Shakespearean Star: Laurence Olivier and National Cinema [Illustrated] 1107181119, 9781107181113

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Prologue The Next Olivier

In 1996, Richard Olivier – the son of the actor-director Laurence Olivier – published a book that charted the problematic relationship that existed between himself and his famous father. The book, Melting the Stone: A Journey Around My Father, opens with an account of Laurence Olivier’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey in October 1989. This is described as a lavish and official ceremony, a rite of national mourning in which Olivier’s status as the nation’s greatest actor was both celebrated and hotly protected. In his account of the events leading up to that day, Richard Olivier describes how invitations to the Abbey service were extended to selected members of the royal family, with Prince Charles the preferred senior attendee. Unable to be present, Prince Charles told the Olivier family that he had ‘asked Kenneth Branagh to represent him’ instead. Branagh had acted in and directed a cinematic production of Henry V the year before (a production that was just about to be released) and, as a result, he had been widely touted as ‘the next Olivier’, a comparison that was evidently supported by Prince Charles. The younger Olivier describes the wider implications of Charles’s suggestion and imagines how Olivier’s peers might have responded to the possibility of Branagh’s officiating: According to Royal protocol, the representative carries the same position in etiquette as the Royal he or she represents. Therefore, as the invitations stood, Mr. Branagh – as senior Royal representative – would be the last person to enter the Abbey. He would be met at the door and escorted by the Dean, while the entire congregation, including Prince Edward, stood until he was seated. Frankly, I think several surviving senior Thespians would have passed away on the spot. Moreover, those close to Larry knew him to be not entirely selfless and to have gone to the grave firmly clutching whatever laurels he had earned. The last thing he’d want at his memorial would be the apparent crowning of an heir to his throne. 1

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The Olivier family declined the proposed substitution and insisted that the ‘press-safe’ Richard Attenborough represent the absent Prince Charles; Branagh was not invited to attend.1 In 2000, Kenneth Branagh – now actor-director of three Shakespeare adaptations, Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996) – visited the University of Reading in order to introduce a screening of his fourth Shakespeare film production, Love’s Labour’s Lost. As Samuel Crowl notes, Love’s Labour’s Lost was to be the first production in a ‘threeShakespeare-picture deal’ signed with Miramax, the others to consist of ‘a version of As You Like It set in Japan, and a reimagining of Macbeth in modern Manhattan’.2 The screening took place in October of that year, by which time Love’s Labour’s Lost had had to weather a storm of unfortunate reviews in the US. Branagh was despondent yet defensive about the film’s reception. In a post-screening interview, Branagh told the representative for the student newspaper that, while he particularly wanted to film Macbeth, he doubted that a studio would finance the production.3 Indeed, following disappointing critical reactions to Love’s Labour’s Lost, Branagh’s agreement with Miramax, since lapsed, was not renewed.4 In a review of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Time magazine in June 2000, Richard Corliss questioned Branagh’s status as Olivier’s heir: ‘it’s time to wonder what happened to this Great Hope of the British Theatre, this jack-of-all-arts, this next Olivier’.5 In November 2011, Simon Curtis’s film adaptation of Colin Clark’s memoir, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, in which Clark details his experiences working as an assistant on the 1957 Olivier film, The Prince and the Showgirl, was released. Titled My Week With Marilyn, the official website for the film claims that it focuses on the ‘collision of [two] worlds – old England and new Hollywood’ apparently represented respectively by Olivier and Monroe.6 In My Week With Marilyn, Kenneth Branagh plays Laurence Olivier. An image of Branagh as Olivier was released in September 2011 as a teaser for the forthcoming film (Figure 1). Branagh’s casting – and his decision to accept the role – initially caused something of a furore and instigated a particularly vitriolic outburst by Joe Queenan in the Guardian. In his article, ‘Kenneth Branagh: The Star who Forgot how to Shine’, Queenan castigates Branagh’s apparent failure to live up to his initial billing as ‘the next Olivier’. Citing My Week With Marilyn as ‘misguided’, Queenan concludes: ‘I am sure [Branagh] will be very good in the part [of Olivier]. He will bring his trademark intensity. He will huff and puff. But there is something bittersweet about this turn of events. Branagh was supposed to be the next big thing, the new Olivier.’

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Figure 1 Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier in a publicity shot for My Week With Marilyn (dir. Simon Curtis, 2011)

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Queenan implies that Branagh’s decision to perform as Olivier articulates a failure to replace him, an inability to fulfil the requirements expected of ‘the next Olivier’ [my emphasis].7 Queenan evokes a particularly nationalistic discourse here, his denigration of Branagh apparently related to the latter’s connection with mainstream Hollywood, which is unfavourably juxtaposed with Branagh’s prior cinematic Shakespearean career. For his own part, Branagh claims that he was drawn to the role for a very specific reason: I was incredibly impressed by the screenplay and wanted to play this man who just happened to be Sir Laurence Olivier – but who was a fascinating human being to play at this point in his life . . . The script was a fascinating study of a very fine artist coming up against an equally fine one and the fireworks that result.8

Here, Branagh asserts a connection to Olivier ‘at this point in his life’, a claim that seems particularly relevant in light of the fact that Branagh’s early career is characterised by an attempt to distinguish himself from – and even distance himself from – Laurence Olivier. For me, it is significant that ‘at this point in his life’, Olivier was organising the production of what was to be his fourth and final Shakespeare adaptation, Macbeth; a production that, like Branagh’s, failed to materialise. In performing Olivier, Branagh may well be performing or enunciating himself, privileging the sense of correlation between the two men urged in earlier comments on Branagh’s Shakespearean career, rather than, as Queenan does, emphasising a failure to live up to the comparison. Ultimately, Queenan’s article connects with the wider cultural discourses that inform both Olivier’s and Branagh’s constructions as particularly Shakespearean stars, while Branagh’s comment implies a much more personal relationship to those constructions. In fact, Queenan’s and Branagh’s different responses to the actorly task of playing Laurence Olivier map onto what Christy Desmet (after Michael Bristol) understands as constituting ‘big-time’ and ‘small-time’ Shakespeare: ‘“Big-time Shakespeare” serves corporate goals, entrenched power structures and conservative cultural ideologies. “Small-time Shakespeare” . . . emerges from local, more pointed responses to the Bard.’9 I am interested in how these concepts of ‘big-time’ and ‘small-time’ Shakespeare overlap through the very specific interface that is the Shakespearean star. Such an overlap is certainly exemplified here in the different ways in which Kenneth Branagh’s star image can be seen to mean in relation to that of Laurence Olivier, both for Queenan and for Branagh himself. Accordingly,

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The Shakespearean Star: Towards a Definition

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Branagh’s role in the 2011 film – and contemporary critical reaction to it – invites me to ask the question that is at the heart of this book: what exactly does it mean to be the ‘next Olivier’? Or, more pertinently, not to be? Shakespearean Star: Laurence Olivier and National Cinema tells the story of what it means to be (or not to be) the ‘next Olivier’ by tracing Laurence Olivier’s construction as a Shakespearean star through his cinematic adaptations, Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), Richard III (1955) and the unmade Macbeth (1958). These films were not only produced or planned at key moments in the development of the British film industry, but they reflect and inform the wider national-cultural landscape from 1944. It is not for nothing that the statue that commemorates Olivier outside the National Theatre remembers him in a film: the 1948 Hamlet. This, then, is a particularly national story. It is also a personal story. Olivier’s own engagement with Shakespeare in his contemporary life-writing and later autobiographies sheds light on the mechanisms that produce the very specific model of celebrity that he comes to embody. It is precisely by paying attention to this dialogue between the ‘big-time’ and the ‘small time’, to the interweaving of the political and the personal in the construction of Laurence Olivier’s Shakespearean star image, that our own significant cultural investment in that construction can be acknowledged. And it is in and around Olivier’s cinematic Shakespeare adaptations that that investment is so powerfully evidenced. Laurence Olivier, as a Shakespearean star, performs for us – continues to perform for us – a very important national-cultural function.

The Shakespearean Star: Towards a Definition The concept of the Shakespearean star or Shakespearean stardom has not been fully examined either within a film studies context or a Shakespearean performance studies context. It is also the case that while models of stardom have been variously proposed and developed within the disciplines of film studies and theatre studies, these modes of thought have not yet been made to speak to each other.10 This has led to something of a gap in terms of critical attention to the specifically Shakespearean ‘star’ – the (usually) theatrical icons that make the transition from stage to screen to the extent that they enjoy an equally large yet seemingly more culturally legitimate celebrity status than that afforded their film star contemporaries. Barbara Hodgdon has remarked on the slipperiness of the term ‘Shakespearean star’ as one which, despite implying a rich performance history, is problematically modern, ‘less associated with classical theatre

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than with the rise of modernity and mass communication and with the politics of large-scale industrial cultures’.11 For me, however, it is in this very slipperiness that the Shakespearean star’s cultural power resides. To expand on Desmet’s useful binary, the Shakespearean star is produced through the interaction that takes place between cultural, political or industrial appropriations of the national poet and a sense of a star’s personal affiliation with Shakespeare (both as it is constructed through broader star discourses and by the star’s own direct enunciations). These modes of appropriation, for a variety of different reasons, draw on Shakespeare’s cultural authority and established formulations of ‘Shakespeare’ in national culture; these are the myths that Graham Holderness argues work to ‘[contain] consensus and [sustain] delusions of unity, integration and harmony in the cultural superstructures of a divided and fractured society’.12 I stress the distinction between Shakespeare (the early modern dramatist) and Shakespeare (Holderness’s conceptual alternative) from here on in. But if Shakespeare is widely celebrated as an icon of cultural authority, he also represents a vast cultural enigma, the site of consistent interrogation and contestation, a desire to know. It is here that the ‘slippery’ Shakespearean star – a paradoxical conflation of the ‘classical’ past and present ‘modernity’ – steps in. Through a complex process of negotiation, the enigma that is Shakespeare maps directly onto the enigma that is the star. Our desire to know Shakespeare has a direct counterpart in the ‘presentday star phenomenon’, a phenomenon that, as Hodgdon succinctly asserts, is characterised by ‘the complex desire to see – even to know everything about – an extraordinary actor’.13 For Richard Dyer, this desire to know what a star is ‘really like’ is satisfied by multiple media manifestations that work to create an effect of authenticity. This authenticating process constitutes something of a paradox: the star image appears ‘truer, more real . . . than an image’ precisely because such media manifestations are both manifold and contradictory.14 In convincing us that the star is ‘truer, more real . . . than an image’ the authenticity effect then proliferates to such an extent that ‘the other particular values’ embodied by the star likewise appear to be authenticated, whatever those values might be’.15 This deceptively simple process by which multiple and contradictory images work to authenticate the values embodied by a particular star is amplified when it comes to the Shakespearean star, who authenticates for us the varied and evolving hegemonic cultural values that are articulated by the concept of Shakespeare. This is because the authentication process is supported and rendered even more powerful by the fact that the star

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expressly narrates his or her own identity through the intimation of a formative or inherent connection to Shakespeare, an interaction that, in turn, authenticates for the star a particular and treasured conception of selfhood. What this ultimately tells us is that the Shakespearean star can be understood to embody and authenticate the hegemonic cultural values that are enunciated by Shakespeare precisely because these values appear to be authorised by the star’s true self. While it remains the case that the surfeit of information that works to authenticate the star image paradoxically drives the desire to know rather than offering satisfaction or a solution to the question of what the star is ‘really like’, it is through an acknowledgement of this self-defeating dialectic, this sleight of hand, that the wider cultural currency of the Shakespearean star can be most clearly explicated. Through a process of referral, the Shakespearean star appears to offer a solution (however temporary and illusory) to the desire to know what Shakespeare is ‘really like’, promising access to coveted Shakespearean meaning and authenticating (and performing) a wider cultural memory of the national poet.16 The cultural enigma that is Shakespeare can thus be understood to be temporarily managed through the nominated star; in this instance, through the surrogating image of Laurence Olivier. It is the project of this book – in asking what it means to be (or not to be) the next Olivier – to demonstrate precisely how this paradigm (applicable to subsequent and even preceding stars) works through Laurence Olivier and is developed for specific ends in and around his cinematic Shakespeare adaptations.17

Laurence Olivier’s Shakespearean Stardom The negotiation between the ‘big time’ and the ‘small time’ and the related fusion of enigmas that underwrites the Shakespearean star is made especially coherent when we look at Laurence Olivier. This is because Olivier demonstrates an intensely personal investment in the construction of his star image, an investment that is matched by his lifelong tendency to articulate a sense of a coherent identity that is aligned to a stabilising Shakespeare. This tendency is evidenced frequently in his life-writing, in and around his Shakespearean feature films, and in his two published autobiographies, Confessions of An Actor and On Acting.18 The countless ways in which these multimodal materials interact inform the approach that I take towards documenting the evolution of Olivier as a Shakespearean star in this book, which draws on contemporary media

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and personal and professional archival material alongside Olivier’s cinematic texts and his life-writing. In placing a firm emphasis on the role that life-writing and autobiography play in producing the Shakespearean star, I am building on the work of Peter Donaldson whose Shakespearian Films/ Shakespearian Directors (1991) examined Olivier’s Henry V and Hamlet as auteurist productions, stressing a heavily psychoanalytical (and, ultimately, autobiographical) reading of these particular film texts. Although Donaldson limits his study to two specific tableaux as described by Olivier in Confessions of an Actor,19 his work remains to date the only sustained critical consideration of the interaction that takes place between Olivier’s Shakespearean adaptations and his later autobiographical work. Yet this relationship informs all of Olivier’s cinematic Shakespeares. Donaldson’s 1991 study therefore marks an important and lone milestone in drawing attention to the fundamental role that the autobiographical plays in the complex process of surrogation that comprises Shakespearean stardom. At the same time, it opens up a related and radical space for reading Olivier’s Shakespearean film adaptations as autobiography. Indeed, Confessions of an Actor and On Acting, in their reappropriation of Olivier’s Shakespearean roles both as narrative and image, work to counteract Elizabeth W. Bruss’s denial of the possibility of cinematic autobiography in her famous maxim ‘there is no eye for “I”’.20 Bruss is referring specifically here to the autobiographical cinematic text, but reading Olivier’s autobiographies alongside the film adaptations invites us to consider, instead, the reappropriation and re-reading of film within the autobiographical text. Approaching Olivier’s cinematic Shakespeares through the lens of the autobiography in this way offers us a remarkable window onto the previously invisible authenticating mechanisms that produce the Shakespearean star. Autobiography, by its very nature, engenders a performative construction of selfhood and, in Olivier’s case, the autobiographical self is constituted not just through appropriations of Shakespearean meaning but through various textual configurations and photographic records of his Shakespearean body on screen. As Leanore Lieblein tells us, the Shakespearean body is a Bakhtinian classical body, a body ‘whose excesses are a product of the actor’s choice, discipline and skill’.21 Indeed, it is this normative, culturally authoritative body that is recalled in Olivier’s autobiographical writing, usually in order to narrate moments of personal and professional crisis. It is recalled by way of the narrative and photographic reappropriations of Olivier’s Shakespearean roles that are then mapped onto his life experiences in order to interpret or contain them, to stabilise

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their ‘excesses’ by referring to ‘the actor’s choice, discipline and skill’ in navigating them.22 Over the course of this book we will see how this construction of a Shakespearean body works in Olivier’s autobiographical material to reinterpret and to fix Olivier’s presence or autobiographical identity in his cinematic Shakespeares. By reconfiguring the Shakespearean body on screen throughout the autobiography, Olivier asks us to (re)read his Shakespeare adaptations as texts that very much express him-self and, in doing so, he supplements the life narrative with a culturally charged presence. It is with the significance of this relationship in mind that Shakespearean Star: Laurence Olivier and National Cinema is organised chronologically around the three cinematic Shakespeares that made it to the screen – Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955) – and the fourth – Macbeth (1958) – which, famously, did not. This last, Macbeth, constituted, until recently, a ‘lost’ text. Unexamined in the archive, having achieved a mythic status fuelled not least by Olivier himself, Macbeth lays bare, more than any other text, the interactive relationship between cinema and autobiography that underwrites Olivier’s Shakespearean star image. It is by unpicking this relationship that we discover exactly what it means for us to look at Laurence Olivier. And what becomes clear is that looking at Laurence Olivier means looking at Shakespeare. It means uncovering the multivariate and often surprising ways in which Shakespeare is appropriated through Olivier’s star image throughout the twentieth century. It means understanding how and to what ends concepts of nationhood, national cinema and national theatre are mobilised and developed in 1940s and 1950s Britain. It means directing our attention to the significance of specific contexts of production, something that is often neglected in Shakespearean performance studies. Certainly it is imperative that the development of Olivier’s Shakespearean star image be understood as rooted firmly within the industrial contexts within which his Shakespearean feature films are produced. Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III and the unmade Macbeth are produced – or not produced as the case may be – at pivotal moments in the histories of the British film and theatre industries and, relatedly, pivotal moments in the histories of significant British film and theatre companies: the Rank Organisation, London Films Limited, Pilgrim Pictures, Woodfall Films, the Old Vic, the Royal Court, the National Theatre, to name but a few. They are produced at times of national crisis and cultural upheaval. They are produced at times when, for all of these reasons, our age-old national-cultural desire to know Shakespeare is intensified. It is here that Laurence Olivier enters.

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With this in mind it is worth mentioning, briefly, texts that I have chosen not to include as part of this study but that many will associate with Olivier’s name. The relationship between the development of Olivier’s Shakespearean star image and the historical, political, cultural and industrial contexts of 1940s and 1950s Britain is central to the line of enquiry taken here and it is for this reason that I do not include in Olivier’s oeuvre texts that are produced after 1960, such as his later television work and filmed theatre productions, including Othello (1965), The Merchant of Venice (1973) and King Lear (1983). Not only do these films not constitute British cinematic feature films but, most crucially, they are not directed by Olivier. It is for this reason, too, that I do not categorise Paul Czinner’s As You Like It (1936) as constituting part of Olivier’s oeuvre. In delineating Olivier’s oeuvre, I focus definitive attention upon the cinematic Shakespeare adaptations in which he functioned as actor, director and producer, a unique tripartite role that speaks to a special level of creative control that is both played up in contemporary marketing and further consolidated by Olivier’s autobiographical revisitings. Indeed, focusing a spotlight on Olivier’s cinematic Shakespeare adaptations means gaining insight into an exceptional relationship between the big time and the small time, the political and the personal: a relationship that underwrites Olivier as a Shakespearean star. Accordingly, and in anticipation of the next chapter, on the cinematic Henry V (1944), it is appropriate that I turn at this point to Olivier’s early career, to his life-writing and, most importantly, to his own narration of his formative engagements with Shakespeare.

