The first two years at the National Theatre had been an almost unqualified success. They had been fun as well as supremely testing. “I was taking a tremendous amount of things in my stride,” Olivier remembered with some satisfaction. “I was showing a lot of power, a lot of guts, a lot of strength, a lot of reserve and a lot of stamina.” But the price he paid was a high one. Whether his stage fright was in part caused by his exhaustion, or his exhaustion was exacerbated by his stage fright, the burden sometimes seemed too great to bear. Not only was he producing, directing and acting in a range of testing plays; he was running a complex organisation. Nor could he do this without any outside interference; at every stage he had to carry with him a Board of Directors who could thwart his efforts if they were so minded. He was to find that Olivier as the servant of the Board had a task quite as testing as any other of the functions he performed in the National Theatre.22
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Peter Hall professed dismay at the terms of Olivier’s contract. “The Board can require him to do anything they want,” he told his agent. “More horrendous, they can appoint, after consultation with him (although he has no right of approval), any associate directors they see fit. I would not sign a contract like this.” There was something in what he said, but in practice it mattered little. The Board had no doubts about the status of their Director. Technically he was their servant, but they would not have dreamt of treating him as such. Olivier, as they minuted after a discussion of the National Theatre’s relations with the press, was “a great world star”. No journalist would have much interest in talking to anybody else who professed to speak for the National Theatre, whether he came from within the organisation or as a member of the Board. They were well aware that, if he were driven to resignation, the effect on the National would be catastrophic. It followed that his influence, if not his power, was infinite. When he came to Board meetings, said John Mortimer, he would treat its members “with mock humility, behaving like Othello before the Senate, calling us his ‘very notable and approv’d good masters’. Naturally, he didn’t mean a word of it.” They would never have contemplated imposing an associate director on him without knowing that he wished it; almost always any such appointment was made at his initiative. If they did express an opinion – as when, according to Olivier, they “indicated strongly” that he should confine his relationship with the press to occasions on which he was speaking formally on behalf of the National Theatre – it was almost certainly because this was a ruling which he wanted himself and had put into the Board’s mouth.23
Nevertheless, the members of the Board were men of stature and independent minds. They would accept the pre-eminence of their Director and defer to his opinion, but they knew their rights and felt there were issues on which they were not merely entitled but obligated to express their views. Olivier had agreed with Lord Chandos that he would only discuss the choice of plays with the Board if “there would be cause to worry on political or the other main grounds for censorship – profanity, obscenity or libel”. This made sense provided Olivier and Chandos agreed in their definition of these words and drew the same conclusions about the consequences. Nearly always they did, but there were differences of opinion, and with polemicists like Tynan eager to stir up outrage over any attempted restriction on the freedom of the artist, the possibility of acrimonious argument never disappeared. In the early years at least, Olivier’s relationship with the Board was reasonably trouble-free, but it was still a preoccupation and one which made demands upon his time and energies.24
Censorship was, of course, not an issue which involved Olivier and the Board alone; the Lord Chamberlain was still the arbiter of what should or should not be shown upon a stage, and when Olivier debated with his Board the potential hazards of a piece, it was the likely reaction of this remote panjandrum that concerned them both. Olivier’s own views on the issue, as he confessed, were “deliciously though probably maddeningly vague”. On the whole he thought the Lord Chamberlain was not the appropriate person to judge the propriety of a play, but he was by no means in favour of abandoning censorship altogether. Somebody would have to make the decision, but who that man should be, it was hard to decide. The trouble, as Olivier saw it, was that any change to the current system “might carry with it worse disadvantages”. To Tynan this seemed pitifully pusillanimous. He was forever urging on Olivier into a outright row with the Lord Chamberlain. When the Lord Chamberlain excised “Balls”, “Bugger” and “You can take a crap” from “Mother Courage”, Tynan argued that the National Theatre was a special case and should be exempt from such restrictions. Nobody had greater respect for the National than the Lord Chamberlain, his office responded blandly, but he had no discretion to distinguish between one theatre and another.
