*
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.”13
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.14
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.”15
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.”16
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.17
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.18
Osborne was correct, however, in thinking that Olivier was over-awed by what he saw as Tynan’s intellectual superiority. When Tynan was appointed, Cedric Hardwicke sent him a telegram of congratulation, ending: “Don’t be too intellectual.” “Is Larry an intellectual?” queried Tynan. “No, but he wants to be,” was the reply. He did indeed want to be, but he considered that a university education was a prerequisite and that the chance was therefore lost for ever. He had read little, and though he felt no urge to remedy the deficiency, he felt ill at ease in literary circles. When he was asked by a Miss Jepson to contribute to a collection of tributes to Max Beerbohm he confessed that the request filled him with shame. “It is true that I am a Maximilian, but it is also certain that I am by far the least qualified to be a member of that worthy throng … My knowledge and appreciation of his works is of the skimpiest and most unenlightened.” When Miss Jepson responded by sending him a copy of Beerbohm’s Around Theatres he appealed to his secretary to produce “a v. nice letter which I can copy out”. It is unlikely that he ever opened the book. He did not always suffer intellectuals gladly, having the perception to realise that some of them were fools. He apologised to Tynan for having been off-hand with a visiting Italian: “There is
nothing so depressing to a non-intellectual like me than his particular brand of mysterioso. I get terribly bored by … trying to look knowing when the reverse is true.” But more often a reputation for being an intellectual inspired respect if not reverence. “You’re so much cleverer than I am,” he would say to his son Richard, meaning that Richard had been to university and so was supposedly better equipped to argue a case or to draw the right conclusion from some data.19
*
When intellectuals disagreed, Olivier had to choose between them. Gaskill and Dexter believed the Berliner Ensemble – the immensely influential company established by Bertolt Brecht in 1949 – to represent the pinnacle of repertory theatre. The Ensemble demanded a company without stars, or perhaps more correctly, a company containing nothing but stars, meshed together in practised fluency. Of course, some people would have to play larger parts than others, but it was the team that counted. Tynan believed in stars, whether from within the company or from outside it: big names that would attract big audiences. Though the gulf between the two points of view might seem insuperable, in practice it usually made little difference: decisions were taken on the basis of the needs of the day and of the actors and actresses who happened to be available. It was all very well to urge the merits of a coherent ensemble which would operate as a permanent unit with no concern for the ambitions of the individual – Joan Littlewood almost brought it off in the Theatre Workshop – but a company the size of the National Theatre could not be staffed by automata and few actors are without personal ambition. Gaskill complained that Maggie Smith, for example, “kept going off to make films”. She was not alone. “Gradually the company gets watered down to people who are less than adequate. And that’s the problem. You can never have a large-scale true ensemble.” The result, as Olivier had known it would be from the start, was a compromise. Gaskill thought that too much was lost as a result. It was “a spurious kind of ensemble” which didn’t even have “the glamour of old-fashioned actor-manager theatre about it”. Olivier thought it worked and did not concern himself too much about the issues of principle that lay behind it.20
He was emphatic in rejecting any form of a “house style”. Again with the Berliner Ensemble in mind Gaskill and Dexter hankered after a uniformity of approach which, whatever the play, would make the identity of the company instantly apparent. To the argument that this required the genius of some superman like Stanislavsky, Gaskill retorted that Stanislavskys did not spring fully-fashioned from their mother’s womb but grew with their job: only if the National Theatre adopted the true faith would a British Stanislavsky have the chance of achieving greatness. Tynan argued that the National’s repertoire was too extensive and its staff too fluid to make any such rigidity conceivable, let along desirable. Here Olivier came down on Tynan’s side. “I wouldn’t have allowed a house style,” he declared. “You must find a style for each play, I said, right from the beginning. There’s not even a National Theatre Shakespearean style. I’m sure there is in almost all other countries in Europe, but I have a prejudice against it.”21
*
The key members of the personnel were designated or in place; the venue had been chosen; the issues of principle had been aired if not resolved: it remained to put on some plays.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The National: Act Two
“I’m so glad you’re still bossing Chichester,” his sister Sybille told Olivier in July 1963. “This concentration thing is the very devil, I know. But you have it, alright.” He needed every bit of it. 1963 was bad enough, with the first production at the National Theatre scheduled to begin in October, but 1964 promised to be almost impossible. By 1963 he had given up any pretence that the Chichester Festival existed in its own right. “I quite deliberately created that second Chichester company for the National,” he admitted. Evershed-Martin was, or professed to be, content with this arrangement but was put out when it seemed that, even if the average performance played to a house that was three-quarters full, there might be a loss of £9,000 on the season. That would cost the guarantors £1,000 each: “While some could well afford it others, like myself, could not.” Olivier made soothing noises and in fact the season ended without a loss, but the goodwill which had reigned during the first season was wearing thin. It wore still thinner when the Chichester Board were offered only two seats for the opening night of the National Theatre. “With the proposed close link between us and the National, I should have thought it would have been a common courtesy to have offered all members of our Board seats for the occasion,” wrote an affronted James Battersby. The suggestion that the Board members should ballot for their seats was a sign of “unnecessary indifference”. There were simply not enough seats to go round, pleaded a spokesman for the National; even members of the National Theatre Board had had to ballot for tickets. Battersby was not appeased.1