‘I felt Shakespeare within me’: A Brief Biography of Laurence Olivier (1907–1942) Laurence Olivier, born in Dorking, Surrey, on 22 May 1907, was the third and youngest child of Gerard and Agnes Olivier. In the opening pages of his first autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, Olivier describes the very different relationships that he had with his father and with his mother, the former fraught and unfriendly, the latter intense and loving, with Agnes Olivier functioning as the young Laurence’s protector and sheltering him from the undisguised antipathy of his father. Significantly, as the autobiographical narrative develops, the ‘slight disgust’ directed at Olivier by his father and the ‘frank favouritism’ shown to him by his mother is associated with Olivier’s natural talent for acting.23 In the narrative of his early life, this is evidenced by a propensity for lying and, eventually, by his mother’s presence – and his father’s conspicuous absence – at the performances he

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would give, surrounded by homemade footlights and standing on an upturned crate in his nursery.24 Donaldson implies that the ‘pattern of conflict that is associated with acting’ in the early pages of Confessions is bound up more specifically with ‘questions about gender identity’ that may have impacted on the father–son relationship as it is described by Olivier (original emphasis).25 However, while the young ‘Larry’ was certainly considered to be a ‘feminine boy’ at home, Olivier himself does not directly refer to any problematic familial (or, specifically, paternal) preoccupations with his gender identity;26 rather, the connection between acting and an apparently problematic gender identity as suggested by Donaldson is most obviously developed as Olivier begins the narrative of his schooldays. At All Saints Choir School – which he began attending at the age of nine – Olivier’s talent for performance was encouraged by Geoffrey Heald, a choirmaster with a penchant for acting who cast Olivier in a wealth of Shakespearean roles, beginning with Brutus in Julius Caesar (for which Olivier records acclaim from Johnston Forbes-Robertson) and culminating in his performance as Katerina in The Taming of the Shrew (opposite Heald as Petruchio). This latter production was eventually performed at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1922 and famously earned Olivier an accolade from Ellen Terry. By this point, however, the fifteen-year-old Olivier had graduated from All Saints and was attending St Edward’s School in Oxford, where he enrolled in 1921. At St Edward’s, Olivier suffered alienation and abuse as well as the unwanted sexual advances of older boys; this occurred as a direct result, he suggests, of his acting background and, specifically, his transvestite roles: my giddily successful acting opportunities [had] lent my exterior a hint of show-off; and the female roles had varnished it with an extra coat of girlishness . . . I very soon caught the attention, rapidly followed by the attentions, of a few of the older boys . . . I did not in any way welcome such attentions; I knew well enough what they spelt.27

For Olivier, the transvestite roles that had literally impacted upon his body were indicative of ‘not effeminacy [but] femininity’, a difference that ‘my colleagues were not to be expected to distinguish’.28 As this suggests, while his peers associated Olivier’s ‘femininity’ with effeminacy and – as narrated in Confessions – a passive homosexuality, Olivier imagines instead an androgynous ability to project femininity that is indicative of acting ability and aligned with a perception of the self as a blank canvas ready for (specifically Shakespearean) impression.29 It is this autobiographical dynamic that Donaldson recognises when, reading Confessions, he asserts

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that ‘[if] playing female roles helped to confirm the perception of Laurence Olivier as “school tart”, his skill enforced respect’.30 However, this specific connection is not made by Olivier himself; rather, it is more accurate to say that the early transvestite roles function in Confessions to anticipate an imminent Shakespearean maturity and, relatedly, the reworking of his fraught experiences at St Edward’s. In 1923, the seventeen-year-old Olivier was cast as Puck in the St Edward’s School production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Initially terrified of performing (‘Puck, to that audience!’), Olivier reports a decision to utilise the role of Puck as an opportunity to showcase his Shakespearean skill, to alter his peers’ unfavourable perceptions of his talent for dramatics by ‘[knocking] their bloody eyes out with it somehow’.31 The performance would be characterised by an emphasis on physicality that would eventually become a hallmark of Olivier’s Shakespearean acting style. His Puck was ‘robust’, ‘high-spirited’ and physically active: ‘[I danced] about among the audience, up and down the aisles and to and fro among the cross sections, making surprise appearances, my face lit from underneath by two torch-lamps which were fixed to a harness around my chest’.32 Afterward, Olivier found himself ‘at long last popular’, his skill legitimised by the boys who had previously shunned him as suspiciously effeminate and who now ‘were not only willing but anxious to walk round the quad with me, their arms through mine’.33 The performance of Puck is associated in the life narrative with a significant formative shift in Olivier’s identity, a fact certainly emphasised by Olivier’s description of an encounter with his father ‘only a few days later’, in which Gerard Olivier gives his unexpected blessing to Olivier’s desire to be an actor.34 For Donaldson, it is this encounter with the father that marks ‘the beginning of [Olivier’s] professional life and the moment at which his adult male identity was confirmed’;35 but Olivier also converts this experience into a tangible (and mutual) identification with Shakespeare: ‘there and then I learnt that Shakespeare could look after himself and look after, too, the actor who trusts him’.36 For Olivier, the performance of Puck had established Shakespeare as a culturally authoritative signifier capable of legitimising his talent for dramatics and, consequently, of reworking his fraught relationships with his peers and with his father. But it also marks a formative moment in which Olivier perceives of himself as ‘establishing a nurturant connection’ to the national poet.37 From here on in, Shakespeare is evoked as mentor and benefactor, but also as a stabilising and identificatory force, with

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Olivier narrating his autobiographical self through various appropriations of Shakespearean meaning; as he would later claim, ‘I’d been taught as a child to make Shakespeare my own language’.38 In terms of Olivier’s professional acting career, it is in relation to the 1935–6 New Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet – in which John Gielgud invited Olivier to alternate the roles of Romeo and Mercutio – that Olivier most explicitly cites an intrinsic connection between himself and the national poet. This comes as no surprise given Olivier’s claim that it was in 1935, with Romeo and Juliet, that he made the conscious decision to become a specifically Shakespearean actor.39 Typically, however, it was a decision made on the back of professional crisis. In 1933, and following little previous success in Hollywood, Olivier was presented with an unexpected (and patently irresistible) offer from MGM: the opportunity to star opposite Greta Garbo – at the peak of her celebrity – in the upcoming Queen Christina. When the news was leaked to the British media, Olivier found himself a famous Hollywood star by anticipation, his face ‘splashed all over the various organs of the press’ as ‘Greta’s Leading Man’.40 Olivier felt ‘quite a little hero’ as he sailed from Britain; less so on his return when after just two weeks in Hollywood he was ‘found wanting.’41 Olivier claims that he was intimidated by the domineering Garbo and unable to assert himself as her leading man; certainly, having originally suggested him, she rather brutally rejected him in that role. The incident makes frequent appearances as a defining failure in Olivier’s correspondence with young actors who write to him suffering the disappointment of rejection. In On Acting, when Olivier comes to describe the period between Queen Christina and Romeo and Juliet he dismisses it as representing nothing more than a ‘wasteland’ in which ‘Shakespeare had got lost’.42 Banishing his unfavourable experiences in Hollywood to nothing more than an insignificant ‘wasteland’ devoid of his spiritual touchstone, Olivier seizes the opportunity offered by Romeo and Juliet in 1935 to remould his image in the shape of Shakespeare. Olivier received mixed reviews for his performance as Romeo/Mercutio, but in the autobiographical narrative this very fact is presented as evidence of Olivier’s inherent ability to communicate ‘real’ Shakespearean meaning; just as his peers at St Edward’s had not originally appreciated Olivier’s skill, the London critics of Romeo and Juliet are aligned with an old-fashioned and ‘plastic’ conception of Shakespearean performance that is imagined to be epitomised by John Gielgud, ‘king of the West End’.43 Invoking – and appropriating – the Shakespeare legend, Olivier characterises himself as an ‘upstart’ whose instinctive, unschooled genius contrasts with the

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Prologue

intellectual fakery prevalent in contemporary Shakespearean performances like Gielgud’s.44 The term recalls Robert Greene’s infamous reference to Shakespeare as an ‘upstart Crow’ and, here, Olivier works explicitly to configure himself as Shakespeare’s heir and surrogate, with the legend of Shakespeare’s rise from humble origins to compete with ‘university wits’ like Greene juxtaposed with Olivier’s rise from the modern theatre to compete with the classical ‘Establishment’, represented by Gielgud.45 Olivier conceives of himself as ‘natural’, opposed to Gielgud’s affected ‘sing song’ style; he is ‘physical’ to Gielgud’s ‘poet’; ‘earth’ to ‘the stars’; ‘active’ to ‘passive’.46 Implicit in all of this is the notion that Olivier has access to some kind of inimitable Shakespearean essence; as Olivier puts it, when Gielgud was on stage the audience ‘knew it was a temporary measure till the real that’s going to come’ (my emphasis).47 By the end of the run of Romeo and Juliet, Olivier suggests that critical opinion had shifted and ‘there was quite a strong tide in my favour’.48 Terry Coleman attests that it was as a direct result of Olivier’s success in Romeo and Juliet (which had an extended run) that Paul Czinner cast him in his first Shakespearean film role, Orlando in As You Like It (1936). From December 1935 toFebruary 1936 Olivier filmed as Orlando during the day, before evening performances as Romeo/Mercutio at the New Theatre. While Olivier claimed to detest the film – it does not receive a mention in Confessions – he nevertheless received favourable reviews for his performance. In the press Olivier appropriated As You Like It as a means by which to refocus attention on his theatrical career, asserting unfavourable comparisons between screen Shakespeare and his work on the stage: in Film Weekly he implied that he only accepted the part of Orlando to rather bloody-mindedly ‘prove his contention that Shakespeare is not suited to the screen’.49 Meanwhile Coleman records a rather brazen speech made by Olivier following a matinee performance at the Old Vic in which, despite the fact that As You Like It was being screened nationally and Fire Over England was awaiting imminent release, he congratulated the audience on ‘[coming] here today instead, perhaps, of going to some pantomime or movie’.50 That matinee performance was Hamlet, in which Olivier played the title role during the 1936–7 season. Confirming his belief that by the end of the run of Romeo and Juliet the popular tide had turned ‘in my favour’, Olivier had been offered the opportunity to lead this season, also taking the title role in Henry V alongside a performance as Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. During 1937–8 these roles were succeeded by Macbeth, Iago and Coriolanus in a season that Olivier felt fully established him, at last, as

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A Brief Biography of Laurence Olivier (1907–1942)

15

a specifically ‘Shakespearean actor’. Safe in that knowledge, Olivier revived his ‘old interest . . . and ambition’, scorned since Queen Christina, and flew to Hollywood, having accepted William Wyler’s offer to star opposite Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights (1939).51 Pride and Prejudice (dir. Leonard, 1940) and Rebecca (dir. Hitchcock, 1940) followed. When filming finished on Alexander Korda’s propagandist epic Lady Hamilton in November 1940, Olivier, sensitive to the accusations of cowardice that were levelled at exiled British actors in the press, returned to Britain with Vivien Leigh, whom he had married just before filming commenced on Korda’s film.52 They landed at Bristol in January 1941 and in April of that year Olivier joined the Fleet Air Arm (FAA), the Air Force Division of the Royal Navy, at Worthy Down, Hampshire, as sub-lieutenant. Too old for active service, Olivier found his administrative and chauffeuring duties for the FAA humiliating, claiming that ‘the palpable safety of my service began to make me feel a shirker’.53 Trading on his name, Olivier was charged with organising and performing in charity concerts and propaganda events that promoted the FAA and the RAF, most notably at Winchester Guildhall and the Garrison Theatre, Aldershot, in February 1942. Though Olivier is reluctant to elaborate on the discontent that he felt serving in the FAA, his apparent inability to assimilate with his fellow officers has been well documented by various biographers, including Cottrell, Holden and Coleman (though, significantly, not by Barker who wrote his 1953 biography with Olivier’s assistance). Olivier’s son Tarquin, drawing on contemporary letters written to him by his father, claims that the FAA reinforced for Olivier a nagging perception of himself as ‘the ultimate non-achiever’, a serviceman dismissed as ‘a film star [who] could never be one of the boys with his brother officers’.54 In these respects, it is clear that Olivier’s experiences in the FAA to some extent replicated his experiences at St Edward’s School. Alluding to the feelings of bitterness and jealousy towards the other officers that he never directly cites, Olivier conceives of himself at this time as having ‘become Iago’;55 however, just as Olivier’s transvestite roles functioned in Confessions to anticipate the evolution of Olivier’s identity, the appropriation of Iago here gestures towards the subsequent commissioning and filming of Henry V. In On Acting, Olivier imagines a dissolve, a seamless elision between his role as actor and director of Henry V and his role as a serviceman, with his time in the FAA representing training, ‘tuning up’, for the ultimate cause of Henry V: From the beginning of England’s war with Germany, I realise now, I was being tuned up for the undreamt-of film of Henry V. As I flew over the

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16

Prologue country in my Walrus I kept seeing it as Shakespeare’s sceptred isle. I was thirty-seven and in fine fettle . . . I could think of the play sideways, upwards and outwards, because I knew it backwards. I saw its nuances of rhythm and movement in my mind’s eye, and then heard its dialogue.56

The image evoked here, of Olivier-as-Henry-V, flying a Walrus over Shakespeare’s sceptred isle and imagining the nuances of the play text in his Hamletian ‘mind’s eye’, encapsulates the film text’s ultimate appeal to Shakespeare as a signifier for the wartime British nation. At the same time, it functions in the autobiography to rework Olivier’s problematic experiences in the FAA.57 When he began filming in 1943, Olivier sent Tarquin a photograph of himself as Henry V: ‘it’s a rather peculiar little photograph, but it’s just in lieu of the one I promised I would send all dolled up in my uniform as a Naval Officer’.58 In light of his experiences at the FAA and given Olivier’s characteristic tendency to invoke Shakespeare in order to stabilise or narrate moments of personal and professional crisis, it is no surprise that, as Olivier describes it in Confessions, being offered the opportunity to film Henry V ‘seemed to answer every problem’.59 But if Olivier’s autobiographical allusion to Henry V here gestures towards the actuality of the film text itself, it also emblematises the wider cultural potency that Henry V would attach to Laurence Olivier as a British star from 1944. Accordingly, I begin with a return to Westminster Abbey.

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chapter 1

Henry V (1944)

On Monday 25 October 1971, a date that marked the 556th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, a service was held at Westminster Abbey in order to commemorate the restoration of the effigy of Henry V. Louisa Bolt had been commissioned to sculpt a new crown, head and hands for the effigy based on portraits and early descriptions of the monarch.1 However, in a 2008 publication celebrating the muniments of Westminster Abbey, Tony Trowles recorded that Bolt had in fact modelled the effigy’s new hands ‘on those of the actor Laurence Olivier’.2 This idea was reiterated by Reverend Doctor Nicholas Sagovsky in 2010 ahead of a series of events hosted by the Abbey in collaboration with the RSC and entitled Shakespeare’s Kings and Westminster Abbey.3 On an evening dedicated to Henry V, Sagovsky concluded his lecture by directing the audience’s attention towards the monarch’s tomb: ‘In the lower part [of the Chantry Chapel] you can see the wooden effigy of the king. The head and the hands have been replaced – the hands were modeled on those of Laurence Olivier.’4 Within the last five years, the anecdote of Olivier’s hands and Henry V’s effigy has been recounted to me on several occasions in response to my work on Olivier; but, despite the prevalence of this myth, there is no evidence to suggest that Bolt modelled the effigy’s new hands on those of Laurence Olivier.5 The anecdote that attends the restoration of Henry V’s effigy is, however, of some significance in terms of highlighting and understanding Olivier’s particularly national celebrity. While the veracity of the story of the effigy’s hands can be discounted, it is nevertheless the case that Laurence Olivier’s body is imagined as undergoing a sort of conflation with the effigy of Henry V at Westminster Abbey in 1971, a fact that no doubt gives rise to the subsequent notion that the figure on the tomb is partially modelled on the actor. The Abbey service for King Henry V was built around Olivier’s recitation of lines from Shakespeare’s play, delivered ‘from the steps of the Sacrarium, where Kings and Queens of England have been crowned since 1066’.6 The day 17

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Henry V (1944)

Figure 2 ‘King reheaded’: Laurence Olivier stands over the newly restored effigy of Henry V in Westminster Abbey, 1971

after the service, the Times acknowledged the significance of Olivier’s role in the ceremony, offering an image of the actor standing over the newly restored effigy of Henry V (Figure 2). The subtitle that accompanies the image, ‘King reheaded’, is followed by an account of Olivier’s delivery of the St Crispin’s Day speech, in which he is said to have ‘revived memories of one of his most famous Shakespearian roles’.7 Ultimately, the emphasis on Olivier’s performance urged in the Times article and in the accompanying image makes it unclear as to whether it is the head of the restored effigy or the talking head of Laurence Olivier as Shakespearean performer that more adequately ‘re-heads’ the King at the Westminster Abbey service. Indeed, the slippage evoked between Laurence Olivier and the effigy both in the newspaper report and in the Abbey service works to collapse Olivier’s flesh-and-blood body into the immobile, wooden effigy that is represented on Henry V’s tomb. Here, Olivier comes to represent what Joseph Roach identifies as a ‘performed effigy’, a flesh-carved cultural ‘surrogate’ that, through performance, works to ‘body forth’ that which is absent.8 As performed effigy, Laurence Olivier’s body functions as a productive and particularly potent site of cultural memory. As the Times article makes clear, however, Olivier’s body, in remembering Henry V, more pertinently remembers Shakespeare. What Olivier’s

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1940–1942

19

peculiar ability to ‘rehead’ the King ultimately signals is the way in which his cinematic performance as Henry V in 1944 feeds into the larger cultural performance that he gives at Westminster Abbey in 1971. It tells us that the filmic Henry V9 works to articulate Olivier as the embodiment of the nation to such an extent that he can later be imagined to substitute for the effigy on the monarch’s tomb. As the brief introduction to Olivier’s career offered in the Prologue to this book suggests, however, Henry V represents the culmination – or rather evolution – of a process of Shakespearean star-making that begins some time before 1944.

1940–1942 On 19 April 1942, the BBC Home Service broadcast a 70-minute radio production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Produced by Dallas Bower, Laurence Olivier read the part of the King, solidifying his association with a role that he had played to some acclaim at the Old Vic in 1937.10 Olivier also recited the ‘Harfleur’ and ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speeches from Henry V for Bower’s 15-minute radio programme Into Battle in May 1942. Six months later in October 1942, Bower wrote to Olivier with the news that Filippo Del Giudice, Managing Director of Two Cities Films Limited, had agreed to produce a film adaptation of the play. This adaptation would be based on a script that Bower had originally produced for television and abandoned subsequent to the advent of the First World War. Now, in 1942, Bower’s idea was presented to the Ministry of Information as a powerful propaganda vehicle and Del Giudice received approval (if not finance) for the project from Jack Beddington, head of the MoI’s Films Division. In asserting that the film would represent ‘Shakespeare and England’, Bower’s 1942 letter informs Olivier of Del Giudice’s very specific proposal that ‘you shall produce and play the King’. At some point between January and May 1943, Olivier was also named as director.11 Given that Olivier had no experience of either producing or directing a feature film, Del Giudice’s willingness to allow Olivier this level of control over the production might appear unusual. In attempts to make sense of the decision, a number of biographers and scholars have suggested that Olivier himself must have insisted on this level of responsibility (Barker, Cottrell, Coleman, Lloyd, Cook). In his biography, written during Olivier’s lifetime and with his close involvement, Felix Barker claims that Olivier ‘did not want to be associated with any film version of

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20

Henry V (1944)

Shakespeare over which he did not have complete control’ and was therefore ‘determined that Bower should be the associate producer’.12 The repeated insistence on Olivier’s desire for total control of the production, as espoused here by Barker, bears testament to the sense of authority that Olivier’s name would later be seen to command over productions of Shakespeare.13 However, as correspondence between Bower and Olivier makes clear, Bower’s role as associate producer was Del Giudice’s decision.14 The decision to hand control of Henry V over to Olivier is actually entirely consistent with Del Giudice’s general approach towards film production and, specifically, the prestige film, which he conceived of primarily as a creative venture in which his so-called ‘talents’ deserved full rein. Ultimately, I think that Russell Jackson is correct in identifying a propagandist impetus behind the enlargement of Olivier’s role; as Jackson asserts, the film is often represented in its publicity ‘as the heroic achievement of one man’.15 At this point, though, Olivier was not just any ‘one man’. By 1942 Laurence Olivier was functioning as a particularly connotative British star. By the time that Henry V was commissioned in 1943, Olivier was already associated with the cinematic performance of British nationhood, having starred in two of Alexander Korda’s internationally successful propaganda films: the Elizabethan epic Fire Over England (1937) and the unashamedly patriotic Lady Hamilton (1941). In Lady Hamilton, Olivier played Lord Nelson opposite Vivien Leigh; they had married just prior to commencing filming and, certainly, this particularly nationalistic project would inform later formulations of the Oliviers as Britain’s ‘Theatre Royals’. Reviewing Lady Hamilton in 1941, Jonah Barrington inadvertently stressed its propagandist bent by noting Churchill’s admiration for the production and dramatically decreeing that the film ‘enshrined the soul of the British Navy’.16 Olivier’s presence in Lady Hamilton seemed to be imbued with further significance when, on his return to Britain from Hollywood, Olivier joined the Royal Navy himself. While serving as lieutenant in the Fleet Air Arm, Olivier starred as Henry V in the two radio programmes produced for the BBC by Dallas Bower; he was also invited to participate in numerous patriotic celebrations.17 On one occasion, he appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in his Royal Navy uniform, delivering a self-penned (and bizarrely Shakespeare-esque) call to arms.18 The expression of this speech, with its distinctive crescendo, replicates what would later come to be known as Olivier’s most famous piece of oration: the St Crispin’s Day speech as delivered in the 1944 film of Henry V.19

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1942–1944: ‘Epitomising something’

21

By 1942, the Daily Express was describing Olivier as a figure capable of ‘crystallis[ing] the present mood of the British people’.20 Olivier paraphrased this description in a letter to Jill Esmond: ‘Last week I was at the Albert Hall – “crystallising the fighting spirit of the Empire” or something – or maybe it was “epitomising” something – anyway The Daily Express knew what it was.’21 Olivier’s allusion to ‘“epitomising” something’ betrays an awareness of the distinctive shift that takes place in his star image after the outbreak of war. Even before Henry V, then, Laurence Olivier was imagined as connoting nationhood, as representing ‘the British people’. While this is something that is undoubtedly consolidated and underscored by the 1944 film, it remains the case that both Henry V and Laurence Olivier’s star image have an (interrelated) prehistory that is heavily informed by formulations of Shakespeare and nationhood as perpetuated through the wartime media in the early 1940s.

