Olivier (41 page)

If it had been possible he would have liked to direct or play a leading role in every production in the Old Vic, but he knew it could not be done: partly to respect the susceptibilities of other members of the company, still more because the burden on him, already almost too heavy to bear, would become unsustainable. He must ration himself, pick out only those plays in which he could make an important contribution, play roles which would contribute both to his own reputation and to the reputation of the theatre. When Tynan suggested that he should play Othello he at first demurred. Othello was a bass part – whatever Verdi may have thought about it – and, as Wolfit had pointed out when Olivier had played Lear, he was a natural tenor. Othello needed to be, or at least needed to seem to be, of massive build; Olivier over the years had enormously strengthened his physique, but he was still not a big man. Then the sheer excitement of the challenge overcame him. “One day I thought: I’m going to fucking well get the voice. Most things like that are a question of concentration and repetition and exercise… One always regards one’s limitations in the light of techniques rather than of not being right for a part. I would never admit that I was wrong for any part.” For six months he worked on his voice with a voice teacher from R.A.D.A., roaring like a bull, forcing it lower so that in the end Sybil Thorndike asked incredulously what magic he had been practising. For six months he worked on his physique, building up his muscles so that he could swagger around the stage as the full-blooded black man he had resolved to be: “I must say I looked perfectly dandy as Othello. I looked like Othello should look.”
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And Othello should look, he concluded, like a burly immigrant from Central Africa, or perhaps Jamaica. He had no use for the concept of a coffee-coloured Moor, as Othello was conventionally portrayed – “I had to
be
black. I had to feel black down to my soul. I had to look out from a black man’s world.” He maintained that this was what Shakespeare
had intended and his audience had expected; what else could phrases such as “old black ram” and “sooty bosom” signify? Few were convinced by his arguments. “What he gives us is a Notting Hill Gate negro,” said Jonathan Miller, “and his portrait is made up of all the ludicrous liberal cliché attitudes towards negroes: beautiful skin, marvellous sense of rhythm, wonderful way of walking etc… . Shakespeare’s Othello was a Moor, an Arab, and to emphasise his being
black
makes nonsense of the play.” It was above all the “wonderful way of walking” which seduced Olivier and led him into what most people felt to be a successful yet self-indulgent irrelevance: for hours he studied the way a black man moved, he practised endlessly, as he walked from office to office in Aquinas Street his colleagues would notice his self-consciously rolling gait, his exaggerated gestures. As Sybil Thorndike observed, it was a fascinating study of a member of an oppressed race. But Othello, she went on, was not a member of an oppressed race: “He was a Moor, a proud man, bigger than any of the whites in the play.”
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An extra reason for Olivier’s modelling himself upon a black man was that it gave him unequalled opportunities to indulge his passion for making up. Before beginning his preparations he enquired what makeup the Black and White Minstrels used. Max Factor’s “Negro No. 2”, he was told; this was easy to apply and to take off and was guaranteed not to dry the skin. Whether it was easy or difficult to use was of secondary concern to Olivier; he would have made any effort to achieve perfection. It took him three and a half hours to apply the make-up, with two coats applied to every part of his body irrespective of whether or not it would be visible on the stage. Another hour and a half was needed to take it off. Even his devoted dresser, who normally viewed his master with unquestioning devotion, felt that the enterprise was misguided; other members of the cast found it slightly comic – “How now, brown cow?” asked Maggie Smith, as she put her head round the door while he was making up. Olivier was indifferent to such cavilling. The distinguished actor-manager Mr Vincent Crummles told Nicholas Nickleby that he had once had in his company a “first-tragedy man” who, when he
played Othello, used to black himself all over: “But that’s feeling a part and going into it as if you meant it; it isn’t usual – more’s the pity.” Noone went into a part as if he meant it more wholeheartedly than Laurence Olivier. But his transformation caused some confusion among the younger members of his family. His two-year-old daughter Tamsin visited him in his dressing room while he was removing his make-up. Fascinated, she watched him grow lighter under her eyes. Next day she saw a black girl in the playground of her infant school. Solicitously, she took out her handkerchief and set to work trying to rub her new friend clean.
