Olivier (37 page)

He still had obligations to Chichester and, indeed, saw the Festival as playing an important part in its own right, but from the end of 1962 the National Theatre was at the heart of all his planning. He identified himself wholly with its doings, committing to it the allegiance due to an institution which had taken over his life yet loving it with the fierce pride of an artist surveying his own creation. He was owned by the National Theatre and yet he owned the National Theatre. He did not agree with Peter Hall on many things, but when Hall said that the National was above all Olivier’s creation, he would have endorsed the sentiment. In the not-so-small hours of the morning, after a heavy drinking session, Olivier announced in a stentorian voice: “There’d be no National Theatre if it wasn’t for me!” It was vainglorious, but it was nevertheless a case of
in vino veritas
. “Come on, Larry, it’s time you went to bed,” said Joan Plowright.
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H
ow he wished Tarquin was there, Olivier told his son in the autumn of 1962, to talk about anything except the National Theatre, “because you can guess that every Jack who can use a typewriter is telling me how to run that”. By the end of the year he was devoting all his energies to the Theatre’s affairs. He even made a resolution to give up alcohol for the whole of 1963. “I shall miss it dreadfully,” he told Tyrone Guthrie, “but I have made an important discovery, and that is that if you don’t drink there is nothing else to do but work, and that is the only way I can hope to get it done.” Some might have thought his lack of alternatives a little dispiriting – could he not have read a book? Looked at pictures? Gone for a walk? Made love? – but even if his remark need not be taken too literally it demonstrates both the extent of the dedication he gave to his work and the importance he attached to drink. Acting and heavy drinking frequently go together. Olivier never drank before or during a performance but afterwards, or if he was off duty, two or three whiskies and a fair amount of wine would have been the norm. Like most heavy drinkers, he thought that he had a strong head. Ralph Richardson disagreed. “Of course Laurence never had a head for drink,” he said. “He came up to me one day and said: ‘The trouble with you, Ralph, is that you can’t hold your liquor.’ And he fell flat on his face.” There are enough accounts of Olivier the worse for wear to make it clear that Richardson was justified in his comments: he was never close to being an alcoholic, but he drank a great deal more than even the most liberal of doctors
would have thought desirable. Drink was an important part of Olivier’s life and to renounce it was an important sacrifice. He stuck by his word. He wrote triumphantly to Tarquin in December 1963 to announce that he was coming off the wagon on Christmas Eve: “I shall probably have a couple of drinks, be sick all over the kids and be carried screaming up to bed in disgrace.”
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The burden of running the National was made the greater by his determination, from the very start, to concern himself with every aspect of its existence. “Delegation” was not a word which came easily to Olivier. Any significant policy decision would, he took for granted, be under his control. When the South Bank Board set up an Advisory Panel to supervise work on the new enterprise, Olivier wrote to the Chairman, Lord Cottesloe: “It is a little awkward for me to put to you what I want to, without sounding as if I thought no end of myself … It is that I do feel that I should run this Advisory Panel myself and I feel that, as Director of the theatre, the idea need not be too unacceptable.” But to be in charge of the broad sweep of policy while leaving the niggling details to others was not his style. When a long-serving doorman retired it was Olivier who decided that a party would be in order, vetted the guest list, approved the budget and in due course appeared and said a few words himself. He wrote petulant minutes about the low quality of the lavatory paper in the staff toilets and enquired whether it was necessary to have so many lights permanently burning in the entrance hall. “There were occasions when you thought: ‘Will there ever be any peace?’” said Rupert Rhymes, the theatre manager. No detail was too small to escape his attention. There had been much discussion about the exact colour of the posters: from Canada he despatched a postcard – “Lousy postcard, but this is the shade of yellow.” Upset by the amount of coughing in the auditorium, he sent Rhymes round to a manufacturer of cough lozenges, instructing him to persuade them to supply sachets which could be handed out by the usherettes. His obsessive interest in detail could be irritating, sometimes even ridiculous, but no-one doubted that it stemmed from his determination that the National Theatre should be, in every way, as
good as it could possibly be, and that the welfare of all those who worked in it was very much part of that consideration.
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Olivier had always maintained that it would be disastrous to build a theatre and then look for a company to fill it; the company must come first, the building should follow a few years later when the company was well established. This meant that the National Theatre would need a temporary home. For reasons both practical and sentimental the most proper place for it in those early years seemed to be the Old Vic. Olivier’s glory days under the Old Vic banner had been while the company operating under that name was based in the West End, leaving its war-damaged headquarters in ruins just off the Waterloo Road on the South Bank. He had no particular affection for the now rebuilt theatre, but it was serviceable enough and would act as a base while its permanent home was being built. His experiences at Chichester, however, had made him dissatisfied with the traditional hole-in-the-wall stage which the Old Vic then offered. He insisted that the stage should be thrust forward into the auditorium, a procedure which was both expensive to achieve and involved the sacrifice of a number of seats. Still worse, the change damaged the acoustics. “It was my fault,” Olivier admitted. “I brought the stage forward one too many times. I ruined it. It used to have the best sound in the world.”
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Even Olivier had to accept that he could not conduct the whole operation single-handed. For his principal support he hoped to enlist the driving force at the Royal Court, George Devine. Devine was only three years younger than Olivier; since his spectacular breakthrough with “Look Back in Anger” he had transformed the Royal Court into one of the most innovative and successful companies in the British theatre; he felt no urge to embark on this new enterprise under the command of someone else. “We were like partners, we were never like rivals,” protested Olivier. “I could have provided a formula that would have included him.” Joan Plowright thinks that it could have worked, that the two men were sufficiently mature and respectful towards each other to have established a modus operandi. Olivier would have tried,
but it is hard to see how the two men could for long have lasted in uneasy partnership. “He felt he couldn’t work under Larry,” said Devine’s widow, and whatever arrangements might have been cobbled up, this in effect is what would have had to happen.
