Olivier (38 page)

Of equal interest were the names of those who were not on the list. The only stars who could be mentioned in the same breath as Olivier were Michael Redgrave and Peter O’Toole. Where were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield? It has often been claimed that Olivier wilfully excluded from the National Theatre those whom he considered to be his rivals. There is some truth in the allegation, but it is far from being the whole story. Ralph Richardson is the most interesting case. When he played John Gabriel Borkman at the National in 1975, after Olivier’s departure, Harold Hobson wrote of his “angry grief that the Ibsen production, in all its splendour, should be Sir Ralph’s first appearance in a National Theatre that has already existed for more than a decade”. The clear implication of this sentence was that Richardson had been kept out of a theatre in which he would have loved to play. Yet the blame was not Olivier’s alone. He could reasonably claim to have been discouraged by Richardson’s response when he had been asked to play Lear at Chichester. “I am extremely grateful for your kind and magnanimous and too flattering thought,” wrote Richardson. “Can I have time to think about this? You are so bold … Let your timorous friend turn this thought of yours over in his mind.” The timorous friend duly did so and decided against the venture. When the action moved to the National, Richardson told his biographer, he was only offered dull roles – “odd dukes and the like”. In fact he was offered Halvard Solness in
“The Master Builder”, Claudius in “Hamlet” and Hobson in “Hobson’s Choice”: not a dull duke among them and all subsequently played by Michael Redgrave. The reason for his refusal is to be found not in the dullness of the roles but in the relationship between the two men. “I was always happy with him on an equal basis,” said Richardson, “but I wasn’t very happy with him as the boss … he was schoolmastery, you know. ‘Come to my office,’ he’d say.” The result was that Richardson not merely did not respond enthusiastically to any overtures but was discouraging in his attitude. Yet Olivier was by no means innocent. He admitted that he had not pressed his friend very hard. “I was a little shy of asking him because, obviously, if I was the Director, it put him in a slightly less right position in the public mind … I never went on about it very much. I said ‘Would you like to play …’ two or three things, I think, in the whole time I was there.” The guilt, if guilt there was, seems to have been divided. As a result, the two men drifted apart. “I do wish I could see something of you,” Olivier wrote a few years later. “My job seems to get more and more intricate and testing – I enjoy it, of course, but there is very little life apart.” Ronald Harwood asked Richardson whether he still saw a lot of Olivier. “No, he only telephones me to ask for other people’s numbers,” was the terse reply.
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John Gielgud, too, said that he was “a bit hurt” at being offered so few important parts. Olivier admittedly was slow to approach him but when he did so he seems to have been at pains to dispel any feeling of rejection on Gielgud’s part. In mid-1964 he wrote to stress “how overjoyed I would be … if you would ever like to consider working for us at the National”. He should, he admitted, have made this clear much earlier, but if Gielgud had thought his silence indicated lack of interest it would be “not only tragic but utterly wrong. So please, dear Johnnie, if… you find yourself in possession of an idea you would like to present to us, I should be overjoyed to hear about it … To be perfectly frank with you, the National Theatre earnestly needs your stature.”
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John Dexter suggested Shylock. Gielgud replied that he had failed in the part in 1938 and saw no reason why he should do better now. “I
remember thinking it was marvellous,” retorted Olivier – and, anyway, he would hate to be judged by his own Macbeth of the same season. Gielgud was not convinced, nor was he any more enthusiastic about a suggestion that he should play Antony to Irene Worth’s Cleopatra. “Johnnie feels, with good reason I think,” Olivier told Worth, “that he does not wish to be hurried into something for any expedient reason, which means unless he feels dead right in the part … he does
not
want to be made to look or feel however slightly miscast.” When finally Gielgud found something to his taste – Orgon, in Molière’s “Tartuffe” and the Oedipus of Seneca – Olivier was, or at least professed to be, ecstatic: “I wish I could tell you how enraptured not only I, but all in the conclave, feel about your blessing the National with your presence.” As with Richardson, it seems that the worst Olivier can be accused of is not pressing the point with sufficient urgency and vehemence. Even against this charge he has a good defence.
