My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Richards’s book is wonderfully informative about the Victorian cult of celebrity (a word which, surprisingly, was current in more or less its present meaning from the 1850s) and Irving knew exactly how to turn it to his advantage. The first London manager for whom he worked – ‘Colonel’ Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman, who occupied roughly the same position in his life that ‘Colonel’ Parker did in Elvis Presley’s – taught him the black arts of promotion. Irving and his general manager, Bram Stoker (author of Dracula), engineered sensational atmospheres at first nights, and cleverly paid court to friendly critics; Irving’s intimate dinner parties backstage for the greatest celebrities of the day – Liszt, Gladstone, Buffalo Bill, Whistler – make him the Elton John of his days. His cultivation of royalty knew no limits: he personally paid for the Command Performances he gave at Windsor. He became something of a cult himself, his idiosyncratic appearance – long hair, pince-nez, tall broad-rimmed hat, low collar, and flowing-collared coat – widely imitated.

  Alongside all this commercial calculation was his mission to transform public attitudes to the theatre. His strictly Nonconformist mother had cut him off the moment he decided to make the stage his profession, and after the first night of The Bells his upper-crust wife Florence asked him: ‘Are you going to go on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?’ As soon as she said the words, he stopped the carriage, got out, and never spoke to her again; nor was he ever reconciled to his mother. But he determined to prove them wrong: that the stage was both moral and serious. Tirelessly making speeches, cultivating academic, journalistic, ecclesiastical and aristocratic patronage, he succeeded triumphantly. ‘I know of nothing in the history of modern civilisation,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘that can compare with the revolution in thought and idea caused by Irving’s work in connection with the theatre as a national institution.’ For the Coronation of his patron and supporter Edward VII, he threw – at his own expense – a banquet on the stage of the Lyceum for all the colonial premiers, princes and their retinues. His knighthood (announced the day that Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency) seemed to confirm that the theatre was now part of the establishment. This did not mean that it was reactionary: Irving himself was socially and intellectually progressive; his Shylock was a radical reassessment of the character from a characteristically liberal perspective. But it meant that the theatre now operated from within society rather than from its traditional position, at its barely respectable fringes.

  Towards the end of his life, Irving unveiled a plaque to one of his great predecessors, James Quin. The stage journal The Era commented: ‘The present generation, with its keen sensitiveness, its intellectual activity, its moderation, its humanity, and its self-control, paid honour on Friday to the eighteenth-century ideal of an actor: the three-bottle or six-bottle man, the rake, the duellist and the beau. How much humanity has advanced since those days of limited ablution and unlimited paint, powder and perfume; of foolish fighting and intemperate indulgence; or heartless repartee and scandalous epigram, it is hardly necessary to note.’ From this distance, it is hard not to lament what has been lost: the great alternative carnival tradition, embracing the antipodes so alarming to the Victorians, celebrating the continuum of existence, exalting the communal body. Thanks to Irving, the theatre ceased to be part of us and became part of them. It has yet to be fully reclaimed.

  My knowledge of the theatre, past and present, was becoming encyclopedic. Immersing myself in it in almost scholarly fashion, I was at a loss to know what to do with these insights, these overwhelming emotions. I had a small – a tiny – outlet in the Sixth Form Literary and Debating Society, which I had founded with the sole purpose of giving myself the opportunity of reading great roles in dramatic masterpieces, which I accordingly did. As the price of that indulgence, I reluctantly submitted to the tedious horrors of the weekly debate. I was also involved in another form of play-acting, in that I had been appointed Head Boy of the school. It was a part I took to enthusiastically, seeing myself as a Reform candidate, which I suppose I must have been. I was a dunce at sport, success in which area had hitherto been the sole criterion for Head Boyship; they must, I reasoned, have wanted something different. So I gave it to them. I vigorously set about transforming the prefectorial system, attempting to increase the prefects’ power and responsibilities and diminish those of the teachers. The headmaster, like many another absolute ruler who has wanted to make a gesture in the direction of change, found that he didn’t in fact want to change anything, and blocked my reforms. I handed in my notice. Like Lady Bracknell, he told me that if I should cease to be Head Boy, he would inform me of the fact; until then I was to go back to doing what every other Head Boy had done. As this amounted to being tall and handsome and doing dashing things with balls, I was unable to oblige, and sulked my way through my year of tenure, in office but not in power.

