olivier played Rice in a way that was both inept and almost unbearably poignant. More than any other part he played it took him over, invaded his offstage life. One of the part-time jobs that he took on during the run of “The Entertainer” involved Bible readings; he was dismayed to hear, when he listened to the recordings, that he had developed “ever so slightly doubtful vowel sounds”. None of his friends said he sounded common, but he suspected that they must have thought it. “This is the real me,” he told the designer Jocelyn Herbert when she saw him in his make-up. He was joking but, she thought, “in a funny way he meant it”.
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William Gaskill, who had been one of the most uncertain about Olivier’s suitability for the Royal Court, was the first to admit how misjudged his doubts had been. “It would have been very easy for the work of the Court to have been a fringe activity performed by a group of left-wing cranks,” he told Olivier. “The moment you decided to play Archie Rice it became a movement of importance to the theatre.” Olivier knew that whatever he had given to the production was more than balanced by what he had gained from it. Before the first night he sent an effusive letter to Osborne. “Thank you for the thrilling and lovely play …” he wrote. “Thank you for the most deeply engaging part, perhaps
barring only Macbeth and Lear, that I can remember – certainly the most enjoyable … Hope I don’t fuck it up for you tonight.” He did not fuck it up; on the contrary he produced a performance of such startling versatility that the critics were left struggling for new superlatives: “You will not see more magnificent acting than this anywhere in the world,” wrote Harold Hobson. In a sense Osborne’s fears were borne out; the play was distorted by Olivier’s presence. “Olivier is fabulous in the part of Archie Rice and wonderful to act with,” Joan Plowright, who took over from Dorothy Tutin as Rice’s daughter, told her parents, “but the rest of the play’s characters don’t really mean very much.” Yet Osborne had no complaints. His compliments to Olivier were quite as fulsome as Olivier’s to him: “Whatever might become of me in the future, nothing could deprive me of the memory of your tremendous, overwhelming performance, nor the experience of working with such greatness.”
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But though each man knew how much they owed the other, they never got on well. When the play went to New York Osborne put a paragraph in the programme denouncing the American theatre critics. Olivier felt that this could only harm its prospects. “It was the action of a cunt,” Olivier observed, “but then he was a cunt.” While Olivier’s performance was lavishly praised, the play itself got a poor press. “Darling heart, they’re not good, not good at all,” Olivier told Osborne after reading the reviews. “Well, not good for
you
, anyway. I shouldn’t read them.” He said it without a trace of irony, Osborne remembered, “only concern”. It would be surprising if the concern was not tinged with a touch of
Schadenfreude
. Olivier himself was disappointed because the Tony award which he felt he ought to have been given was instead awarded to Ralph Bellamy, who was playing Franklin Roosevelt elsewhere on Broadway: “As a performance, well, to put it mildly, I didn’t think it outshone mine.” The excuse was that he had just been given a special prize for his performances of Shakespeare. “I do congratulate you on the invention of this wonderful prize,” he said sourly in his acceptance speech, “and the effective removal of my candidature for the Tony …”
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Some people were shocked by what they saw as Olivier’s indecorous descent from the pedestal of classical theatre. “I appeal to you,” wrote the Rev. David Parton, “to put the wretched, vulgar thing behind you.” But for every one who deplored the vulgarity, a hundred wondered at the exceptional versatility and, indeed, courage of an actor who, at the age of fifty, was prepared to thrust forward into unknown territory and risk his reputation in the quest for a new horizon.
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One hazard during rehearsals was the frequent attendance of Vivien Leigh. She would slip in unobtrusively, sit in the dress circle and make no attempt to advertise her presence; but the fact that she was there was disturbing; as distracting, as Osborne rather bizarrely put it, “as an underwear advertisement at a Lesbians for Peace meeting”. No doubt she paid particular attention to Dorothy Tutin: Olivier’s daughter on the stage and, as she no doubt knew, his mistress off it. But such minor escapades cost her no real anxiety. She would have much more cause for worry a few months later. Tutin withdrew, to be replaced by the rising star of the Royal Court, Joan Plowright. Olivier had first seen her in “The Country Wife”, had been immensely impressed by her acting and enchanted by her appearance and personality. He would have taken steps to ensure that she took over from Tutin, but fortunately found that the management had reached the same conclusion with no help from him. She for her part had worshipped Olivier in the film of “Henry V” and then, under the influence of the Royal Court, come to see him as a fustian figure, more a celebrity than a serious actor, even perhaps a bit of a ham. When Olivier came backstage after “The Country Wife” she was partly awestruck, partly derisory. Once she was enlisted to play in “The Entertainer” and began the rehearsals that all changed. “He got down on the floor with us,” she said. “Larry won us over with sheer talent, and when you have that it pulls everyone up on their toes. There was no side about him – no nonsense at all. His sleeves were rolled up and his braces were showing. He was one of us.”
