A Mr Andrew Main wrote to Olivier to condole with him on what he felt was the inappropriate laughter that his performance had from time to time provoked. Olivier’s reply illustrates his conviction that even “Hamlet” or “Macbeth” were the more effective for a little humour. “The Dance of Death”, he said, was in his view not a tragedy. “Even if the play were to be a tragedy I would not object to laughter … I personally feel that the difference between tragedy and comedy is far more thin than by most is imagined, and it is my aim in life to make that more and more so. I wish, you see, to leave the audience in the position of the gods, to whom, after all, our most searing tragedies must be things of comedy.”13
“The Dance of Death” was for him the most taxing of the plays the National Theatre took to Canada in the autumn of 1967. Having decided not to tour in “Othello” Olivier felt bound to appear in all three plays and took over the tiny but significant role of the butler in Feydeau’s farce, “A Flea in Her Ear”. He had not played so small a part for years and, perhaps for that reason, found it peculiarly difficult to remember his lines. He kept a copy of his script on a music-stand in the wings, with his spectacles beside them, so that he could go offstage, refresh his memory as to what came next and then come back on to resume the action. “Darling girl,” he said to Jane Lapotaire, who had just joined the company and was playing the French maid, Antoinette, “if I should dry, you will help me out, won’t you? For example, if a line begins with ‘I’, just point towards your eye.” Lapotaire thought this was the most preposterous thing she had ever heard; but then Olivier did dry. “He just spun round 360 degrees, slapping his hands that had got white-buttoned gloves … The audience thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.” Lapotaire asked Geraldine McEwan what it was like to have Olivier join the cast. “Well,” said McEwan, “it used to be a play about a woman who thinks her husband is unfaithful to her; now it’s a play about a butler who works for a woman who thinks her husband is unfaithful to her.” Being Olivier, he could not resist behaving like the director if the real director was absent or even, now and again, if he was present. Once, he saw Lapotaire was having trouble working out how she ought to play her role. “Now, darling Jane,” said Olivier, “the maid should be like this.” He took an imaginary feather duster, bent over and stuck his bottom out, glanced around him with the wickedest, most sexually alluring look and said, “You see, she’s like that.” “And within about ten seconds,” remembered Lapotaire gratefully, “there was my Antoinette.”14
Everyone who knew him well realised that, medically speaking, he should not have been on the tour at all. He remained ebullient, contriving to get a great deal of fun out of his activities and to make it fun for other people. In Montreal he saw some actors from the company getting ready to go to hear a group of black singers called The Supremes. He asked if he could join them. “Who are The Supremes?” he enquired in the taxi on the way to the concert. He was given a few facts. The Supremes heard that he was in the auditorium and, before the concert started, the lead singer announced how privileged they were to have “the greatest actor the world has ever known” in their midst. Olivier promptly went on stage and delivered an eloquent eulogy to The Supremes and their achievements. “And he’d never even heard of them half an hour before!” said one of his party in wonder. “God!” said Olivier afterwards. “I’ve fallen in love.” He invited The Supremes to the next day’s matinée and, in his curtain speech, made them stand up and introduced them to the audience. They then went back stage and had a riotous time. “It was such fun,” said Edward Hardwicke. “Can you imagine Peter Hall doing it?”15*
But he himself felt that he was beginning to lose his grip on things. Back in London, he found that he was facing what seemed to him a critical challenge. He had invited Peter Brook to direct Seneca’s “Oedipus”. His relationship with Brook had never recovered from the near-debacle of “The Beggar’s Opera” and it may have been the recollection of that contretemps that led Brook to introduce into the production some features that he knew Olivier would find offensive. At the end of the play the cast were to dance up and down the aisles to the tune of a jazzed-up version of “God Save the Queen”; meanwhile a vast phallus was to be displayed on the stage, first wrapped in swaddling clothes, then displayed to the world in proud erection. Olivier believed these to be vulgar and pointless extravagances which would destroy the effect of an otherwise impressive production. Brook refused to give way: John Gielgud, who was playing Oedipus, agreed with Olivier – “I understand why Larry was so upset; he thought they’d close the theatre.” He felt it was not his place to intervene, however, and when a fearful row broke out in his dressing room after the dress rehearsal, he fled the scene. He returned to find that the full-length mirror had been shattered – “I never discovered which of them had thrown the ashtray.” In fact, according to Frank Dunlop, who was also there, it was not an ashtray but Peter Brook himself, who tried to storm out and, in his rage, walked into the mirror instead.16