1942–1944: ‘Epitomising something’ In describing Laurence Olivier as a figure able to ‘crystallise the present mood of the British people’, the Daily Express evokes an image of national community, a sense of united nationhood that is given form by the actor.22 Olivier’s star image works here to paper over the ‘multiple, unintended meanings’ that are inevitably generated by attempts to define or represent the nation, functioning instead as a seemingly logical and coherent site of identification for ‘the British people’ as a collective.23 Specifically, Laurence Olivier functions as a site for the articulation of what Benedict Anderson identifies as the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.24 For Anderson, the nation is ‘imagined’ because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.25 It is this sense of the nation, as a people united in communion, that Olivier is imagined to epitomise, to ‘crystallise’, at the Royal Albert Hall. However, as Anderson asserts, achieving an impression of national oneness inevitably involves privileging particular meanings of identity over others: the nation ‘is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ despite ‘the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each [nation]’.26 Anderson’s conception of the ‘imagined community’ is thus particularly useful for elucidating Olivier’s significance as a Shakespearean star and figure of national identification in 1940s Britain, because it is precisely the kind of competing and contradictory meanings that attend notions of nationhood

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22

Henry V (1944)

that Dyer understands the star, as a charismatic figure, to work to negotiate, to ‘counterpoise’.27 Dyer describes the star as a text, a ‘structured polysemy’ in which the contradictory meanings that make up a star image are structured so that ‘some meanings and affects are foregrounded and others are masked or displaced’.28 In such a way, the star can either consolidate or counteract dominant ideology through a mediation of ‘specific instabilities, ambiguities and contradictions’ in culture.29 Like the illusion of the imagined community, then, the star is produced through a practice that foregrounds particular meanings while displacing others. For Anderson, the imagined community becomes ‘visibly rooted in everyday life’ through the mass media.30 However, I want to understand the imagined community as referring to an illusory ideal of collective British nationhood that is perpetuated not just through the theatre, the radio or the cinema as a mass medium but also through the star as a cultural text. Through an appropriation of Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier enunciates an ‘image of Britishness’ in and around the 1944 Henry V.31 Yet, this fact should not be considered in isolation; rather, it should be explored with Olivier’s 1971 performance at Westminster Abbey in mind. This is because the Times article with which I opened this chapter articulates, regenerates and maintains the project of Shakespearean star-making that begins before Henry V and that is consolidated through the film’s production, marketing and distribution strategies as well as through its reception. Michael Dobson describes Shakespeare as ‘a ubiquitous presence in British culture, his fame . . . so synonymous with the highest claims of contemporary nationalism that simply to be British is to inherit him’.32 Indeed, given the national poet’s complex cultural status as a formation in which ‘“essential” British greatness’ is imagined to be preserved, it is perhaps inevitable that Shakespeare came to function as a particularly potent image of nationhood in wartime Britain.33 As early as February 1939, Neville Chamberlain was instilling public confidence in British resources by quoting from King John.34 The following day, the Times expanded on the connection made by Chamberlain between the nation and its national poet, evoking Britain’s imagined community through a formulation of Shakespeare as, specifically, ‘our Shakespeare’ (my emphasis).35 Shakespeare, then, was variously pressed into ideological service during the Second World War, with Holderness citing G. Wilson Knight’s The Olive and The Sword (1944), E.M.W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) and Olivier’s Henry V (1944) as evidence of Shakespeare’s renewed cultural currency in 1944.36 Indeed, Knight’s

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1942–1944: ‘Epitomising something’

23

polemical tract (the second to utilise Shakespeare in this way) illustrates just how effectively Shakespeare could be made to function as a trope for the imagined community of the nation in wartime Britain.37 Here, a collective sense of British nationhood is inferred as an inevitable consequence of an engagement with the national poet: I urge the incomparable necessity of re-awakening the national imagination, which means a renewed respect for our poetic, and particularly Shakespearian, heritage; since in a vital understanding of Shakespeare’s work lie the seed and germ of a greater Britain.38

It is this sense of the British nation as one people, a community united and uniting under the banner of Shakespeare, that works to produce a nationhood effect in line with Anderson’s hypothesis. Here, the imagined community is created through an emphasis on an illusory cultural commonality represented by Shakespeare, a dynamic that recalls Dobson’s assertion that, given Shakespeare’s prevalence in formulations of national culture, ‘simply to be British is to inherit him’.39 This is a sentiment anticipated by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh’s more nationally specific propagandist assertion in 1918 that ‘any one who reads and understands [Shakespeare] understands England’.40 Indeed, Knight’s invocation of a Shakespeare that represents ‘the soul of England’ echoes press reactions to Henry V, which consistently align the admirable production of a Shakespearean film in wartime – and, specifically, the image of Olivier as Henry V – with an expression of, as the Observer put it, ‘the spirit of England’. Following the Observer, the Yorkshire Post suggests that Henry V does ‘justice to Shakespeare and to the English spirit glorified in his play’, while Edgar Anstey in the Spectator believes the film to more comprehensively communicate ‘a timely message relevant to the British tradition and the British spirit’ (my emphases).41 These responses, with their alternative national emphases, are certainly anticipated by the early papers relating to Henry V, where Olivier describes the project as constituting a ‘national gesture’ capable of ‘[pleasing] the public’.42 For Bower, this is achieved through an enunciation of ‘Shakespeare and England’, while, for C. Clayton Hutton (working for Eagle Lion) it is achieved through the film’s capacity to make its audience ‘feel proud to be British’.43 Indeed, Clayton Hutton’s The Making of Henry V – a booklet released contemporaneously to the film – specifically emphasises ‘the producer’s wish to show us the British spirit’.44 The slippage between the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ evidenced here and within contemporary media relating to Henry V reflects the film

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Henry V (1944)

text’s wider project, which downplays the play text’s satirical commentary on (and stereotyped interplay between) the separateness of Welsh, Irish, Scottish and English identities, in order to more emphatically celebrate a sense of united nationhood.45 Within this context, I understand commentary relating to England/the English spirit (instead of Britain/the British spirit) to more precisely evoke the materiality of the play text itself, with its stirring evocations of English nationality and mettle. This does not detract from the fact that the emphasis on Britishness simultaneously urged in the film and its extratexts actually evidences a more inclusive conception of nationhood, mobilised less through an idea of ‘Englishness’ than through formulations of Shakespeare as the ‘soul’ of the (united) nation.46 However, and as the press excerpts featured here make clear, in the film and its related extratexts the articulation of Shakespeare is most precisely urged through formulations of Laurence Olivier’s stardom.47 Jonathan Bate underscores Shakespeare’s authority as an abstracted concept when he argues that ‘“Shakespeare” is not a man who lived from 1564 to 1616 but a body of work that is refashioned by each subsequent age in the image of itself.’48 In 1944, wartime discourses shape Shakespeare in the image of Laurence Olivier. Appealing to the notion of a shared cultural memory of Shakespeare at a time of national crisis, Laurence Olivier’s body works in and around Henry V to ‘summon an imagined community into being’ through a surrogation of what Knight had articulated as ‘the great heritage we possess of English letters’.49 Inevitably, this necessitates an erasure of the more problematic aspects of Shakespeare’s warrior-king, which are excised in favour of a wartime ideal that equates Britishness ‘with national unity and social cohesion’, an ideal emblematised by the ‘symbol of organic unity’ that constitutes Shakespeare (rather than Shakespeare’s Henry V).50 An examination of Olivier’s representation in Henry V and its extratexts renders this negotiation most clearly visible. Indeed, because extratextual materials ask us to read the film in a particular way, they provide, as Phil Wickham has usefully argued, ‘a nexus between text and context’ capable of engendering a more specific understanding of the ‘place of [the] film in its world and in the lives of those that saw it’.51 Accordingly, materials as diverse as publicity press books, press brochures, promotional lecture script, a souvenir brochure, exhibitor directives and a magazine/press articles will be considered over the course of this chapter alongside the film itself. For the purposes of clarity, however, this tour of representations of Laurence Olivier in and around Henry V will be principally organised around four key texts: a publicity press book; the film; the

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Representations of Olivier in and around Henry V

25

lecture script; and a publicity campaign book issued to cinema exhibitors on the film’s general release (1945).

Representations of Laurence Olivier in and around Henry V (1944) I.

Publicity Press Book

Informed by the Times article, this chapter began with an assertion that at Westminster Abbey in 1971 Laurence Olivier is rendered capable of substituting for the wooden effigy on Henry V’s tomb. What is clear from the publicity materials that surround Henry V is that the concept of effigy is also integral to representations of Olivier in 1944. Indeed, the tradition associated with Henry V’s effigy is one that is clearly anticipated by the discourses surrounding the cinematic Henry V, where a similar sense of conflation between Laurence Olivier and the medieval monarch is stressed. Like the anecdote that imagines Olivier’s body as merged with the wooden effigy on Henry V’s tomb, the publicity image from the 1944 press book reproduced below envisages Olivier bodying forth the absent king (Figure 3). Olivier’s pose, reversing that of the monarch in the portrait, works to suggest a completion of the image, with the performing bodies of the cinematic star and the ancient king representing two halves of a whole. Yet, the image also performs difference. It is clearly a photograph, the apparel is costume-like and the bright, garish colours anticipate the fairytale-like mise-en-scène of the later sequences in the film text. Moreover, it constitutes the first in a series of posed publicity stills that form a narrative in which Olivier’s performance as King Henry V blends seamlessly into his performance as an Elizabethan actor, the carefully arranged hands that mimic those of the subject in the portrait metamorphosing into the staged hand gestures associated with the early modern stage (Figure 4). In Alan Dent’s publicity notes, the ‘Elizabethan actor’ that Olivier performs in this material and in the film text is identified as Richard Burbage.52 The portrait of the real Henry V is incorporated here into an overall Shakespearean performance narrative that blends history with theatrical heritage and evokes a national tradition of stage players as representatives of monarchy in the space of the ‘Mimic State’.53 Specifically, the press book celebrates a national past that is narrated through and sustained by Shakespeare, whose supposedly universal image is bodied forth by Laurence Olivier as performed effigy. In light of Knight’s

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26

Henry V (1944)

Figure 3 (a) Laurence Olivier as Henry V from publicity press book for Henry V (1944); (b) unknown artist, Portrait of Henry V, c.160054

suggestion that the ‘soul of England’ is to be found in its literary and dramatic heritage, it appears that, in the context of the war, Olivier’s performance as effigy in and around Henry V might work to enable the nation to reconfigure the crisis of the present, to ‘imagine a number of possible futures’ by appealing to a Shakespearean past.55 This sense of reading the wartime present through the Shakespearean past is urged not just through the imagining of Olivier as effigy but in multiple other ways in the publicity materials issued with the film. A souvenir brochure, issued in 1945 at the Odeon-Majestic in Staines, aligns Henry V with a war charity, ‘St Dunstan’s for Men and Women Blinded on War Service’, to which all proceeds from the sale of the brochure are donated. The emblem printed on the front page of the brochure is reproduced in other publicity materials, including the campaign book for cinema exhibitors discussed later in this chapter (Figure 5).56 This image juxtaposes the materials of war (represented in the chivalric mode of the film) with the swan, a recognisable symbol of Shakespeare, the ‘swan of Avon’, and of the heritage that Knight understands as representing ‘the soul’ of the nation currently being fought for.

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Representations of Olivier in and around Henry V

27

Figure 4 Detail of image from publicity press book for Henry V (see Figure 3a)57

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Henry V (1944)

Figure 5 Detail from publicity campaign book for Henry V

The souvenir brochure also mimics the narrative of the press book, positing Olivier’s film – and the contexts that produce it – as the most recent development in a national genealogy that encompasses the socalled golden age of Elizabethan England and the victorious medieval conquest of Agincourt. Thus, the brochure begins by offering a brief account of the reign of Henry V in which the king is characterised as ‘brave, handsome and vigorous’, a description that happily accords with Olivier’s depiction of Shakespeare’s Henry in the cinematic text. This history is succeeded by an account of ‘Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre’, where Henry V is held up as the national poet’s greatest achievement, ‘for it is a story of a valiant Englishman’. The brochure concludes with a few facts about heraldry, production costs of the film, a ‘making of’, a map outlining the position of the English and French armies at Agincourt and, finally, a page introducing ‘The Players’. Here, Olivier’s image is reproduced as Henry V, holding the helmet that forms the centrepiece of the emblem on the front page (Figure 6). This representation brings together the multiple histories outlined in the brochure: King Henry V, the national poet, and the Elizabethan performer are

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Figure 6 Detail from souvenir brochure for Henry V

incorporated here into Olivier’s star image. As this suggests, both the press book and the souvenir brochure are structured so as to induce a sense of dissolution (and therefore continuity) between a mythical national past and the wartime present. But this is a process that is played out on Laurence Olivier’s body. What becomes clear is that the marketing materials that attend Henry V function as an effective shorthand for Olivier’s construction within the cinematic text itself.

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Henry V (1944) II.

The film, Henry V

Henry V opens with an invitation. Following a title that declares the film to be ‘a Laurence Olivier production’, a playbill flutters through the air to confront the spectator with the notice of a performance about to take place: ‘The Chronicle History of king henry the fift with his battell fought at Agincourt in France by Will Shakespeare’ to be played ‘by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the globe playhouse this day the First of May 1600’. The immediate presentation of the playbill (and its title, shared by the film) foregrounds the cinematic text’s emphasis on an elision between various historical and performance frameworks: it simultaneously invites the spectator to a theatrical performance and to a filmic presentation; it links the film’s stars with Elizabethan players (and the filmic production of the actor-director Laurence Olivier with the play written by the dramatist, Shakespeare); and finally, in declaring that the performance will take place ‘this day the First of May 1600’, the playbill encourages its audience to imagine an ellipsis between the historical specificity of their position as cinematic spectators in 1944 and that of the theatrical spectators of 1600. This effect is emphasised by the playbill’s subsequent dissolve into a tracking shot that traverses an idealised model of Elizabethan London, figuratively transporting the cinematic spectator from picture house to the Globe Playhouse; from Britain in 1944 to a nostalgic realisation of early modern Southwark.58 Anthony Davies interrogates this impression of dissolution between apparently distinct historical boundaries, understanding Henry V to consist of a tripartite structure in which ‘spatial signals’ work to denote ‘three layers of time’.59 These ‘layers of time’ are identified as ‘Renaissance time’ (signalled by the early modern playhouse space), ‘medieval time’ (signalled by cinematic space) and ‘universal time’, with universal time emerging as a direct result of the interplay between the prior ‘layers’ and their related ‘levels of action’.60 Though Davies overlooks the allusion to the contemporary wartime situation that is made explicit in the film’s opening frames, he does acknowledge that Henry V’s appeal to ‘universal time’ is inevitably inflected by Britain’s ‘wartime circumstances’.61 In fact, Davies’s identification of a level of ‘universal time’ as emerging from the film’s different ‘spatial strategies’ is particularly useful for understanding how the wartime nation is imagined in Henry V. After all, ‘[universal] time is a convenient term here for that imaginative reconstruction of time stimulated and reinforced by myth’.62 Inevitably, it is myth that underpins the illusion of the imagined community of the nation, itself an ideological fabrication

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that, as Anderson asserts, ‘can not be remembered’ and, therefore, ‘must be narrated’.63 As the film’s opening frames – and Davies’s work – attest, one of the ways in which the mythical identity of the wartime nation is narrated in Henry V is through Olivier’s utilisation of theatrical and cinematic space and its relationship to the film’s different narrative levels. Critical work on Henry V following Davies tends to restate this notion of ‘universal time’ as emerging from the interplay between the film’s variant ‘areas of action’ and ‘levels of action’, albeit in diverse ways (my emphases).64 Donaldson, for example, comments on how the cinematic adoption of Robert Weimann’s locus/platea model enables the ‘transitions between representational levels [to be] as seamless as possible’, evoking continuity between the present and the ‘glorious past’; Jackson, meanwhile, examines the multiple ‘stories’ that are evoked by the elision between the film’s theatrical and filmic frameworks.65 While the connection between theatrical/cinematic space and the narration of a mythical past is central to any reading of Olivier’s Henry V, it is also the case that this connection can be read more specifically in relation to Olivier’s performing body. If, as Davies, Donaldson and Jackson have argued, the spatial strategies that characterise Henry V evoke an overall impression of ‘universal time’, then this is a relationship that is made most fully coherent through Laurence Olivier’s performance within Henry V’s transitional cinematic space(s). This is most emphatically demonstrated in the sequences that take place in the reconstructed Globe Playhouse. As Donaldson notes, Olivier employs what Weimann has usefully identified as ‘locus and platea conventions’ in the playhouse sequence.66 In Weimann’s model, the locus or upstage area of the early modern stage functions ‘as a fairly specific imaginary locale or self-contained space in the world of the play’ while the platea space is identified with the downstage area, functioning ‘as an opening in mise-en-scène through which the place and time of the stage-as-stage and the cultural occasion itself’ are made apparent.67 For Donaldson, ‘Olivier maps the difference between locus and platea onto the relation between the Elizabethan playhouse as a whole and the more realistically conceived historical and cinematic space that replaces it’.68 While this may ultimately be the case, it is clear that the movement from playhouse to cinematic narrative is more precisely achieved through an establishing focus on locus and platea as theatrical spaces that foreground transitional modes of bodily performance. Rather than mapping Weimann’s locus/platea model onto a binary notion of theatrical or cinematic space, then, an examination of how Olivier performs in these spaces enables a more specific understanding of how the

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Henry V (1944)

Figure 7 Olivier’s entrance as the Elizabethan player in Henry V

theatrical framework establishes and informs – rather than merely keys – the filmic narrative. Moreover, it becomes clear that, in mapping these spaces, it is Olivier’s body that functions most effectively as the site through which the filmic transitions between different historical and performance frameworks are made coherent. Olivier is first introduced apart from the stage, in a sequence that prepares for the way in which his body can be understood to mean throughout the film text; that is, both in terms of the playhouse sequences and in the more ‘realistically conceived’ cinematic representation that follows.69 Located in the bustle of the early modern tiring-house, the camera remains static as Olivier (here performing as Burbage/Elizabethan actor) moves into the frame from the left. He displays nerves, raising his hand to his mouth as he clears his throat in preparation for his entrance (Figure 7). Like the publicity materials that surround the film, this sequence posits Olivier’s body as a site in which multiple national narratives are collapsed. Laurence Olivier performs as Richard Burbage performing as the medieval Henry V in a play by the people’s poet (the communally named ‘Will’ Shakespeare); he performs in the Globe Playhouse, represented – like the wartime cinema – as

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a site of national community, where hawkers and orange-sellers mingle with richly dressed Lords and costumed players. But Olivier’s stance as the Elizabethan actor here also recalls his performance as Henry V in the publicity image that reproduces the medieval portrait of the king (Figure 3).70 Incorporating extratextual filmic materials into the cinematic text itself, this (re)presentation of Olivier in the opening sequences of Henry V restates the dissolution between the historical and performance frameworks evoked by the playbill/tracking shot and in the publicity image. But, more pertinently, it also restates Olivier’s function as effigy; here, Olivier’s body cites – or surrogates – various figures from the national past, figures who are imagined to be simultaneously articulated by Shakespeare. This embodiment or reanimation of the dead through Shakespeare renders Olivier as a site of national narrative that is written ‘up time’; that is, through a ‘curious inversion of conventional genealogy’ that starts ‘from an originary present’ and is ‘fashioned upwards’ i.e. towards Shakespeare.71 The connection between this understanding of how national narratives are constructed and Roach’s concept of effigy is clear; but Olivier’s alternative use of locus and platea spaces throughout the playhouse sequences makes the connection even more specific, because the oscillation between the representational and the actual that characterises the early modern theatrical space can be mapped onto the effigy’s paradoxical articulation of ‘immortality amid physical decay’.72 Introduced as a surrogate for Shakespeare and the nation in the tiring-house, the constant shift between personae (Olivier/Burbage/Henry V) that characterises the performative use of space in the represented Globe Playhouse reiterates Olivier’s function as effigy, both within and without the film text. As the Elizabethan actor, Olivier moves directly from tiring-house to platea, where he bows ostentatiously to his audience before delivering his first line with deliberate theatricality and with the stagey hand gestures associated with his performance as the actor in the publicity materials. Throughout these opening sequences, Olivier’s transitions between locus and platea spaces key different performance styles, an oscillation between the theatrical behaviours of the early modern playhouse (with the camera viewing at a distance or from a low angle) and the more muted actions of the cinema (with Olivier in close shot). In the sequence that dramatises Henry’s receipt of the Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls, for example, the King’s reaction to the insult is viewed in medium close shot, with his facial expression communicating anger, then decision; the reactionary transformation from cold smile to hardened countenance that is traced by the sustained camera shot sharply contrasts with Henry’s subsequent

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Henry V (1944)

Figure 8 Olivier as the King occupying the locus (a) and platea (b) spaces in the Globe Playhouse sequences, in Henry V

verbal – and highly theatricalised – riposte (Figure 8a,b). The crowd’s vocal rejoinder to Henry’s muted reaction in the locus space underscores this sense of disjunction, with the theatrical context apparently intruding into Henry’s particularly cinematic performance. At this moment, caught in a liminal space between the anticipated cinematic narrative and a reminder of the platea convention, Olivier himself is emphasised as the conduit through which different spaces and representations are given meaning or precedence. Olivier’s subsequent move from the throne to the platea space underscores this, his vocal acrobatics and excessive gestural behaviours once more privileging his performance as the Elizabethan actor over the character of Henry V (Figure 8b). This sequence demonstrates how transitions between different modes of physical performance within the theatrical space work to anticipate the eventual movement into a new level of cinematic representation; but, when this movement does finally occur, it becomes clear that the performing body functions not only to indicate the transition through a further shift in performative behaviour, but to suture the dramatic context into the cinematic representation.