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So far as Paul Scofield’s recruitment for the National was concerned, Olivier is even less guilty. “I am burningly desirous that you should be attached to the National Theatre,” Olivier told him. He would be welcome as a guest star, “but guest stars, nice as they are, are things that I don’t feel altogether happy about in relation to the National”. Would he not become a permanent member of the establishment? Scofield too was offered Antony and Shylock, and rejected both. In the end he was coaxed into the company as an associate director. Did Olivier believe that Scofield might eventually succeed him as Director? asked
The Times
. They had never discussed the matter, said Olivier, but he was sure “if it was a job Mr Scofield wanted to do, he would do it well”. The possibility, if it had ever existed, disappeared when Scofield flounced out with only two of his three designated plays performed. Olivier accepted the blame for the contretemps: “I know I cannot have been a v. satisfactory partner,” he wrote. “If a man carries a load a bit too heavy for him, his condition perhaps makes him sparing of courtesies to his friends.” Even then he stressed how much he hoped that the association would be renewed: “It would be ghastly if I really thought you could turn
your back on us for good.” He may indeed have been brusque or tactless but Scofield was at least as much to blame. Peter Hall, for one, is convinced that Scofield always found professional relationships hard to sustain and never gave his association with the National a reasonable chance. He was to do the same thing a few years later – walking out on Hall at the last minute with a cursory “Sorry to let you down”.
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Letters do not tell the whole story: so much can be conveyed by timing, expression, tone of voice. Olivier can justifiably be accused of a certain lack of enthusiasm when it came to promoting the careers of those few people he looked upon as rivals. But he did not try to deny Richardson, Gielgud and Scofield access to the National Theatre. On the contrary, he made more than token efforts to welcome them aboard. He was anxious for the National not only to succeed but to succeed spectacularly. His prestige as an actor might be somewhat diminished if one of his great contemporaries outshone him on the stage; the National Theatre would be the more glorious. Olivier was no fool and he knew that in the end this would redound to his greater credit.

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Gaskill and Dexter were another matter. Both were talented, strong-minded and capable, with ideas of their own. It was certain that they would clash with Olivier; the only questions were, how soon, and whether they would be able to work out a
modus operandi
which would satisfy both sides in the partnership. Gaskill was the more likely to fall out with his Director: he was a theorist, an ardent Brechtian, who longed to establish an acting team which would work together in total harmony, solving each problem by democratic discussion and shunning the vulgar appeal of the “star”. In practice, of course, he was himself capable of imposing his will with the most autocratic rigour and had a shrewd idea of what would appeal to an audience, but he managed to invest all his activities with an aura of Brechtian purity. He urged the use of masks in rehearsal and encouraged improvisation in the early stages of a production. Olivier disliked what he held to be meretricious gimmickry, but he gritted his teeth and put up with it when Gaskill was
the director and he the actor. He gallantly joined in the improvisation when Gaskill directed “The Recruiting Officer”: “I think he hated it,” wrote Gaskill, “but he didn’t show it.” It was perhaps fortunate from the point of view of their relationship that George Devine died suddenly two years or so after the National Theatre had started and Gaskill retreated to take over at the Royal Court. “I loved him [Olivier],” Gaskill told Derek Granger. “I can’t understand why, for he was a sod really … The two years at the Old Vic were, I think, the happiest working period of my life.”
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Dexter was more down-to-earth, less ruled by principle, but he shared the same ideals and ideas. He was rough, gruff and defiantly outrageous, with a sharp tongue and a ferocious wit. Less doctrinaire than Gaskill, he was no less effective as a director: he had a reputation for being sadistic and could be harsh and exacting, but the results were formidable. Olivier was one of the few people whom he respected, but even the Director was sometimes treated with less than deference. When rehearsing “Othello” on tour in Birmingham Dexter was enraged by what he thought a slovenly performance and berated the whole cast, Olivier included. Olivier drew him aside, “I won’t have you speaking to my company like that,” he said. “
Your
company?” Dexter retorted. “I thought this was the National Theatre.” The relationship survived that episode but grew progressively more edgy and in the end broke down altogether.
