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Actors
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Sir Laurence Olivier - 8
A fine, virile actor and athlete, a good fencer and a somewhat robust elecutionist, he is excellent in strong romantic costume parts, to which his dark good looks give an added attraction. So Olivier was described in the third edition of the Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and in few words this does sum up many of Olivier's characteristics as an actor. He had a weakness for swashbuckling parts, revealed early in his career when he turned down the chance to take Journey's End to the West End, preferring to take the lead in a very commercial theatre version of P.C. Wren's Beau Geste, a part in which he could buckle swashes to his heart's content! However both the part and the play were in every way inferior - and considerably more shallow - than Sheriff's tragic examination of life in the trenches in World War I. Significantly Journey's End is still played today, whilst Beau Geste the play is totally forgotten. A comparison with his contemporary and fellow theatrical knight John Gielgud is instructive. In 1935 Olivier joined Gielgud at the New Theatre in Gielgud's own production of Romeo and Juliet (which also featured Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the Nurse - what a cast!). They alternated the parts of Romeo and Mercutio and contemporary accounts show a huge difference between the performances. Gielgud's performance was, to use the words of one critic, "musical": his speaking of the verse was controlled and his technique perfect. Olivier, on the other hand, was much more daring and dashing, but his verse-speaking was considered at the time to be rather "rough". On the other hand, Gielgud never achieved the status of a matinee idol as Olivier did in the thirties. In fact, Olivier devoted a considerable amount of his time to cinema, appearing in about sixty films in the course of his long career. In the thirties much of his time was devoted to the sort of play which typified the period, from Private Lives toBees on the Boatdeck, but by the end of the decade he was turning more towards the classical theatre. Romeo and Juliet with Gielgud in 1935 was his first Shakespearean production since playing Parolles in All's Well in 1927, and in 1937-8 he only did one non-Shakespearean play. In the forties he extended his classical repertoire to include Restoration Comedy, Ibsen and Chekhov, but by the end of the decade he was appearing in contemporary work, such as Anouilh's Antigone, and directing Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, both in 1949. I well remember the furore caused when, in 1957, Olivier, generally regarded as the greatest classical actor of the age (although many Gielgud adherents would dispute this!), appeared as the seedy Archie Rice in Osborne's The Entertainer at the Royal Court, transferring to the Palace later, and then in the 1960 film version. But this was typical of Olivier: he saw - perhaps rather more quickly than many critics - the importance of this new movement in theatre (the so-called "angry young man" and "kitchen sink" drama) and became almost a patron of the new wave, in the sense that his support gave it a legitimacy which encouraged others to look at it in more depth and avoid the knee-jerk rejection with which it was greeted by so many.
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