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Figure 9 Olivier’s first appearance as the King in the ‘cinematic locus’,73 in Henry V

Indeed, when the camera intrudes deeper into the space of the locus, through its painted curtain (and into Donaldson’s ‘cinematic locus’), Olivier’s body signals a new level of representation in which the prior dramatic context is at once remembered and restated.74 This is achieved through a further establishing emphasis on Laurence Olivier’s performing presence as effigy, the site at which the multiple identities performed in these different representational contexts converge. Here, for example, the shift to cinematic representation – and naturalised performance – remembers the Burbage role (intricately linked to a reminder of Olivier’s own celebrity) through another allusion to the publicity materials. Thus, Olivier’s high-collared costume as Henry V in the film text cites that of Olivier as the Elizabethan player performing as Shakespeare’s King Henry in the publicity book, the pillar that denotes theatrical space replaced with the ship’s mast of the cinematic narrative (Figures 4, 9). While in the latter image, the Elizabethan player remains the dominant figure, it is the represented character of Henry that takes precedence in the film text: here, each performance cites the other. The minor differences in the costume (the red/white inner collar, for example) merely work to

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Henry V (1944)

Figure 10a–d Transitioning back to the Globe, in Henry V

emphasise this complex sense of transition and resultant multiple levels of citation. This effect is also demonstrated successfully at the close of the film, when Olivier’s bodily gestures anticipate and negotiate the transition back to the playhouse. As Olivier-as-Henry enters the scene of the French court (set up to mimic the space of the Globe Playhouse), he is viewed, as at the beginning of the film, marching into the stage space from the left hand side, ready to perform. Assuming the theatrical hand gestures of the Globe sequences in place of the naturalistic style associated throughout the film text with the character of the King, Olivier’s performance calls into being the Elizabethan player and the platea space of the playhouse, into which the ‘cinematic locus’ is about to dissolve. As Henry and Katherine ascend their thrones – which are imminently revealed as occupying the locus space of the Globe’s stage (Figure 10, a–b) – a closeup shot underscores the shift back to the character of the actor intimated by Olivier’s performance in the French court sequences. Here, Olivier’s facial expressions key the film’s final spatial transition as he is viewed acknowledging applause from the audience, stationed at various levels in

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the Globe (Figure 10c). Back in the playhouse, the Chorus pulls a curtain over the locus space and its represented fiction and, as he does so, the Elizabethan actor registers shock at the intrusion, raising his head and moving backwards (Figure 10d); here we have a further narrative shift, in which the role of the Elizabethan actor is itself revealed as a performance, one that is interrupted by the drawn curtain. Consequently, this act of separating the locus and platea spaces engenders a last emphasis on the performing body of Laurence Olivier, the site at which the multiple national figures enunciated by the film text are made simultaneously coherent. In this way, Olivier’s performance throughout Henry V underpins the spatial project of the film text as identified by Davies, Donaldson and Jackson, naturalising the dissolution between different representational levels. As the dissolve into the cinematic narrative confirms, then, Davies’s sense of a collapse into ‘universal time’ is most clearly performed on and through Olivier’s body as a representative site of national Shakespeare. As this analysis attests, the foregrounding of Laurence Olivier as a surrogate for Shakespeare and nationhood is intrinsic to the film’s propagandist project, but an immense body of critical scholarship approaches the film-as-propaganda through a concern with how wartime ideology impacts upon the represented character of the King; that is, through a comparison of Shakespeare’s more ambiguous Henry with Olivier’s chivalric knight. While it is true that Olivier’s Henry presents an image of ideal Britishness in the wartime context of 1944 through an erasure of the more problematic behaviours of Shakespeare’s King (a fact aided by the use of the platea space to distance Henry’s more ambiguous responses by emphasising theatricality), there is an alternative route to understanding this streamlining of Henry’s character: one that moves to privilege the film text over the play text. This approach involves an assessment of the ways in which extratextual materials urge a reading of the film in which the character of Henry is overwritten by a transparent emphasis on the actor-director Laurence Olivier.75 The relevant materials here include a lecture script designed to promote the film to local audiences and an Eagle Lion publicity brochure. These materials offer a more comprehensive understanding of how the film – and its portrayal of Henry – reflects wartime ideology; but, read in dialogue with the autobiography, they also signal just how crucial Henry V proves to the ongoing maintenance of Olivier’s star image throughout the twentieth century, underwriting his performance at Westminster Abbey in 1971.

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Henry V (1944) III. Lecture Script

Following its premiere at the Carlton Theatre, Leicester Square, in November 1944, Henry V was ‘roadshowed’ from July 1945.76 Along with a variety of publicity brochures, Eagle Lion’s distribution arm issued local cinema exhibitors with lecture material to accompany the film. Designed ‘for use in Factories and Schools’, the lecture – entitled Half Hour with an English King77 – offers a historical account of Henry V, detailed information on the making of the film during wartime (including insurance costs), an introduction to the ‘great personality of the film’, Laurence Olivier, and a brief foray into Elizabethan stage conventions.78 As this suggests, Half Hour with an English King urges the same sense of temporal slippage between the past and the present that characterises both the film text and the other publicity materials examined in this chapter. Analogously evoking an overall impression of national continuity, Half Hour with an English King describes Henry V as constituting ‘a crusade to show the world that the British spirit is of a quality which has endured down the years and is something to contend with wherever met’.79 What becomes clear is that, in order to make this connection – or slippage – between the celebrated past and the wartime present coherent, Half Hour with an English King places a stress on Laurence Olivier as the conduit through which ‘the British spirit’ that is expressed in the lecture can be realised or made visible. This is achieved through a narrative process that equates ‘the British spirit’ with a genealogy of British servicemen that includes Olivier.80 Following a reiteration that the ‘underlying idea’ of Henry V consists of an articulation of ‘the British spirit’, the script directs that the speaker (who at this point stands in front of an image of a medieval archer which has been preceded by that of a medieval knight) ‘here turn illustrations over to that of present-day soldier, sailor, air-man’.81 The images accompanying the lecture thus point to a sense of continuity between the past and the present through representations of British servicemen as idealised embodiments of the national ‘Spirit’ for which the iconic Shakespeare functions as shorthand. Indeed, the images of the modern ‘soldier, sailor, air-man’ that remain on view supplement the lecture’s subsequent assertion that present-day Britishness is accurately represented in the filmic Henry V: ‘don’t let us be embarrassed to see that invincible spirit depicted in a screen story ’.82 The ‘invincible spirit’ evinced by the British serviceman and depicted in this adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V is consequently imagined to be most obviously epitomised by Laurence

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Olivier himself. Thus, celebrating Olivier’s feat in British filmmaking, Half Hour with an English King also reminds the audience of the actordirector’s army career: ‘Olivier was busy at his duties in the Fleet Air Arm when approached to tackle the huge task of making a Shakespearian play into a film – and it took a long time to persuade him to allow them to obtain the necessary leave of absence.’83 Sonya O. Rose has discussed at some length how idealised representations of the British serviceman were intrinsic to formulations of national identity and masculinity during World War II.84 The publicity materials surrounding Henry V certainly reflect this connection as they shore up Olivier’s effectiveness as a surrogate for Shakespeare and nationhood through an emphasis on his dedication to his service career. This is a connection that can be explicated further in relation to a publicity brochure also distributed with the film on its general release. This brochure, entitled ‘Laurence Olivier’s Presentation / Henry V by William Shakespeare in technicolor’ is particularly comprehensive; circulated to cinema exhibitors for marketing and publicity purposes, it includes ideas for a heraldic contest aimed at children and a section on ‘Historical Links with Henry V’ that traces the monarch’s association with particular localities, such as Courtfield near Monmouth, where Henry was sent ‘to be nursed as a baby’.85 Like Henry himself, Olivier is given a thorough biographical focus in this brochure, which outlines how his prior career has culminated in this, ‘Laurence Olivier’s Great Work’. Following a reference to Olivier’s commission in the Fleet Air Arm, his screen credentials as an actor capable of representing the nation are stressed: ‘His success as Nelson in Korda’s “lady hamilton” was proverbial, for perhaps, up to the beginning of the war, no British film actor had reaped such a popular success abroad as did Laurence Olivier’s Nelson.’ Not only is Olivier’s service career blended seamlessly, and apparently logically, with his role as Nelson, but the slippage evoked here between the contemporary success of the British film industry and the heroic military successes of the past informs an understanding of how Olivier’s status as a Shakespearean star functions later in relation to specific post-war attempts to construct an identity for the national film industry through appropriations of heritage. Here, however, the evocation of Nelson prepares for the assertion that ‘it was felt that the production of “Henry V” would serve a national purpose’, a national purpose for which Olivier’s ‘release [from the Fleet Air Arm] was granted’. Accordingly, Henry V is explicitly imagined in this publicity brochure as an extension of Olivier’s army career: ‘In producing,

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Henry V (1944)

Figure 11 Image and image detail from publicity brochure for Henry V 86

directing and playing the title role in “henry v” Laurence Olivier has rendered a great service to his country.’ Indeed, the parallel emphases of Half Hour with an English King and the publicity brochure’s biography – equating Olivier’s work on Henry V with his service career – are usefully recapitulated by an image that appears in the brochure after the ‘Historical Links with Henry V’ section (Figure 11).87 The image is a painting or etching rather than a photograph; it reproduces a publicity still of Olivier as Henry V. What is different about the image is that the face, while resembling Olivier’s, does not clearly belong to him: it both is and is not a representation of Laurence Olivier as Henry V. In fact, this is an image of Henry V as Laurence Olivier, rather than the other way around. Physically distanced from Olivier’s biography and linked most obviously with the historical Henry V, the image cites the sense of continuity between past and present evoked in the lecture, where Henry V is summarised as a film that ‘takes a king with his belief in his countrymen, and their love of country, to show that the spirit [‘The British Spirit’] burned in medieval days too, in high hearts as well as low’.88 This image articulates Olivier as Every(service)man, its non-specific facial features enabling its patriotic representation of Henry V to speak for the contemporary wartime

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community and its servicemen. As such, the image intimates the co-existing and paradoxical qualities of ordinariness and extraordinariness that underpin the star phenomenon and that enable Olivier to function as a naturalising trope for the wartime imagined community from 1941. Rather pertinently, the image also offers further evidence of Olivier’s construction and function as effigy across a variety of extratextual materials in addition to the film text. As this extratextual emphasis on the present-day serviceman might suggest, and as critical commentary on Henry V has pointed out extensively, the problematic impulses that lead Sutherland and Watts to describe Shakespeare’s King as a ‘war criminal’ are overlaid in Olivier’s film;89 specifically, they are overlaid in favour of an expression of the ‘temperate’ qualities of ‘good humour’, ‘kindliness’, ‘heroism and bravery’ that Rose associates with formulations of ideal masculinity in wartime.90 This focus is certainly encouraged by Half Hour with an English King and the publicity brochure discussed in this section. Through their assertion that Henry V articulates ‘The British Spirit’, these materials urge a reading of the film text that privileges the presence of Laurence Olivier as idealised serviceman and national effigy over that of Shakespeare’s King. It is in this sense that the textual excisions that transform the character of Henry as it appears in the play text should be understood to function. When Olivier’s chivalric Henry succeeds in his extraordinarily polite siege of Harfleur, it is the image of the contemporary British serviceman – signified through Shakespeare as iconic symbol of nationhood – that is represented. In this sense, the impact of the wartime context on the represented character of the King is much more complex than considerations of the propagandist deletion of problematically violent lines generally allow for. Moreover, this is certainly a reading that is endorsed by Olivier himself as he enthusiastically restates the collapse imagined in the publicity materials between his role as ‘producer-director and actor’ in Henry V and his role as lieutenant in the Fleet Air Arm.91 We might recall here Olivier’s 1943 letter to Tarquin, in which he enclosed a photograph of himself as Henry V ‘in lieu of the one I promised I would send all dolled up in my uniform as a Naval Officer’.92 In his life-writing as it pertains to the period 1939–45, Olivier urges the same sense of slippage between his service career and his role in Henry V that characterises the film’s publicity materials. With this in mind, I would like to briefly fast-forward from the wartime context of 1940s Britain to the 1980s, and to the publication of Olivier’s autobiographies, Confessions of an Actor (1982) and On Acting (1986). As we have seen, in terms of his autobiographical project and its appropriations of Shakespeare, Olivier’s self-fashioning as Henry V goes some way towards

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Henry V (1944)

reimagining his negative experiences of life in the Fleet Air Arm, as well as enabling a reworking of his earlier association of film acting with cowardliness, with ‘losing my birthright’ through non-active service.93 However, this particular autobiographical self-fashioning is also indicative of Olivier’s wider cultural relevance as a surrogate for Shakespeare, after Henry V and World War II. Thus, the conflation between Olivier and Henry V imagined in the 1940s publicity materials is, in Olivier’s retrospective narrative, additionally informed by later (post-war) developments in Olivier’s star image. For example, although it also reproduces the contemporaneous sense of slippage between Olivier/Henry V that is evoked in the film’s publicity materials, Olivier’s rather explicit description of himself in On Acting as an effigy of – or surrogate for – Shakespeare in 1944 more clearly anticipates and celebrates his subsequent post-war contributions to the British film industry through the Rank Organisation: I had a mission; I was physically and emotionally fit; I’d learnt about coordination and balance while flying my Walrus; my country was at war; I felt Shakespeare within me, I felt the cinema within him. I knew what I wanted to do, what he would have done, and every sinew was stiffened because the budget was so tight.94

Specifically, this narrative image prepares for the developing significance of Olivier’s role as Britain’s premier cinematic adaptor of Shakespeare by inducing a further sense of slippage; this time between the idea of the nation-at-war and the beleaguered national film industry. It is a slippage that is made coherent through a narrative representation of the star image of Laurence Olivier that purposely appeals to earlier conflations (both contemporary and autobiographical) of his service and film careers. If, in 1944, Olivier’s star image articulates the wartime imagined community in and around Henry V through an appropriation of Shakespeare (‘within me’), this autobiographical reworking anticipates a subsequent connection between Shakespeare’s Olivier and the post-war revitalisation of Britain’s national film industry (‘within him’). Indeed, it is an often overlooked fact that – ‘roadshowed’ from July 1945 – Henry V is not just a wartime propaganda film but also a particularly potent post-war text.95 This leads me to consider a final extratext relating to Henry V: a publicity campaign book issued to cinema exhibitors on the Odeon circuit as a guide to ‘the appropriate advertising and exploitation’ of the film from late 1945.96 This document enables a reconsideration of Henry V’s importance as a post-war film for the Rank Organisation and, in doing so, it looks forward to Laurence Olivier’s increasing significance as a figurehead for the post-war

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British film industry through the production of Hamlet. As this suggests, the campaign book provides, through its connection with the Rank Organisation, the necessary background to the post-war industrial contexts that inform Olivier’s second Shakespeare adaptation in 1948. IV.

Publicity Campaign Book

The publicity campaign book would have been circulated to cinema exhibitors on the Odeon circuit, fully controlled by J. Arthur Rank from 1941.97 In its directions for Odeon exhibitors, the campaign book outlines in detail how Henry V should be advertised in individual towns, how the local press and schools should be approached and how front of house displays should be ‘dignified yet startling’, with exhibitors expected to fashion their own flag poles from local broomstick suppliers. Amidst such colourful marketing instructions, however, this material also stresses how Henry V fits into the Rank Organisation’s wider post-war campaign to promote its films at home and abroad.98 Opening with a personal message from J. Arthur Rank himself, the campaign book intimates Henry V’s importance as a flagship product for the Rank Organisation from the very beginning. In his message, Rank exhorts exhibitors to fashion their exploitation campaigns in such a way as to take advantage of two specific ‘opportunities’ offered by Henry V: 1. Of giving a large number of the public much enjoyment, and thus enhancing the goodwill of your theatre. 2. Of setting an example to the world of the high grosses that can be obtained. While the other publicity materials considered in this chapter99 underscore Henry V as a timely cinematic articulation of the national spirit, the campaign book transparently states the wider commercial intention that lies behind this emphasis. Specifically, it asserts Rank’s much publicised intention to penetrate the American market through the initiation of a post-war export drive. However, the attempt to marry – through the exploitation of Henry V – the two ‘opportunities’ represented by success in the home market, on one hand, and by success overseas, on the other, evidences a contemporary tension between these two disparate focuses, which are not necessarily understood to be compatible with each other. Given the cultural upheaval of the immediate post-war period, Rank’s emphasis on ‘setting an example to the world’ actually engenders

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44

Henry V (1944)

formulations of the Rank Organisation as a potentially destructive – and even anti-British – monopoly. In order to understand how Olivier’s Henry V and Hamlet fit into the Rank Organisation’s attempts to neutralise such accusations from 1945, it is necessary first to offer some outline of Rank’s position – and reputation – within the British film industry at the end of the war. Alexander Korda’s international successes in the early 1930s had set a precedent for the possibility of establishing a lucrative trade in the American market and, as Geoffrey Macnab attests, America came to represent for many working within the British industry ‘a land of milk and honey . . . brimming with box office receipts’.100 Following a visit to America in May 1945 (just before Henry V’s roadshow distribution commenced in Britain), Rank appeared to be in as much of a position to infiltrate the US market as Korda had been in the 1930s. However, the apparently successful post-war trip to America (in which Rank secured coproduction deals with David Selznick and RKO)101 must be read against the backdrop of Rank’s long campaign towards the penetration of the overseas market already fought – and continuing to be fought – at home, in the face of the political and cultural tensions that characterised the British industrial landscape. These tensions are certainly addressed in the Henry V campaign book, which, in championing Rank’s post-war export drive, situates industrial power firmly within the British market: For a long time now pictures have been sold to Britain on the basis of their success elsewhere. The same process but in reverse must now be established for British production. We have to show the world what can be done at British box offices with “henry v.” Ours is to be the example.

The defence of, and promotion of, the broader commercial aims of the Rank Organisation evidenced here reflects a wider cynicism regarding the impact of Rank’s consistently avowed plans ‘to extend our activities to various countries throughout the world’;102 in his 1944 chairman’s address at Gaumont-British, for example, Rank acknowledges that ‘in certain quarters criticism [has been] made that we might be running an undue risk in going into unknown markets’.103 In this address, Rank rather predictably goes on to reassert the benefits to the British industry that his export drive would provide, but his acknowledgement of dissension ‘in some quarters’ certainly discloses – and attempts to engage with – a wider contemporary distrust of the activities of his organisation and its impact on the national film industry, particularly regarding the American market.

