Olivier (42 page)

But “Othello” had barely completed its run at Chichester before he found himself flung into another major part. Michael Redgrave had been engaged to play Solness in Ibsen’s “The Master Builder”. It was a part for which he should have been well suited, but it soon became obvious that he was incapable of playing: he floundered, forgot his lines, dragged down the performances of his fellow actors. The production, the most expensive that the National Theatre had so far mounted, threatened to be an out-and-out disaster. Subsequent history suggests that Redgrave was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease; Olivier
attributed the failure to drink. Probably the two worked together: Redgrave was anyway known to be a heavy drinker and the terror induced by the onset of that odious and – to him – inexplicable disease may well have driven him to excess. Knowing nothing of this, Olivier was unsympathetic: “I did have a scene with him one day and gave him a very long lecture.” Redgrave felt that Olivier had lost confidence in him. Worse still he had lost confidence in himself. He abandoned the part and left the company. If he had known the full facts, Olivier might have handled him more gently, but the result was the right one. Redgrave was unfit to play the part. After only four or five days of rehearsal, Olivier took over.
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Once more he found himself pitted against Maggie Smith. According to Robert Stephens, who was to marry Smith two years later, Olivier was offended by a review which said that she had acted him off the stage. He turned on her: “If I may say so, darling angel, heart of my life, in the second act you nearly bored me off the stage, you were so slow.” Incensed in her turn, she tore through her scenes so fast that he could barely get his lines in. “She made him look a complete monkey,” wrote Stephens, “and not many people did that to Larry and lived to tell the tale … Larry swore never to work with her again.” This must be a somewhat exaggerated account of the confrontation. Olivier and Smith were both highly professional and conscientious actors and neither would have contemplated destroying a performance so as to score points against the other. But it was not a comfortable occasion for either actor. The audience were the ones who gained. William Gaskill doubted whether Olivier much enjoyed acting with Smith, but he says that their partnership generated an electricity that almost set the theatre alight. The fact remains that Olivier never did act with her again.
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What Olivier did not enjoy about his performance in “The Master Builder” was a recurrence of the panic which had afflicted him in “Othello”. He had just had to rush to Newcastle to deal with a furious Noël Coward. Coward was directing a revival of his play “Hay Fever”, which was touring in the provinces before moving to the Old Vic. He
claimed that the production was being destroyed by the inadequacy of the elderly Edith Evans who seemed quite incapable of remembering her lines. Evans must be dismissed, he insisted. Olivier found himself physically and emotionally drained by this imbroglio, but still dashed back to London in time for the evening performance of “The Master Builder”. “There I was, when I had despised Edith so much for not knowing her lines, playing the part that should have been played by Michael, whom I had despised so much for not knowing
his
lines, in the dressing room where of rights
he
should have been dressing, and I suddenly thought: ‘Christ, I believe I’m too tired to remember my lines!’” He plucked up his courage, took to the stage, and for ten minutes all went well. Then in an instant, “I never felt so ill in my life.” He began to eye the exits: “I could only dream of one thing: run, out of the theatre, straight into the station, buy a ticket for anywhere at all, sit in a railway carriage and never be seen again.” The worst of the panic passed, probably it only lasted a few seconds, but for the rest of the evening Olivier was on autopilot, coasting along with no real knowledge of where he had come from or to where he was going. Years later he told Anthony Shaffer that he had suffered an identity crisis so severe that he did not know who he was. “You mean, you did not know what part you were playing?” asked Shaffer. “No, I didn’t know who
I
was.”