He was, however, prepared to accept “You’re all wetting your pants” as a substitute for “You’re all shitting in your pants”. A group of similarly trivial excisions from “Andorra” stung Tynan to still greater indignation. He proposed that a list of the censored phrases should be included in the programme so that the audience should not be robbed of its fair share of obscenities. Olivier had never much liked the play anyway and privately thought that the Lord Chamberlain had a good point. “I am sorry to be po-faced about this,” he wrote, “but the value or non-value of the Lord Chamberlain’s office is something about which my mind maintains a stubborn duality. In any event, I am against this form of attack, which has a petulant feeling about it.”25
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As well as running one theatre Olivier was time-consumingly involved in the development of another. The South Bank Board was responsible for the design and construction of what is now the National Theatre – a task which it was at one time thought might be completed by the end of 1964 but which slipped further and further behind schedule at every step. Olivier was the only actor on the Board and so felt his contribution to be particularly significant. In his view he was thwarted and frustrated at every turn. “No-one listened to what I wanted,” he told Sarah Miles. “My way was the only way it could work.” His colleagues saw things differently: all of them, wrote Richard Eyre, agreed on one thing: “It was Larry’s baby … It embodies him as he was – grand, grandiose even, bold, ambitious, difficult, exasperating even, but often thrilling and occasionally unique.” Unquestionably his was the loudest and most persuasive voice, but he did not have things altogether his own way. His original plan had been for a building with a single theatre seating not more than a thousand people – the largest number, he was convinced, on which it was possible for an actor to impose himself. But should that theatre be in the round, a compromise as in the remodelled Old Vic, or of a traditional proscenium design?26
Olivier seems to have been as “deliciously and probably maddeningly vague” over this as he was over censorship. He was never certain as to what was the ideal solution. In 1969 a new theatre was being opened in Sheffield. Bernard Miles was asked to sponsor the enterprise. He refused indignantly. It was worse than Chichester, he protested: “They have even got forty or fifty seats at the back. All that is now required is a glass stage [through which] to look up the girls’ skirts!” He sent a copy of the brochure to Olivier. “Here’s another FUCKER! Worst of the lot to date. Acting is largely a frontal job, as you well know.” Olivier was not sure how well he knew or, indeed, what he knew. It all depended what one meant by “largely”. He wrote to the director of the Sheffield theatre to say that he was “a little bit anxious about the extreme design”, but he was not prepared to join Miles in his out-and-out condemnation of the project. When Miles denounced the enterprise in the newspapers and cited Olivier as being on his side, Olivier took him to task – “Do learn to manage the opening of your pretty mouth with a little more discretion, dear boy.” “That was a real shitty little note you wrote,” Miles replied. “After all, I’m only doing it for you and your doubtless gifted progeny, who will one day be faced with the problems of this stupid, bookish theory.”27
It was easy enough to see bot
h sides of the argument when somebody else’s project was in question. Olivier was faced with the problem here and now in the National Theatre. He was not prepared to dispense altogether with the traditional proscenium stage – how else could he invite the Comédie Française to act in London? he asked – but was determined that this should not be the only, or even the most usual configuration. What he wanted was a single theatre that could be adapted to a variety of shapes, something that was eventually achieved on a small scale in the Cottlesloe Theatre, but which he accepted was impossible in a larger auditorium. So two theatres evolved: the traditionally designed model, to be called the Lyttelton, and the Olivier with its thrust-forward stage. Nobody really wanted the Lyttelton, said Peter Hall; he, George Devine, Peter Brook, Michel Saint-Denis, all opposed it. They were overruled, “because Larry was the boss man, and that was it”. The charge is not wholly accurate, but the contemporary National Theatre, with its weaknesses and far greater strengths, is more the creation of Laurence Olivier than of any other individual involved.28
He was no less influential in the choice of architect. It was he who conceived the idea of getting the Royal Institute of British Architects to nominate twenty individuals competent to undertake the task and then for each one to be interviewed by an advisory panel who would recommend a name or names to the South Bank Board. Olivier was, of course, prominent on the advisory panel and it was largely his doing that, in the event, only one name was recommended to the Board, that of Denys Lasdun. All the interviewers, said Olivier, had been “impressed by his spirit of co-operation and his sense of dedication, as well as by evidence of his work”. There were to be times over the next few years when he wondered whether the panel had made the right decision, but at the end of the day he had no doubt that his opinion had been justified.29
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As he had predicted from the start, one of the most difficult problems facing the National Theatre was finding the best actors and actresses and retaining them, even though suitable parts would not always be available. Olivier urged Christopher Plummer to be ready to accept a minor role; if he did so, he would “look a jolly good sport by mucking in with the company”. The trouble about this was that Plummer, like almost every other actor, was more concerned about his career than whether he appeared a “jolly good sport”. Ian McKellen refused to sign a three-year contract. “The crux of my decision,” he admitted, “is ambition. My ambition to achieve recognition as an actor … I think there is more chance of establishing my ability publicly elsewhere.” He was to come back to the National, but only after he had achieved his object of making his name elsewhere.30