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Representations of Olivier in and around Henry V

45

Ubiquitous scepticism regarding Rank’s attempts to compete in the US market is intricately bound up with tensions concerning the activities of the Rank Organisation at the level of the home market itself. Despite the relative boom of the war years, the post-war British film industry was, in Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street’s terms, only ‘superficially healthy’, with ‘the biggest element of uncertainty’ arising from the ongoing issue, not only of ‘American competition’, but of ‘domestic monopoly’.104 Certainly, Rank’s name constituted something of a byword for domestic monopoly in the 1940s. As Dickinson and Street usefully record, by 1943 Rank ‘owned two of the big three cinema circuits, the most important British distributor, GFD, two big modern studios and four smaller ones; he controlled the production companies Gaumont-British and Gainsborough, was chairman of a group of small production units, Independent Producers Ltd, and financed Del Giudice’s Two Cities production company’.105 Coupled with his much trumpeted campaign towards the penetration of the US market, Rank’s powerful position inspired fear and suspicion, with a series of independent producers raising vocal concerns about the potentially homogenising impact of Rank’s activities on the identity of a national film industry from as early as 1943.106 Indeed, a 1948 retrospective in the Laboursupporting magazine Tribune explicitly linked the growth of the Rank monopoly with a ‘tendency to pander to American tastes’ over the establishment of a ‘real British film industry’.107 Between 1944 and 1945, Rank was variously described in the Daily Express as a ‘colossus’, a ‘dictator’ and a ‘kingpin’, with the Financial Editor of the Guardian accusing him of ‘strangling a highly important British industry in a vital stage of its growth’.108 These accusations – and the relationship between monopoly and Americanisation that they underscore – are countered in the campaign book by an emphasis on Henry V as a ‘unique’ British picture with ‘individual attention in the making’, an important bulwark in the ‘Grand Plan to establish British film production’. The campaign book, then, is clearly impacted by the growing industrial and political unease about Rank’s position that had led the Cinematograph Films Council (CFC) to commission an independent report on monopoly in 1944.109 Chaired by Albert Palache, the findings of this select committee were detailed in a document entitled Tendencies to Monopoly in the Cinematograph Industry, widely referred to as the Palache report. On 15 January 1944, the Daily Express published an article under the headline, ‘two groups fight for future of british films’. This article contrasts the divergent views on production policy supposedly held by

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Henry V (1944)

independent film producers (imagined to be headed by Ealing Studios’ Michael Balcon) and ‘the big combines’, epitomised by Rank. The article succinctly sums up the two positions as follows: Should British studios make pictures at a reasonable cost and concentrate on the home and Empire market for their returns; or should they seek some reciprocal arrangement with America enabling them to make pictures on the million-dollar scale and compete in the world market?110

When the Palache report was submitted to the CFC and the Board of Trade in July 1944, it was the cause of the independent producer – or what Dickinson and Street call the Balcon school of thought – that was most widely upheld. Emphasising the importance of fostering independent film production to the national culture, the Palache report recommended immediate state intervention and the subsequent protection of the national film industry against the possibilities of British or American monopoly (generally considered to go hand in hand): It appears therefore that the statement that ultimate control over the three major exhibition circuits reposes in as few as two hands may not adequately convey the gravity of the situation in which independent British producers have suddenly been placed. For it may further be the case that these two hands are or may ultimately be guided by American interests . . . It would indeed be an unsatisfactory outcome of years of special encouragement of British film production if while this country continued to be served mainly with foreign product, British production in its turn should become more and more dominated by the desire to appeal first to the foreign market.111

Replicating the juxtaposition articulated in the Daily Express article, the Palache report associates the vertically integrated combines with a detrimental and singular focus on the overseas market and ultimately links British monopoly with American control. While the multiple findings of the Palache report have been most extensively detailed by Dickinson and Street and Macnab, it is this particularly nationalistic discourse (evidenced throughout the report and demonstrated in the excerpt reproduced above) that is of interest here. In the Palache report, independent producers are connected with the concept of a British aesthetic and a championing of national culture, while the combines come to represent a potential denigration of that culture through a supposed emulation of Hollywood codes and conventions: ‘This country has its own contribution to make and does not need slavishly to imitate the idiom of other producing centres of the world . . . This country

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Representations of Olivier in and around Henry V

47

has the human resources, the craftsmen, who, given the opportunity, may confidently be expected to make their own contributions to the universe of film art.’112 Read against the Palache report, Rank’s declarations concerning profitable returns in both the home and overseas markets suggest a potentially detrimental impact on the work of the independent producer, principally because they are imagined to be predicated on a commercial privileging of a Hollywood style or aesthetic over a British one – what Tribune would later designate as a ‘pander[ing] to American tastes’.113 It is certainly clear that the Palache report’s intense focus on the cultural – and Americanising – impact of monopoly in relation to the role of the independent producer gestures towards other binary notions, for example, quality/prestige, realism/tinsel, that characterise debates about British film culture in the 1940s. Fortunately for Rank, the Board of Trade ultimately rejected the advice put forward in the Palache report.114 Though the Cinematograph Films Council supported (and recommended) the report, the Board of Trade took advantage of the expiration of the current CFC’s term of service in order to appoint a new Council from September 1944. Rather than implementing the suggestions published in the Palache report, what Street calls a ‘wait and see policy’ was favoured by the Board of Trade, which was reluctant to disadvantage Rank’s commercially profitable position; in November 1945, Sir Stafford Cripps, the new president of the Board of Trade, outlined his position on the report as follows: ‘I am anxious to leave the strong Rank combine effective for meeting and possibly dealing with American competition but at the same time I want ample opportunity for independent producers to make reasonably priced films to be shown primarily in this country.’115 In February 1944, the Conservative minister Lord Brabazon put the situation somewhat less delicately, inadvertently summing up the worrisome attitude towards the independent producer that the Palache report had criticised: ‘It is highly inadvisable when a man like Mr. Rank has emerged to fight the Americans, to worry him with pin-pricks.’116 In fact, Lord Brabazon’s reference to this noble emergence of a British conglomerate to ‘fight the Americans’ recalls Rank’s own (and infinitely more subtle) attempts to negotiate concerns that connected the activities of his organisation with American control, American interests or, indeed, the privileging of a Hollywood aesthetic over British filmmaking traditions. From 1943 – and most obviously following the publication of the Palache report in 1944 – Rank consistently induces a sense of slippage between the idea of the nation-at-war and the striving post-war British

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Henry V (1944)

film industry, linking his export drive with an assertion of national culture and/or national community: My ambition has always been to help to create a strong British film industry in co-operation with the Americans. Our two countries are so strong in war that they ought also to be strong in peace, and my schemes in connection with the film industry have always had this object in view (1943)117 We have to show the world what can be done at British box offices with “henry v.” Ours is to be the example. (1945)118 We have made great progress in the last two or three years, in making pictures in the British studios, and whilst having British flavour and characteristics, they are, at the same time, of high entertainment value and have been great box office successes. (1945)119 I have a property in ‘Henry’ worth more than any other motion picture extant. I propose to sell it or ‘close the wall up with our English dead.’ (1945)120

Rank’s own appropriation of Shakespeare in this last comment recalls Olivier’s autobiographical self-construction as Henry V in On Acting; in both cases, a mission to champion the British film industry is made coherent through a correlation between Shakespeare and nationhood that evokes the potency of the wartime imagined community. Indeed, this correlation gestures towards Olivier’s continuing significance for the Rank Organisation as surrogate for Shakespeare and actor-director of the 1944 and 1948 adaptations, Henry V and Hamlet. In the post-war marketing of these films, Shakespeare is invoked and promoted as an icon, not just of British culture, but of British film production specifically. This is certainly reflected in the campaign book for Henry V, which announces this ‘great British picture’ as the ‘latest and greatest production of the new British film industry’ (my emphasis). It is also urged through Olivier’s foregrounding as a specifically Shakespearean star. Accepting a Picturegoer audience award from Rank for his performance in Henry V, for example, Olivier’s prize, and his response to it, are presented as evidence of ‘a vindication of the Rank policy to try and make British pictures the admiration of the world’: In a message to you Olivier says: “I cannot express myself better than the way that Shakespeare did through the mouth of our beloved Moody Dane, ‘Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks, but I thank you.’”121

Here, the potency of the Shakespearean star as an interface that connects ‘big-time’ and ‘small-time’ appropriations of the national poet is clearly evidenced, with Olivier’s intimation of an innate Shakespearean selfhood appearing to validate or justify Rank’s industrial policy.122 From 1944,

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Representations of Olivier in and around Henry V

49

then, Laurence Olivier’s Shakespearean stardom works to neutralise contemporary formulations of the Rank Organisation as a monopolistic enterprise working against the interests of the national film industry, but this dynamic also reflects a wider trend in the cultural landscape of post-war Britain. If Shakespeare is appropriated as a symbol of the imagined community of the nation during wartime, then it is also the case that Shakespeare comes to function as a particularly potent symbol of national regeneration in the post-war period. This is especially evident in the renewed campaign for the establishment of a National Theatre on the South Bank as a memorial to the national poet. Consequently the potency of the Shakespeare film as a flagship product for the British film industry – or the Rank Organisation – is informed in the post-war climate not just by concerns over an Americanising of the national film culture, but by cultural and industrial developments in the post-war theatre industry; indeed, these two foci are intricately connected. If, in wartime Britain, Olivier came to function as effigy for Shakespeare and figurehead for the imagined community of the nation through Henry V, then, in this developing cultural context, the fully-fledged Shakespearean star performs the very same role for the evolving British film industry through his second Shakespeare adaptation, Hamlet.

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chapter 2

Hamlet (1948)

the film of tomorrow Weekly Review, 1948

[Hamlet] restores the prestige of British films

New Statesman and Nation, 1948

In [Hamlet] the screen, and particularly the British screen, has aimed at a standard previously untilted at.

Kinematograph Weekly, 1948

[Hamlet] is at any rate a further proof that although [Britain] may be poor in many things, it is immensely rich in the products of its cultural inheritance. There are many signs that it is on the threshold of a new Renaissance. Montreal Daily Star, 19481

These excerpts from press reviews of Olivier’s 1948 adaptation of Hamlet variously associate the film with a wider sense of industrial regeneration; for the critic writing in the Montreal Daily Star, however, Hamlet is also indicative of something more: namely, the post-war regeneration – or ‘Renaissance’ – of Britain itself. The interrelation foregrounded here between the ‘poor’ post-war British nation and the ‘rich . . . products of its cultural inheritance’ reflects contemporary cultural discourses that align national regeneration with an investment in and preservation of Britain’s artistic heritage. However, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the British film industry is often excluded from consideration as a viable vehicle for the articulation of the nation’s ‘cultural inheritance’ and post-war recovery. Instead, this correlation is most obviously narrated thorough intensely nationalistic formulations of the theatre as an institution that constitutes, in contrast to the cinema, the legitimate hub of Britain’s cultural heritage. It is within this context that Olivier’s Hamlet trades on the hybrid status of the Shakespearean star in order to intervene in post-war discourses that 50

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The Old Vic, 1940–1946

51

contrast the theatre and the cinema as legitimate forms of national and cultural expression. In order to fully understand how Hamlet works to do this, it is necessary to consider the evolving status of the theatre (and particularly the Old Vic) as a national institution in Britain between 1940 and 1946, in addition to the emerging relationship between the theatre and the cinema in the cultural imagination during this time. These concerns clearly impact upon the film’s aesthetic strategies, yet, with the notable exception of Robert Shaughnessy, scholars writing on Hamlet tend to focus on the film text’s aesthetic negotiation between theatrical and filmic techniques at the expense of the particular contexts of production that inform this negotiation.2 With this in mind, it is significant that the slippage between theatrical and cinematic frameworks that characterises Hamlet is – as with Henry V – also dramatised extratextually: that is, through its marketing materials and through the promotion of Olivier as a specifically Shakespearean star. It is for this reason that I move, again, to privilege these materials here, working to understand Hamlet as constituting one part of a complex intertextual chain. As this suggests, directing our attention towards extra/intertextual materials in this way also means directing our attention towards Olivier’s later autobiographical work and its engagements with Hamlet. This is a significant corollary. After all, it is in this relationship that the cultural function of the Shakespearean star is at its most visible; indeed, Olivier’s life-writing encourages us to read Hamlet as an autobiographical expression of his contemporary experiences as actor, director and producer of the 1948 film. In dialogue with the earlier materials, the potent collapse between Shakespearean star image and narrations of a Shakespearean selfhood evidenced here gives us some insight into the effectiveness of Hamlet’s production and publicity strategies from 1946–8 with the cultural climate of post-war Britain in mind.

The Old Vic, 1940–1946 During the war, the Old Vic company was promoted not only as a symbol for the continuing robustness of national culture, but also as a model for the much longed-for National Theatre. Indeed, these two emphases were intricately connected, because the idea of a National Theatre – prophesied through the wartime achievements of the Old Vic – meant looking forward to the post-war reconstruction of Britain. Ivor Brown, writing in the Observer in 1941, described the Old Vic as a company ‘of national

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Hamlet (1948)

importance’ and as a scion of future possibility: ‘We may dream of our post-war National Theatre in London: we are in fact, and in wartime, making a national theatre in the country.’3 In a similar vein, Basil Dean, writing for the Times, credited the Old Vic with constituting a major ‘factor in the nation’s vitality’ during wartime, and argued that ‘the theatre should occupy [a place] in our national life during the years of reconstruction’.4 However, Dean also reminds readers that attitudes towards the theatre appeared to be characterised by a ‘spirit of indifference’5 before the war, an anomaly that raises the question of how exactly the theatre – and, particularly, the fostering of a potential national theatre company – suddenly came to be regarded as essential to national life in the post-war period. Certainly it is a shift that speaks to the effectiveness of wartime investment in the promotion of the theatre as a particularly British institution. In April 1940, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was officially established, a government-sponsored body designed to sustain national morale through support of the arts. CEMA’s mission lay in fostering ‘a high standard in the arts of the nation and [making] them as widely accessible as possible’.6 In the early years of the war, CEMA was instrumental in enabling the Old Vic company to tour the provinces, starting in 1940 with tours of South Wales and Durham; according to Andrew Davies, it was precisely the success of this arrangement that ‘encouraged CEMA to support [other] dramatic companies’.7 On their return to London in 1944, the Old Vic company took up residence at the New Theatre in London’s West End.8 CEMA offered, as George Rowell records, to guarantee the first season (1944–5) at the New Theatre ‘against loss up to £10,000’.9 In the event, however, CEMA’s money was not required. The 1944–5 Old Vic season at the New Theatre was to be the first under a new triumvirate of directors or, as the Guardian described them, ‘a galaxy of distinction’.10 Enlisted to enable the Old Vic to compete in the commercial whirligig of the West End, this ‘galaxy of distinction’ consisted of John Burrell, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. Olivier describes his appointment, following a conversation with Richardson and Tyrone Guthrie, in Confessions: These two felt deeply that the Old Vic should be redeemed from the extinction into which it had fallen . . . in order to answer the growing sense of dissatisfaction with the poor class of entertainment available. Those on leave from services or other war work and even the civilian population were all members of a civilized community and justifiably felt they had the right to the sweets of emotional and intellectual uplift . . .11

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A National Theatre and an Americanising Cinema

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Olivier’s narration in Confessions reflects pertinent formulations of the theatre as a national institution in the immediate post-war period. Firstly, Olivier references the unhappy ‘extinction’ into which the theatre had fallen during the war.12 Secondly, Olivier rearticulates CEMA’s position on the importance of the promotion of the theatre to the national image, linking the Old Vic’s redemption with the ‘uplift’ required of the national community. Thirdly, Olivier describes this national community – represented by the theatre-going public – as a ‘civilised’ and intelligent ‘population’ of servicemen, workers and civilians. These concerns proved central to the imagining of the theatre as a particularly British institution in an age of prevalent cinema-going. While theatre attendance was generally in decline, the cinema had flourished during the war, reaching, according to Dickinson and Street, ‘a peak of popularity’ in 1945, when ‘attendances [rose] from 19 million in 1939 to 30 million’.13 In response to this discrepancy, post-war calls for a National Theatre frequently urged the necessity of protecting Britain’s cultural heritage against the force of popular culture peddled by – and epitomised by – the cinema. In a letter to the Times in 1945, for example, Robert Morley prophesied that ‘England [might] become the centre of theatrical culture in the world’ were it not for the fact that the population had a tendency to ‘wile [sic] away . . . hours in vapid entertainment’ at the cinema.14 As this suggests, the emphasis on the theatre as a kind of national nucleus, a stronghold of British cultural heritage through which the postwar vitality of the nation could be asserted, tends to go hand in hand with a distrust of the corrupting cultural effects of the cinema. But, as the mounting suspicion of the potentially un-British activities of the Rank Organisation indicates, this kind of aversion to the cinema more specifically reflects an intense wariness concerning America’s growing cultural influence in post-war Britain.

A National Theatre and an Americanising Cinema Apprehension regarding Britain’s growing economic dependence on America is reflected, as Dickinson and Street assert, in the overwhelming ‘distaste for American culture’ that characterises the immediate post-war period. If America was typically ‘portrayed as the home of vulgarity, of values debased by mass production’, then, inevitably, the cinema – propagating a steady influx of Hollywood films – constituted a prime focus for such concerns.15 Fears regarding the growing influence of American culture and the potential threat that it posed to British society are certainly

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Hamlet (1948)

reflected in contemporary comment that associates the popular (and specifically American) cinema with a decline in the nation’s moral health: Will you please allow me the courtesy of your columns to ask why we cannot cut out the rubbishy American films which form so great a part of an average cinema show today? . . . It seems to me that these rubbishy films ought first to be stopped before the tobacco cut – in addition, it would be in the interests of the moral and mental health of our youngsters, to say nothing of their language. (W.E. Pritchard, Guardian, 194716) I am convinced that the main agencies of mischief [amongst young people] are the wireless and the cinema . . .. The idea seems to be that no story is worth telling unless it ends in a “blood-bath.” Why should we go on with this glorifying of wrong-doing as though it were the kind of adventure young people should emulate? There is plenty of wholesome adventure in life’s story, if our cinema artists and broadcasters will make it their theme. (Percy Hurd, Times, 194817)

Defined against the Americanising cinema and its uncouth patrons, the theatre (as Olivier’s own 1982 retelling of this period makes clear) is consistently associated with a refined national audience interested in the preservation and celebration of British cultural heritage: for Basil Dean, these patrons constitute nothing less than ‘a brave new world of young audiences’.18 As Dean’s comment suggests, wartime and post-war celebrations of the potential national theatre – the Old Vic – consistently evoke the promise of Britain’s future through references to a nostalgically theatrical and specifically Shakespearean past. As early as 1941, an article by Ivor Brown in the Guardian aligned the Old Vic’s regional tours with early modern theatrical practice, a move that worked to invoke a reassuring sense of national continuity: Old ways return. The presence of the London players in smallish towns and even in villages is itself a renewal of the oldest theatrical practice. Shakespeare and his fellows, for example, went on tour when the plague made their natural stages untenable. Then a plague of boils; now a plague of bombs.19

A 1945 editorial in the Times similarly suggested that the ‘revival of faith’ in a permanent company at the Old Vic replicated the formative experiences of Shakespeare for the post-war nation.20 Finally, Dean’s description of upcoming theatre patrons as constituting ‘a brave new world of young audiences’ explicitly celebrates the national present through the national past.21 Here, Shakespeare is evoked as an iconic cultural force of futurity, a representative of the ‘brave new world’ of post-war Britain.22

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A National Theatre and an Americanising Cinema

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This sense of an assertion of post-war nationhood through the preservation of the cultural traditions of the past is also echoed by emphases on the importance of the establishment of the National Theatre as a lasting memorial to Shakespeare. In these formulations, the National Theatre – or, rather, Shakespeare – is imagined as constituting an essential bulwark in the preservation of the national culture against the unnamed but nevertheless implicit shadow of Americanisation; as Lord Esher put it, ‘the National Theatre, with the inspiration of the Old Vic behind it, would teach people to act and to listen and preserve the purity and continuity of the English Language which [has] been so sadly corrupted in recent years’.23 As this suggests – and as Mr Pritchard’s comment in the Guardian (quoted above) certainly attests – the alleged Americanising of the British language as a result of exposure to the cinema constituted a particular preoccupation in the mid-1940s and, against this, the theatre represented the ultimate bastion of Britishness, what Shaughnessy refers to as ‘a citadel of the mother tongue’ able to ‘[preserve] the spoken word’s integrity against the onslaught of the industrially produced, ubiquitously circulating visual image’.24 These formulations of the Old Vic as a flagship for post-war promise, blocking the path of impending cultural Americanisation, support Dominic Shellard’s contention that by 1945 the Old Vic represented ‘an emblem of national consciousness second only to Shakespeare’.25 However, the question remains as to how the revival of the Old Vic as an ‘emblem of national consciousness’, or, more aptly, of Shakespeare, might impact upon concerns regarding Americanisation that are levelled at the film industry, and specifically at the Rank Organisation from 1943. While studies of the wartime and post-war emergence of a specifically British filmic tradition distinct from Hollywood tend to focus on the establishment of the documentary-realist films produced by so-called independent producers such as Balcon at Ealing, it is pertinent to consider how the Shakespeare film – produced by Two Cities Films Limited for the Rank Organisation – fits in here. Between 13 September and 11 April 1944, the new Old Vic company performed Richard III at the New Theatre, with Laurence Olivier as Richard. Richard III was to constitute the outstanding success of the 1944–5 season, with the Guardian saluting Laurence Olivier’s ‘remarkable’ and ‘dazzling’ performance.26 In the Observer, a particularly ecstatic J.C. Trewin described the ‘major Shakespearean performance’ that he had witnessed, with the ‘evilly debonair’ Olivier projecting what he drolly felt to constitute ‘the true double Gloucester’.27 In a 1944 editorial that demonstrates the significance of the thriving theatre to projections of the

