Olivier (50 page)

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While the battle over “Guys and Dolls” was still raging, Olivier played one of his last great Shakespearean roles. This “Merchant of Venice” was to be set in the late nineteenth century. Olivier claimed to have conceived the idea himself and to have sold it to the talented young director, Jonathan Miller. Rather more credibly, Miller says that it was his idea and that Olivier only agreed to take on the part of Shylock himself when he had been convinced that Miller’s approach would provide a new and challenging experience. The production is of particular interest as being one of the few in which Olivier accepted direction from somebody far younger and less experienced than himself. “I’m awfully snooty with directors, I’m afraid,” he once admitted, but Miller impressed and intrigued him. Olivier had conceived his Shylock as being a traditional Fagin-like creature with hooked nose, ringlets, protruding teeth and rich Jewish accent. Miller convinced him that Jews did not have to be like that and that, if he imposed this vision on the kind of production that was envisaged, he would end up looking like “a ridiculous pantomime dame” in the midst of a rather ordinary nineteenth-century set. Even more daringly, he challenged Olivier on his verse-speaking. As Olivier had found Gielgud declamatory and “poetic” a quarter of a century before, so now Miller accused Olivier of being preoccupied by the sound rather than the sense and intoning melodiously when he should have been realistic. “I’d made a mountain out of mannerisms and had ended up impersonating myself,” Olivier admitted. “Jonathan decided that nobody would have the nerve to tell me things about myself if it wasn’t he … I took no offence at all … it was bloody plucky of him and I admired him.” The false nose went, the
ringlets went, the mannerisms were curbed: all that was left were the dentures; these had cost Olivier so much money that Miller did not have the heart to suggest they too should be discarded.
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Olivier knew that, if the doctors had their way, he would not have been on the stage at all. Jane Lapotaire, who played Jessica, was horrified by his condition and doubted whether he would survive the first night. “They’ve come to see whether I’m going to die on stage,” Olivier told her grimly. To add to his woes, he suffered stage fright more agonising than anything he had so far experienced; he begged the other actors not to look him in the face: “For some reason this made me feel that there was not quite so much loaded against me.” Somehow he got through the performance on the first night, gained rapturous applause at the end, and felt such relief at having survived that the stage fright almost miraculously receded. By the end of the London run it had gone for ever. Gielgud refused to watch Olivier as Shylock: “Larry with false teeth and fur coat
à la
Rothschild,” he told Irene Worth. “I don’t think anyone really likes it much, though of course the new look intrigued the critics.” He must have been selective in the people with whom he discussed the performance; most people seem to have felt that Olivier’s Shylock was a brave and intelligent representation of what is one of Shakespeare’s most testing parts. “One of the most astonishing things you have ever done,” Tynan considered. “You show us Shylock turning into a Jew before our eyes.” Shylock started as a businessman who happened to be a Jew, his daughter’s flight with a Christian reminded him what it was to be Jewish, by the end of the trial “he knows it through and through – so indelibly that no-one in the theatre will ever forget it”.
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“The Merchant of Venice” was still running when Olivier was reminded that the problems of the Director of the National Theatre were by no means confined to the plays in which he himself was involved. He had taken on, more or less unseen, a version of “Coriolanus”, reworked by Brecht, which Tynan had assured him was “desperately exciting”. The play came as a package, with directors from the Berliner Ensemble thrown in. “I fell for the argument that here was the great modern
production,” Olivier admitted. “I always had wide-open flapping ears for anything to do with modern work.” Constance Cummings, who had been invited to play Volumnia, asked whether the production would be Brechtian, “for she wasn’t very keen on Brecht”. Either Tynan had misled him or Olivier deceived himself. He assured Cummings that it was essentially Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” that would be played. Brecht might have made some minor adjustments, but nothing of significance. Scofield had originally been intended to play Coriolanus but had defected from the National Theatre. Christopher Plummer took his place. Plummer was an excellent actor but one with certain pretensions: he arrived each day in a Rolls Royce and insisted on being personally called when due to go on stage rather than accepting the summons by tannoy which Olivier and everybody else found adequate. Not surprisingly, the rest of the cast resented him; a circumstance which caused him little disquiet since he dismissed all but two or three of them as “a bunch of unwelcoming humourless malcontents whose socialist leanings not only were far left of Lenin but made Harold Wilson look like King Farouk”.