  I left school in a state of high disgust, reviling the academic life in any form, determined above all not to go to university. Instead, I went to work in Oppenheim’s Library Wholesalers in South Kensington, which was a mistake for someone who loved books, as it involved carrying large piles of Mills and Boon romantic novels from one shelf to another. My visits to the National at the Old Vic became compulsive. As I have recorded elsewhere, my passion for it, and especially for what I perceived to be the company spirit that seemed to touch every part of that organisation – ushers, bookstall, ice-cream sellers – led me to write a three-foolscap-page letter to Olivier himself. I stood by the letter box trembling before I finally bit the bullet and shoved the letter in. Astoundingly, he wrote back by return of post, inviting me to come and work at the Old Vic, in the box office. This was my first professional connection with the theatre. I could scarcely have hoped for a more exhilarating one. The National, though it was going through a slightly sticky patch, was still close to its golden zenith. When I went to work there in 1967, it was only five years after it had opened, and I sold tickets for some of the productions which had made it world famous, bringing a level of glamour to the classical theatre that it had scarcely known since the days of Irving and Tree. Olivier’s combination of absolute mastery of the physical aspects of acting with a determination to make his work speak directly to the audience about their own lives permeated the organisation he had created, which felt dedicated in every fibre of its being to creating the nightly miracles on stage that I was now able to see as often as I liked.

  Ken Tynan’s influence was everywhere too. He would appear in a foyer or down a corridor, a haunted, brooding presence, immensely tall, his legs stick-thin, the skin pulled tight over his skull, eyes bulging with intelligence, a lit cigarette always delicately held between second and third fingers. At the age of forty-two he was already the figure he later described himself as being, Tynanosaurus Rex, his best work behind him. To me he seemed mythic, more so, curiously, than Olivier himself, whose offstage persona of absent-minded senior clerk of a city company was unimpressive, if endearing. At the time, Tynan was notorious: he had just said ‘fuck’ on television, he was talking about producing an erotic revue, and he was publicly at war with the Board of the National. I of course knew nothing about the dramas that were at the time engulfing the organisation; I simply knew that if the National were anything like the sort of theatre Tynan lauded in his reviews – glamorous, cosmopolitan, provocative – then I wanted to be part of it. On the whole, it was, and that it was, was in no small measure thanks to him; but it was a brief golden age, and it ended badly for both Olivier and Tynan. When he left the National, Tynan lost an empire, and never thereafter found a role. Even I was vaguely aware that there was dissent in the ranks, that my hero was on the way out as a result of titanic boardroom struggles, that Sir Laurence was not as well as he might be. All this gossip was thrilling: the National was always in the newspapers, the world and his wife wanted tickets, there was a constant sense of its place at the centre of cultural life. For me this was exactly what I had dreamed of. However menial my positio
n might be (and it was), Life seemed suddenly to matter; I seemed to have escaped the rut of the ordinary, to be condemned to which was the thing I dreaded more than anything in life.

  But more than that, I was able, eventually, to observe the life of the theatre. It was a real company, over a hundred people uncomfortably squeezed together in that cramped and antiquated building. Olivier had with brilliant cunning insisted on a cheap but excellent canteen in the Old Vic, so that everyone would eat there. There I met people central to the running of the theatre but of whose existence I had hitherto scarcely been aware: electricians, stage carpenters, wardrobe mistresses, wig masters, stage managers, all evidently feeling themselves part of some mad dysfunctional family, rubbing up against each other with a boisterous and occasionally venomous esprit de corps. The Stage Manager Diana Boddington was one of the first of the technical staff I got to know. Nearly forty years after I met her, I wrote her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

  Diana Boddington was born in Blackpool on July 30th, 1921; she died in London on January 17th, 2002. She had retired from the National Theatre, where she had been the senior stage manager, in 1987, after a career in that profession which had lasted over forty-five years. She started out as an assistant electrician at the Old Vic – the de facto National Theatre – in 1941 during the Second World War; after the Vic was bombed, she stayed with the company when it transferred its operation to the New Theatre under the aegis of John Burrell, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. She and Olivier formed a strong working relationship on, among other productions in that legendary season, Richard III, Henry IV Parts One and Two and the famous double bill of Oedipus and The Critic, and she continued to work for him when in the late 1940s he became, under the banner of Laurence Olivier Productions, a commercial manager; she was stage manager on the LOP presentation of Orson Welles’s Othello in 1951, and proved more than a match for that legendary temperament. Her lifelong bond with Olivier was essentially one of camaraderie; they had once taken refuge together under a table at the National Portrait Gallery when surprised by an air raid, and something of the spirit of those days continued to characterise their relationship. When, in 1962, Olivier was appointed to the Chichester Festival Theatre as its first director, Boddington went with him, and then accompanied him to the National Theatre at the Old Vic in the following year.