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Hamlet (1948)

national image at the end of the war, the Guardian understands the Old Vic’s success with Richard III to reflect the vitality and fortitude of the imagined community of wartime Britain; here, Olivier’s performance is described as constituting a ‘[work] of art in which any nation at any time might justifiably take pride’, particularly ‘in the London of the “little blitz” and the “flying bomb”’.28 As a result of such formulations, Felix Barker – Olivier’s earliest biographer – records a shift in public opinion, a general consensus that ‘asked if [following Richard III] Olivier should not now be considered the greatest living actor’.29 That such debates attended the Old Vic season is certainly borne out by the critic James Agate who recalls that ‘the editor of a theatrical magazine’ had written to ask ‘which I consider the better actor, Olivier or Gielgud’.30 In the end, Olivier’s inauguration as the greatest living actor seemed to be conferred upon him by Gielgud himself, when he famously presented Olivier with the sword once used by Edmund Kean in the role of Richard III, and inherited by Gielgud from his mother, Kate Terry. Olivier described the gift as ‘A great and unselfish and typical act of friendship, but a greater love for the art of acting’.31 What is especially important about Olivier’s 1944 breakthrough in Richard III is that it coincides with the release of the filmic Henry V, a film in which, as The Tatler and Bystander declared, ‘Laurence Olivier Embodies the Fighting Spirit of our Ancestors’.32 Coupled with his success at the Old Vic, the release of Henry V ensures that Laurence Olivier represents a particularly potent star text by 1945, functioning simultaneously as a national signifier for the achievements of wartime Britain and its theatre and film industries. Unsurprisingly, then, reviews of Henry V in the national press consistently align this new movement in cinematic Shakespeare with the emergent national stronghold that constitutes the Old Vic and the post-war British theatre. In the Manchester Guardian, the recent Old Vic season provided the background to an account of the film, with the reviewer declaring that Olivier’s Henry ‘is like his Richard III on stage’ and concluding that ‘it is uncommonly invigorating to hear such fine and lively language in the cinema’.33 The Times responded by publishing a comprehensive editorial on the new phenomenon of ‘Shakespeare on the screen’ initiated by Henry V.34 This piece aptly demonstrates how the Olivier Shakespeare film functions to negotiate the disparate cultural discourses associated with the theatre and the cinema as national institutions at the end of the war: [the theatre] can only reach a fraction of the population; there is a cinema, on the other hand, in every village street and it is this ubiquity of the screen . . . which makes the experiment of filming Henry V in technicolour of the greatest

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importance . . . Those whose business it is in America to advise on the saleable properties of films seem sometimes to give a cruel judgement on the mental capacity of the multitude, and it has always seemed that the cinema is too much inclined to play down to the imagined dictates of public taste. Henry V is a test case. The public now has its chance, and its verdict will do much to decide whether or not it is, by implication, being libelled and whether there is a future in the cinema for Shakespeare and others of his cast and mould.35

Here, Henry V is characterised as an intensely British film, the emblematic product of a national film industry unhampered by the aesthetic and cultural demands of Hollywood. While Rank’s intended post-war export drive is consistently linked with ‘a tendency to pander to American tastes’ and even to the American language, the Shakespeare film functions as an apparently legitimate cinematic articulation of the British nation and its cultural heritage, providing what the Palache report had called Britain’s ‘own contribution’ to the cinema.36 In addition, this formulation of the Shakespeare film – apparently not driven by commercialism or ‘the box-office’ – works to neutralise concerns regarding the Rank Organisation’s monopolistic practices, concerns that so dominate industrial discourses from the early 1940s and that are intricately linked to notions of Americanisation. With this in mind, the editorial also addresses the Shakespeare film’s emphasis on the theatrical as an antidote to the supposed banality widely associated with American film, catering to ‘public taste’ without damning ‘the mental capacity of the multitude’; borrowing from Shakespeare, the British film industry is imagined to have produced what Jon Burrows has elsewhere called a ‘legitimate cinema’.37 In light of the issues raised in this editorial, it is particularly significant that Henry V’s initial release also coincides with the submission of the Palache report to the Board of Trade in July 1944. In May 1945 – four months after the Times editorial was published – J. Arthur Rank flew to America in order to conduct his controversial investigation into the reception and exploitation of British films and to make preparations for the much anticipated post-war export drive. A week earlier, Production Facilities (Films) Limited had sent Olivier, on behalf of J. Arthur Rank, a contract to sign in which he committed his services as actor, producer and director for the cinematic production of Hamlet.38 Filming began in May 1947. In a 1948 letter to Rank, Olivier expressed his wish that Hamlet ‘does all that we hoped it would for you and your organisation’.39 The varied extratexts and ephemera released with the film give us some idea of exactly how Olivier’s Hamlet ‘does all that we hoped it would’ for the Rank Organisation.

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Figure 12 Cinema programmes for Hamlet: (a) original Odeon programme; (b) world premiere programme; (c) souvenir programme42

‘“Hamlet” Film is Model Compromise’40 The theatrical release of Hamlet was preceded by a long marketing campaign in which a series of production photographs from a notoriously closed set appeared as teaser features in national newspapers and magazines over a ten-month period; that is, from May 1947.41 On 12 June 1947, Olivier was knighted in the King’s Birthday honours list and became Sir Laurence Olivier, a circumstance that would very much inform Olivier’s own relationship with the film, as well as its critical reception. Press previews for Hamlet began on 4 May 1948, with the world premiere on 6 May. As with Henry V, a variety of publicity materials accompanied the film’s release; these range from ‘making of’ publications to cinema programmes and commemorative booklets. The extratextual materials that accompany Hamlet enable us to situate the film very precisely in relation to the pertinent cultural and industrial contexts discussed here. Indeed, in foregrounding Hamlet as ‘a model compromise’ between two representational modes – the theatrical and the filmic – these materials work to posit the Shakespearean star – Laurence Olivier – as an emergent interface between the theatre and the cinema as British institutions. Cinema Programmes These cinema programmes issued with Hamlet all bear a cover image of Olivier as the prince, reading (Figure 12). The image cites the familiar set designs by Roger Furse (much circulated in the national press), but, despite

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its nod to the shadowy cinematic Elsinore, Olivier-as-Hamlet appears to be framed in a particularly theatrical spotlight. This is made especially clear in the souvenir programme sold at the Central Cinema in Cambridge, where the high stone columns of Elsinore resemble nothing so much as a proscenium arch. The programmes are characterised by this sense of a constant oscillation between the theatrical and the filmic, working towards an overall impression of hybridity, and certainly upholding Bernice Kliman’s famous conception of Hamlet as a film ‘hybrid’.43 It is in this notion of hybridity that a particularly British cinematic aesthetic is urged, what the original Odeon programme designates as ‘a [deep] mark in the advance of filmcraft’.44 Most obviously, though, this emphasis on hybridity in the Hamlet marketing materials works to foreground an understanding of film as a particularly national-cultural art form by borrowing from the legitimising discourses associated with the theatre.45 From the outset, then, the Odeon programme works to embrace Hamlet as a production of both the theatre and the cinema. A list of dramatis personae, ‘The Players’, is juxtaposed with a roll call for ‘The Production Unit’, both given equal standing in relation to the final film. This list of creative and technical contributors is then followed by a short essay examining ‘How Hamlet was Put on Screen’. Akin to the variety of prefaces that accompany other spin-off publications relating to Hamlet (including Brenda Cross’s edited collection, The Film Hamlet: A Record of its Production, and Alan Dent’s Hamlet: The Film and the Play), this piece underscores the film as an ‘experimental’ treatment of the play.46 Along with other terms variously applied to the film by Olivier himself, such as ‘essay’, ‘engraving’ and, indeed, ‘experiment’,47 this emphasis works to enunciate the filmic production as a distinct entity that is nevertheless constructed around a sense of respect for – and impetus to preserve – ‘the artistic integrity of the play’.48 This paradoxical stress on theatrical or dramatic origins through an emphasis on Hamlet as an exciting ‘experiment’ in film production characterises all of the publicity materials that accompany the film. Indeed, in light of the industrial-cultural contexts outlined here, it becomes clear that it is precisely this emphasis on the theatrical that works to underscore Hamlet as a particularly British cinematic product. This is especially evident in the way in which the Shakespearean star is represented in relation to the film, because it is through its connection with Laurence Olivier as a premier theatrical authority that Hamlet is most obviously understood to constitute an important milestone in British film production:

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Hamlet (1948) It has been truly said that the interesting point about ‘hamlet’ is not that it is being filmed, so much as how it is being filmed. Olivier, not a professional film director, demonstrated in ‘henry v’ an imaginative technique in advance of conventional production. The impact of the originality of his conception has left a deep mark on the current cinema. ‘hamlet’ will make a far deeper mark in the advance of filmcraft.49

Here, it is the Olivier of the Old Vic, a man who is emphatically ‘not a professional film director’ that is foregrounded. Through Olivier, Hamlet will, like Henry V, make a significant impact on – and will even advance – current ‘conventional [film] production’, a phrase that evokes the mainstream cinema and has specific connotations for the Rank Organisation. Ultimately, the Odeon programme stresses a connection between Hamlet and the regeneration of the British film industry through an appropriation of the cultural status of the nation’s theatre or, more accurately, an appropriation of Olivier as a figurehead for the national theatre industry.50 As a journalist in Kinematograph Weekly put it, ‘“Hamlet” has been produced at a time when British studios are being attacked left, right and centre . . . The industry’s critics are vocal: if “Hamlet” turns their jibes into paeans of admiration we must be additionally grateful to it.’51 Accordingly, in its biography of Olivier, the Odeon cinema programme announces Hamlet as ‘the most important production [Olivier] has yet attempted’.52 The legitimising mediation between the theatrical and the filmic enunciated by the Shakespearean star is underscored in the Odeon programme’s presentation of the players’ biographies, which foreground – and then work to foreclose – a disparity between the performative modes imagined to be epitomised respectively by the theatre and the film star. The calibre of Olivier’s theatrical casting is reflected in the biographies of such luminaries as Eileen Herlie – described as ‘one of the great tragediennes of the modern English Theatre’ – and Basil Sydney, whose role as Claudius is announced in light of the fact that ‘he played the same role on the stage in London’.53 Amongst this particularly theatrical cast, however, Jean Simmons constitutes the exception to the rule. Introduced as ‘one of the great British “star” discoveries’ who is ‘under long-term contract to the Rank Organisation’, Simmons is foregrounded as a signifier of the cinema.54 While Olivier is described as a star, Simmons is a ‘star’, the quotation marks highlighting a disparity between the different kinds of celebrity embodied by each. This distinction is consistently replicated in other tie-in products as well as in press features that concern the making of the film. In The film Hamlet: A Record of its Production, for example, Simmons’s essay focuses on her

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experiences as a film actress and, therefore, the theatrical ‘inexperience’ that she felt ‘would be very obvious in the company of so many celebrated Old Vic players’.55 However, in asserting this, Simmons also stresses her ‘cinematic sense’, a benefit that she imagines herself to possess over ‘many of the “Hamlet” cast’.56 Simmons represents a significant figure in Hamlet’s negotiation of the theatrical and the filmic as disparate representational and performative modes, functioning as an emblem of a new and distinctive national film aesthetic that evades established criticisms associated with theatricality in the cinema, particularly as they apply to acting styles. This is made clear in press reviews that associate Simmons’s presence with a cinematic freshness or modernity over an old-fashioned theatricality. Time magazine, for example, understands Jean Simmons – ‘a product of the movie studios exclusively’ – to ‘[give] the film a vernal freshness and a clear humanity which play like orchard breezes through all of Shakespeare’s best writing, but which are rarely projected by veteran Shakespearean actors’.57 With this in mind, the image of Simmons as Ophelia is meaningfully positioned in the world premiere edition of the cinema programme for Olivier’s Hamlet. In the world premiere programme, Simmons’s image is juxtaposed with a short essay entitled ‘Filming Hamlet: Past And Present’.58 In contrast to the history of stage Hamlets that appears in Hamlet: The Film and the Play or The Film Hamlet: A Record of its Production, this essay situates Olivier’s film within a British cinematic tradition. Citing Cecil Hepworth’s silent production of 1913 (dir. Hay Plumb) as ‘the first important attempt’ to realise Hamlet on screen, the essay goes on to celebrate ‘the improved methods which [have marked] the advancement of the film industry’ since Hepworth’s production thirty-four years before.59 Such advancement, however, is unfortunately understood to have only increased ‘the difficulties in making a film of this kind’ by 1948. This is because Olivier’s film represents a fundamental shift in Hamlet’s screen history; rather than a static recording of a theatrical performance, Olivier ‘[translates] the play into Cinema’: whereas Hepworth had simply to produce a representation of ForbesRobertson’s stage “hamlet” for audiences who regarded “moving pictures” as an amusing new toy, Olivier has had to produce an artistic film for extremely critical audiences.60

Susan Sontag has suggested that ‘the history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical modes’, but while this impetus towards emancipation is certainly evoked here, it is managed

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Figure 13 Page from world premiere programme for Hamlet

through a complex conflation between the cinema and theatre as national industries.61 For example, contrasting Hepworth’s theatrical ‘static camera’ with Olivier’s cinematic shooting technique – described as ‘on the move’ – the 1948 Hamlet is imagined to achieve an innovative compromise between the theatre/theatrical films of the past and the new, modern cinema.62 In this way, the world premiere programme announces Hamlet as an example of a contemporary British cinema that nevertheless has its roots in a venerable stage and screen tradition. Simmons’s image is central to this impression of Olivier’s Hamlet as representative of a major development in the cultural and industrial history of Shakespeare in production; this is directly due to the fact that the publicity materials released with the film consistently assert her status as a cinema actress. The images that accompany the essay – Forbes-Robertson declaiming in the graveyard scene; Olivier’s performance in the same scene in the 1948 film text; Olivier directing; Simmons as Ophelia – trace this sense of progression, citing a performative and industrial history through transitional representations of the British theatre and film star (Figure 13). Ultimately, these representations contribute to a wider sense of national and cultural continuity that is most explicitly urged in the essay’s final paragraph:

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Olivier’s production is entirely cinematic. Unfettered by the demands and restrictions of the stage, he has made the film in the way he believes Shakespeare might have done, had he been a modern screenplay writer instead of a Tudor playwright.63

The cultural status associated with the theatre is thus transposed to a new era of British cinema through Hamlet and – pertinently – through an evocation of Olivier as a cultural surrogate for Shakespeare, the ultimate function of the Shakespearean star. In this particular formulation, Shakespeare/Olivier bridges the cultural gap that is imagined to exist in post-war discourses between the theatre and the cinema as national art forms. Clearly, this dynamic has significant implications for the Rank Organisation, as the world premiere programme confirms. The world premiere programme opens with a statement from Lord Cromer, the president of the Council of King George’s Pension Fund for Actors and Actresses; this is the charity that would be the beneficiary of the proceeds to be collected at this inaugural exhibition of Hamlet. Recalling a 1911 charity gala performance at His Majesty’s Theatre, Lord Cromer equates the Hamlet premiere (another royal occasion) with this prior auspicious event and, indeed, with the recent history of – solely theatrical – events that had been organised for the fund: the Theatre enabled a substantial contribution to be made to our cause. Tonight, the Film Industry, thanks to the generosity of Mr. J. Arthur Rank’s Organisation, is giving an assured hope of future pensions. The talking Film has burst the bounds of space; no longer are we confined to one building and the compass of the human voice. Today as we view this Performance of “hamlet”, the voice and image of Sir Laurence Olivier is with us as our thoughts go out to him in Australia.64

The Rank Organisation and the film industry are here connected with a history of royal or national patronage of the theatre, a connection that is underscored by the reference to Olivier’s absence in Australia, where he was embarking on a national tour for the Old Vic. The slippage induced in Cromer’s speech between the theatre and the cinema as national institutions encapsulates the project of the general marketing materials published with Hamlet. Emphasising collaboration and cooperation, concerns about the negative impact of the cinema on the theatre as a national institution are overridden. Indeed, Cromer’s speech offers a particularly theatrical blessing to this new cinematic production, a production that has ‘burst the bounds of space’ but is still described as a ‘Performance’.65 (2). With

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Cromer’s description in mind, the final item that I consider here speaks directly to Hamlet’s ‘model compromise’, making it nothing less than physically tangible.66 Booklet and Model Theatre If the marketing and press materials surrounding Hamlet work to foreground Shakespeare/the Shakespearean star as an interface for the theatre and the cinema as British institutions, then the commemorative booklet released with the film epitomises that project. The booklet is described as ‘not only a unique record of one of the greatest films of modern times, but . . . specially designed so that the scenery and characters can, if desired, be mounted and displayed upon the stage of a Model Theatre’.67 Indeed, the title page adequately references the booklet’s status as a filmic extratext that provides Wickham’s ‘nexus between text and context’ because it offers a three-tiered image in which the cinematic Hamlet is viewed both through the model stage itself and through a more realistically painted proscenium arch (Figure 14). Here, Roger Furse’s cinematic set designs (which provide the scenic backdrops for the model theatre) are discernible behind the cut-out characters designed for use on the model stage. Indeed, the pillars of the model theatre are also clearly visible in the middle ground, with all bordered by an overarching proscenium frame. Anchored by the proscenium arch, the expansive cinematic space cites the film through its theatrical origins, with the booklet’s commemorative status marking Hamlet as a new venture in the cultural reproduction of Shakespeare. Offering a variety of scene synopses with directions for performance in the model theatre (which advocate a lot of dramatic curtain raising and lowering), the booklet reproduces the set designs from the film alongside a plethora of pantomimic theatrical characters that restates this sense of gradual slippage between the theatrical and the filmic (Figure 15). These characters are garishly coloured, and while the image of them performing in front of Furse’s muted and expressionistic design for the Queen’s chamber with its vagina-like bed is somewhat jarring, the cut-out figures function as mediating presences between the stage and the screen. They encapsulate the simultaneous emphasis on the booklet as a ‘delightful record of the film, and an introduction to the complete play’ and reiterate Hamlet’s cultural potency as a cinematic vehicle for the articulation of the nation’s

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Figure 14 Cover image from model theatre booklet for Hamlet

literary and dramatic heritage, a characteristic also evident in the other marketing materials considered in this section.68 It remains the case, however, that, as a result of their mediating function, these intensely coloured dramatic figures, in celebrating the theatre, also draw attention to the particularly cinematic qualities of Olivier’s film because they dramatically underscore the expressionistic quality of Furse’s set designs. This, in turn, directs our attention towards another powerful intertext connected to the 1948 Hamlet: the autobiography. As I have shown, a sense of slippage between the star image and a conception of selfhood that is aligned to Shakespeare is central to the efficacy of Shakespearean stardom. Coupled with the film text’s expressionistic aesthetic, Olivier’s later autobiographical reworkings of Hamlet encourage us to (re)read Hamlet as a subjective engagement with Olivier’s construction as a Shakespearean star and figurehead for the national theatre and film industries during this period, rehearsing and consolidating that status.

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Figure 15 A selection of scenes and characters from model theatre booklet for Hamlet

Reading the Film through the Autobiography So oft it chances in particular men That through some vicious mole of nature in them, By the o’ergrowth of some complexion Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, Or by some habit grown too much; that these men – Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Their virtues else – be they as pure as grace, Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.