Nor, even when they could be prevailed upon to stay, were many actors prepared to make the sort of financial sacrifice which Olivier was ready – and much more able – to accept. Artists’ fees were costing the theatre much more than he had expected, he told the Board: actors were not “inclined to regard work at the National Theatre as a charitable duty”. When Peter O’Toole held out for a higher salary, Tynan declared loftily that, if an actor was not prepared to accept a lower wage in exchange for the honour of playing in the National Theatre, then “he was not the sort of actor the theatre wants”. Olivier agreed that this was an admirable sentiment, but “it’s not an entirely workable principle these days”. He knew that his success or failure as Director would be judged by the Board as much by the financial returns as by the quality of the productions. This in its turn put an additional burden on him. Box-office receipts slumped when he was not himself acting in a play. He therefore saw it as his duty to act whenever his schedule made it possible – a duty which fortunately for him coincided with his predilection for playing a leading part in every production if he could get away with doing so.31
The relationship with Stratford, too, made constant demands on Olivier’s energies and patience. By the end of 1963 Peter Hall had convinced himself that the Royal Shakespeare Company was in peril, that it could not survive the unfairly subsidised competition of the National Theatre. “We are now at the end of the road,” he told Joan Plowright. “Unless persons in high places can help we shall be finished at the beginning of 1965 and Stratford will have a new Director.” The person in a high place to whom this appeal was implicitly addressed was Olivier himself. On the whole he responded generously. He told his Board that a Co-ordinating Committee was being set up to consider how the National could help Stratford in its fight for survival. He stressed the importance of its outpost in London at the Aldwych Theatre and “pointed out that the disappearance of Stratford’s London branch would reflect adversely upon the National Theatre”. But soon the exchanges became acrimonious. In February 1964 the Sunday Times carried a story about the rivalry between the two theatres and reported that Hall proposed to denounce the National if it didn’t offer its rival some tangible support. Plowright felt certain that Hall himself was the origin of the story, and wrote to remonstrate. Three days later Olivier fired the second barrel. It was Stratford which had sabotaged the negotiations for some sort of merger; it was the National which had been responsible for Stratford getting “its bloody dough … all of which history seems to me to be pretty bloody immaculate, and I think it is now time somebody said so, and I think that somebody is you … Sorry, cock, over to you.” No such public avowal was forthcoming and resentment lingered on both sides, but it was soon apparent that Hall had overstated the desperation of Stratford’s plight and that there was plenty of room for the two companies to survive in healthy competition.32
Tynan, it is hardly necessary to say, was zealous in fomenting the hostility between the National and Stratford and more specifically between Olivier and Hall. He was no less energetic when it came to making trouble within the National itself. Dexter, in particular, was his target. “At the moment I expect he would quite like to assassinate me,” he told Olivier. Were not three directors more than the National Theatre needed? He reported that he had asked the Director of the Prague National Theatre how it was that his theatre ran so smoothly. “It’s simple,” he had been told. “I decide on the repertoire with the dramaturge and then we tell the other directors what they are going to do. Is there any other way?” Was there not a lesson there for the National Theatre? asked Tynan. Olivier did not think there was and urged Tynan both to curb his tongue and to moderate his aspirations. He had no intention of dispensing with his services, though, and a large part of his already overstretched energies had to be devoted to repairing the damage which his irrepressible dramaturge had done. There was little on which Tynan did not feel qualified and entitled to express an opinion. When a filmed version was made of the National Theatre “Othello” – not a film in its own right, but a photographed record of what was happening on the stage – Tynan insisted on being present and clamoured for more close-ups of Olivier. If one took close-ups of what Olivier was doing on the stage, explained the film’s producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, the audience would be in “gales of laughter because he’s spitting, his face is contorted. It’s an overblown performance for a big theatrical performance; the antithesis of what you can do on film.”
The trouble was that Olivier, never totally reconciled to the demands of the screen, was more than half inclined to agree with Tynan. He gave a stage performance, and made little attempt to curb his gestures or expressions to suit the different medium. The result was an uneasy compromise: much better than nothing, but still only a distorted shadow of its majestic original.33
Tynan made so much noisy mischief that it is easy to overlook the good work he did. He was particularly efficacious in opening Olivier’s eyes to Europe. Without Tynan he would never have invited the Berliner Ensemble to act in London. Even this got him into trouble with Peter Daubeny, who had brought the Ensemble to London some ten years before and appears to have thought that he had a monopoly on the importation of foreign companies. “It seems to me a betrayal of the good faith on which relations between people and great theatres are customarily based,” he complained. Olivier replied that he was baff
led: “Really, dear Peter, you have invited the Moscow Art Theatre, the Comédie Française, the Habbima etc., with nothing but my blessing … Must you begrudge us our East Berliners?”34
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