Olivier (52 page)

At the time Chandos retired it still seemed likely that the first production in the new building would take place within the period of Olivier’s contract or, at least, very shortly afterwards. Even by the standards of institutional architecture, however, progress was sluggish. Nobody could decide quite what was wanted, nor exactly where it was going to be. Denys Lasdun had ceased to be the universally acceptable figure Olivier had once imagined him. Every member of the Building Committee had his own ideas about the way plans should develop, Lasdun resolved the problem by sticking to his own solution. The Committee was becoming frustrated by what they saw as Lasdun’s intractability, Olivier told Cottesloe: “What we all hoped for all along were many more designs from Lasdun … but it always does seem to come back to the same thing.” The final design satisfied nobody completely, but it was not so far removed from anybody’s conception as to be unacceptable. By the time the foundations had been laid and serious building begun, most people were so relieved that
something
was at last going up that they were ready to accept it. Olivier could tell himself, without too much self-deception, that
his
concept had won the day and that it was
his
National Theatre which would be opened.
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The question of who would run it now began to preoccupy him. Even if he himself were still in charge when the new theatre opened he knew that this could not last for long. His contract would soon run out, and even if the Board was anxious to renew it he would be well into his
sixties, his health was not at all what it had been, he was tired and even slightly bored, he wanted to make some money to support his young family: it would be time to move on. He must leave his beloved National Theatre in safe hands. Joan Plowright was only one of many ideas that occurred to him. It was not a good one; mainly because she had no wish to do the job. She loved acting, she was determined to devote time to her children: “There is no way I could have given every working moment to running a place like that.” “Suggesting me was a sort of frenzy,” Plowright told Tynan. It was a way of carrying on himself in spite of the fact that he had retired.
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There were plenty more ideas. “I was quite determined that it should be an actor if possible,” Olivier stated. Albert Finney was one of those whom he recommended. He was the right sort of age, Olivier told Arnold Goodman, who as Chairman of the Arts Council was bound to be involved in the selection process, he had the right sort of following, the right sort of promise, the trust of his colleagues. Finney was in his early thirties, he was relatively inexperienced, and even if Chandos had not been irritated by the fact that Olivier had chosen to make an oblique approach by way of Lord Goodman rather than directly to the Chairman, he would have dismissed the idea out of hand. Anthony Quayle was another possibility, though Olivier doubted whether he was “quite of the right generation” (a curious observation given that Quayle at the time was almost exactly the age that Olivier had been when he had taken over the National Theatre). If neither of these appealed, then how about Richard Attenborough, an actor and director of serious distinction in spite of having been the star in the early days of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap”?
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Olivier had other, still more exotic ideas. At what seems to have been an exceptionally drunken dinner he more or less offered the Directorship to Richard Burton. Burton seems to have taken the offer seriously and an embarrassed Joan Plowright had to persuade her husband to write to him explaining that the job was not in his gift. “He must have been very drunk the last time we talked to him,” wrote Burton in
his notebook, “as nobody could have turned down the job with more firmness.” He wrote to say that he thought he had already made it clear that Olivier should drop any idea that he might do the job: “I didn’t think I had the administrative ability and certainly not the experience.” Privately Burton considered that the job would be intolerable on the terms under which Olivier held it: “I couldn’t see myself being overruled by a Board of Governors.” Olivier should have resigned over Hochhuth, even though the play “was a travesty and badly written … Those old Etonians, etc., would drive me mad in five months.” He also thought that Olivier had let the National Theatre subside to a level of depressing competence. Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith were all very well, but they lacked grandeur. What the National needed were “the towering oaks of the profession: Scofield, Guinness, Redgrave …” and, by implication, Burton. “I love Larry,” he concluded, “but he really is a shallow little man with a mediocre intelligence.”
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His stock of eligible actors exhausted, Olivier looked nearer home. He had been gaining increasing confidence in Michael Blakemore, especially since Blakemore had made an excellent job of directing him in the “Long Day’s Journey”. Tynan supported Blakemore as Olivier’s successor, no doubt in part because he believed that Blakemore as Director would keep him on and that his influence would not be noticeably diminished. Olivier was impressed by the idea and tried it on Lord Rayne. Rayne, it turned out, had never even met Blakemore: he was too junior, he ruled, he did not carry the guns required in a Director. “They were confoundedly stupid about any of my suggestions,” Olivier recalled. “All they were concerned about was the stature of the man concerned, which I tried to point out was the wrong way round.”
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One name which he did not put forward, a name which it seems did not even occur to him, was that of Peter Hall. His relationship with Hall had varied over the previous years. In August 1966, when it had seemed that Hall might be washing his hands of any responsibility for the design of the new theatre, Olivier wrote to urge that it was “really terribly, terribly
important” that he remained part of the operation. “It isn’t our theatre, it’s yours … It is a National Theatre, and you are every bit as much a national figure as I am, probably more.” He knew that this was not true and did not expect Hall to believe he really meant it, but his anxiety to keep Hall on board was sincere. Yet it never occurred to him that Hall should one day succeed him. On the contrary, Hall was Stratford; Hall was, if not the enemy, then at least a member of another and rival family. Within a few weeks of his urging Hall to remain involved with the planning of the National Theatre he was complaining that the Royal Shakespeare Company was trespassing on the National’s territory. “You must not think that I am questioning your right to put on any plays whatever … it is merely that we find ourselves a wee bit caught unawares by the rapidity with which our work seems to be coinciding. I wake up one morning and find you in bed beside me – charming, of course, but surprising.”
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At the beginning of 1968 Hall gave up the job at Stratford. Olivier wrote in warm tones to praise this decision; he felt he should similarly move on from the National Theatre, but he didn’t know what else to do. He praised the “dazzling brilliance” with which Hall had run the Shakespeare Company. “Our relationship has been one that others might have found difficult,” he wrote, “but you have always made me believe that the
great liking
(somehow true and more trustworthy than ‘love’ …) was, together with the undoubtedly wholehearted admiration – somehow reciprocated.” Hall was touched and responded in equally ardent terms. “I not only admire you inordinately,” he wrote, “but ever since we met first to work with each other, I have
liked
you, and trusted you, and felt you my friend.”
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When they worked
with
each other, that was no doubt true, but in the nature of things they more often than not found themselves working against each other. In the autumn of 1969 war was declared. Peter Shaffer had written a new play, “The Battle of Shrivings”, which Olivier considered had been commissioned by the National Theatre, or at any rate was morally theirs. Shaffer told Olivier that he wanted Peter Hall
to direct it. No, no, protested Olivier, what the play needed was for him and John Gielgud to act in it, “kindly, charitably, directed by Glen Byam Shaw, and the three of us must be strong enough to cut your text, which is terribly over-long”. Whether it was the threat of extensive cuts or a conviction that Hall was essential as part of the package, Shaffer now spoke directly to Hall about the production. Olivier was disconcerted. “Please don’t think I do not share your enthusiasm for Peter,” Olivier told Shaffer, “because I do, and have particular good reason to, as I have seldom enjoyed working with a director more than I did with him on ‘Coriolanus’ some ten years ago, but I would never have thought of ‘Shrivings’ as a Director’s piece – by which I mean that a star director’s signature needed to be written across it … I must say it was a little bit of a jolt to learn that you should have talked to him without my knowledge and I could not help wondering if this was the beginning of a big freeze-off.”
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It was: the next thing Olivier knew was that Shaffer had offered the play to Binkie Beaumont, who took it over as private management and mounted a production with Hall as director. “I was absolutely ashen with disappointment,” Olivier remarked. “He just went right ahead and snatched the fucking thing away from me. I didn’t know people of that ilk behaved like that, that Peter Hall could do it in order to pinch the play for himself. I guess he thought ‘This is a nice turn-up. Thanks, Larry!’ I’ve never been able to wish any of them well ever since.” No doubt the facts of the affair would have sounded very different if recapitulated by any of the other parties; the result was, however, that when the matter became urgent, Olivier thought ill of Hall and would not have viewed him as a possible successor at the National even if a former director from Stratford had been the sort of person whom he felt right for the job.
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It therefore came as an unpleasant shock when on 24 March, 1972, he met Max Rayne to discuss the succession and was told that Peter Hall was the Board’s favoured candidate.