To paraphrase the infamous tagline associated with the PickfordFairbanks The Taming of the Shrew (dir. Sam Taylor, 1929), the 1948 Hamlet opens with a quotation from the play by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Laurence Olivier. The adapted citation from Shakespeare’s play performs two specific functions. Following a gradual dissolve between images of crashing waves, disorientating fog and the stone battlements of Elsinore, the recitation of these lines asserts the psychoanalytic emphasis of the film text and the related megalomaniac

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atmosphere that impacts Olivier’s Elsinore. Meanwhile, the addition by the actor-director – ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’ – foregrounds the interpretive crux of Olivier’s much anticipated cinematic ‘essay’ and, in doing so, underscores the stakes inherent in fulfilling the role of ‘Shakespeare’s interpreter’.69 As is clear from the outset, Hamlet is characterised by a labyrinthine miseen-scène that evokes the troubled mind of its protagonist, with the camera journeying through a shadowy, skull-like and cavernous Elsinore. Ernest Jones’s influence is heavily perceptible here. Jones’s Freudian psychoanalytical reading of the play had inspired Olivier’s performance as Hamlet in the 1937 Old Vic production and Olivier consistently cites Jones in his own commentary on the film.70 This stress on the psychology of Hamlet and its pervasive impact on the mise-en-scène (evidenced by the heavily symbolic set designs) also aligns the film with the sudden spate of Hollywood crime thrillers – later designated noir – that emerged during the 1940s and propagated a popular form of psychoanalysis, what Frank Krutnik calls ‘popFreud’.71 Evoking a disordered and obsessive perspective through the employment of expressionistic techniques, this cycle of films consistently presents a ‘distorted mise-en-scène [that] serves as a correlative of the hero’s psychological destabilisation’.72 Donaldson certainly understands the miseen-scène in Hamlet to function in this way, but, for Donaldson, the hero whose psychological destabilisation is reflected in the labyrinthine passages of the cinematic Elsinore is not Hamlet, but Olivier himself. In what is to my knowledge the only other critical work that reads Olivier’s cinematic Shakespearean adaptations alongside his life-writing, Donaldson contends that Hamlet is informed by ‘autobiographical pressures’ that directly relate to the sexualised bullying suffered by Olivier when at school.73 However convincing this autobiographical reading may be, Donaldson does not address the influence that contemporary cinematic trends might have on his ability to read the film in this way.74 Indeed, the adoption of an expressionistic aesthetic and psychic mise-en-scène reflects Hamlet as a product of the industrial and cultural contexts that I have outlined here and, in consequence – and therefore in contrast to Donaldson – I find that the ‘autobiographical pressures’ that inform the text are specifically related to this period in the late 1940s. What we can conclude, then, is that Olivier’s deployment of expressionistic techniques operates in two distinctive ways: firstly, they function as a signifier of Hamlet’s negotiation between theatrical and cinematic modes, particularly as Olivier uses them to develop the psychoanalytical discourses examined in his earlier 1937 performance for the Old Vic; secondly, they work in conjunction with Olivier’s life-writing in order to enable an autobiographical

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re-reading of the film text. However, an acknowledgement and examination of the relationship between Hamlet and Olivier’s life-writing is not the same as reading Hamlet as a directly autobiographical text in the way that Donaldson does. Rather, the film and the autobiography should be understood to function as intertexts that make meaning from each other. The possibility of establishing a relationship between the cinematic text and the autobiography is foregrounded from the outset as a direct result of Hamlet’s distinctive filmic framework. Here, Olivier’s voiceover is preceded not only by a succession of chiaroscuro images of waves, rocks and towers, but also by the final image of the film: the dead Hamlet borne aloft by soldiers on the topmost turret of Elsinore. This disorientating strategy of beginning at the end is augmented by the voiceover: the narrator is Olivier himself, performing as the film’s director rather than as the prince: ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.’ Here, it is possible to discern a connection in Hamlet between the universe of the film text, where narration and death appear to be intertwined, and the autobiography. This is because, in foregrounding Olivier’s presence as director through its opening narrative device, the film Hamlet – read in conjunction with Olivier’s life-writing – can also be considered to foreground Laurence Olivier as autobiographical subject. The film, Hamlet In Confessions of an Actor, Olivier asserts that Hamlet represented, for his forty-one-year-old self, ‘the most important work of my life’.75 An impression of Olivier’s intense and very personal investment in this, his second Shakespeare adaptation, haunts his autobiographical narratives, and in On Acting, the film is described in particularly proprietorial terms: ‘Whatever people may have thought of my Hamlet, I think it was not bad. I know it was not perfection, but it was mine. I did it. It was mine.’76 This sense of personal investment in the film – and a related anxiety concerning the public reaction to it – is matched by Olivier’s contemporary comment on Hamlet before its release. In his foreword to Hamlet: The Film and the Play, for example, Olivier implies that the Old Vic’s Australian tour had been deliberately scheduled so as to protect him from a potentially negative public response to the film: It was – as may well be imagined – with feelings of some trepidation, a kind of fearful awe, that I approached the idea of a Hamlet film. Indeed, it will be noticed, and doubtless commented upon, that I took the precaution of

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being in Australia when the film opened in London! But more seriously, the snares and pitfalls that await anybody who touches so world-famous a masterpiece were only too obvious to me.77

Though this comment presents as a characteristic instance of Olivier’s performative disingenuity, it nevertheless reiterates the level of cultural significance attributed to Hamlet not just by the film industry but by Olivier as actor-director and Shakespearean star. It also presents a pertinent example of the consistent slippage evoked by Olivier between himself and the character of Hamlet, a slippage that is endemic to Olivier’s autobiographical narratives as well as to his contemporary allusions to his role in the film. Indeed, in Hamlet: The Film and the Play, Olivier’s foreword is peppered with appropriations of the part of Hamlet, and the ‘snares and pitfalls’ that evoke Hamlet’s ‘slings and arrows’ here are matched by similar autobiographical allusions to, for example, Olivier’s auteurist ‘mind’s eye’, to an acknowledgement of his cinematic mission ‘to bring caviar to the general audience’, to his frustration over the ‘flat and stale’ delivery of a soliloquy (since cut)78 that might lead to the ultimate crime: committing ‘the murder most foul’ of Shakespeare’s text.79 Indeed, and as I will demonstrate, the possibility of committing the ‘murder most foul’ of Shakespeare remains the enduring preoccupation of both the autobiographical narrative and the rereading of the film text that the autobiographical narrative invites. If we return to the issue of Olivier’s adoption of an expressionistic aesthetic for Hamlet, we can see that the slippage between Olivier/ Hamlet that is evoked in contemporary texts such as Hamlet: The Film and the Play and in the later autobiographies is also foregrounded in the film text as a direct result of this aesthetic strategy. Or, rather, it is perhaps more accurate to say that Olivier’s autobiographical appropriations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet actually rework an earlier slippage between Olivier and Hamlet that is emphasised from the outset of this 1948 adaptation. This cinematic sense of an alternate focus on – or constant oscillation between – Olivier-as-Hamlet and Olivier-as-narrator/director is made particularly explicit in the film’s opening moments, where an overwhelming awareness of Olivier’s presences as Olivier haunts our introduction to Elsinore. Here, the fog that calls the narratorial voice into being dissolves into an image of the dead prince over which Olivier’s voice performs its interpretive function: ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.’ Olivier’s camera zooms in to focus on Hamlet’s body but this frame immediately dissolves into another tableau, another reproduction of the sequence in which the bodies of Hamlet and his soldiers are

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transformed into wooden figures representative of the real bodies that had just occupied that place. Sandra Sugarman-Singer has commented that these wooden characters constitute a reminder to the viewer ‘that the scenes which unfold before us do so under the control of an all-powerful story-teller, who manipulates his figures to suit his narrative’.80 Certainly, an emphasis on an overarching ‘all-powerful story-teller’ is developed by the camera movement here, with, as Davies describes, ‘the narrative persona [becoming] the camera almost at once’.81 Following the watch’s encounter with the Ghost, the camera – linked to the narrator – journeys down winding staircases and through cavernous, shadowy archways in order to take the viewer past a series of objects that mean in relation to Hamlet throughout the film. The first of these is the chair in which Hamlet soliloquises and broods throughout the film. This chair both is and is not Olivier’s director’s chair and it presents here as a mediating object between Olivier’s role as ‘Shakespeare’s interpreter’ (underscored by the inanimate wooden figures that frame the film text) and his performance as Hamlet.82 What the travelling camera and its link to the disembodied voiceover ultimately stress, then, is an immediate filmic distinction between two narrative entities: one cinematic (Olivier-asHamlet) and one extra-cinematic (Olivier-as-Olivier). Consequently, this extra-cinematic presence is emphasised not only by the movement of the camera, but by the complex interactions that take place between the camera/narrator and the physical body on screen of Olivier-asHamlet. In Hamlet, the physical corporeality of the prince is imagined as analogous to one of the inanimate wooden figures that frame the film text; that is, awaiting manipulation by Sugarman-Singer’s ‘all-powerful story-teller’, the other Olivier. This is well demonstrated in the presentation of Hamlet’s first soliloquy. The sequence begins with a high-angle shot: Hamlet is viewed reclining in his chair in the large, empty hall following the exit of Claudius, Gertrude and the rest of the court (Figure 16a). Immediately, the camera zooms in towards Hamlet from its high-angled position above the hall, with the prince remaining still as stone until the camera is close enough to his body, at which point he turns his head (Figure 16b–c). This is a subtle movement but the suggestion is that the camera effectively initiates Hamlet’s movement, literally animating him. Cutting to a close-up, Hamlet slowly turns his head back and the soliloquy begins in voiceover with the camera viewing from a low-angled position (Figure 16d). This recitation belongs to the extra-cinematic voice of the opening frames. Rising and moving to the chair that simultaneously cites Olivier as actor and as director,

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Figure 16a–d Olivier-as-Hamlet soliloquises in voiceover

Olivier-as-Hamlet corrects the voiceover’s ‘That it should come to this – / But two months dead’, replying ‘nay not so much, not two’ and raising his eyes to the high position associated with the narrator and at which point the sequence began.83 The soliloquy is characterised this way throughout, with certain lines attributed to Hamlet and the rest spoken in voiceover. On the final line, ‘But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue’, Hamlet returns to the chair in which he began the soliloquy.84 As this line is spoken in voiceover, it appears that, in ceasing movement again, Hamlet is following a command delivered by Olivier or is no longer animated by this extracinematic Olivier. The whole sequence creates a sense of sharing the soliloquy and emphasises Olivier’s authoring of Hamlet while at the same time creating an impression of difference. Here, Olivier and Hamlet (or Olivier-as-Olivier and Olivier-as-Hamlet) are underscored explicitly as co-existent and connected presences within the film. It is this complex sense of cinematic symbiosis that can be understood and developed further by directing our attention towards the life narrative. Indeed, if the opening wood-carved allusion to Sugarman-Singer’s ‘all-

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powerful story-teller’ can be understood to invoke Olivier as director of the 1948 film, it can also be understood to evoke another very specific presence – Olivier as subject of the 1980s autobiography. In On Acting, Olivier’s autobiographical account of the production of Hamlet invokes the memory of his voiceover from the 1948 film: ‘As Shakespeare’s interpreter, I would of course have to be true to his idea of tragedy and make up my mind about the vicious mole in Hamlet’s nature’ (my emphasis).85 This evocation works to instate the autobiographical subject into the film text (and vice versa) because, in paraphrasing Olivier’s interpretive crux – ‘the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’ – it underscores the filmic identification between the extracinematic Olivier and Olivier-as-Hamlet, subsequently uniting these entities under an overarching autobiographical signature. This notion of an overarching autobiographical persona is underscored by Olivier’s emphasis on the privileging of his own subjectivity as crucial to an understanding of the film: ‘I thought it quite legitimate to make my own subjective contribution . . . to add to the universal consciousness of Hamlet.’86 The claustrophobic and schizoid world of the film makes this subjective emphasis especially coherent and it is evoked by Olivier in his description of Hamlet’s cinematic landscape: ‘The story is seen through his [Hamlet’s] eyes and when he’s not present, through his imagination – his paranoia.’87 However, Olivier’s life-writing confirms that the story is seen, not just through Hamlet’s eyes but through Olivier’s; not just through Hamlet’s paranoia, but through Olivier’s. At this point in On Acting, the autobiographical subject is explicitly connected with the 1948 cinematic narrator who is, in turn, aligned with the nightmarish paranoia of Hamlet in the film. It is precisely this procession and conflation of multiple Olivierian figures – Hamlet, cinematic adaptor, autobiographical subject – that enables an autobiographical reading of the cinematic text. It is no wonder that Rasmus describes the 1948 film as a ‘picture [that] smacks of megalomania’.88 Shifting attention away from the film text, Olivier’s autobiographical material offers us an alternative lens through which to read the film, Hamlet. In doing so, it takes us to the very heart of the complex negotiation that produces Olivier as a specifically Shakespearean star. The Autobiography When Olivier refers to ‘Shakespeare’ in On Acting, he does not directly evoke the dramatist who was born in 1564 and died in 1616; instead, he

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evokes a performance tradition in which various players function as signifiers – or surrogates – for the national poet: a cultural function that Olivier, as Shakespearean star, was, by 1944, expected to fulfil. Indeed, Olivier goes on to explicitly link the ‘spirit of Shakespeare’ with an ‘audience’s consciousness of Hamlet’, a connection that calls to mind an expectational performance tradition.89 This is a tradition that Olivier had imagined to be embodied by specific performing presences earlier in the life narrative: Blazing away out there are the spirits of Burbage, Garrick, Kean and Irving, lighting the theatrical sky for ever. Smiling, grinning, laughing and saying, “Follow that!” . . . Lead me by the nose, Richard, David, Edmund, Henry . . . Let me make the judges think that I am the best bull in the ring.90

Olivier’s anxious invocation of the laughing spirits of these theatrical giants of the past evolves into a prayer in which Olivier asks to be chosen as the heir to these prestigious forebears, who are now appealed to on first-name terms. In the space of a sentence, Olivier voices an anxiety about the challenge meted out by these forebears and a simultaneous confidence in his proven ability to ‘Follow that!’ – an eventuality that the autobiography will inevitably narrate and celebrate.91 In Confessions of an Actor and On Acting, it is Hamlet that represents the climactic point in Olivier’s apotheosis into the ‘theatrical sky’ that accommodates Richard, David, Edmund and Henry. However, the success of Hamlet also concludes what is described in the life narrative as a period of heightened anxiety concerning Olivier’s belief in his ability to adequately embody Shakespeare. Prior to Olivier’s description of the production of Hamlet in Confessions, he presents an increasingly bizarre account of his competitive relationship with Ralph Richardson during their time as co-directors of the Old Vic in the early to mid-1940s. Olivier describes how throughout this period he felt consumed by a ‘feeling of grievance’ related to the fact that ‘the finger seemed to point to [Ralph] as the more leading of the two of us’.92 Olivier develops this narrative in On Acting where he gleefully describes the turning point at which he felt he had surpassed Richardson (in Paris with Richard III), an event that rather colourfully leads to a maniacally jealous Richardson dangling Olivier over a Parisian balcony.93 As described by Olivier, Richardson’s anger is directly linked to Olivier’s inauguration as heir to the theatrical tradition lauded in the opening pages of On Acting. Indeed, Richardson is imagined as on the verge of forcing Olivier to ‘[act] with Henry Irving much sooner that I’d anticipated’.94 However, Olivier’s

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description of the murderous Richardson appears to represent a displacement of – or reworking of – Olivier’s own discomfort regarding Richardson’s supposed preeminence at this time. Certainly, the incident is not reported in Confessions, where, instead, it is Olivier’s jealousy that is illustrated as all-consuming, particularly following the news of Richardson’s knighthood in early 1947: I was unable to stop the cracked record from grinding round in my head: I’ve done every bit as much as he has, look how I’ve carried the flag abroad, New York, the American road, Hollywood pictures and an even fuller record in the classics; and there was a little film called Henry V. If only we could have been done together that would have been fine. Fine.95

The period prior to Hamlet, then, is viewed through a lens of inadequacy, an overpowering concern that perhaps it is Richardson rather than Olivier who constitutes Richard, David, Edmund and Henry’s ‘best bull’. Moreover, it is characterised by an overt awareness of the plaudits that had celebrated Olivier as the naturalised heir to a British theatrical tradition following Henry V and Richard III in 1944. For this reason, Olivier claims that he ‘approached [Hamlet] with terror and the utmost respect’.96 In the event, Olivier received a knighthood in the same year as Richardson and during the filming of Hamlet, in June 1947. Coupled with the receipt of an honorary award at the Oscars for Henry V, this double recognition appeared to confirm for Olivier his inauguration into a performance tradition that he had felt alternatively groomed for and excluded from: ‘On the day that my knighthood was announced, I stalked about Denham Studio, got up in Hamlet’s glad rags for the play scene . . . People weren’t quite sure if I was in costume or if I was always going to be dressed like that from now on.’97 However, despite the apparent sense of approval offered by the knighthood (which here appears to induce an ultimate conflation between Olivier and Hamlet/Shakespeare), the potentially fraught relationship with the memory of the various ghosts of Hamlets past that haunts Olivier’s autobiographical narrative also haunts Olivier’s ‘subjectivised’ reading of the film text.98 The sense of oscillation between anxiety and confidence that characterises Olivier’s life-writing can be mapped onto the film text and, specifically, onto the disparate filmic personae identifiable in Hamlet and represented by the extra-cinematic Olivier and the performing body of the actor. This dynamic can be explicated most convincingly in relation to Olivier’s rendering of Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost. Here, the life narrative enables a reading of this sequence as a retelling of the contemporary anxieties

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that are explored by Olivier in his autobiographies, particularly as they concern Olivier’s construction as heir to a prior theatrical tradition. The image of crashing waves that initiates this sequence reworks the film’s opening: here, too, the foaming waves fade into the fog-covered battlements and initiate Olivier’s disembodied voice: ‘The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.’99 Recited over the image of the battlements, these extradiegetic words might be mistaken for a direction concerning the setting of the scene. Immediately, however, it is Olivier-as-Hamlet who enters the frame. A cut to a medium shot distinguishes this persona from the extra-cinematic persona that is principally associated with low- and high-angle shots throughout the film and certainly in its opening frames. Interrupting his commentary on the court’s ‘heavyheaded revel’,100 Hamlet moves to the tower space where the film began in order to re-voice its opening recitation (‘So oft it chances in particular men . . . ’).101 The effect is to suggest the seemingly oppressive control that the narrator-figure impresses upon the film text, Hamlet’s words borrowed, his assertions belonging, ultimately, to somebody else. More to the point, however, it is these words that conjure the presence of the Ghost. A sharp, high-pitched chord is accompanied by a throbbing noise that could be marching or a heartbeat, but it is unclear to whom the noise might be attributed. Here we have another example of the film’s blurring of the distinctions between the extracinematic Olivier and Olivier-as-Hamlet, but with a surprising consequence. Hamlet rises, framed by a low-angle shot as the noise gets gradually louder; with each beat, the frame blurs only to become clear again as the camera moves closer and closer towards a Hamlet whose sharp intakes of breath and rolling eyes conclude with his collapse into Horatio’s arms as the latter exclaims: ‘It comes, my Lord!’102 Here, the beats become calmer, retreating further away, and Hamlet speaks to a vision off-camera that the viewer is yet to see. This sequence suggests Hamlet’s possession by the narrator-figure (as the camera moves in towards his head, disorientating him) but also, in its sudden dissociation from Hamlet, the camera/narrator’s creation of the Ghost. In this sequence, then, the Ghost appears to emanate from inside Hamlet himself, driven out by the narratorial persona or linked with its invasion of Hamlet. The distorted, blurred vision, the confusion and noise that accompany an invading tilt shot that travels towards the Prince’s head, only cease the moment that Hamlet has something to ‘look on’.103 The beats suggest labour pains as, increasing in intensity, they terminate only when the Ghost has effectively been produced: the camera’s focus on

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Hamlet’s head (a preoccupation throughout the film text) suggests the Ghost as an entity that originates in his mind. However, while the camera’s ability to see inside Hamlet’s head might intimate the film’s interest in the protagonist’s subjectivity, we have already seen that this investment in Hamlet’s psychology is intrinsically linked to the extra-cinematic presence of Olivier. Here, Olivier attempts to occupy Hamlet’s mind and emerges as the Ghost. This Ghost, however, represents none of the revered entities that haunt Olivier’s ‘theatrical sky’ and are evoked in On Acting. Rather, Olivier’s dilemma maps onto Hamlet’s as he is confronted with a monstrous double, a corrupted surrogate in place of the idealised embodiment of Shakespeare signified by those player-ancestors. This monstrous double is identified in a passage in On Acting, where the encounter with the Ghost as dramatised in Hamlet is recalled through the evocation of a by now familiar sense of slippage between actor/Hamlet: Whenever an actor first attempts Hamlet, he should be aware that it’s a sporadic collection of self-dramatisations in which he tries to play always the hero and, in truth, he feels ill cast in the part. His imagination is working as though he is a hero, but his soul is working in the brave light of the author, who decided to write a play with a hero who wasn’t a hero.104

The two presences evoked here are representative of the two presences foregrounded in the film text. In Hamlet, Olivier plays the hero but he simultaneously explores his vulnerable cultural position as the supposed embodiment of the ‘brave light’ of Shakespeare that, here, functions as a spotlight and threatens to reveal the real Olivier who, beneath the facade of his ideal Hamlet, is actually ‘ill cast’.105 Olivier’s anxiety regarding his ability to truly function as ‘Shakespeare’s interpreter’ during the 1940s, then, is articulated here through an appropriation of the film text that enables an autobiographical re-reading of the cinematic encounter with the Ghost in Hamlet, the other father that is not Shakespeare but might be Olivier. Indeed, the encounter with the Ghost in Hamlet is also appropriated elsewhere in the autobiographical narrative, where it enables Olivier to imagine a disquieting interaction with a specific theatrical forbear: Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. In Confessions, Olivier recalls being confronted by a ‘magnificent full-length portrait’ of the ‘resplendent’ Tree and ‘[quailing] a little under the full glare of those eyes’.106 In the autobiography, Tree is evoked as an anxiety-provoking figure, a Ghost-like entity that stands over the quailing Olivier and voicelessly conveys a paternal challenge. But