  Her working partnership with Olivier was explosive, her occasionally excessive candour resulting in fierce arguments which frequently ended with him angrily dismissing her; she would be reinstated the following day amid emotional apologies and reconciliations. She remained at the National Theatre for some thirteen years after Olivier’s departure from the company and its transfer to the South Bank, providing a vital living continuity between Olivier’s regime and that of his successor Peter Hall. In truth, she was always something of an anomaly in Denys Lasdun’s great concrete emporium, with her flat sandals, her check dresses, her round spectacles and her straight up-and-down haircut, making her look for all the world like someone in charge of the tombola at a parish fête, though her vigorous use of four-letter words might have curled the vicar’s hair. (In fact, she was an ardent Roman Catholic and cycled to work every morning after having attended six o’clock mass.) She never entirely mastered the new stage technology which developed so rapidly in the 1970s: the Tannoy system was a particular pitfall for her. Giving the actors their calls, she would often forget to remove her finger from the button, thus continuing to broadcast her private thoughts to the entire theatre: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the Henry VIII company, at this afternoon’s performance the part of Cardinal Wolsey will be taken by Mr Henry Jones… I can’t think why, I worked with him twenty years ago and he was useless then.’

  It was not for her technical skills that she was cherished. It was for her sense of what the human beings involved in the process required in order to do their best work: directors, wardrobe department, make-up, stage-management team, above all, actors, of whom she was especially fond, in her no-nonsense way. ‘Marshal Boddington’ she was dubbed by the intake of ’64 (which included Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi), bluffly organising and rallying her troops. She was not a democrat, was, indeed, a famously devoted monarchist, and insisted on proper titles and a sense of the natural hierarchy within the company. Whatever she called Olivier to his face, behind his back she defended him like a tiger. Even on the impersonal South Bank, she managed to maintain a quality which is seriously imperilled in the vast theatrical organisations of today: theatre as family. Her sense of esprit de corps was profound; somewhere inside her lived the spirit of the wartime Old Vic, speaking for England – the theatre as a gallant enterprise made up of individual human beings, a human pyramid of which every member was made to feel his or her vital importance. It was an inestimable boon for actors and directors, and an inspiring example for generations of stage managers who worked with her or were trained by her, an example on which the future of the theatre as a human enterprise greatly depends. Very properly, in view both of her services to the stage and her devotion to the Royal Family, she was the first (and so far the only) stage manager to be appointed MBE.

  The theatre was her life, so it is remarkable that she led such a cheerfully happy domestic existence with her husband, the actor Aubrey Richards, who predeceased her by some two years. Boddington is survived by her two children, Claudia and David, whose upbringing and indeed whose very existence, given the extraordinary length of their mother’s working day, were, in the words of a witty colleague, something of a mystery.

  This sense that the theatre could become one’s life was intoxicating to me. I felt something that those who have undergone religious conversions feel: a huge, a relieving, a joyful sense of the rightness of things, of belonging, of having a purpose. I scarcely knew what my contribution could be, and for the time being simply gloried in being part of it. To my surprise, it was perfectly possible and indeed easy to talk to the actors – especially the young ones, like Mike Gambon or Jane Lapotaire or Derek Jacobi. Far from being members of some rarefied caste, they were eminently human – almost too human: noisy, expansive, tactile, emotional, hilarious. Of course, I didn’t know who they were: they were just the young bloods of the company. What was more remarkable was that the famous ones – Maggie Smith, Bill Fraser, Jeremy Brett – were just the same, and though they perhaps appeared more preoccupied than the others (because, I assumed, they were playing leading parts), they were just as much part of the family, and just as prone to shriek or roar or burst into tears. Astonishingly, Laurence Olivier was quite likely to be found at one’s table in the canteen. The anxious thought that one was eating one’s scampi and chips with Richard III was dispelled by the amiable, slightly distracted manner of the man himself. When I finally saw him on stage, at the Vic, in The Dance of Death, it was almost impossible to connect him with the man I had eaten with in the canteen, who would occasionally drop in to the box office for a cheery chat, but his slightly dotty affability, his wonderment at the fact that money was changing hands, that tickets were being sold, that we had cash tills and calculators, booking plans and specially printed stationery, seemed to have nothing whatever to do with the animal that prowled the stage night after night.