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When the German directors and the Brechtian script arrived it was discovered that Shakespeare’s text had been treated with scant respect and that Plummer’s part, in particular, had been cut ferociously. The director spoke almost no English: after a tirade in German lasting several minutes the translator would interpret his words as: “He say: ‘You stand there’.” When Plummer demanded that his lines be restored, the Germans said that Brecht’s widow insisted that there should be no deviation from the sacred text. In the end they agreed to some of the cuts being put back, but not enough to satisfy Plummer, who insisted that either they or he must go. A cast meeting was held, and it was decided unanimously that it was Plummer who should be the loser. “The whole episode [was] a splendid vindication of the new collective leadership at the N.T.,” wrote Tynan in his diary. Olivier did not see it quite like that. He would far rather have kept Plummer and lost the German directors, and would have ignored the views of the company if he had
had the chance. The fact was, however, that he was committed by contract to the Brechtian package and would have been involved in expensive lawsuits if he had tried to escape his obligations. Like it not: Plummer must go and the German directors stay.
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There was yet more trouble to come. Plummer’s place was taken by Anthony Hopkins. As a result Hopkins was replaced by Plummer in what he considered to be a more important role in “Danton’s Death”. He was furious and demanded to see Olivier. “I know you’re very, very angry,” said Olivier. “Yes.” “Punch me on the jaw,” suggested Olivier. The proposition did not appeal to Hopkins. “Just give me a bloody explanation,” he asked. “Why did you do it?’ “I’ll tell you why. Because Chris is a big star and you’re not.” This somewhat brutal statement of the truth did not seem calculated to appease Hopkins’s susceptibilities. Nor was Olivier much more conciliatory when it came to Hopkins’s performance. “Highly lauded and welcomed” as Hopkins’s Coriolanus had been, he wrote after the play had been running for a few weeks, “there really is a very general complaint about incomprehensibility, because the audience cannot understand what you are saying … I
must
draw this to your attention … a general complaint such as this could well sink us.” There followed a few lines of unctuous flattery about Hopkins’s brilliance and the “stellar proportions” of his success, but the opening rebuke must have been hard to swallow.
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“Coriolanus” was not a success and Tynan can be blamed for it. On the other hand, he must be praised for inducing Olivier to take on a role which he would otherwise have shunned. Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” is the story of a defunct actor, once modestly celebrated, never great, mouldering in obscurity with his alcoholic sons and drug-addict wife. It is bleakly, blackly depressing and one of the greatest, if not
the
greatest play of the twentieth century. It terrified Olivier. He had seen Fredric March act it in New York in 1956 and had thought: “I wouldn’t play this bloody part for anything and, what’s more, I’ll never play any actor now I’ve seen this.” Whoever played James Tyrone would have to bring off that most difficult trick: to be a great actor pretending
to be a bad actor, or at least a second-rate actor. Yet he knew that it was a magnificent part in “a pretty well perfect play”. When Tynan told him that he had more or less committed him to mount the play at the National Theatre at the end of 1971 and to play Tyrone himself, he professed outrage. “I feel a bit incredulous,” he wrote, “that you should be quite so prepared to land me in for studying a huge part and sweating out performances for possibly many months … feeling nothing but cold dislike for the part, the play and the whole occasion.”
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And yet he knew that it was a part he had to play and even while he groaned in public a bit of him rejoiced. For several months “Long Day’s Journey” took over his life. Learning a part was no longer the matter of routine it had once been: for twelve weeks, he told Tynan, he had “devoted every single second of my thinking, learning and reading life to it –
sans
alcohol too.” The demands the part made on him were second only to those of Othello, and physically he was far less able to resist them. Denis Quilley remembered that during the one-minute break between Acts One and Two he would slump into a chair in the wings and go to sleep: “I’d have to tap him gently on the shoulder and remind him which stage of the play we’d reached, and he’d go on as vigorously as ever. He loved hard graft.”
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The graft was almost too hard. Derek Granger at some point asked him whether he was not enjoying the part. “Crazy wife, drunken old ham actor, don’t you think it’s just a little near the bone?” Olivier replied. “Some of us have lived a little, boysie.” In fact Olivier never for an instant identified with Tyrone, but he introduced some of his own actorly tricks and techniques into his performance, he knew that he was playing what he might have been, he walked a tightrope between self-parody and self-revelation. It was “a performance of intense technical and personal fascination,” wrote Irving Wardle. “The dejection that settles on Olivier’s frame from the start – his body hunched and his mouth cracked into a small, crooked line – expresses a sense of defeat that encompasses his whole life.”
