Post-War British Theatre Criticism (Routledge Revivals)

John Elsom

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317557500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book, first published in 1981, sets out the critical reaction to some fifty key post-war productions of the British theatre, as gauged primarily through the contemporary reviews of theatre critics. The plays chosen are each, in their different ways, important in their contribution to the development of the British theatre, covering the period from immediately after the Second World War, when British theatre fell into decline, through the revival of the late 1950s, to the time in which this book was first published, in which British theatre enjoyed a high international reputation for its diversity and quality.

This book is ideal for theatre studies students, as well as for the general theatre-goer.

The Old Vic at the New Theatre (1944–49)

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The Old Vic theatre in Waterloo Road was bombed in 1941 ; but Tyrone Guthrie had kept an Old Vic company together, touring regional theatres from a base in Burnley. In 1944, however, Guthrie and the Vic-Wells governors decided that the Old Vic should return to London. One of the governors, Bronson Albery, was an impresario who owned the New Theatre, which he offered to the company as a temporary London home. Guthrie arranged that a new management team should be formed for the London seasons, consisting of Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, who were both released from the Fleet Air Arm for the purpose, with John Burrell, a young drama producer from the BBC.

The first seasons were triumphant. I doubt whether any British company, before or since, made such an immediate impact on the public mind. Thirty years later, young actors were still mimicking Olivier’s Richard III, a performance which they could not have seen except in the screen version. This performance, together with his remarkable double-performances as Hotspur and Justice Shallow in the Henry IV plays and as Oedipus and Mr Puff, raised Olivier’s reputation as a classical actor above those of his contemporaries, which included John Gielgud and Donald Wolfit. He was widely regarded as the greatest living actor ; but he was also a matinée idol – one paper disapproved of the fact that he was being given the kind of reception by teenagers associated with such pop stars as Frank Sinatra – and a patriotic symbol. His film of Henry V went on general release in 1945.

Richardson’s performances as Peer Gynt, Falstaff and the Inspector in J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls were also acclaimed ; and the Old Vic company included Sybil Thorndike, Miles Malleson, George Relph, Harcourt Williams and Margaret Leighton. The presence of such an acting team in London during the last months of the war was inspirational. British theatre-goers boasted that despite the doodlebugs and flying bombs, London possessed the finest acting company in the world. In 1945, the first formal steps were taken to unite the Old Vic with the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Trust in a joint initiative to establish a British National Theatre, which eventually led to the passing of the first National Theatre Bill in 1949.

In the meantime, the Old Vic in a sense behaved like a national theatre. In 1945, Olivier led the company on a remarkable six-week summer tour of Europe. They were the first foreign company to be invited to play at the Comédie-Française, where they were rapturously received. They also visited Germany where the response, perhaps surprisingly, was not less enthusiastic. The Staatliche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, which had miraculously survived without too much war damage, was packed with cheering audiences. They also played a matinée for the soldiers whose grim task was to care for the survivors and bury the dead at Belsen. Their Belsen visit was a harrowing experience. ‘I’ll never get over today,’ wrote Sybil Thorndike afterwards, ‘never.”

In preparation for the establishment of the new National Theatre, Olivier, Richardson and Burrell proposed to the Old Vic governors that a training centre should be incorporated into the Old Vic organisation. It was to consist of a children’s theatre, a training school for actors and an experimental studio ; and two directors associated with the pre-war London Theatre Studio, Michel St Denis and George Devine, were invited to run it with Glen Byam Shaw. According to Irving Wardle’s The Theatres of George Devine, St Denis, a French director inspired by the work of Jacques Copeau and the Compagnie des Quinze, provided the original outlines of the scheme, while Devine was its dogged organiser. Of the three sides to the Old Vic Centre, the actors’ training school was probably of greatest long-term value, for it furnished Britain with many of its best actors and directors of the coming generation.

The Old Vic seasons at the New, however, proved to be one of several false dawns for the National Theatre. In 1949, Olivier, in Australia touring with the Old Vic company, and Richardson, who was filming in Hollywood, were curtly informed by the new chairman of the Vic-Wells governors, Lord Esher, that their contracts would not be renewed. It was a great blow from which the Old Vic took years to recover ; and indeed it never regained its former pre-eminence. The Old Vic Centre was soon to be disbanded, with Glen Byam Shaw moving to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford, Devine eventually establishing the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre and St Denis accepting an appointment as the director of the Centre Dramatique in Strasbourg.

The precise reasons behind the governors’ drastic action have not been fully revealed. There were certainly many motives involved. In 1948, the Old Vic had a bad season, leaving an overdraft of £8000. This was particularly embarrassing in a year when the National Theatre Bill was passing through its various parliamentary phases. The long absences of Olivier and Richardson, touring abroad with the company or filming, had weakened the Old Vic in London, despite the brave efforts of John Burrell to carry on ; and artistic standards had fallen. One justification for Olivier’s world tours was that they brought much-needed foreign capital to the company and the country ; but Guthrie was amongst those who were uneasy at the workings of the triumvirate which he had helped to bring into being. Burrell inevitably was overshadowed by his star associates, who were so much in demand that their professional attentions continually seemed to be drawn away from what Lord Esher regarded as the main purpose of the enterprise, the establishment of a National Theatre. Nor was Esher particularly enthusiastic about the Old Vic Centre, which he regarded as foreign to the traditions of British drama.

The drama director of the Arts Council, Llewellyn Rees, took over as the new administrator of the Old Vic, following the collapse of the old management, with Hugh Hunt as the new artistic director. The theatre in Waterloo Road was rebuilt and the company moved in, with Hunt responsible for the opening season in November 1950. The inspiration, the fervour and pride of the Old Vic seasons at the New during and just after the war were not easily forgotten ; and for many years to come, they were cited as an example of what British theatre was like, at its best.

