Olivier (55 page)

It was a brave decision, though. The long speech was not just at risk of boring any non-politically minded audience to distraction, but it was also hard to learn. Olivier found it very testing. “I used to spend the whole first half of the evening knowing that when you start you couldn’t help hearing a little voice saying: ‘Cheer up. You’ll be finished in twenty minutes.’ My memory faculty was beginning to go.” Diana Boddington had to stand by with a stopwatch and let him know whether he had been quicker or slower than the night before: “I don’t know how he did it,” she wondered. Tynan initially doubted whether he was the right man for the part. Whoever played Tagg, he felt, must possess “a core of burning revolutionary zeal: a passionate and caring political intensity”. Olivier would never have laid claim to such attributes, but he was an actor and he believed that he could counterfeit Tagg’s idealism quite as convincingly as Hamlet’s doubts or Othello’s consuming jealousy.
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From the first reading Tynan’s reservations were proved unfounded. Olivier delivered his speech without even glancing at the text and won a round of applause from the rest of the cast. It would be “the most inspiring call to revolution ever heard on the English stage”, wrote Tynan in his diary: “How ironic – and splendid, that it should be delivered by Larry from the stage of the National Theatre.” Olivier took his evangelical fervour from his father’s pulpit manner; his aged green tweed suit came from Joan Plowright’s father; his hairstyle was borrowed from the socialist pioneer, James Maxton: the rest was genius. John Dexter said that, within the profession, Olivier’s Tagg was held
to be one of his finest pieces of acting: “I don’t think any other actor in the world could have held me totally absorbed with the long political speech,” Eileen Atkins told him. “That is magic. And your
granite
silence!’ Olivier himself said that he was a bit disappointed by the reception – “Maybe they were horrified at my being a Communist.” Neither the reviews nor the takings at the box office suggested that his doubts had any basis. Tagg may not have been his greatest role, but in the challenges it posed and in the courage and skill with which he overcame them, it was a worthy end to his career.
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There had been no announcement that he would never act on the stage again, probably he had not finally decided it himself, but on the last night there was a feeling in the theatre that an era was ending. Olivier made an emotional curtain-speech, then knelt down and kissed the stage. “This may sound schmaltzy, but it was not,” Gawn Grainger remembers. “He was bowing to the roots of his theatrical soul. The King was abdicating.” And then the cast went up to the rehearsal room at the top of the Old Vic and had a party: “Denis Quilley played the piano and we sang and danced and behaved like four-year-olds. And Larry was part of our gang.”
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“Part of our gang”: it was an epitaph that Olivier would have relished. Peter Hall would never have been part of “our gang” – nor would he have wanted to be. Perhaps the spirit of the gang could never have survived the transfer to the clinical wasteland of the new building. But at the Old Vic it was Olivier’s singular achievement to start with nothing and to end with a proud and passionately united body, taking great pride in its achievements, resolved to correct and build upon its failures, committed in loyalty to the man whom it had accepted as its leader. Perhaps it was anachronistic; people have claimed that Olivier’s National Theatre was the last proud flourish of the actor-manager rather than the first manifestation of the big-business, depersonalised institution which would be needed as the twentieth century wore towards its end. It might be fairest to see it as a halfway house. Olivier’s National Theatre could not have survived in the form in which he had fashioned it,
but nor could the National Theatre of today have existed but for the passionate exuberance, the dynamic energy, of Olivier’s creation. It is true to say that there would be some sort of National Theatre today even had there been no Olivier, but if there had been no Olivier the triumphant impetus which carried it into the new millennium would have been lacking. The debt owed to him by the British theatre is inestimable.

F
arewell the plumed troop and the big wars, that makes ambition virtue …” Was it indeed a case of Olivier’s occupation gone? For the previous ten years the National Theatre had been at the centre of his life; in his thoughts every waking hour and sometimes sleeping hour as well. For nearly fifty years acting on the stage had been his first preoccupation: he had made many and important films but for him, in the last analysis, the theatre was what really mattered. Now his role in the National Theatre had been diminished, if not yet extinguished; his career as an actor on the stage was over. The cinema and television might expand to occupy a greater part of his still considerable energies, but would they be enough? Had he the intellectual resources, the range of interests, to fill his life in a way that he would find satisfying? Could his family play a large enough part to compensate for the dwindling of his professional activities? However those questions would be answered it was sure that he was venturing into unknown waters and that the process of adjustment would be difficult and might well be painful as well.