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Olivier had warned Coward before the tour of “Hay Fever” started that Edith Evans was always slow in learning her lines and that there was no point in worrying about it. When he saw her in Newcastle, however, he was horrified by her performance – she was “no good at all. She nearly killed it … I took against her very strongly, but thought it was worth sticking with her at least until the play reached London.” He was proved right when she finally turned in a performance that, if not exceptional, was at least workmanlike. Coward too came round to her; he thought that the only weak link in a cast that otherwise “could have played the Albanian telephone directory” was Sarah Miles, and she, fortunately, retired hurt after the first day’s rehearsal and was never seen on the set again. Success was more than usually important, since
“Hay Fever” was the first play written by a living British dramatist to be performed at the National Theatre. Dexter and Gaskill thought that this lightweight comedy was hardly worthy of so exalted a status. They demurred still more when Olivier insisted on bringing in Coward himself to direct it. “Why import a director from outside?” they wanted to know. The existing staff at the National was capable of looking after its own requirements. Olivier overruled them. “It was obviously the box-office thing to do,” he reflected. Also he believed that the importation of the occasional star director from outside, unlike a star actor, was compatible with the concept of the ensemble. They would bring in new ideas, challenge accepted conventions, revivify what might otherwise become a stagnant institution.
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He had to overcome the doubts of the putative director as well as his own colleagues. Coward was at first reluctant to take on the task and only agreed in the end because Olivier was “in a frizz” about having to take over in “The Master Builder”. “He was very clear and persuasive and said how important it would be to the company.” Neither Olivier nor Coward had reason to regret their decision; “Hay Fever” had a rapturous reception on its first night and was second only to “Othello” in its drawing power. “Bravo to my beloved one and only prettiest and best,” telegraphed an ecstatic Olivier. “What a frigid, ungenerous little telegram,” replied Coward. “I love you if possible more than ever.” If that amorous exchange fell into the hands of the police, Joan Plowright observed drily, the two men would be arrested.
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The first two years at the National Theatre had been an almost unqualified success. They had been fun as well as supremely testing. “I was taking a tremendous amount of things in my stride,” Olivier remembered with some satisfaction. “I was showing a lot of power, a lot of guts, a lot of strength, a lot of reserve and a lot of stamina.” But the price he paid was a high one. Whether his stage fright was in part caused by his exhaustion, or his exhaustion was exacerbated by his stage fright, the burden sometimes seemed too great to bear. Not only was he producing, directing and acting in a range of testing plays; he was running a complex
organisation. Nor could he do this without any outside interference; at every stage he had to carry with him a Board of Directors who could thwart his efforts if they were so minded. He was to find that Olivier as the servant of the Board had a task quite as testing as any other of the functions he performed in the National Theatre.
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Peter Hall professed dismay at the terms of Olivier’s contract. “The Board can require him to do anything they want,” he told his agent. “More horrendous, they can appoint, after consultation with him (although he has no right of approval), any associate directors they see fit. I would not sign a contract like this.” There was something in what he said, but in practice it mattered little. The Board had no doubts about the status of their Director. Technically he was their servant, but they would not have dreamt of treating him as such. Olivier, as they minuted after a discussion of the National Theatre’s relations with the press, was “a great world star”. No journalist would have much interest in talking to anybody else who professed to speak for the National Theatre, whether he came from within the organisation or as a member of the Board. They were well aware that, if he were driven to resignation, the effect on the National would be catastrophic. It followed that his influence, if not his power, was infinite. When he came to Board meetings, said John Mortimer, he would treat its members “with mock humility, behaving like Othello before the Senate, calling us his ‘very notable and approv’d good masters’. Naturally, he didn’t mean a word of it.” They would never have contemplated imposing an associate director on him without knowing that he wished it; almost always any such appointment was made at his initiative. If they did express an opinion – as when, according to Olivier, they “indicated strongly” that he should confine his relationship with the press to occasions on which he was speaking formally on behalf of the National Theatre – it was almost certainly because this was a ruling which he wanted himself and had put into the Board’s mouth.
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Nevertheless, the members of the Board were men of stature and independent minds. They would accept the pre-eminence of their
Director and defer to his opinion, but they knew their rights and felt there were issues on which they were not merely entitled but obligated to express their views. Olivier had agreed with Lord Chandos that he would only discuss the choice of plays with the Board if “there would be cause to worry on political or the other main grounds for censorship – profanity, obscenity or libel”. This made sense provided Olivier and Chandos agreed in their definition of these words and drew the same conclusions about the consequences. Nearly always they did, but there were differences of opinion, and with polemicists like Tynan eager to stir up outrage over any attempted restriction on the freedom of the artist, the possibility of acrimonious argument never disappeared. In the early years at least, Olivier’s relationship with the Board was reasonably trouble-free, but it was still a preoccupation and one which made demands upon his time and energies.