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Richard III

13 September 1944

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It is the marriage of intellect and dramatic force, of bravura and cold reason, that so distinguishes Mr. Laurence Olivier’s study at the New Theatre. Here indeed we have the true double Gloucester, thinker and doer, mind and mask. Blessedly the actor never counterfeits the deep tragedian, the top-heavy villain weighted by his ponderous and marble jaws. His Richard gives to every speech a fire-new glint. His diction, flexible and swift – often mill-race swift – is bred of a racing brain. If, outwardly, he is a limping panther, there is no lameness in his mind. Other players have achieved the Red King, boar, cockatrice, bottled spider, and developed the part with a burning theatrical imagination; none in recent memory has made us so conscious of the usurper’s intellect, made so plausible every move on the board from the great opening challenge to the last despair and death.

J. C. Trewin: Observer
17 September 1944

There was a great deal of Irving in Wednesday’s performance, in the bite and devilry of it, the sardonic impudence, the superb emphases, the sheer malignity and horror of it. If I have a criticism, it is that Mr. Olivier takes the audience a little too much into his confidence. … I do not propose to forget its mounting verve and sustained excitement.

James Agate: Sunday Times
17 September 1944

As he made his way downstage, very slowly and with odd interruptions in his progress, he seemed malignity incarnate. All the complications of Richard’s character – its cruelty, its ambition, its sardonic humour – seemed implicit in his expression and his walk, so that when at last he reached the front of the stage and began his speech, all that he had to say of his evil purpose seemed to us in the audience less like a revelation than a confirmation of something we had already been told.

W. A. Darlington: Daily Telegraph
14 September 1944

From a sombre and uninventive production, this brooding, withdrawn player leapt into life, using the circumambient gloom as his springboard. Olivier’s Richard eats into the memory like acid into metal, but the total impression is one of lightness and deftness. The whole thing is taken at a speed baffling when one recalls how perfectly, even finically, it is articulated: it is Olivier’s trick to treat each speech as a kind of plastic mass, and not as a series of sentences whose import must be precisely communicated to the audience: the method is impressionistic. He will seize on one or two phrases in each paragraph which, properly inserted, will unlock its whole meaning: the rest he discards with exquisite idleness. To do this successfully, he needs other people on the stage with him: to be ignored, stared past, or pushed aside during the lower reaches, and gripped and buttonholed when the wave rises to its crested climax. …

In this Richard was enshrined Blake’s conception of active, energetic evil, in all its wicked richness. A lithe performance, black at heart and most astutely mellow in appearance, it is full of baffling, irrational subtleties which will please while they puzzle me as long as I go to theatres. I remember the deep concern, as of a bustling spinster, with which Olivier grips his brother George and says, with sardonic, effeminate intentness: ‘We are not safe, Clarence; we are not safe’; while, even as he speaks, the plot is laid which will kill the man. The persistent bonhomie of middle age shines in his face as he jests with his chosen victims: how often he skirts the footlights, his eyes turned skyward, on some especially ironic aside: with what icy disregard he slights his too ambitious minion Buckingham ! ‘I am not in the giving vein today’; the words fall like drops of frozen dew.

Kenneth Tynan: He That Plays The King
(Longmans, 1950)

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(Tynan reprinted this review in A View Of The English Stage (1975, Davis-Poynter) and gives it a date, 1944. From references within the article to the film of Hamlet and to the revived Richard III production, with Vivien Leigh as Queen Anne, it is clear that Tynan revised the piece for inclusion in his first book. He might have revised it for other reasons too, for in 1944, he was only 17½ years old, about to embark on his dazzling career at Oxford. He sent this review, among others, to James Agate, the doyen critic of the Sunday Times, who recognised the uncommon eloquence, perception and maturity of this young undergraduate. The descriptions also reveal Tynan’s particular appreciation of Olivier’s acting, a fascination and respect which later led to their working together at the National Theatre during the 1960s.)

Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2

26 September 1945 3 October 1945

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Are Shakespeare’s Barons inevitable bores? One has often thought so, as the stuffed breast-plates boomed away, without character or meaning. Recent productions, however, gave this gloomy theory a crack or two. Henry IV, Part I at the New smashes it finally. Of course, Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff and Laurence Olivier’s Hotspur are first-rate company: the essential point is that the company are grand company, too. The baronial halls are packed with humour and humanity; behind the breast-plates are flesh and blood. Now the play soars like an eagle uncaged. …

… there is a tremendous Falstaff performance. Mr. Richardson grows to obesity downwards; the legs are dropsical trunks, the paunch is sketchy, the head is even and lean. … No nose-painting here ; indeed the neb already is almost as sharp as a pen and pale as a quill. So Falstaff is not just a gigantic purple patch on the fabric of history. He is in the heart of the play, its commentator as well as its cordial, a man of testy, sardonic wit. …

… Laurence Olivier’s Hotspur immediately possesses the audience. Odd, uncouth, now darting of mind and phrase, now almost stammering of speech, sour, fiery – the figure is unforgettable: you watch him at every moment, tenderly domestic, roughly discursive, baiting Glendower, dying with harness on his back and iambics halting on his tongue … These two portraits, aligned in a notable production, give one high pride in the English theatre, which, amid all the difficulties of our time, is offering, in several quarters, presentations of the classics worthy of a National Theatre. …

Ivor B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Old Vic at the New Theatre (1944–49)
• Index