My Life in Pieces (3 page)

Clarkie was long dead by the time Toto started taking me there, in the early 1960s, when the theatre was under the direction of Michael Elliott, later creator of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. She and I had occasionally been to plays in the West End, but this was a very different experience. For a start, Waterloo was, in those days, a far from salubrious quarter, just as it had been in the 1880s when Emma Cons had transformed the disreputable Old Vic (as the Royal Victoria Theatre was quickly dubbed) into the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern. Her plan was to lure the locals out of the pubs and gin palaces and into the warm, clean and alcohol-free auditorium, where they would be diverted and improved by classical concerts and the occasional scene from Shakespeare; little by little, under Lilian Baylis’s direction, this evolved into performances of operas and the first full cycle of Shakespeare’s plays, and in the 1920s and ’30s, still underpinned by evangelical inspiration and desperately underfunded, it had become the great breeding ground of English classical actors. By 1962, when I started going there, it was as chronically short of money as ever, and the evangelical fervour was flag
ging. Waterloo itself was of course dominated by the station, at the back end of which the theatre was to be found, a far cry from the ultra-modern glamour of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, with its fine position on the river and its commanding view of the West End.

The Vic itself was a somewhat unprepossessing four-square building, part of a block which included a large branch of the grocer David Greig. The effects of bombing were still apparent and the impression was functional rather than glamorous. The Lower Marsh, just behind the station, was a busy market, selling clothes and household goods rather than food; to the left of the theatre as you entered was The Cut, a run-down suburban street of butchers, greengrocers, pubs and caffs. Directly opposite the theatre was a little green on which were to be found the successors of Miss Cons’s original target audience, the so-called winos, though methylated spirits was their more likely tipple, with an occasional Brasso chaser.

One was nipped pretty smartly past these ladies and gents and into the foyer. This was no vision of loveliness, no prelude to romance: plain, practical, unembellished, it was simply the doorway to the auditorium,
the general impression of which was dim, the burgundy seats further darkened by the sweat of thousands of backs and buttocks, the gold paint on the balconies and boxes dulled and peeling, the curtain moth-eaten and sagging. Inexplicably, this tattered and tired interior had a thrilling effect: redolent of past excitements, archaic and mysterious, full of shadows and stray shafts of golden light, it was utterly unlike the outside world. To enter it was to be inducted into a space which was halfway between waking and dreaming, one in which something momentous seemed about to happen. Sometimes, bravely, I took myself to see plays there alone, which meant going to the gallery, to the
gods
, as I quickly learned to call them. One entered by a side entrance, struggled up what seemed like hundreds of stairs and found oneself sitting on wooden benches, clinging vertiginously onto the metal railings. From this position the auditorium seemed even more dramatic, incorporating as it did a view of the rest of the audience, on whom one looked down, in rather, well, godlike-fashion. Emanating from the Gallery Bar, an aroma of coffee (a direct legacy of Miss Cons, perhaps) permanently hung in the air. And then suddenly the fanfares would sound – it was generally Shakespeare – and one was immediately in the midst of dynastic struggles, or fearing for star-cross’d lovers or chilled by the dank mists enshrouding some Scottish castle.

These productions which so enthralled me were, I realise in retrospect, for the most part serviceable rather than inspired. The days of the Old Vic Company under Elliott were numbered: it had already been announced that the newly created National Theatre under the direction of Laurence Olivier would be taking up residence in the building. And when, in short order, they did, they brought with them – to say nothing of the greatest actor in the world, a superb ensemble and a clutch of challenging directors – a team of brilliant theatre managers, architects and press officers (many from Sadler’s Wells) who radically altered the experience of seeing a play at the Old Vic.