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There was another man in at the birth of the National Theatre who was quite as influential as either of the two directors. Kenneth Tynan was acknowledged to be the leading theatre critic of his day: brilliantly witty – sometimes too much so, since the temptation to indulge in a telling phrase from time to time got the better of his balanced judgment; well informed about the theatre in half a dozen countries; with the ability to evoke the atmosphere of a play so that the reader almost felt that he had been in the stalls himself. His influence was enormous: a good review from him could make a play successful, a bad review do it irreparable harm. To Olivier he was above all the critic who had
consistently ridiculed and belittled Vivien Leigh; the fact that he had also praised Olivier in the most lavish terms mitigated but did not altogether excuse his offence. He sometimes drew near to the frontiers of absurdity – languid, affected, epicene – but he was nevertheless a figure of real importance: “When the history of the theatre in the twentieth century comes to be written,” said Jonathan Miller, “Tynan’s role in giving back to the theatre an image of its own importance, without in fact being self-important, will be recognised as both distinct and crucial.”
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Tynan now proposed that he should join the National as “drama-turge” – an ill-defined role that would involve him in most aspects of the National’s affairs but particularly in the selection of the plays that were to be put on. Olivier’s first reaction was to reject the overture in the most offensive terms. Joan Plowright urged him to think again; to rebuff Tynan would be to turn him into an inveterate and dangerous enemy. To welcome him would be to affirm that the National Theatre was going to be, not a conservative and traditional repository of outworn values but innovative, daring, striding boldly into the future. Besides, Olivier needed someone like Tynan, who would be a fount of new ideas and, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of European theatre, would open up a world which otherwise would remain closed or shrouded in mystery. Olivier reflected and was persuaded. “I think that your suggestion is an admirable one, a most welcome one, and –” stretching the limits of credulity rather further than even Tynan would have accepted – “one that I’d thought of myself already.” At the bottom of his letter he scrawled in manuscript: “God –
anything
to get you off that
Observer
.”
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Over the next ten years Olivier was from time to time to doubt the wisdom of his decision. Tynan combined prickly arrogance with over-sensitivity. Olivier constantly found himself soothing injured feelings. “I felt conscious that I might have seemed to be leaving you out in the cold once or twice in my talks to the boys,” he wrote – “the boys” being Gaskill and Dexter. “I am sorry for that. I
was
a bit too exhausted to manage things with proper smoothness.” But Tynan himself was no respecter of the feelings of others. He was a mischief-maker and an
intriguer, never happier than when stirring up trouble among his colleagues. He would express his opinions with alarming frankness and with indifference to other people’s sensibilities. His progresses around the offices of the National Theatre were marked by a series of vituperative rows. After one damaging escapade Olivier felt bound to write: “I like you. I like having you with me … But you can be too fucking tactless for words.” He urged Tynan “to be a little quicker in letting me have your thoughts and a little slower in imparting them to others”. But such rebukes were rare; on the whole he put up with Tynan’s troublemaking with an equanimity that astonished those who had experienced his impatience and short temper.
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Not everyone felt Tynan was worthy of such indulgence. John Osborne, for instance, detected “a sort of intellectual spivery that Olivier mistakes for up-to-date awareness and flair. He’s so afraid of being thought old hat that he’s allowed himself to be sadly misguided by Tynan.” Undoubtedly Tynan could be pretentious and sometimes silly, but on the whole his contribution was invaluable. Not merely was his knowledge enormous and his taste usually sound, he understood how a theatre worked, he could see when a cut was needed or the pace was being allowed to flag, he could envisage not just a suitable choice of play but a package – play, director, designer, actors, and how to present it to the public. He was a versatile and skilful wordsmith who could formulate Olivier’s inchoate concepts and put them into phrases that were both clear and telling. Olivier was right to take him on and, though the price was sometimes high, right to retain him when in due course the Board revolted against his rebarbative and gadfly presence.
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