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Instead, according to Olivier with Devine’s approval and certainly with his acquiescence, Olivier proceeded to poach the Royal Court’s brilliant young directors: William Gaskill and John Dexter. Their appointment was a striking affirmation of the way he intended the National Theatre to develop; it represented a rejection of the traditional ways of the old classical theatre and an acceptance of the new world into which he himself had ventured with “The Entertainer”. Dexter accepted the invitation with alacrity; Gaskill took rather more persuading – he wanted assurances that the National would put an emphasis on modern work – but allowed himself to be convinced without too much difficulty. “We were tremendously excited and flattered,” Gaskill remembered. At one point a formal relationship between the National Theatre and the Royal Court was envisaged. The Drama Committee of the National Theatre considered the issue and the Board was told that the Director “thought it would be advantageous if some link could be formed with an organisation so intimately linked with the younger school of dramatists”. A press release later that year announced that the two bodies would cooperate in certain fields, such as the training of young actors and the commissioning of new plays. In fact the traffic seems to have been mainly one way. As well as Gaskill and Dexter, the National was to recruit several of the Royal Court’s most promising young actors as well as to invite dramatists who had first written for the Court to produce work for the National. Relations remained harmonious, though, and when something close to open warfare existed between the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company it was reassuring to know that an ally was at hand in Sloane Square.
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In taking on Gaskill and Dexter Olivier was well aware that he was welcoming to the National two young directors who were not only used to working together but had ideas different to his own which they would
not hesitate to promote. He accepted the incipient challenge with equanimity. “I was determined to surround myself with good actors and first-rate directors,” he wrote. “I wanted people who were prepared to outgun me. I wanted the cream of the British theatre, and I think I got it.” So far as the directors were concerned this was true. Gaskill and Dexter were not given a free hand, but they enjoyed a high degree of independence and their views were canvassed and taken into account on most important issues. When it came to the actors it was not quite so clear-cut. Olivier did not relish competition. The British stage was littered with corpses of those who had tried to outgun Olivier and had perished for their pains. He was disinclined to give too much space to those few whom he saw as genuine or even potential rivals. But he was eager to bring forward young actors of promise who had a career to make, and he rejoiced in their success. He was resolved that the National Theatre should provide the best dramatic performances in the world: for this he would need the best actors and to engage them was his resolve.
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He was determined that the National should not become a repository for actors who were past their prime or, at least, seemed to have little potential for new development left within them. To achieve this he was obliged to disappoint and sometimes offend many veterans who had served with him in the past. At least a hundred times he used a formula designed to keep petitioners at bay: “Even now plans long made persist in crumbling and fate will insist that we continue to find ourselves at Square One in a most aggravating and frustrating way.” It seems unlikely that this meaningless mantra was of much consolation to the rejected, but Olivier convinced himself that it possessed almost mystic qualities and would appease even the most demanding applicant. It was soon apparent to him that the ability to say “No”, whether gracefully or gracelessly, was going to be a most important weapon in his armoury. Timothy Bateson, who had played quite important roles at Chichester, took it for granted that he would be invited to join the National. To his dismay he was passed over. “Obviously he [Olivier]
had decided to associate himself with the contemporary Royal Court influence,” he wrote sadly. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his long association with Olivier, Roger Furse too was dropped. This “very much hurt him”, thought Derek Granger, though, to judge by an amicable exchange of letters some years later, no lasting harm was done to the friendship. Some important actors were rejected too: John Mills, though an old and close friend, was told there would be no place for him at the National because – a not entirely convincing reason – the theatre could not afford him; while Rex Harrison, much less of a friend, was turned down on the grounds that Olivier, “for the sake of the
amour propre
of the company”, wished only very rarely to disturb a working ensemble by introducing stars from another sphere. Mills seems to have borne no grudge at his rejection; Harrison, either for this or for some other reason, saw Olivier as an enemy. “A stupid bastard, obsessed by
folie de grandeur
,” he described him.
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Of the first group of actors Olivier picked, four, among them Joan Plowright and Robert Stephens, were associated with the Royal Court; two – Maggie Smith and Max Adrian – had established a name for themselves in revue, and two – Michael Redgrave and Diana Wynyard – were established stars. There was nothing strikingly innovative about this selection, nor about the bright young novices in their twenties – Anthony Hopkins, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi – whom Olivier picked from the plethora of talent which washed around the National Theatre. As Michael Billington has pointed out, it would be extravagant to argue that Olivier, “with his instinctive patriotism and actor-manager paternalism”, was in any way a revolutionary figure. But nevertheless he chose to reject not merely his own past but a large part of London’s theatrical establishment. He ventured into terrain which, if not unexplored, was unfamiliar. And every appointment was
his
appointment. Anthony Hopkins, when his turn came to audition, was excited to find that Olivier was very much in charge of the operation and surprised how ordinary he looked, “very average in his horn-rimmed glasses and three-piece suit”. Having seen Olivier playing Othello the night before
he rather daringly offered the deathbed scene. “You’ve got a bloody nerve,” remarked Olivier. He helped himself to a cigarette: “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I’m so nervous in case you’re better than me.” This was, thought Hopkins, “his charming way of trying to relax me”. Evidently it worked. After the piece was finished Olivier said: “Well done. I don’t think I’ll lose any sleep tonight, but I think you were awfully good. Would you like to join the Company?” By May 1963 the company had been selected prior to the opening in October. The Board was told that, as well as those mentioned above, a contract had been signed with Peter O’Toole. “It was agreed that the above, together with Sir Laurence himself, formed the nucleus of an excellent company.”
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