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Olivier saw Othello as a “devil-worshipping savage”, who in the first four acts of the play would alienate audiences by his arrogance and stupidity and then, at the very end, would “pull their emotions right back into loving him with an intensity they otherwise would never have felt”. The image crystallised in his mind while the planning was still in the most preliminary stages; by the time of the first read-through it had been enriched and strengthened. Normally the first reading is a lack-lustre affair – a getting-to-know-you session with the players doing little more than mumble through their lines. Olivier, said Tynan, “delivered the works – a fantastic full-volume display that scorched one’s ears, serving final notice on everyone present that the hero, storm-centre and focal point of the tragedy was the man named in the title”.
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The man
not
named in the title is Iago. Iago has more lines than Othello and can sometimes seem to have the more important part. When Olivier had played Iago to Richardson’s Othello in 1938 he flattered himself that he had stolen the show. He did not intend that any Iago should steal
his
show. John Mills had suggested that it might be a role for him; Olivier did not relish the idea. Instead he chose Frank Finlay, a highly competent but not particularly charismatic actor who had only performed one Shakespearean role before and could be relied on to play second fiddle to Olivier’s first violin. “He didn’t want me or Albert Finney playing Iago,” said Robert Stephens, “and he didn’t want some cocky young fellow either; he wanted an ordinary actor … whom
he could push out towards the corners, leaving the centre of the stage for him.” He wanted his Iago to be a non-commissioned officer: diligent, resourceful, but not an aspirant for glory. Partly this was to accommodate his own ambitions, partly because he felt that was the sort of man Iago was. During his wartime service he had seen many N.C.O.s hungry for promotion and resentful if somebody else was awarded the coveted extra stripe: any one of them, he believed, “could be guilty of Iago’s offence if they hadn’t enough sense”.
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Maggie Smith’s Desdemona more than made up for Finlay’s subfusc rendering. According to John Dexter, as reported by his long-established boyfriend Riggs O’Hara, Olivier at first had doubts about Smith’s suitability; he wanted the traditional simpering innocent and, anyway, was uncertain about her abilities as a classical actress. Olivier himself insists that he knew Maggie Smith was “a marvellous actress”, and believed that the fact that she was celebrated for her roles in comedy was a recommendation rather than a handicap – “It would be a mistake to play a tragic role if you weren’t a comedian.” He took her to lunch at the Ivy and told her what he planned. “Oh, sir,” she said. “You must be out of your mind.” “You’ll be out of
your
mind if you turn it down,” Olivier retorted. Maggie Smith herself admits she was startled by the proposal. “I was very nervous of Sir Laurence,” she told Bryan Forbes. “It’s unfair on him, but it’s bound to happen. You are in awe of him, very much so.”
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Neither the awe nor the nervousness were apparent on the stage. Maggie Smith was one of the few players who stood up to Olivier in the theatre. She had the courage to assert her presence and the skills to hold her own once she had done so. She complained vociferously when she thought she was being misused. “Me and Frank at the front,” she complained. “We can’t even see each other it’s so dark; then
he
comes on, the lights go up, and we’re blinded. We can’t see each other because of the lights.” Olivier seemed intent on keeping as far away from her as possible. “I’ve come all the way from Venice to see you,” she protested. “You’ve won the war. I’m pleased to see you. What do you want me to do? Back away in fucking horror?” In one performance, Olivier became
so enraged by her refusal to accept what seemed to him his sensible suggestions that, instead of slapping her across the face with the piece of parchment that had been sent to him by Lodovico, he punched her on the jaw. She fell heavily and for a moment seemed to lose consciousness, leaving the horrified stage hands wondering whether or not to bring down the curtain. They were only to act together on one other occasion and Smith never wholly forgave him. You must admit, Derek Granger told her, “that he is a great
monstre sacré
.” “
Monstre
, yes,” she replied.