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Censorship was, of course, not an issue which involved Olivier and the Board alone; the Lord Chamberlain was still the arbiter of what should or should not be shown upon a stage, and when Olivier debated with his Board the potential hazards of a piece, it was the likely reaction of this remote panjandrum that concerned them both. Olivier’s own views on the issue, as he confessed, were “deliciously though probably maddeningly vague”. On the whole he thought the Lord Chamberlain was not the appropriate person to judge the propriety of a play, but he was by no means in favour of abandoning censorship altogether. Somebody would have to make the decision, but who that man should be, it was hard to decide. The trouble, as Olivier saw it, was that any change to the current system “might carry with it worse disadvantages”. To Tynan this seemed pitifully pusillanimous. He was forever urging on Olivier into a outright row with the Lord Chamberlain. When the Lord Chamberlain excised “Balls”, “Bugger” and “You can take a crap” from “Mother Courage”, Tynan argued that the National Theatre was a special case and should be exempt from such restrictions. Nobody had greater respect for the National than the Lord Chamberlain, his office responded blandly, but he had no discretion to distinguish between one theatre and another.

He was, however, prepared to accept “You’re all wetting your pants” as a substitute for “You’re all shitting in your pants”. A group of similarly trivial excisions from “Andorra” stung Tynan to still greater indignation. He proposed that a list of the censored phrases should be included in the programme so that the audience should not be robbed of its fair share of obscenities. Olivier had never much liked the play anyway and privately thought that the Lord Chamberlain had a good point. “I am sorry to be po-faced about this,” he wrote, “but the value or non-value of the Lord Chamberlain’s office is something about which my mind maintains a stubborn duality. In any event, I am against this form of attack, which has a petulant feeling about it.”
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As well as running one theatre Olivier was time-consumingly involved in the development of another. The South Bank Board was responsible for the design and construction of what is now the National Theatre – a task which it was at one time thought might be completed by the end of 1964 but which slipped further and further behind schedule at every step. Olivier was the only actor on the Board and so felt his contribution to be particularly significant. In his view he was thwarted and frustrated at every turn. “No-one listened to what I wanted,” he told Sarah Miles. “My way was the only way it could work.” His colleagues saw things differently: all of them, wrote Richard Eyre, agreed on one thing: “It was Larry’s baby … It embodies him as he was – grand, grandiose even, bold, ambitious, difficult, exasperating even, but often thrilling and occasionally unique.” Unquestionably his was the loudest and most persuasive voice, but he did not have things altogether his own way. His original plan had been for a building with a single theatre seating not more than a thousand people – the largest number, he was convinced, on which it was possible for an actor to impose himself. But should that theatre be in the round, a compromise as in the remodelled Old Vic, or of a traditional proscenium design?
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Olivier seems to have been as “deliciously and probably maddeningly vague” over this as he was over censorship. He was never certain as
to what was the ideal solution. In 1969 a new theatre was being opened in Sheffield. Bernard Miles was asked to sponsor the enterprise. He refused indignantly. It was worse than Chichester, he protested: “They have even got forty or fifty seats at the back. All that is now required is a glass stage [through which] to look up the girls’ skirts!” He sent a copy of the brochure to Olivier. “Here’s another FUCKER! Worst of the lot to date. Acting is largely a frontal job,
as you well know
.” Olivier was not sure how well he knew or, indeed, what he knew. It all depended what one meant by “largely”. He wrote to the director of the Sheffield theatre to say that he was “a little bit anxious about the extreme design”, but he was not prepared to join Miles in his out-and-out condemnation of the project. When Miles denounced the enterprise in the newspapers and cited Olivier as being on his side, Olivier took him to task – “Do learn to manage the opening of your pretty mouth with a little more discretion, dear boy.” “That was a real shitty little note you wrote,” Miles replied. “After all, I’m only doing it for you and your doubtless gifted progeny, who will one day be faced with the problems of this stupid, bookish theory.”
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