Olivier (34 page)

It was at Notley that Olivier had made the most conscientious efforts to establish a proper relationship with his son Tarquin. He always reproached himself with having opted out of the duties of a father almost from the moment of Tarquin’s birth, but his efforts to reinstate himself were erratic and not always successful. When his brother Dickie died in 1958 Olivier wrote to Tarquin to say how painful he was going to find the loss. “As time goes on you will no doubt fill that gap for me, as indeed you will many another one for me, and you will give me such gifts of ever-increasing pride, ever-closening devotion and joy in you and in your life.” That all sounded very fine, but as time went on Olivier made little effort to fit his son into that or any other gap. When he did take steps to assert his presence he sometimes hit the wrong note. He expressed doubts, for instance, about Tarquin’s plan not to settle down to a steady job but instead to embark on an ambitious and adventurous journey around the world. Jill Esmond
rounded on him. “You have forgotten what it is like to be young,” she wrote. “Go on! Go home to the next play. That’s all you understand and care about.”
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Vivien Leigh and Tarquin got on well together and for as long as she was around the relationship between father and son improved, but as the marriage foundered so Tarquin found the atmosphere at Notley less congenial. When Tarquin began to write a book about his travels, Olivier was at first unenthusiastic about the project, then critical because work was not progressing rapidly enough. Finally he was told that the book had been accepted by a publisher. “I have never asked to see the book,” Olivier told his son, “because something told me that my opinion would be qualified enough not to be anything but depressing to you … I don’t want to read the book now because I simply haven’t got time, that’s all. I go into rehearsal in four weeks and I don’t know how I’m going to get through all I have to. I’ve taken on too much, I know. I’m sorry, but I don’t see what I can do about it … I haven’t exactly encouraged you to come and stay or anything because I wouldn’t be able to give any proper time to you.” As a model of how not to write to an affectionate but neglected son, this letter could hardly be bettered. Noël Coward, as so often, got it right. “Tarquin is really a bright and sweet boy,” he wrote in his diary. “Jill … has been a wonderful mother to him and he quite genuinely adores her. Larry, as a father figure, has not come off quite so well.”
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Olivier and Joan Plowright were in the United States when the decree absolute ending the divorce proceedings came through on 3 March, 1961. A fortnight later they married. “If someone had told me, fifteen years ago, that I would one day be serving as best man for Larry Olivier, I’d have summoned him a bloody ambulance,” Richard Burton remarked on the Dick Cavett show. In fact he overstated his role; the ceremony, such as it was, took place in the strictest privacy in Wilton, Connecticut. The couple rushed back to New York, however, and Burton gave a party for them after their respective shows had finished. “Joan is a very natural
and splendidly earthy young woman,” Olivier told Tarquin, “and if I am to make her happy and fulfilled she’s simply got to have [children], that’s all, she’s that type.” He addressed himself to his duties as a putative father with commendable alacrity.
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“I
know nothing about Festivals or how they are run,” Olivier told an enquirer in 1952. “I have no signposts to show you, and know of no pitfalls of which to warn you.” A decade later his reply would have been very different. Between those dates a prosperous, energetic and stage-struck citizen of Chichester, Leslie Evershed-Martin, had conceived and brought almost to reality his dream of building a theatre in his home town and holding an annual Festival. Well did he call his book on the subject
The Impossible Theatre
; to persuade his fellow councillors that the project was worth pursuing was hard enough; to find a suitable site and raise the funds to buy and build upon it was an almost absurdly ambitious enterprise. Even then his troubles were only just beginning. He had to find someone to run it, who would be prepared to work enormously hard for little money and who would be able to attract to Chichester actors and actresses of the calibre necessary if the fledgling theatre was to be established.
