Olivier (35 page)

One of the main reasons Evershed-Martin had been so anxious to enlist Olivier had been that he felt nobody else would be able to attract important stars to come to an untried theatre in a provincial town. Olivier turned first to his old friends, then, when he had made sure of them, looked for actors who he felt would be sympathetic to the challenge. Joan Plowright was the first to be recruited. Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson were figures of immense eminence whose presence alone was enough to guarantee the respectability of the enterprise. Michael Redgrave, another old ally, was recruited particularly to play the title role in “Uncle Vanya”. A powerful group was assembled to make up numbers: Joan Greenwood, Fay Compton, Max Adrian, John Neville, Robert Lang, Rosemary Harris, Keith Michell – it is hard to believe that anybody else in Britain could have persuaded so distinguished a body to come aboard. Rosemary Harris was in the United States when she was asked to join the company. What are the parts? she asked. He was not prepared to tell her, Olivier replied. “I don’t want anybody to know what plays I’m doing. These plays have been on library shelves for the last hundred years and it’s a big secret what they are.” Harris stuck to her guns and in the end was given the information she wanted.

“I don’t know how I had the gall,” she remembered. “I would have gone barefoot to China to play for him.” Olivier himself was omnipresent. Not merely did he mastermind the whole enterprise and concern himself with the smallest detail, but he acted in two of the three plays and directed all of them. Chichester was no Toad Hall, but the malicious could see a touch of Mr Toad in Olivier’s determination to feature prominently in every aspect of the Festival.
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Not everyone succumbed to his blandishments. Claire Bloom wanted a part in “Uncle Vanya”, but when told that Joan Greenwood and Joan Plowright had already been cast for the play refused to come to Chichester. “Olivier’s face became stonelike, his basilisk eyes as impenetrable as granite. All he said at the time was: ‘How wonderful of you to have been so honest with me!’ What he meant was: ‘You will never work for me again.’ Laurence Olivier never forgave a slight.” “Claire would have felt a wee bit dull,” was his explanation to Michael Redgrave, but he did indeed bear her a grudge and got his own back in due course. The following year she wrote to say that she had heard “Othello” was being planned. Perhaps Desdemona had already been selected, “but, should the occasion arise your Barkis is willin’.” Desdemona was indeed already cast, Olivier answered with some satisfaction; “Of course, I’ll remember you, my dear, as and when.” “Cold and wounding,” Bloom found this reply; it certainly was not fashioned to spare her feelings.
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For every one who refused to join, ten clamoured for the privilege. A twenty-three-year-old Steven Berkoff wrote to protest that he had been denied an audition. “I demand it!” he wrote. “I would not make the demand as a poor actor or even as an average or competent one. I only make it because I
know
that I shall not disgrace myself before you.” “I have no further room in the company for anyone of your age group,” Olivier replied, “that is the truth and the long and the short and the tall of it.” Unlike Claire Bloom, Berkoff forgave the rebuff. Fourteen years later he wrote to invite Olivier to act or direct for him at the Greenwich Theatre: “It is my greatest regret that we have never worked together.

However, you have taught me as much as if you had given me lessons in the same room.”
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It was not only actors and actresses whom Olivier sought to draw to Chichester. He wrote to John Arden, Robert Bolt and Harold Pinter, asking them to write plays for the Festival. “Whether this idea entertains you or not,” he told Pinter, “I am writing to beg you to come and see the theatre and the work.” In one dramatist, however, he had lost interest. “I do think we go on a bit about Kit Fry,” he told Harold Hobson. “I do think he may come back, but I don’t think he’s the most important author in the world.”
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Even if these dramatists had been ready to oblige there would have been no possibility of their plays being ready in time for the first season. Olivier had to choose three plays from the existing repertoire. He was determined not to do the predictable – “‘Peer Gynt’ and ‘Charley’s Aunt’” as he contemptuously put it – and so, as he had told Rosemary Harris, he turned to the library shelf. From it he extracted two obscure seventeenth-century plays, “The Chances” by the Duke of Buckingham and “The Broken Heart” by John Ford. “The Chances” would open the season. It was “a romp and to my mind still a very endearing and pleasant little romp,” he wrote – suitable for an occasion when the attention of the critics and public would be focused almost entirely on the theatre itself. The Ford was more of a heavyweight piece, but also more difficult to put over. Olivier was apprehensive about its reception. It had, however, been brought to his attention by Kenneth Tynan, “with what I thought was a certain enthusiastic expectation”, so at least one good review could be anticipated.