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Meanwhile he had to disengage himself from the National Theatre. This process would not be easy for anyone involved. The scene was set early in 1973 when Hall in his diary recorded that Olivier had been “in a devilish mood and was changing ground on anything that had been said previously”. He told Hall that he had been reconsidering
and now was by no means sure that he meant to hand over power at the end of the year. “I said it was his decision and he must do what he wanted; I would stand by in any way that was necessary.” How far Rayne would have tolerated an Olivier determined to cling on to power after his allotted span must be uncertain; in fact Olivier had no serious intention of staying on and was doing no more than voicing his pique and getting some satisfaction out of causing Hall disquiet. His attitude continued to sway, day by day, from an almost exaggerated helpfulness to a campaign of wilful non-cooperation which sometimes amounted to sabotage.
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The situation changed in November, when Hall took over as Director and Olivier was demoted to Associate Director. It was little less difficult for Hall, however. He was the boss, but it was still Olivier’s theatre, almost all the personnel were Olivier’s appointments, now working for Hall but owing allegiance to Olivier. The powers and duties of the Associate Director were ill defined. If he had chosen to, Hall could have left Olivier out of the decision-making process altogether. He did not, partly because he admired Olivier and valued his opinion, partly because he did not wish to provoke a revolt and a spate of resignations among the Olivier loyalists of his staff. Olivier missed no opportunity to demonstrate his independence, as, for instance, by failing to turn up at a press conference though well aware that his absence would raise embarrassing questions. He relished the occasional opportunity to criticise Hall’s decisions. In July 1974 Hall mentioned that he was thinking of appointing a Deputy Director: Olivier at once challenged him, doubting the wisdom of such an action. The company were already restless, he said; they never saw Hall, they did not know what they were supposed to be doing. They wanted to work with Hall, not with some deputy: Hall was the boss, he must be seen to be the boss, and he must do some bossing. Hall ruefully admitted that there was some truth in these strictures. But it was not easy to be the boss with the potent shadow of the former boss still very much on the premises. It was as if President Pompidou had had to govern France
with General de Gaulle not lowering balefully in Colombeyles-Deux-Églises but still in residence in the Élysée.
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Joan Plowright contributed to Hall’s uneasiness by telling him that there were widespread doubts in the National about the future of the theatre and the threat posed to it by growing institutionalisation and bureaucracy. She told Jonathan Miller that she felt the company was becoming unhappy and fragmented. She and Robin Phillips, the artistic director at Stratford, planned to form a new company which would try to rekindle the spirit of the old National Theatre. Would Miller be prepared to direct for it if they did? Nothing much happened, but the possibility cannot have made Hall sleep more soundly.
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It was not only Hall who was disquieted by Olivier’s presence. John Gielgud took on the role in “The Tempest” which Olivier had turned down. Olivier asked if he could attend the rehearsals and then joined Gielgud and Hall in the latter’s office. “He sat and chatted, making Gielgud feel uneasy,” Hall noted. “It is extraordinary to watch these two giants. Gielgud obviously is disturbed by Larry, and Larry knows it.” When Richardson joined forces with Gielgud in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” Olivier went backstage after the performance to tell them that he had not been able to hear a word either of them had said and that he had gone to sleep. Richardson was very upset, Hall recorded, asking: “Why is Larry so harsh?” Yet when Hall later criticised Olivier’s attitude, Richardson admitted the justice of what he said but added gently that “as soon as he saw him, the charisma, the size of the man, took over, and he loved him again”. “I know what he means,” Hall commented. Olivier for his part seems to have been resentful of the fact that Richardson and Gielgud, perhaps feeling some irritation at being, if not rejected by the National, then at least insufficiently appreciated by it, had struck up a working relationship as well as a friendship which was producing some spectacular performances. In an embarrassing tribute broadcast on Richardson’s seventieth birthday, Olivier declared: “Ralphie, Ralphie boy, my dear old cocky, I’m probably your oldest friend. I know I’m not your best friend, but I believe I am the one who loves you best.”
Constantly he reiterated the fact that he and Richardson had been close friends long before Gielgud had known either of them; a fact that was true, but one which did not necessarily redound to the credit of the man who asserted it.
