My Life in Pieces (8 page)

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. Aston
ishingly, 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 the 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.

It seemed to prepare him for the great leap which he took two years later, when he appeared at the Royal Court Theatre as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s
The Entertainer
. The first actor of his generation or stature to associate himself with the new wave of playwrights, he scored an enormous personal success and boosted the new movement. His straddling of the old and the new, added to his managerial experience and personal authority, made him the inevitable and only choice for the directorship of the National Theatre when in 1962 it was finally voted by Parliament. Drawing together the best talents from the various theatrical worlds he had inhabited – the Royal Court, the West End and the Classical theatre – he created an organisation which for some years set new standards of excellence. Directing, acting (his Othello, Shylock, Edgar in
Dance of
Death
, James Tyrone in
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
and Tagg in
The
Party
were among the outstanding creations of those years) and leading very much from the front, he brought the century-old dream of a National Theatre to life in a way that no one else could have done. Towards the end of his tenure, tiredness and ill-health led to a slight decline in the vigour of the work, but he laid the foundations for a flourishing organisation. After retiring from the National Theatre in 1973 he never appeared on stage again, though he continued and continues to make film appearances. Since the war, in fact, he has acted in over twenty
films, often with great distinction, but without ever quite seeming to belong in the medium. It is his work on the stage that has brought him the immortality he so fervently sought, and from the early Fifties it has been a commonplace for English-speaking actors (Americans as well as British) to refer to him as the greatest living actor. Certainly no one in our century has challenged himself more. Transforming himself vocally and physically for every part, he has left an indelible stamp on a number of the greatest roles in the repertory. He always sought a realistic core to his characterisations which sometimes robbed them of their poetry or their grandeur; but in compensation he brought comedy verging on the vulgar, physical audacity bordering on the reckless and an emotional intensity that could be terrifying. Olivier never concealed his virtuosity: he wanted his audiences to be as interested in the mechanics of acting as he was. His ambition was so huge, his achievement so great, that his disappearance from the stage has left something of a vacuum. This was to some extent deliberate. Asked who would inherit Kean’s sword (given to Olivier by John Gielgud after a performance of
Richard III
) he replied: ‘No one: it’s mine.’ A question mark thus hangs over the very idea of great acting in our age.