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Whether or not Maggie Smith’s presence stimulated him to greater efforts, Olivier’s Othello was one of overwhelming passion. In the course of his career he acted with greater subtlety, he showed greater psychological penetration, but nothing could excel the potency of this performance. “I knew by the trembling of my body as I left the theatre,” wrote an awed Christopher Fry, “that I had heard ‘the hum of mighty workings’. The rage was elemental, the pain so private that it seemed an intrusion to overhear it.” Some thought it vulgar – unspeakably so, judged John Osborne, adding that no other actor would have had the courage to do it that way – but no-one doubted that they had experienced something titanic which was unlikely ever to be repeated. Billie Whitelaw took over the role of Desdemona from Maggie Smith. “It was like being on stage with a Force Ten gale,” she said. He himself realised that he was achieving something altogether extraordinary, which he could scarcely comprehend. One night, when he had given a particularly spectacular performance, the cast applauded him at curtain call. He retreated in silence to his dressing room. “What’s the matter, Larry?” asked another actor. “Don’t you know you were brilliant?” “Of course I fucking know it,” Olivier replied, “but I don’t know
why
!”
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The price he paid was mental and physical exhaustion more complete than anything he had experienced before. When “Othello” opened in Chichester he had rationed the number of performances he would do because he suspected it would be exceptionally demanding; it proved to be far worse than he had believed possible. He refused to go to the première of the film “Khartoum”, even though he was one of the
leading actors and it was to be graced by the presence of Princess Margaret, because he had a matinée of “Othello” that day, “after which, I shall, I am afraid, be quite exhausted. The only way I seem able to cope with this exercise … is by going straight home and having something on a tray in my bed.” His colleagues in the National knew that it was best not to approach him if he had played Othello the night before – “I really felt I was useless in the office; as if I had been run over by a bus.”
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Exhaustion was bad enough, but at least he knew that twenty-four hours off would restore him. It was when he was acting Othello that he experienced for the first time the far more threatening stage fright. “It is an animal,” Olivier wrote in
On Acting
, “a monster which hides in its far corner without revealing itself, but you know that it is there and that it may come forward at any moment.” Before “Othello” Olivier had known that stage fright existed but had assumed that it was something that happened to other people. Now it had happened to him, for no apparent reason, without warning. He forgot his lines, lost touch with the progress of the plot, developed an irrational audience shyness, “against my will I would find myself turning away from them to show them the back of my head”. Some people he knew had never recovered from this paralysing malady and had retired prematurely from the stage. Olivier refused to follow their example; mainly, he claims, because he thought he had an obligation to his colleagues – particularly the more elderly among them: “If I, who was acknowledged more or less the top, if
I
failed, how were those poor fuckers going to face up to the rest of their lives?” So he battled on, every evening a potential crisis. There were lulls in which it seemed impossible to believe that he had ever been affected, there were weeks of concentrated agony; it was to be five years before the affliction disappeared, as suddenly and inexplicably as it had started. Olivier’s composure can hardly have been helped by the exploit of Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins for the first time was playing the humble role of the messenger from Cyprus who, in Act One, Scene Three of “Othello”, announces the arrival of the Turkish fleet. He lost his head and instead delivered Iago’s opening speech from early on in Scene
One. Nobody in the audience seemed to notice and the play resumed its normal course. “Oh, dear heart, my ears were flapping,” Olivier told him. “I thought you were going to start the whole play over again.” If Hopkins had been a more experienced actor or if the offence had been repeated, Olivier would have been unforgiving. As it was, he made a joke of it and the matter was never referred to again.
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The occasional critical reservation made no difference to the success that “Othello” enjoyed with the public. It was the play that anyone who claimed any familiarity with the theatre
had
to see. Queues for the tickets available on the day stretched sometimes hundreds of yards, far beyond the point at which would-be purchasers could hope to be successful. Because people were allowed to stand at the back, it played to a phenomenal 102 per cent capacity, breaking all records at the Old Vic. Franco Zeffirelli was an Italian director of enormous renown who knew the London stage better even than the continental. Olivier’s performance, he said, was “an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the last three centuries. It is grand and majestic, but it is also modern and realistic. I would call it a lesson for us all.” It was a lesson for Olivier; it taught him that there was a limit to the burden he could impose on his physique, his voice, his nerves. He never acquired the gift of moderation, but he did learn some of the perils of excess. He was to play many more demanding roles, but never again would he engage in something so compelling and all-absorbing as the Othello he played in 1964 and 1965.
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