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His first idea was Tyrone Guthrie, who had recently supervised a similar undertaking in Stratford, Ontario, a Canadian town very similar in size to Chichester. Guthrie was no more ready to take on a second festival than he had been to engage with the National Theatre. He was in favour of the project, however. He read with interest the list of possible candidates which Evershed-Martin had drawn up, then commented: “Leslie, you keep on about having only the best of everything at Chichester, so why don’t you go for the best? Ask Laurence Olivier.” Guthrie
offered to approach Olivier himself and duly did so, stressing that nothing very extravagant was being contemplated: “Just an opener, so to speak – a Shakespeare and a Shaw for three or four weeks.” Olivier, who was in America, did not immediately respond and Evershed-Martin followed up Guthrie’s letter. Olivier was cautious: he had just seen two London theatres – the St James’s and the Stoll – pulled down in spite of his efforts to save them and, as he wryly noted, he was beginning to think “that my presence in a London theatre would only be enviable to a member of the I.R.A.”. He suggested that Evershed-Martin get in touch with his agent, Cecil Tennant. Would he have full artistic control? he asked. And how much would he be paid? Yes, and £5,000 a year, were the answers. Too much, said Olivier. He would accept only £3,000 – “he wanted to be all in all with us in the adventure”. By the time Olivier first met Evershed-Martin on 23 June, 1961 a deal had almost been done.
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Binkie Beaumont and the producer, Cecil Clarke, were amazed to hear Olivier was interested in so precarious a venture. “I’ve got it,” said Clarke. “He wants to prepare himself for the National Theatre.” He was not wholly wrong. Olivier did have in mind that to launch a new theatre in Chichester would strengthen his claim to take over the National when the moment came, give him useful experience in running a repertory company and enable him to launch productions and build up casts which would be available for the South Bank. But this was not the whole story. Olivier was in a mood to start his own company and Joan Plowright is convinced that he would have grasped at Chichester even though he had known that the National Theatre would never happen or that he would not be asked to take it on. Chichester provided an irresistible challenge; he never doubted that he could make it work and rejoiced in the opportunity to prove it.
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There was another reason why the idea of Chichester was appealing. If it had been Cheltenham or Salisbury he might have hesitated, but Chichester, as the crow flies, was less than thirty miles from Brighton and it was in Brighton that he and Joan Plowright had decided to make their
home. In 1961 they bought a handsome four-storey Regency house with twelve rooms in Kemp Town’s celebrated Royal Crescent; believed by its inhabitants to be the best address in Brighton and certainly offering stiff competition to any rival. It had used to boast a statue of the Prince Regent, put up by the developer in an effort to ingratiate himself with the occupant of the Royal Pavilion. Unfortunately it was not made of durable material and the nose and fingers fell away. It seems that the developer must similarly have economised on the houses themselves. Olivier had not even moved in before it became apparent that the front of the house was on the point of collapse and that it would cost a fortune to restore it. To compound his troubles, he insisted on making certain structural alterations which involved substantial building works. The result was that he found himself committed to spend more on rebuilding than he had spent on the house itself and was confronted by a vista of apparently endless construction works. When the Oliviers spent their first night in the building on 16 December, 1961, it was in the knowledge that for months to come they would be sharing their house with a gang of labourers. Not content with this, as their family grew they concluded that they needed more room. Within a few years they had bought the house next door and the builders were back again turning the two houses into one.

But they were enormously happy. The Cassons had dinner with them shortly before the move into the Royal Crescent. Sybil Thorndike noticed a striking difference. “For the first time in years he is relaxed and like the dear old Larry that we’ve not seen for the last ten years,” she wrote. “Joan is a darling. You couldn’t have anyone more unlike poor Viv.” As a married couple they were entirely satisfied with each other: in that happy honeymoon phase when each one is discovering new and delightful things about the other and every difference seems a reason for congratulation rather than a presage of potential trouble. As actors, the relationship was rather more complicated. “Marry him if you must, but do not act with him if you can help it,” had been George Devine’s advice. He meant, Plowright thinks, that she must avoid
being thrust into parts which Olivier thought would suit her or would complement parts he himself was playing but which in fact were wrong for her. Plowright could see the danger and anyway dreaded the “Actor-Manager and his Wife” syndrome, which would damage both their own reputations and the reputation of whatever institution they were working in. Olivier realised that he must tread carefully. Years later he insisted that his wife was “one of the finest actresses in the country. I didn’t give her much of a leg-up towards that,” he admitted. “I’ve been wrong so often about her, so often I’ve thought: ‘I’m not quite sure Joannie can handle that part.’ I’ve always been wrong. I didn’t really appreciate the darling thing. I don’t think it was anything to do with being married.”