As it happens, in those radiantly enlightened days of the now defunct
Inner London Education Authority, we started going in school parties to
matinees at the new National Theatre, an electrifying, and, for this par
ticular schoolboy, life-changing experience. Week after week, we were
astounded by, say, Colin Blakely and Joyce Redman in
Juno and the Paycock
, or Olivier’s heartbreaking production of
The Three Sisters
, or maybe
the asphyxiatingly hilarious Feydeau farce
A Flea in Her Ear
. Almost
beyond belief for sheer delight was
Much Ado About Nothing
, with Mag
gie Smith and Robert Stephens at their outrageous brilliant best in
Zeffirelli’s stupendously Sicilian production, utterly incorrect, in a rewrit
ten text, as our teachers carefully explained to us, replete with
anachronisms and cod Italian accents, but releasing more of the pain, the
wit and the tenderness of that play than any production I have ever seen.
This was an Old Vic transformed.

The exterior of the theatre hardly changed, though the stage door was switched from the left of the theatre to the right, but internally everything was different, from the arrangement of the foyer, which now contained a bookstall and a wide-open box office which radically broke from the tradition of the enclosed, latticed lair of the typical West End theatre, to the graphics announcing the exits and the whereabouts of the bars (very modern), to the colour of the seats (blue) and their arrangement – there was now a gap at row O – and then, most significantly, to the proscenium, which Sean Kenny, Olivier’s first designer, reshaped, thrusting the stage forward and eliminating the stage boxes, which were faced with grey boards. The splendour of the old proscenium arch (however dimmed with age) was now replaced with something functional, even ugly, and the auditorium accordingly lost some of its mystery and charm. The gain was obvious, however, the moment the curtain went up. After the solid and sensible productions of the last days of the Old Vic Company, Olivier and his cohorts offered a riot of colour, in costume, set and performances: sensuality and glamour had returned to the theatre, made all the more dazzling because of the new austerity of the auditorium.

The old place was transformed, and my first visits there, with my school on a typical ILEA matinee outing, instantly revised my understanding of what was possible in the theatre. The acting company was a crack unit, strong at every level, with the old warrior, Olivier, leading from the front; but everybody there – ushers, bookstall staff, coffee vendors, all in their smartly functional uniforms – seemed part of the enterprise, which had a swaggering sense of itself that stemmed directly from the boss. Some fairly brutal alterations had been made to the original scheme of the foyers, the walls covered with brown hessian which could be covering
hardboard as likely as bricks. Olivier, he claimed, had never liked the Old Vic, where he had his first classical triumphs, and he certainly remade the old place. But it remained recognisably Lilian Baylis’s theatre. When, later, I became an usher, I discovered that the password in case of fire was ‘Miss Baylis is in the house’, which struck me as rather risky, since many of her original customers, now elderly, were regular visitors to the National: the thought of her suddenly wheeling lopsidedly round the corner, frying pan in hand, to take up her usual position in the stage box, there to cook her supper, as was her nightly wont, could easily have given them a heart attack.

As a supplement to theatre-going, I was reading insatiably. I found plays
wonderfully easy to read: I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye as I
turned the pages, and raced my way through all of Congreve, Racine,
Molière, Goethe, Wilde, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Maugham, Wesker,
Osborne, Jarry, in a state of high excitement, further fanned by Shaw’s
theatre reviews, the manifestos of Artaud and Edward Gordon Craig, and
Eric Bentley’s brilliantly lucid theoretical writings. But best of all was Ken
neth Tynan, whose reviews were still coming hot off the press every week
in the
Observer
. I had read him from the early Sixties and began to find
his collections in second-hand bookshops. His sense of occasion, his power
of sensuous evocation, his youthful audacity, his political provocativeness,
his visceral response to great acting – all these spoke of the theatre as
both wildly exciting and very important. The following is a review of
Dominic Shellard’s biography.