L
aurence Olivier, aged sixty-five, was a man acutely aware of his limitations. For most of his life he had believed that anything was possible; now he accepted that it was not and that what powers he had left were fast diminishing.

He had been the most physical of actors. Simon Callow wrote of John Dexter that his conception of acting was at heart athletic, it was a skill requiring physical address as well as mental stamina: “It was a bad day for the rest of us when he met Olivier, who is that sort of actor supreme.” For decades Olivier had been pushing his body to the limit; sometimes, as his multifarious breaks and strains attested, beyond the limit. He knew that this could not go on indefinitely. In 1968 he had refused to act in Robert Lowell’s version of “Prometheus Bound”; “I don’t feel quite up to such a brutally physical effort.” In fact the play did not appeal to him for other reasons as well, but this was not an excuse that would have occurred to him ten years before. When he first played “Long Day’s Journey” he introduced a feat of startling physical virtuosity, clambering onto a table so as to light a lamp and then stepping backwards into space and landing on his feet. By the time that the run was over, this piece of business had been dropped and James Tyrone made a more decorous descent. There may have been other reasons, but it seems most likely that Olivier realised he no longer had the flexibility, the agility, to make his backward leap an acceptable manoeuvre.
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His eyesight had long been failing. He preferred not to be seen
wearing spectacles in public, but he found them increasingly hard to escape. Things became worse in 1973 when he came back to the house in Brighton, went upstairs and was coshed by a burglar whom he disturbed at work. The eye specialist assured him that his vision would not be affected, but it was later discovered that damage had indeed been done to the optic nerve and that only the constant administration of eye-drops could save what was left of his sight. His hearing too was not what it had been; it did not get badly worse until the 1980s but he found it difficult to follow the dialogue if he was watching a play or to pick up the cues if he was acting in one. His voice – those reverberant, clarion tones which had dominated the stage for more than forty years; the lung power, which Vivien Leigh said had only been surpassed by Kirsten Flagstad – was still remarkable by any standards, but did not come so naturally as had once been the case. In the past he had effortlessly imposed himself, now he had to strive to achieve the same effect. Most difficult of all for an actor, his memory was not what it had been. Ralph Richardson had once marvelled at the incredible facility with which Olivier could learn long and complex parts; now he was subject to human frailties. The last role he played on the stage included a twenty-minute monologue. He took four months to learn it, adding another twelve or fifteen lines a day: “I was never able to confront it without fear of making mistakes and ultimately being forced to dry up.” He viewed each challenge with increasing nervousness. “I think it only honest to advise you,” he had warned a young actor as long ago as 1949, “that nerves are things that do not get better; they get very much worse as time goes on. I myself am now an extremely anxious actor; when I started I had not a nerve in my body.” It was above all his nervous fears about his memory that led him to confine himself to cinema and television in his last acting decade, yet even here the problem existed. Michael Caine, who acted with Olivier in “Sleuth”, felt at the outset that he would be co-starring with a titanic figure whom he could view only with awe. “But there he was coming to me with the problems
he
had. And you quickly realise this was someone with human
frailties, and as he began to worry endlessly about the script and his problem remembering lines, I found myself in the position of being the one who listened to him and giving my advice!”
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