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For all that he knew that “Long Day’s Journey” was destined to be one of Olivier’s greatest roles, Tynan was nevertheless disturbed about the future of the National Theatre. Olivier, he felt, through ill health and inattention, had let the organisation crumble. The whole place was going to rack and ruin, the repertoire was fusty and unadventurous, there was hardly an actor in the permanent company who was more than a competent journeyman, attendances were down, no thought was being given to what would happen when Olivier retired. He set out all his fears in a long, angry letter and had it delivered to Olivier’s dressing room shortly before the curtain went up on the first night of “Long Day’s Journey”. His assistant, Rosine Adler, was dismayed. “I begged him not to,” she remembered. “You just don’t do things like that when someone is going to appear in the first performance of anything, let alone this show, which came when it did and when ‘Sir’ himself was so worried … The situation at the National was terribly serious, but it was a terrible thing to do.” There is no evidence that Olivier read Tynan’s protest before the curtain rose. If he had, it did not affect the quality of his performance. Nor was the situation at the National as “terribly serious” as Rosine Adler maintained. But all was not going well and Olivier, as he scoured the ecstatic reviews which his acting had earned him, was conscious of the fact that something needed to be done and that he was not sure what it should be or how he should set about it.
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Rather similar is the occasion when the actor Jack Hedley was dining in a restaurant with Olivier and a group of friends. The Goodies came in, causing something of a stir. Olivier asked who they were and what they did. Later, he went to the lavatory, stopped at their table and said how enormously he admired their work. “But you’d never even heard of them,” protested Hedley. “Yes, but they’ll never forget it,” Olivier replied.

T
he National Theatre,” said John Osborne, in atrabilious mood, “has, I think combined the worst aspects of the commercial theatre with those of an institution – a stuffy institution. I also think Olivier’s the least suitable person to run a national theatre. He always wanted to be an actor-manager, but that is something quite different from being the administrator of a theatrical institution … On the one hand he wants to be trendy, or to keep up with public taste, or get beyond it; and on the other he is also … very orthodox and conservative.”
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Not many people would have seen things as starkly as that, but Tynan, a man whom Osborne loathed and despised, would have echoed every word of it and disquiet was general. At the end of 1970, instigated by Robert Stephens, there was something of a palace revolution. A meeting was held, at which doubts about the Company’s future were voiced, and reports leaked into the newspapers. “Difficult phase at the N.T.,” was the headline in the
Evening Standard
. In the face of such publicity, the Company closed ranks and professed its total loyalty to its Director, but the Board, too, was concerned. Average attendances had dropped from 85 per cent to 78 per cent and were at one point to sink to a miserable 67 per cent. The Board concluded that “one or two recent productions had not been very exciting, that new faces in the Company would help renew interest and that new impetus would be given if Sir Laurence were to appear again in a major role.”
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The last point at least had been met by the production of “Long
Day’s Journey”, but the need for new faces was something with which Tynan would have concurred. “I think the Company is at present so weak that it could not succeed in
any
programme of plays,” he told Olivier. “There isn’t anyone at the Vic (except possibly Pickup) to whose next appearance one looks forward with real excitement.” The charge came ill from someone who had himself contributed signally to the National Theatre’s malaise. Only a few months before he had been responsible for Arrabal’s arcane and anarchic “The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria”. The critical response had been one of cautious interest; in terms of attracting audiences it was disastrous. Nor could it even retain the audiences it got. Olivier stood with Tynan to watch the mass defection at the end of the first act. “‘Such a good idea of yours to put this play on, Ken’,” he said, “with the crisply projected diction that could be heard well down the Cut”. But though the primary blame was Tynan’s, Olivier could not avoid all responsibility. “This is a piece of shit, baby,” he had told Anthony Hopkins. “But Ken loves it and says that it will be ecstasy. So let us see.” If he really thought the play was a piece of shit, why did he put it on? Had his experiences with “Tyger” taught him nothing? As Director he had no need to pander to the whims of his dramaturge. To be brainwashed into seeing merit in something which was daringly avant-garde is explicable; to take it on while seeing no merit in it cannot be condoned. Olivier was abrogating the responsibilities of his office; a piece of weakness which was not unique but was strongly at variance with his authoritarian nature.
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