So far it was a question of amour propre. When it became clear that, in the 1964 season, Olivier was so preoccupied by his National duties that he could devote relatively little time to Chichester, Evershed Martin took alarm. “I doubt if you could possibly realise how much your actual presence during the last two seasons has created a feeling of trust and confidence in everybody that Chichester was of importance in the theatrical world,” he told Olivier. If Olivier did not play in at least one of the productions it would have disastrous results for the box office and for the prestige of the whole Festival: “Please, Larry, this is terribly important to me and all of those with me.” He would do his best, Olivier promised; at the moment the prospects looked good. In the event he managed to give them a month of “Othello”. But even by his standards the burden was too much. Early in 1965 he resigned, pleading the impossible pressure of life at the National Theatre. “The simple truth is that I have done all that I can, and I can do no more,” he wrote to Evershed Martin. “At least we have all got something on the map of English life, something which has been absolutely accepted into the landscape.”2
The letter seemed to set the scene for a loving farewell, but things went downhill in 1965. Olivier had recommended John Clements as his successor, but Clements would not be available till the end of the year. Olivier remained nominally in charge, but in fact acted in nothing and paid little attention to what was going on. The company became so worried by the lack of direction that they telephoned John Dexter, who was in New York, and pleaded with him to come back and take charge. To add injury to insult they used the phone in Olivier’s room at a cost of £62. Olivier was outraged. According to Robert Stephens, he gave them “the most terrible bollocking, language you never thought existed … He played every single part you’ve ever seen him play, from Heathcliff to Henry V, shouting in that rasping tenor voice.” Stephens admitted that it was he who had called Dexter. “‘You cunt!’ Olivier screamed. ‘You cunt!’ I really thought he was going to kill me. He was totally out of control.”3
That final year soured Olivier’s memories of Chichester and its governing Board. “They are the stupidest bunch of people I ever had to work with in my life,” he said. “I was very unkind to them. I never asked the Board what I should do, I told them what I was going to do.” He maligned both the Board and himself: for most of the time they worked in harmony. At the time of his resignation he told the General Manager, Pieter Rogers, that they could look at each other “with a special glow of parenthood in our eyes, for between us we have brought [a] child of some significance [into being], and at four years old it looks to be a very bonny one too.” He never ceased to take a benevolent if distant interest in what he held to be his personal creation.4
When, several years later, Topol was enlisted to play in “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”, Olivier and Joan Plowright sent him a telegram: “Dear Hymie. Nobody ever died rich who played at Chichester. Loving wishes.” Certainly Olivier did not grow rich at Chichester, nor did his salary at the National Theatre enable him to support his growing family and considerable commitments. To supplement his income – and also because he enjoyed i
t – he slipped occasional films into his already bursting schedule. In the summer of 1965 he and Noël Coward together joined the cast of “Bunny Lake is Missing”, an inconsiderable thriller, directed by Otto Preminger, about a child who mysteriously disappears. Olivier was satisfied by his part – “it was perfectly alright” – but detested Preminger. “He’s the most awful kind of German there can be,” he once remarked. “He is a Nazi Jew; there can be nothing in the world more awful than that mixture.” The comment is of some interest as being the nearest Olivier is recorded as having come to anti-Semitism. In general he was free of racial prejudice. If he discovered that a colleague was Jewish, or for that matter Bolivian or Bulgarian, he would have considered it a matter of mild interest but no great importance – not a reason for liking or disliking him. The only complaint he had about Jews was their readiness to take offence at an imagined slight. A Jewish friend complained that a line in “Caesar and Cleopatra” could be construed as anti-Semitic. “I have in my own heart nothing but fondness for the Jewish race,” Olivier protested, “and have never been able to distinguish it in my thoughts from any other. All breeds of mankind have their faults and the only one that ever spurs me to a feeling of regret in the Jewish race is this kind of sensibility.”5
Preminger had offended him by fawning on him and Coward and bullying the junior members of the cast. In fact, if anyone needed to be bullied, it was Olivier himself. He was not at his best. “Poor Larry had a dreadful time with his lines,” noted Anna Massey. “They were full of details of bus times and probing non sequiturs. We ended up doing extremely short takes. He felt defeated.” For Olivier to feel defeated was something so unusual as to cause real concern, to his fellow actors and, still more, to himself. Later the same year, when he filmed the Chichester/National Theatre “Othello”, he admitted “it was a very tired performance. I was retreating a bit from the big moments and I shouldn’t have.” The pressure seemed to be telling to a point where it was undermining his acting.6
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