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The first night passed off smoothly, the weather was excellent, the audience in a mood to enjoy itself. “Warmest greetings from the other Chichester,” read a telegram from a well-wisher. “Thinking of you as I approach New York. Wishing you fair winds and happy landfalls. Hope you’re in for as good a voyage as Francis Chichester.” Sailing a yacht single-handed across the Atlantic might seem a hazardous occupation, but, as the unenthusiastic reviews appeared, Olivier may have thought
that the other Chichester was in the better place. “The Chances” was not a failure, but it was far from the resounding success the Festival needed. Worse was to follow. “The Broken Heart” earned the hostility of some and indifferent dismissal from all except one benevolent critic from the
Yorkshire Post
. Unkindest of all: “That bastard Tynan … suggested it to me, then he just sent it up sky high … son of a bitch.” The son of a bitch compounded his offence by writing Olivier an open letter in the
Observer
, denouncing the style of the production and concluding: “Tomorrow ‘Uncle Vanya’ opens. Within a fortnight you will have directed three plays and appeared in two leading parts. It is too much.” If he moved on to the National Theatre, Tynan suggested, Olivier should revert to the Old Vic triumvirate, sharing power with Ralph Richardson and John Burrell, and perhaps adding Peter Brook and Anthony Quayle as joint directors.
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It was soon evident that, at matinées at least, “The Broken Heart” would be playing to half-empty houses. The Festival threatened to be a failure. The only hope lay in “Uncle Vanya” and Olivier was profoundly doubtful about its chances. He did not believe that Chekhov was suitable for theatre-in-the-round and became ever more sceptical as rehearsals progressed. He had originally proposed that Ralph Richardson should play the name part, but his tentative suggestion had not been followed up on either side: “You don’t want to keep bothering people unless you really mean it,” Olivier reflected, “and I wasn’t absolutely sure how deeply I meant it. Did I really want to make another partnership with Ralph? I wasn’t really convinced I did.” Richardson’s replacement, Michael Redgrave, was in the end to provide what Olivier pronounced to be “the best performance I’ve ever seen in anything. It was absolutely marvellous;’ but he was a slow starter and tentative in rehearsals. Casson was inaudible: “For fuck’s sake, Lewis, I can’t hear a bloody word,” Olivier exploded from the back of the stalls. By the first night he was resigned to abject failure, the collapse of the Festival, a perhaps fatal blow to his prospects at the National. “Here’s to another flop,” he pronounced just before the play began. “Nonsense!” said Sybil
Thorndike, and slapped him in the face. Afterwards Olivier said that that moment woke him up.
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What followed was one of those infinitely rare productions in which everything works, everyone is perfect, nobody stands out. The company were better than the Berliner Ensemble, wrote Harold Hobson, than which he could conceive no higher praise. “Here is a living work of art,” was T. C. Worsley’s verdict, “so perfect in every conceivable shade of detail, that those who are lucky enough to get to see it are privileged.” From the moment that he walked onto the stage Olivier knew that his fears had been chimeras; all was going to be exceeding well. As Astrov he gave a marvellously muted and mellow performance, but it was as the director that he took most pride. “I did it awfully well,” he claimed many years later. “I must say I was very clever with it.” He had reason to be proud. Opinions differed about Olivier’s merits as a director, but for his work on Chekhov he gained nothing but praise, and merited praise at that.
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Thanks to “Uncle Vanya” Chichester’s first season had achieved dramatic success. Socially, and in terms of public relations, it had already triumphed. Olivier’s personal prestige and the quality of the performers he had drawn to Chichester had ensured that the Festival had become part of the social season’s calendar: with Glyndebourne and Ascot it was a place where one should be seen. The “darling Duchess of Norfolk”, as Olivier described her, expressed her undying gratitude: “You take our great, majestic guest off our hands for one glorious night” – in other words, the Queen fitted in a visit to the theatre while staying at Arundel for the Goodwood race meeting. Evershed-Martin was ecstatic; the season made a modest financial profit; Olivier could look forward with pleasure to a second season in 1963.
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He was convinced that the acerbic response of the critics to the first two productions at Chichester had been caused in part at least by the leak of the news that he was to be the first Director of the new National Theatre. “An enemy hath done this,” he concluded – the enemy in
his view being probably the twenty-nine-year-old whizz kid from Stratford, Peter Hall. As a result, he believed, the press did not treat the Chichester Festival as an interesting new experiment which deserved encouragement but as something which should be judged by the standards of a national institution. It was bad luck, in that the last details of his association with the National Theatre had yet to be sorted out and no announcement had been intended for several months. Whether it really made much difference to the critics’ attitude is questionable. It certainly did not deter them from indulging in a paean of praise when things at last went right.
