Hall joined the National early in 1973. On the whole his first months went smoothly. There were moments of friction, but on most issues Olivier and Hall were more or less in accord. Both, for instance, agreed that Barbra Streisand’s proposal that she should play a Shakespearean role at the National should be politely but firmly rejected. “I admire the lady greatly,” wrote Hall, “but I would prefer to watch her do Shakespeare somewhere else.” Their views on plays usually coincided. Olivier told Hall that left to himself he would have rejected a play by the American dramatist Michael Weller, which Tynan had recommended. He found it “frankly disgusting”, which he suspected was the main reason for Tynan liking it. He felt, however, that in the circumstances, Hall should make the final decision. Hall found it “very perceptive and original”, but agreed it was not one for the National Theatre.21
Hall’s original title when he joined the National had been Director Designate. It was Olivier who proposed that, from April 1973, they should appear with equal billing as Co-Directors. At the end of October, he went on, Hall should become Director and Olivier Associated Director, with or without the honorific title of President: “This would create a good impression of continuity, of friendliness and co-operation.” After March 1974 he would like to take six months’ sabbatical, after which he would return “to take such part as might be required of me for the opening of the new theatre”. Rayne was relieved by this proposal. He had foreseen ugly squabbles between Olivier and Hall, now all seemed set fair. Olivier’s proposals, he said, were “eminently reasonable and immensely helpful”.22
But even when he put forward these obliging propositions Olivier had doubts about whether he was going to adhere to them. Several months earlier Joan Plowright had told Dexter that her husband was changing his mind from day to day. At one time he would conclude that he should withdraw immediately, “and let P.H. sort it all out”; twenty-four hours later he would say that he must see it through. “Even so,” she went on, “he’s not sure he’s going to stay on in the capacity they (including Peter) all hope for.” More and more he sought to withdraw from the everyday running of the theatre. Early in 1973 he asked Tynan and Dexter to dinner in his flat in Roebuck House and told them that he was going to resign in October: he was bored by the administrative chores, felt no artistic excitement in the job and wanted to escape as soon as possible. They urged him not to retire prematurely and he found that, when it came to the point, it was painful as well as difficult to disengage.23
If 1973 was an uncomfortable year for Olivier, he made sure that it was almost equally awkward for his successor. Overtly he seemed to be anxious to work closely with Hall. “He tries to talk to me most days now,” wrote Hall in his diary: “I can’t quite make out what is going on … If I could be with him at lunch and dinner and sit up drinking with him all night he would be happy. But I can’t do that.” Olivier was at least as confused as Hall. He wished to give the impression that he was doing all he could to help his successor, part of him genuinely wanted to be co-operative, but he still found Hall’s presence a constant irritant, a reminder that this was no longer his personal empire, would, indeed, soon not be his empire at all. He knew that it would be damaging to his reputation if he seemed uncooperative and yet he could not resist flickers of resentment. In March, with some ostentation, he announced that he proposed to vacate his office so as to make room for the Director Designate. Olivier could do what he liked, Hall retorted, but he wasn’t moving in to the Director’s office until he took over in November.24
In fact, Hall was more than happy to take over the management of the National. He would have preferred his predecessor to linger on in some titular role so as to emphasise the “continuity, friendliness and co-operation” which Olivier had extolled a few months before, but provided there was no overt falling out he could accept Olivier’s resignation without too many qualms. What mattered most to him was that Olivier should continue to act in the Old Vic and, in due course, in the new theatre as well. He was anxious not to be cast as the man who had driven Laurence Olivier from the stage of the National, if only because any production which included Olivier in the cast list was likely to attract 10–15 per cent more ticket sales than plays which featured any other actor. When Olivier at the last minute had to drop out of a performance of Trevor Griffiths’s “The Party”, Hall recorded, “the disappointment of people coming into the theatre … was almost unbearable. Many of them looked and behaved like heartbreakingly deprived children.” When it came to committing himself to regular appearances, however, Olivier proved disquietingly evasive.25
What Hall wanted above all was to ensure that Olivier would play Lear: preferably in the forthcoming season in the Old Vic. Olivier prevaricated, seemed to say that he would, then hesitated. Once he told Hall that he had tried to telephone to confirm his readiness to play but had failed to get through and had now changed his mind. Undiscomfited, Hall battled on. At least if Olivier was not ready now, let him promise to make his Lear the first production in the new theatre. “You know I want you to do this more than anything in the world.” Of course he would be honoured to direct the play himself, but “I think you should do it in any way you want and with whoever you want, but please don’t direct it yourself unaided. It is too much.” Olivier’s first reaction seems to have been to accept, but soon doubts crept in. In a letter starting “My very dear Peter”, undated and probably never sent but providing the basis for a conversation, Olivier explained that “there does seem to exist very strongly in my mind and my being a feeling of unhappiness at committing myself to this extent … Something tells me that we both of us – more particularly you than me – may be glad not to cope with my re-entry when it is at present planned.” He asked Hall to avoid making any announcement which included “plans which involve us in commitments which we both may well and truly wish we had not undertaken”.26
For Hall, who was not merely prepared but anxious to commit himself in this way, this must have been a disquieting message. He fared no better when he tried to persuade Olivier to undertake “The Tempest”. In the past Olivier had dismissed Prospero as an unrewarding part; now he seemed interested and at once began to talk about his costume and make-up – “I love the fact that actors always go straight to their appearance,” remarked Hall. But wasn’t the old sorcerer abjuring his magic and breaking his staff almost too obvious a theme for what was likely to be Olivier’s Shakespearean swansong? Joan Plowright thought so. “I don’t think Larry will play Prospero,” Hall concluded. “I believe he will open the National with ‘King Lear’ directed by Michael Blakemore. I shall let him do exactly what he wants.”27
What he did want was unexpected. Trevor Griffiths was a politically conscious left-wing dramatist who was compared with Shaw for his combination of wit with reasoned argument. His new play, “The Party”, featured Tagg, a disillusioned Communist who bemoaned the fate that had overcome his beloved Party. Olivier told Tynan that he had never understood Marxism before he read “The Party”. It does not seem, though, that it was the political content which drew him to the play. Mainly he was impelled by a wish to disconcert those of his admirers who took it for granted that he would bow out with something obvious like Lear or Prospero. As well as this, he was attracted by what he must also have found most daunting. “The Party” opened with a monologue lasting twenty minutes and consisting of a dense and dialectic exercise in political analysis. To retain an audience’s attention through this overture would be a testing challenge, and Olivier in 1974 was no more ready to resist a challenge than he had been forty years before. Finally, and most curiously, he disconcerted the author by telling him that he was anxious to play the part because he had never played a Scotsman before (presumably Macbeth, being royal, did not count). To master a new accent was another, and still more beguiling challenge.28
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 fou
nd 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.29
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.30
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.”31
“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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Olivier’s Occupation Gone?
Farewell 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.
*
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.1
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.2
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.3
It was not only Hall who was disquie
ted 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.4
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