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By the time “The Entertainer” opened in New York they were most
evidently in love. Joan Plowright viewed the relationship with some caution. She knew Olivier’s reputation for casual liaisons which ended after a few months; she was resolved that she would not be just one more name on that dissatisfying list. Vivien Leigh too was still on the scene: Plowright knew that Olivier felt that his marriage must be near its end but she knew too of Leigh’s terrifying instability and Olivier’s feeling that he should not do anything which would precipitate a crisis. Things were to move slowly and uncertainly. Nearly two years after the run of “The Entertainer” in New York came to an end Olivier stayed with Noël Coward at his house in France. “He was absolutely sweet and at his most beguiling best,” Coward wrote in his diary. “I really am becoming more and more convinced that he won’t go back to Vivien. He’s happier than I’ve seen him for years. I
hope
he won’t get a divorce and marry Joan Plowright, but I have grave fears that he will.”
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B
etween the last performance of “The Entertainer” in May 1958 and the start of rehearsals for the Chichester Festival in March 1962, Olivier’s working life was relatively uneventful. To describe as “uneventful” a period which included four plays, four films for the cinema and two for television may sound a misnomer, but even though one of the plays and two of the films were of some importance they were, in Olivier’s mind, secondary to a longer-term development with which he was resolved to be associated: the opening of the National Theatre.

There had been talk of a National Theatre since the mid-nineteenth century; foundation stones had been laid, dug up and re-laid; the foundation and development of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon had clouded the issue – was this perhaps what had been intended all along? In 1948 the scheme had taken on a new life when the London County Council made available a site on the South Bank and, in the following year, while Olivier was in Australia, the Government pledged financial support. Still there was quibbling, haggling, one step taken backwards for every two forward. Without the resolute pressure of a group of devotees, notably Oliver Lyttelton, who in 1954 became Lord Chandos, the process would have stalled indefinitely. As it was it remained falteringly alive. By 1956 Chandos and Lord Esher were joint Trustees. They felt they needed someone from the theatrical profession to lend some practical expertise to their
deliberations. The obvious choice was Tyrone Guthrie, but he proved reluctant. “There are plenty of old duffers around who would jump at the chance … It needs new blood,” he ruled. There was no guarantee that whoever was appointed a trustee would be the first Director of the National Theatre, but he would plainly be well placed to challenge for the job. The Director would have, in Guthrie’s view, to be “someone of an almost heroic stature: infinitely patient (to deal with committees), of an unassailable theatrical reputation (to attract the support of the political establishment) but also sufficiently flexible to absorb the ideas and style of the new generation”. Esher and Chandos did not have this job description to hand when they turned to Olivier, but they must have had in mind the possibility, even probability that whoever they asked to join them would end up in charge of whatever National Theatre finally opened on the South Bank. Olivier put it more modestly. “We don’t believe you’ll be much use,” he alleged Esher had told him, “but what we need is a glamour-puss, and you’re it.”
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Olivier later claimed to have had some doubts about the desirability of an institutionalised National Theatre. If he did, he kept them to himself. When Kenneth Rae, the Secretary of the Board, wrote in June 1958 to announce that Olivier had been elected as a Trustee to serve on “what is really the only important Committee, the Joint Council of the National Theatre and the Old Vic”, he accepted with alacrity. It might be many months before there was a meeting, Rae warned him. In fact the pace quickened, there were more meetings than Olivier could conveniently attend and by early 1960 the fact that he would be the first Director had been agreed if not yet crystallised in a legal contract. Long before then it had been the pole star of his ambitions. Anything that he undertook in these uneasy years was of secondary importance: the main challenge lay ahead.
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One man who, in his own mind at least, was a plausible rival for the role of directing a National Theatre was Donald Wolfit. Wolfit had far more experience than Olivier at running a theatre company and was one of the few other actors of his generation who was capable of greatness.

Olivier disliked him heartily and would have been appalled if Wolfit had been preferred to him for the National, yet there was still some solidarity between them, evidence that, however much actors might vie with each other, they do make common cause when assailed by those outside the profession. Early in 1957 Kenneth Tynan reviewed Wolfit’s performance in Henry de Montherlant’s “Malatesta”. Wolfit, he concluded, was not up to the part; Olivier would have been the better choice. For some reason not immediately obvious to the layman Wolfit considered this line of criticism impermissible. “Can nothing be done about this man Tynan?” he asked Olivier. “What a generation of critics for bitter venom!” Olivier claimed to be outraged. “I don’t read Mister T. myself,” he told Wolfit (a statement that was not entirely accurate), “but what he had said was shown me by friends.” He had intended anyway to write to Tynan “to point out the error of his ways. It was the first letter I have ever written to a dramatic critic [another questionable assertion], so you may judge that I felt strongly moved. I did not make it a public letter as it is against my principles to cross swords with the bastards.” He was as good as his word. Comparisons between actors, he complained to Tynan, though sometimes inevitable were invariably odious. This one was gratuitous, as well. Anyway “I must beg you to remind yourself that Donald Wolfit is an actor of considerable qualities who has given some very greatly admired performances and, as a courageous Actor-Manager, has rendered in his own way substantial services to the cause of the theatre.” The words “in his own way” gave a certain ambiguity to this testimonial, but it satisfied Wolfit, who wrote a grateful letter. “We don’t really know each other,” he concluded, “and I wish we did. Lunch at the Beefsteak?” It would be pleasant to record that this overture was well received and many happy lunches followed. The row with Tynan was still rumbling on, however, when Olivier in Zagreb got the news that Wolfit had been knighted. He had already been awarded the C.B.E., Olivier told Maxine Audley, “‘And that gives him precedence over me!’ He was furious.”
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