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Olivier’s story is that the suggestion that he should take charge of the National Theatre was put to him casually by Lord Chandos and Kenneth Rae when they were visiting him at Notley. “Are you really proposing that I should be the first Director?” he asked incredulously. “Don’t you realise what a cunt I am? Well, you’ll find out now!” It seems improbable that he replied in such terms and still less likely that he was taken by surprise. Olivier was by now pretty sure that he would be offered the job and would have been outraged if it had been given to anyone else. There was little opposition. Whoever was chosen, Tyrone Guthrie suggested, would have to satisfy the Board that he was a traditionalist at heart, while convincing the more turbulent critics and avant-garde directors that he was truly radical. He reckoned that was no job for him. Glen Byam Shaw had only just taken over at Sadler’s Wells. Among the actors, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud had the stature to take it on, but it was not at all Richardson’s sort of thing and while Gielgud had some experience as an actor-manager he lacked the temperament to take over a large and complex organisation. The most convincing competitor was probably Peter Hall; but, though he had already done great things at Stratford, he was extremely young and had only just taken over supreme command. Precisely when a formal offer was made to Olivier is hard to establish. In October 1960, he told Tarquin that his main interest was now the National Theatre. He had, he said, “been instrumental in its present possibilities”. He had been one
of the three Trustees for about two years and had “managed to cut out a lot of dead wood, force conciliations and form a small, efficient working committee of which Kenneth Clark is the Chairman”. It does not sound from this as if the identity of the first Director had yet been settled. Two months later Clark wrote to tell him that he was “
absolutely
delighted by your suggestion. I had sometimes thought of asking you if you would consent to become first Director of the National Theatre, but hardly dared to hope for it.” If he would like to take it on it would make all the difference “both to the public and to actors. Everyone has confidence in you and will be admiring your genius.” The most obvious interpretation of this is that Olivier had suggested to Clark that he should become Director – something incompatible with Olivier’s version of events but not necessarily incorrect for that reason. Another perplexing feature is that Clark’s message makes it sound as if it was he who would select the first Director while in fact Chandos and/or Esher enjoyed the decisive voice. Olivier described a lunch with Esher about this time. Olivier guessed that he was about to say something important because of the concentration with which he was eating. “Eventually he looked up, his moustache dropping soup, and said: ‘Do you hate me?’” Olivier denied he did. “I was afraid you did,” said Esher. Olivier still cherished a grudge against Esher for his abrupt dismissal from the Old Vic during the Australasian tour, but he knew that it was essential that they should work together if the National Theatre was to get away to a smooth start. “I thought he was a stupid old fart,” he said, “and he was, but I knew whatever those boys did was in the purity of conscience.” Esher was far from being a stupid old fart, and Olivier was well aware of the fact. In an ideal world he would have preferred to deal with someone rather more amenable, but if Esher and Chandos controlled the future of the National Theatre then he would accept the fact and get along with them as best he could.
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Whatever the exact timing, Olivier’s appointment as Director had been decided in principle by the time the season started at Chichester. The announcement was made a few weeks later. The staff marked
the occasion by sticking a Union Jack on his door with a placard reading “God Bless Sir”. Olivier came to the door, not knowing anyone was watching him, put his hands together, bowed his head and said, “Please God, help!” Until that moment all Olivier’s preparations for Chichester had been made with the consciousness that the potential needs of a future National Theatre should be borne in mind, but with no direct association between one institution and the other. Once his appointment had been formalised, it was merely a question of how intimate the relationship should be. Olivier was anxious that – overtly at least – it should not appear too close: partly because he did not wish to fetter his freedom of action, partly because it was important that those at Chichester should not feel that they were of value only for the contribution they might make to the foundation of another theatre. When the
Daily Mail
carried a story that the cast at Chichester would provide the nucleus of the National Theatre Company, Olivier denied that this was so. Some had not yet been asked, some would never be asked, at the most it was the case that “certain members of the Chichester Company will, no doubt, be seen at the National Theatre”. “Oh dear, oh dear!” replied the editor of the
Daily Mail
; another story would be published putting things straight. As he no doubt suspected, the original story was closer to the truth than the correction. By the time the second season at Chichester opened every appointment made, every production undertaken, was planned with a view to its relevance to the National Theatre.
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