A compromise was eventually reached: the jazzed-up national anthem was dropped, but only on condition that “God Save the Queen” was not played at all; the phallus was retained. Tynan and Dunlop both took Brook’s side: Tynan relished the offending elements; Dunlop was less enthusiastic, but thought the director’s wishes should prevail. Olivier believed that he had been defeated: “I felt weak; I was weak; and weakly I gave in.” In Dunlop’s view he got the whole thing out of proportion; nobody paid any attention to the phallus and the bacchanalian riot amounted to very little. Olivier, though, felt that a crushing blow had been dealt to his authority. His relationship with Brook remained sour. A few months later he invited him back to direct “Antony and Cleopatra”. Possibly with some relish, he explained that the pay would have to be less than it had been in the case of “Oedipus”; the National Theatre was short of money. Brook took offence and accused Olivier of making him an insulting offer with the intention that it should be rejected. “Oh God, Peter,” Olivier replied. “I sometimes think you take a delight … in missing no opportunity of reminding me of the wretched level I hold in your estimation. It is hard to have to keep having to pluck up the courage to make continual efforts to settle our quarrel against a wall so obviously determined to keep things in this unhappy state.” In the end a reconciliation was achieved, but Brook never worked with Olivier again.17
What caused Olivier the greatest chagrin at this period, however, was not a production that did not turn out to his satisfaction but one which did not take place at all. He had set his heart on doing the American musical “Guys and Dolls”, reserving for himself the role of the crap-game impresario, Nathan Detroit. He believed “Guys and Dolls” to be a masterpiece, an Everest towering above the foothills of traditional musicals; he also longed to show that the National Theatre was up to any challenge. Nothing is taboo, he pronounced: “There may be some types of play that it is felt need to be represented with varying degrees of frequency or infrequency, but there is nothing against our producing a musical.” Robert Stephens did not agree. He canvassed opinion among the actors – “which perhaps I should not have done,” he later admitted – and reported that the general view was that, if the National put on “Guys and Dolls” without professional American singers and dancers, the production would be no better than the work of “some local amateur operatic society”. Worse still, he infected the Board with his doubts. Chandos in particular was sceptical. He thought it would cost too much, he questioned whether “Guys and Dolls” could be considered a classic, he even doubted whether it came within “the terms of reference for which they received public subsidies”. The Board always preferred to leave the choice of plays to the Director, but, said Chandos, they would be shirking their duty if they did not consider these points. They duly considered these points and Olivier’s eloquence won the day; everyone except the Chairman either supported the project or felt that the decision should be left to the Director. “After great battle won Board meeting this morning,”
Olivier cabled triumphantly to Garson Kanin, the American whom he planned should direct the musical. To Noël Coward he stressed how important for the amour propre of the company it was that they should show themselves capable of mounting such a production out of their own resources. “Of course we’re not going to do musicals every bloody year. This escapade is just to freshen up our dreary old image a bit.”18
Victory proved fleeting. Olivier’s health broke down and the Board ruled that, without him, it would be folly to press on. Don’t be so precipitant, urged Olivier. “Surely you wouldn’t turn down Paul Scofield, Richard Attenborough or Johnnie Mills, if I could get them?” He couldn’t get them, though, and the day seemed lost; but by the end of 1970 he had made an unexpectedly complete recovery. He returned to the charge and thought that he had once more prevailed; the long-term forecast which he prepared for Chandos envisaged the opening of “Guys and Dolls” in November 1971. “They proceed apace with ‘Guys’,” he told Kanin. “I shall start my own private preliminary dancing course in a couple of months.” Quite what happened next is obscure, but it seems that Paddy Donnell, the company manager, took fright at the expense of the production and threatened to resign unless it was abandoned. Olivier could not afford the resignation of someone of such stature on the business side, and so gave way. “I was really betrayed by that,” Olivier remembered some years later. “This man was really responsible for my quitting the job, because when that happened, I thought, if I’m going to have to put up with treachery from my partners, I’m going.”19
*
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.20
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”.21
“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”.22
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.23
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 ask
ed. “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.24
“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.”25
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