  It is pretty well impossible to convey in words the physical impact of Olivier’s presence in the flesh as an actor; I have spent many years on and offtrying to do so with only middling success. It seemed to me important to make the effort, since his film work, even the magisterial performances in his Shakespeare trilogy and The Entertainer, for example, gives little hint of what it was like to see him on stage – of the sheer sexual energy he unleashed into the auditorium. Only rock stars or great singers and dancers can compare, but he had no microphone to amplify his voice, nor any orchestra to support him except the music of speech – no choreography but his own instinctual expressivity. He bent every muscle in his body, every note in his voice, to ravish the audience, to take us – by force, if necessary. It was a seduction on t
he grandest and most extravagant scale, perilously close to rape; above all, it was dangerous. By now, I had seen Gielgud, Guinness, Richardson, Redgrave and Ashcroft on stage, all superb actors, who had the gift of drawing you nearer to them. But this was something else. It was domination. It was a head-on assault. It was total war.

  I still have difficulty in putting together the man from the canteen and the man on stage. Whatever the alchemy that transformed the one into the other was, I began to grasp, another essence of acting. I tried to sum him up for an entry in Cassell’s Encyclopaedia of Theatre in the Twentieth Century.

  The son of an Anglo-Catholic priest, Laurence Olivier (b. 1907), demonstrated few gifts as a child for anything other than acting, but at this he was from the earliest age exceptional. As a ten-year-old, he was spotted as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew by Ellen Terry, who said, ‘This child is already a great actor.’ His early career was however far from meteoric. Slight of build, gap-toothed, his face burdened with continuous eyebrows and a very low forehead, he presented a somewhat wild appearance. In conjunction with his enormous high spirits and propensity for uncontrollable giggling on stage, he needed taming. This was provided first of all by the Central School, then run by its founder Elsie Fogerty, by a season or two at the Birmingham Rep, and finally by a longish stint in the unrewarding role of Victor Prynne in the London and New York runs of Coward’s Private Lives, with the author in the cast to keep a sharp eye on him. At this stage, Olivier’s ambitions were entirely directed towards achieving the status of romantic leading man. He made a number of miscalculations however: instead of continuing with the role of Stanhope in Journey’s End, which he had created, he chose to star in Beau Geste, a conspicuous catastrophe: and a brief visit to Hollywood had left him disenchanted with film. The turning point in his career came when, in 1935, John Gielgud, who had previously directed him in Queen of Scots, invited him to alternate the roles of Romeo and Mercutio with him at the New Theatre. Olivier, having by now had his teeth and his hairline adjusted, and acquired a degree of professional discipline, came to Shakespeare with a passionate conviction that the plays were essentially realistic. His performances, as a highly sexed Mediterranean Romeo and a dangerous, wild Mercutio, created a sensation, most particularly by contrast with the lyrical and aesthetically modulated performances of Gielgud. His verse-speaking was disparaged (‘Mr Oliver does not speak verse badly; he does not speak it at all’), but it was clear that an actor capable of reinventing the tradition of classical acting had arrived. This was confirmed when in 1937 he joined the Old Vic company under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie, playing in quick succession Hamlet, Henry V, Macbeth, Coriolanus and Iago. Thus established as a leading classical actor, he returned to Hollywood for Wuthering Heights. His Heathcliff gave him international stardom, but with England at war, he returned home as quickly as possible (against the advice of the British Embassy), first of all to join the Fleet Air Arm, then to direct a film of Henry V, as part of the war effort. This triumphant realisation was followed in 1944 by the assumption of the co-directorship with Ralph Richardson and Michael Benthall of the Old Vic Company. The productions of Peer Gynt, Henry IV, Arms and the Man and King Lear became a focus of national pride to such an extent that the productions and his own performances, above all as Richard III and in the audacious double bill of Oedipus Rex and The Critic, represent high watermarks in the history of the British theatre. It is all the more astonishing that when plans were laid to establish the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1946, in one of the most disgraceful episodes of modern theatre, it was decided that Olivier and Richardson would not head it; actors, it was felt, were unsuitable for the task of running so important and complex an organisation. The National Theatre took another twenty years to come into existence; Olivier went into theatre management on his own, and for some four years was more involved in directing or presenting than acting. He re-entered the lists as a tragic Shakespearean actor with Macbeth and Titus Andronicus, both at Stratford, the latter directed by Peter Brook. Both performances were acclaimed; the Titus particularly as a radical interpretation in a startling production.