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Though she did not wish to act with him, at least on a regular basis, it did not follow that she had little respect for his mastery of his craft or would not listen with attention to his counsels. Olivier was never averse to giving advice, whether to his wife or to some fledgling, and usually the advice was sound. When she played Major Barbara he urged her to avoid any self-conscious emphasising of the difference between her and those around her: “There is one word which describes what you should bring onto the stage with you in this part: RADIANCE. And don’t be frightened of it, pet, and don’t let self-mockery guy you out of it.” When it was “The Entertainer”, he repeated the advice he had been given by Tyrone Guthrie nearly twenty years before: “You are a wonderfully gifted and beautifully disciplined actress,” he told her. “Do not be shy of Dedication. Grasp hold of it … We must love Sergius, Iago or Caliban; we must even love Jean Rice. Ours not to reason why – ours but to apprehend and impart. We must never shirk that preparation in the wings, the practising of the old self-hypnosis act to transform ourselves completely before we step onto the stage.”
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Whatever her reservations about acting with her husband, Joan Plow-right had parts in two out of the three plays that Chichester featured in its first season. When Olivier first saw the site proposed for the new
theatre he must have wondered whether there would even
be
a first season, or at least one starting in July 1962. All that was visible was an open field and six drainpipes stuck in the ground to mark the six points of the hexagon which was to be the shape of the new theatre. The design, by English standards, was revolutionary. The traditional theatre was a box, open at one end, in which the cast performed to an audience seated in an auditorium in front of them. At the other extreme, as practised in Stratford, Ontario, was the boxing ring, with the audience seated all round a circular stage. In between there could be any number of permutations, with the stage protruding different distances into the auditorium. Chichester was to be closer to the theatre-in-the-round than any major British theatre had previously attempted. The drawback was, of course, that at any given time the cast would have their backs to half the audience; the advantage was that many more people were seated close to the stage and, in the view of some at least, a greater intimacy and sense of participation was achieved. Olivier was willing, indeed anxious, to try out theatre-in-the-round, but he was dismayed by the fact that the players, unless some way could be devised by which they could emerge through an opening in the stage, would have to enter by a gangway through the audience. This, he believed, weakened the dramatic effect of an entrance and impaired the illusion on which the theatrical experience was based. His conclusion, by the time Chichester’s first season ended, was that he had achieved a happy compromise. New theatres should be built and, if practicable, old theatres modified, so that the stage protruded at least a few rows into the auditorium.

The first priority, though, was to ensure that there
was
a stage. Work proceeded with remarkable speed, but as the moment for the opening approached rehearsals were conducted against a background of construction noises and the occasional eruptions of workmen wielding tools and wearing hard hats. It was not ideal, but it lent a touch of adventure to the proceedings and Olivier exploited it to foster a sense of embattled endeavour in the enterprise. Whatever happened, everyone resolved, the theatre would open on time and its productions would
be as polished as if Chichester had been holding its Festival since the dawn of time.

Of course things went wrong and Olivier’s temper sometimes grew frayed. Nobody had realised that, since the shape of the theatre made the conventional curtains impossible, normal safety regulations could not apply. Feverish last-minute changes had to be made to accommodate the fire regulations. Incompetence! Olivier stormed; was there nobody but he who was capable of looking ahead? A hammer dropped by a workman narrowly missed his head. He exploded with rage. The rage was characteristic; so was the fact that when he cooled down he realised that he had had no business to be in that part of the theatre. Next day, he publicly and handsomely apologised to the workman, thereby reinforcing the will of everyone involved with the building to get the job done on time.