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His growing detachment from the day-to-day running of the National left him with more time than he had previously enjoyed to indulge in public life, at any rate so far as it impinged upon the theatre. Almost always he exercised his influence in the interests of traditional and right-wing values. When it seemed that Vanessa Redgrave and other elements of the extreme left were on the point of capturing the actors’ trade union, Equity, Olivier rallied to its defence. “Obviously the freedoms which you and I and those like us require are going to cost us something,” he told a friend, “and I am awfully sorry but that means the effort of turning up and raising a hand at the right moment. It is a perfectly frightful sacrifice to give up a Sunday … but it does need sensible people to make a few sacrifices.” He wrote an article in
The Times
, or at least put his name to an article in
The Times
, warning of the dangers facing the acting profession if Equity fell into the hands of the militants. His reward was to be pilloried in
The Stage and Television Today
as an antiquated grotesque “redolent of the Garrick Club and astrakhan collars rather than the jeans and T-shirts that are the garb of the contemporary actor”. Viewed from the perspective of the far left the charge was justified. Olivier was an authoritarian figure with little sympathy for the vagaries of youth or any kind of libertarian excess. When Keith Joseph, in 1974, was under fierce attack for a speech suggesting that Britain’s breeding stock was threatened by the number of working-class mothers unfitted to bring up children, Olivier sent him a congratulatory telegram. Viewed from nearer the middle of the road he seemed a man of liberal instinct and a generous disposition, not interested in politics as such, but conservative with a small “c” and sturdily patriotic. He liked and was attracted by Edna O’Brien, a close friend of his wife, but when Joan Plowright first suggested inviting her for the
weekend he replied that he wasn’t having anybody in the house who supported the I.R.A.
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When the Russian dancers Valery and Galina Panov fell foul of the Communist regime, being refused permission to visit Israel and expelled from the Kirov ballet company, Olivier demonstrated outside the Russian Embassy, sent Panov a personal telegram and took part in an N.B.C. documentary on the subject. With Harold Pinter and Peggy Ashcroft he took the lead in organising a boycott of a visit by the Kirov to London in protest against the Panovs’ victimisation. Part of him relished the attention that his activities gained him: the limelight was where he belonged and he felt uneasy if exiled from it. His sympathy for the Panovs was sincerely felt, however. Nor did he wish to be given more credit than was his due. He was genuinely put out when the newspapers made too much of his contribution and said nothing of Rosemary Winckley and others who had devoted far more time and effort to the cause. “I do so want you and whoever else may be hurt or upset by this sort of inference to understand that I never consciously let this be thought,” he wrote to Miss Winckley. “They always want you to be boastful and that is the way they will have it.” “You ask us to forgive, but for what?” Winckley replied. “We are indebted to you for
always
… It is a wonderful thing to know that someone you’ve profoundly admired for years is as great a human.”
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That he had energy to spare for such diversions is the more remarkable because in 1974 and 1975 his health suffered a series of destructive and, finally, almost fatal blows. As if cancer, thrombosis and appendicitis were not enough, in the autumn of 1974 Olivier developed a rare and ruinous disease called dermatopolymyositis which attacked the muscles, leaving him almost speechless, unable to keep his eyelids open, dependent for survival on heavy doses of steroids which in turn fostered wild delusions or all-consuming lethargy. “I shall be quite a few weeks in this place,” he told Peter Hall from hospital in November 1974. At least it meant that he would be spared having to play Father Christmas; always one of his least successful roles. “I know
you
. You’re not Daddy
Christmas, you’re just Daddy,” was a reception he had grown used to over the years. This was not much compensation, however, for several weeks of extreme pain in which he was in imminent danger of death, and several months of slow and painful convalescence. Only a man of singular strength, both physical and psychological, could have survived. “It shrinks, it eats one up, it’s one of those things when the body is at war with itself,” he remembered with horror. “I had enormous quantities of steroids until I went a bit mad. Poor Joan got really frightened. I said: ‘It’s all round here, Joan. I can feel it going round and round; this madness is going round and round in my ears.’ It was incredible.” It destroyed his looks: an unkind trick of fate for a man whose professional life depended in large part on his appearance. Worse still, it attacked his voice. Peggy Ashcroft visited him at Brighton when he had just emerged from hospital. She was dismayed by his appearance but still more by the difficulty he found in speaking: it was dreadful, wrote Peter Hall, that “a man who has spent all his life getting the last note out of his voice should now find that his vocal chords are affected”.
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