Tynan’s career as a critic was brief out of all proportion to his subsequent
réclame
. First at the
Evening Standard
, and then, triumphantly, at the
Observer
, his survey of the British theatre lasted just over ten years, after which the poacher turned gamekeeper, and he took up his post at the Old Vic, where he attempted to put into effect the vision he had so vividly articulated in print. With the publication of the remarkably frank and searching
Life
by his widow, Kathleen, and the subsequent appearance of his
Letters
and
Diaries
, and a memoir by his first wife, Elaine Dundy, he has become the best known theatre critic who ever wrote. Even James Agate, the legendary critic of the
Sunday Times
, the many volumes of
whose ongoing Diary,
Ego
, fill most of a bookshelf, is obscure by comparison. All this is just as Tynan would have wished. What would surely have surprised him is that, despite the availability in print of his dazzling collection of
Profiles
, none of his critical work – published during his lifetime in various manifestations as
Curtains
,
Tynan on
Theatre
,
Tynan Right and Left
– can currently be bought; not even the most brilliant of them all, his precocious first volume
He That Plays the
King
, a Cyril Connollyesque study of theatre with the critic as hero at its centre. Tynan himself has eclipsed his work. This is a grievous loss for anyone remotely interested in theatre in the twentieth century, or indeed in theatre
tout court
. It is the purpose of Dominic Shellard’s scholarly and rather sober book to focus attention again on what he feels is Tynan’s real achievement.

He is quite right to do so. Tynan’s account of the dramatic life of his times is not only irresistibly entertaining, but also gives a vivid if unashamedly prejudiced picture of one of the great turning points in the history of the British theatre; perhaps of equal importance, it is as good an advertisement for the delights of theatre-going as has ever been written. Anyone reading those reviews would be irresistibly impelled – as I, a portly suburban child in the mid-Sixties, most certainly was – to go and see a play. Any play, really: Tynan had the uncommon gift of making flops sound as intriguing as hits. For him, theatre was an arena, a corrida: glory to the victor, but glory to the loser for having fought. He started writing reviews in the early 1950s when the theatre was at its most becalmed, and his attempts to stir it up were instrumental in creating the climate in which a new sort of theatre, represented by the Royal Court, by Peter Hall’s Arts Theatre and by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Workshop, arose. He was for a while this new theatre’s prophet, its chronicler and its conscience, but then he felt the need to be involved in creating theatre rather than observing it.

This tension between participating and observing is central to his life; the central problem of his life, one might say. To him criticism was a conscious act of performance, and the persona he adopted was securely in place by the time he arrived at Oxford, like Oscar Wilde, in fancy dress, dispensing brilliant judgements and outrageous provocations to his astounded contemporaries. The theatre was his chosen arena, and he set about directing with some energy. His quest to be associated with celebrity was already well-established; Donald Wolfit, Paul Scofield and
Robert Helpmann all attended the first night of his production of the First Quarto of
Hamlet
(he had previously directed it at school). From Oxford he went to Lichfield Rep, where he staged twenty-four plays in as many weeks; subsequently he directed for Binkie Beaumont at the Lyric Hammersmith and leased the Bedford, Camden for a somewhat unsuccessful season. But he was already writing, and it was that, rather than his solid work in rep, from which he accrued the attention and excitement that he craved. His career as a director came to an end when he was ignominiously removed from a production of
Les Parents Terribles
; and Alec Guinness’s eccentric casting of him as the Player King in his own ill-fated production of
Hamlet
led to universal derision. But the inside knowledge of the processes of theatre thus gained, allied to his cocky, bobby-dazzling style, gave a unique vividness to his reviews. He was, as a bonus, one of the funniest writers of his time; his best jokes still make one laugh out loud. ‘Theatre cramps him,’ he wrote of the barnstorming Donald Wolfit. ‘He would be happiest, I feel, in a large field.’ John Gielgud’s mellifluous production of
Richard II
, with Paul Scofield in the title role, was ‘an essay, on Mr Gielgud’s part, of mass ventriloquism’; he remarks on Vivien Leigh’s ‘dazzling vocal monotony’. His comment on Edwige Feuillière’s acclaimed Phèdre is funny, too, but an utterly brilliant vivisection of a performance which perfectly describes something with which we are all familiar: ‘Her performance is an immensely graceful apology for Phèdre, a sort of obituary notice composed by a well-wishing friend: but it is never a life, nakedly lived.’