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this allusion to Tree in Confessions also engenders a reading of the film text where the autobiographical encounter with the portrait can be imagined to be extended and developed; this is because Olivier appears to visualise a similar encounter with Tree in Hamlet. Hamlet’s trailing of the Ghost guides the viewer through Elsinore’s stony ramparts and winding staircases; the journey is peppered with foginduced shot transitions, shifting camera angles and disorientating closeups. Encased in fog, both Hamlet and the Ghost appear to be standing on incorporeal shadows, when the Ghost speaks – with Olivier’s voice.107 Here we have an explicit representation of the extra-cinematic Olivier as a corrupted surrogate for Shakespeare, a representation that is furthered as the Ghost’s speech progresses and a comparative representative of Shakespeare is imagined through an invocation of Tree as King Hamlet. As the Ghost begins the narrative of its murder (‘Sleeping in my orchard . . .’) the camera focuses intently on Hamlet’s face in close-up.108 Hamlet closes his eyes in an action associated with the camera/narrator’s invasion of his mind, as demonstrated at the Ghost’s original appearance. The camera changes position and cuts to a close-up of the back of Hamlet’s head, into which the camera travels, through fog, in order to observe the reproduction of King Hamlet’s murder that takes place in the prince’s ‘mind’s eye’. However, the camera’s invasion of Hamlet’s head actually privileges Olivier’s ‘mind’s eye’, with an eye-shaped rent in the fog evoking this invasive extra-cinematic persona. At this point, it becomes clear that we are witnessing the latter’s representation of the murder, a fact emphasised by the camera’s unsubtle vertical tilting in towards the prince’s head. So what exactly does the extra-cinematic Olivier visualise? The representation of King Hamlet’s murder that is envisioned by Olivier as camera/narrator remembers Beerbohm Tree’s performance in the 1899 King John where the cloaked, bearded King reclines in front of some scenic shrubbery.109 Olivier reworks this image, positioning his cloaked and bearded King Hamlet underneath a more realistically represented tree (with, presumably, a pun intended) (Figure 17). The murder is played out as the Ghost narrates: Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole With juice of cursed hebona in a vial And in the porches of my ears did pour The leprous distilment . . .110

Despite the Ghost’s reference to ‘thy uncle’, Claudius’s face is not seen. Instead, we watch a hand protruding from a black, lace-adorned cuff,

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Figure 17 (a) Detail from King John (dir. W.K.-L. Dickinson, 1899); (b) murder of King Hamlet in the 1948 film (viewed through the eye-shaped rent that evokes the narratorial figure of Olivier)

a hand that proceeds to pour the poison into King Hamlet’s/Tree’s ear. As this image fades, Hamlet’s/Olivier’s own hand, surrounded by a black, lace-adorned cuff, reaches out in an attempt to possess that of the murdered King’s, which is raised in supplication. In this sequence, Olivier’s hand simultaneously represents that of both murderer and redemptor, his doubled presence in the filmic narrative underscored. Indeed, if Olivier worried about being ‘unfaithful to Shakespeare’ through Hamlet, then this sequence dramatises that anxiety.111 Positioned as the monstrous double of Shakespeare, Olivier envisions himself literally poisoning Beerbohm Tree’s memory while, at the same time, anticipating his eventual ascension to the idealised ‘theatrical sky’ invoked in On Acting through his performance as Hamlet.112 However, if the life narrative enables a reading of the film text as an expression of Olivier’s insecurity regarding his cultural function as a surrogate for Shakespeare in the 1940s, it also subsumes that concern through an attempt at autobiographical closure. If Olivier had imagined himself as a monstrous double of Shakespeare in the 1948 Hamlet, then the autobiographical narrative constructs its subject rather differently in the late 1980s: Just as I was determined to eliminate Irving and let the Old Man’s spotlight rest on me, the Young Man, now I have in turn become the Old Man and somebody somewhere must be thinking the same thoughts that I had in Hollywood all those years ago. Well, whoever you are and wherever you are, if you want it, you’ll have to come and get it. But I warn you, it will take more than physical strength and cunning to get it. First you have to dust clean the blackboard of the chalk of memory . . . But just remember, as you come tiptoeing along the passageway to the chamber of gold, that you will

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find an old man standing at the entrance, legs apart, back straight and erect, eyes piercing, barring the way.113

Here, not only does Olivier re-envision his autobiographical identification with the Ghost in Hamlet but, in personifying his living memory, he produces yet another figure to conclude the autobiographical chain that began with appropriations of his role in the film text. Olivier appears, here, as one of the idealised theatrical ghosts that had been evoked earlier in the life narrative, warning his successor that, in the same way that Hamlet wipes ‘away all trivial fond records’, he will have to ‘dust clean the blackboard of the chalk of memory’ in order to take Olivier’s place as surrogate for Shakespeare.114 This is certainly emphasised by the fact that the passage also reworks Olivier’s description of the portrait of Tree in Confessions, with Tree’s ‘eyes that blaze’ replaced with the ‘piercing eyes’ of his successor, Laurence Olivier.

‘Hamlet Restores our Film Prestige’115 Hamlet received an enthusiastic reception both in Britain and in America and was in the top two of Rank’s highest earners in the 1947–8 export drive, alongside Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.116 By August 1949, Henry V was also in profit.117 In March of the same year, Hamlet won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards, and the managing director of the Rank Organisation, John Davis, wrote to congratulate Olivier on the encouragement that the film had given a British industry ‘temporarily in the doldrums’.118 That Hamlet’s positive reception secured the rare beneficence of Davis speaks to the way in which the film’s success reflected on the Rank Organisation. In May 1948 John Ross reviewed Hamlet in the Daily Worker: The British film industry can hold up its head again. The J. Arthur Rank organisation [sic] is responsible for a version of Hamlet that can not only stand up artistically to the great stage successes of the past, but is a worthwhile and satisfying film achievement on its own merits.119

Ross’s review foregrounds Hamlet as a film that impacts upon the problematic reputation that had characterised the Rank Organisation during the early-mid 1940s; it does so by celebrating Rank’s achievement through a reference to Britain’s illustrious theatrical heritage, a connection that subsequently enables Hamlet to be imagined as the product of a distinctly British film industry. As this chapter has shown, it is precisely this impression of conflation between the theatre and the cinema as national

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institutions that characterises the extratextual materials that accompany the film, as well as the cinematic text itself. Incidentally, Ross’s emphasis on the film’s particular and distinct Britishness also dominates American critical comment on Hamlet. The New York reporter for the London Evening Standard praised Hamlet as ‘the most British production brought to America, and one of the greatest pictures of all time’. This report goes on to cite multiple reviews from various American publications such as the Daily Star, which celebrated a cast that ‘could only be called up in England, where the vitality of the Shakespearean tradition keeps the standards of the arts of the theatre uniquely high’. Meanwhile, the Daily News singled out Olivier for special commendation: ‘With the film of Henry the Fifth already to his credit, Hamlet puts Olivier at the top of his profession.’120 Intense interest in Olivier and his role as actor-director-producer is typical of critical and public responses to Hamlet, as had also been the case with Henry V. Following the international release of Henry V, for example, Lewis J. Deak had written to Olivier to offer him a part in a film that he was hoping to produce. Deak described Olivier as ‘hot as a fire cracker’ in America.121 As the Daily News extract suggests, Hamlet appears only to have raised Olivier’s international reputation. In October 1948, an eight-page spread in Life magazine offered an intimate biography of ‘the best actor and the best director alive’, declaring that, following Hamlet, ‘the vistas open to [Olivier] are limitless’.122 In Britain, a cartoon in the News Chronicle poked fun at Olivier’s rising American celebrity as it was directly linked to Shakespeare, imagining two US studio executives overlooking Shakespeare’s birthplace during the Stratford Festival and remembering Laurence Olivier rather than the national poet: in response to the puzzled expression of the first, the second executive clarifies ‘It’s the birthplace of the guy who writes the movies for Larry Olivier.’123 The cartoon juxtaposes a supposedly refined British theatrical culture with a trashy American popularism and makes this juxtaposition coherent through an appropriation of Olivier’s name. Here, the News Chronicle cartoon specifically plays on the post-war tensions between the theatre and the cinema that inform the 1948 Hamlet by connecting a sense of vulgarity with the idea of Hollywood celebrity. This is a commodified notion of celebrity that transforms the recently knighted Sir Laurence into ‘Larry Olivier’, and the national poet into a ‘guy who writes the movies’. Yet, the particular emphasis on celebrity reflected in the News Chronicle cartoon also gestures towards a wider, and related, concern that dominates the British industrial landscape from 1948. In March of that year, the Anglo-

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American film agreement was passed, its legislation to be effective from May. The cartoon would certainly have appeared in the News Chronicle at some point during this period. It is the palpable (and growing) tension between disparate notions of what constitutes British and Hollywood celebrity foregrounded in the cartoon – and the way in which this dichotomy maps onto nationalistic formulations of the British and American film industries in light of the Anglo-American film agreement – that would inform Olivier’s next adaptation, Richard III, in 1955. At this point in 1948, Henry V and Hamlet had ensured that Sir Laurence Olivier’s name was intrinsically associated with Britishness and the British creative industries, the fully-fledged Shakespearean star standing as a cultural bulwark against Hollywood domination. However, and as the News Chronicle cartoon wryly anticipates, as the British film industry continued to plunge into crisis at the end of the 1940s, for Olivier the lure of Hollywood was never far away.

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chapter 3

Richard III (1955)

From April to November 1955, Laurence Olivier led the Old Vic season at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Reviewing Olivier’s performance as Macbeth in a production that ran from June through to the end of the 1955 season, John Barber, in the Daily Express, mused on the current cultural status of Olivier himself: ‘for ten years now, Laurence Olivier has done nothing that has added an inch to his stature. Once he had a reputation. Now he has only fame.’1 Barber’s comments are significant because they gesture towards a marked shift that is perceived to have occurred in Olivier’s Shakespearean star image subsequent to the 1948 success of the filmic Hamlet and prior to the December 1955 release of Olivier’s third – and final – cinematic Shakespeare adaptation, Richard III. This is a shift that speaks to the remarkably different industrial landscapes in which these films were produced and it is one that impacts dramatically upon the aesthetic and thematic concerns of Olivier’s last cinematic Shakespeare. Ultimately, John Barber’s biting review of the Stratford Macbeth tells us that in 1955 Laurence Olivier’s image is aligned less comfortably with the concept of a legitimate British cinema and a flourishing British film industry than it is with its supposed antithesis, Hollywood. The 1955 Stratford season had ended somewhat of a dry spell for Olivier in terms of classical theatre, one that had begun with the culmination of Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s gruelling year-long Cleopatra double-bill from 1951–2.2 In between ‘Cleopatra’ and Stratford, Olivier had appeared in two films: a cameo role in The Magic Box (dir. Boulting, 1951) and as George Hurstwood in William Wyler’s Carrie (1952), the latter (as Wyler’s name suggests) a Hollywood production. In what is supposed to be a review of the Stratford Macbeth, John Barber produces, instead, a rather earnest rumination on Laurence Olivier’s viability as a British celebrity, that is clearly inspired by the (non-British) cinematic work he had undertaken for Carrie. Barber, oscillating between professing distaste for an Olivier who 82

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has ‘lost his way’ and a nostalgic yearning for the ‘old Olivier magnificence’, offers two distinct readings of Olivier’s celebrity at this time: one that evokes the theatre and Britain (encompassing the affiliated British film industry) and one that is aligned with Hollywood and the ‘gloss’ of a distinctly cinematic stardom: [In 1944] The film people would pay anything to get him. Scorning Hollywood, he had directed and starred in his own spectacular film of ‘Henry V.’ He was 38. The war was over . . . He could have acquired his own theatre, and as actor-manager dazzled the world with bold new enterprises. He could have commissioned new plays and given the Olivier stamp to classics as no one had done since Henry Irving. But some weakness in Olivier’s make-up shackled his hands. He went traipsing off to Hollywood to act a waiter in a feeble film called ‘Carrie’ . . . Always now, at his side, was Vivien Leigh.

The metamorphosis that Barber perceives Olivier to have undergone is outlined in specifically national terms, with Barber juxtaposing Britain and British theatrical icons with the lure of the US and, particularly, the Sirenlike machinations of Vivien Leigh, who is envisaged as responsible for transforming the once magnificent Laurence Olivier into a mere commodity: ‘He was no longer an individual. He was half of “The Oliviers”.’ Despite being British herself, Leigh is imagined here as representing a particularly American model of stardom: ‘a dazzlingly lovely but ordinary little actress’, Leigh, in short, represents style over substance. Barber’s hostile reading of Olivier’s image in 1955 exemplifies a continuing tendency in British cultural discourse to unfavourably juxtapose models of British and American film stardom, the former rooted in the theatre and performative skill, the latter in the cinematic commodification of the image. Differentiating between the star and the ‘star’, the marketing materials for Hamlet had worked to mediate these distinctions within the British cinematic context of the 1940s. In the early 1950s, however, they are newly intensified, reflective of the uneasy relationship that existed between Britain and Hollywood subsequent to the so-called Film ‘War’, an industrial crisis punctuated by the Anglo-American film agreement in March 1948. Informed by these pressures, Richard III foregrounds Olivier as a thoroughly British film star, celebrating actorly skill by showcasing his Shakespearean star body in both theatrical and cinematic modes of performance. In doing so, the film initiates a recuperation of Olivier’s image as it stood in the early 1950s. Olivier’s autobiographical work gives us, again, a unique perspective on this process because his 1980s re-readings of Richard III ask us to acknowledge the film text’s recuperative

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project, which extends beyond Barber’s assessment to encompass a series of personal and professional blows. Importantly, however, Olivier’s is not the only image that Richard III works to restore. Produced by Alexander Korda through London Films, the history of Olivier’s Richard III is embedded not just in the immediate cultural tensions attending concepts of British and American film stardom but in the earlier industrial crisis and its impact upon the home market. Alexander Korda, like Olivier, had a particularly personal investment in the production of Richard III.

Alexander Korda and the 1947–8 Film ‘War’ From the early 1930s and throughout the wartime period, Alexander Korda could be described as nothing less than a giant of the British film industry, a special status that can be traced back to the phenomenal success of London Films’ international release, in 1933, of The Private Life of Henry VIII. With Henry VIIII Korda had, as Greg Walker asserts, ‘almost singlehandedly brought British film-making to the attention of the world (and, more importantly, to America)’. 3 From Henry VIII onwards Korda’s name – and that of London Films – became associated with the production of spectacular historical epics that had Britishness and the promotion of the British nation as their central theme. For Korda, it was precisely this national subject matter that was the key to his international success: ‘to be really international a film must first of all be truly and intensely national’.4 That, as Walker clarifies, Korda’s ‘mythical international film was bound up with ideas of “well defined nationality” and the roots of cultural identity’ is further evidenced by the resolutely British subject matter of Fire Over England (1937) and Lady Hamilton (1941), both starring Olivier and Leigh and unashamedly propagandist.5 Korda’s role in the establishment of Laurence Olivier as a British star associated with the depiction of national heroes and events should be noted here. If Korda’s popularisation of the national myth had caught the imagination of the international market in the 1930s and 1940s, then so had Laurence Olivier as the embodiment of that myth. He would subsequently accept offers to star in a series of literary adaptations of classic British novels: Wuthering Heights (1939), Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Rebecca (1940). While Korda had a clear impact on Olivier’s early cinematic career, it cannot be overstated to what extent his achievements in America impacted more generally on the horizons of the British film industry in the 1930s. The possibility of competing in the American market – a dream long held and fostered by J. Arthur Rank – had been proven possible by Korda.

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However, Korda’s success with his tried-and-trusted international formula was, in the end, relatively short-lived, an outcome hastened by what became a dogged attachment to the international format in the changing post-war climate of Britain. Certainly, Korda’s position changed drastically after the war. Key to his success in the 1930s was the fact that he owned shares – and thus access to international distribution – in the American studio, United Artists; however, when Korda was forced to sell those shares following extensive financial complications, he relinquished access to the powerful international distribution channels that had been provided by UA. In need of film distribution opportunities both in Britain and the US, Korda purchased a controlling interest in the British Lion Film Corporation in January 1946. The prestigious international film would, Korda hoped, now represent the cohesive flagship product of London Films and British Lion.6 Unfortunately, the acquisition of British Lion coincided with a major diplomatic crisis that had a devastating impact at the level of the home market and on Korda specifically. Described by prime minister Clement Attlee as constituting nothing less than a ‘Second Battle of Britain’, this crisis is more commonly referred to as the Anglo American Film ‘War’. The Film ‘War’ (which lasted from 1947–8) was, as Paul Swann notes, a battle that took place ‘on the economic front’.7 All imports were drastically cut and, in the case of US films, a 75 per cent tax was imposed: the ‘Dalton Duty’, named after Hugh Dalton, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. The post-war Labour government hoped that the imposition of the Dalton Duty would provide work for British producers and curb the crippling ‘dollar drain from showing Hollywood products’.8 However, while the home market was subsequently freed up for domination by British producers, relations between the British and American film industries were in crisis. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) retaliated by boycotting the British market, refusing to supply any American films to Britain. J. Arthur Rank who had, embarrassingly, been negotiating his own distribution deal in America, was consequently thwarted in this early attempt to conquer the US market. The Daily Express reported retaliatory battle cries from the US studios: ‘Louis B Mayer has declared war on England’; Attlee had ‘incurred the ill will of the American motion picture industry’; ‘They want to freeze Rank and every other British producer out of every American theatre.’9 Significantly, the status of British stars both at home and abroad also enters into the warlike discourses that characterise the press at this time. In the February 1947 Daily Express opinion poll,10 British stars were feted for their apparent

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popularity over American stars and adopted as symbols of the recovering British film industry and its ability to compete with its US counterpart, an idea certainly articulated through Hamlet; six months later, in August, the same newspaper reported the potential failure of the industry with the headline ‘Stars Will Leave’, imagining the industry’s collapse in terms of the loss of its stars and, more specifically, the loss of its stars to Hollywood.11 This tendency to read the industrial crisis against a narrative of British stardom offers us some insight into what exactly John Barber is drawing on in his vitriolic assessment of Olivier’s problematically doubled image in 1955. The Film ‘War’ ended when the Dalton Duty was repealed in May 1948, a consequence of the Anglo-American film agreement which was signed in March that year. However, British producers now found that they had to compete with an influx of American films and were subsequently plunged into a new financial crisis. In an effort to encourage and aid production (and particularly independent producers) in a market flooded by American imports and dominated by the duopoly of the vertically integrated Rank Organisation and the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), the government introduced the National Film Financing Corporation (NFFC) in 1948. The first to benefit from an NFFC loan was the production and distribution company that Korda had so heavily invested in, British Lion. The £3 million loan did more than bring the company back from the brink of collapse: British Lion could now be said to constitute a powerful third force (with Rank and ABPC) in British production and distribution. However, rescue by the NFFC came at a price: Korda was forced to relinquish control within the now statefunded organisation and, almost immediately, he was relegated to the role of production advisor. Before long – and on the back of significant losses made between 1946 and 1949 – Korda’s dream of the international picture as the trademark product of London Films and British Lion would be at odds with the government’s own interests in terms of film production. Originally in accord with Korda’s insistence that ‘international, quality films should still dominate British Lion’s output’, the NFFC officials soon chafed at Korda’s reluctance to support projects that did not qualify as ‘international’, and by 1950 the NFFC had completely ‘rejected Korda’s vision of international pictures with budgets to match, and was trying to reorientate British Lion towards cheaper films that were more domestic in scope and appeal’.12 As Harper and Porter conclude, Korda was, eventually, ‘deliberately alienated’ from British Lion despite his influence being ‘spasmodically in evidence’ throughout its last years.13 Though his involvement

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with British Lion was minimal after 1949, the government would blame the company’s eventual collapse in 1954 on the relatively absent Korda. Korda’s dogged attachment to his concept of the international picture had soured his relationship with the NFFC and obstructed its attempts to refocus British Lion more specifically towards the home market. The NFFC’s position suggests that Korda’s big-budget pictures with their high production values were understood to be fundamentally at odds with what British audiences wanted in a period that ‘saw the decline of historical/costume films; the development of British comedy; a 1940s cycle of “spiv” films/British film noirs; the rise of Cold War films; sciencefiction; horror and the social-problem film’.14 However, as Harper and Porter’s sourcebook has shown, this view oversimplifies what was actually an extremely complex and transitional period in British cinema. If, as Harper and Porter tell us, in the 1950s ‘the real path to commercial success [for the film trade] lay in bringing the occasional cinemagoer back into the cinema’, then it is the case that the supposedly ‘popular’ films of the early 1950s are actually aimed at and reflect the tastes of a small minority of cinemagoers, those who ‘were generally five or ten years older, and were often married or more settled’; those whose ‘ambitions and anxieties were more traditional and conventional than those of regular cinemagoers’.15 For this particular group of people, the association of a specific British star with a cinematic production was potentially instrumental in encouraging cinema attendance, and of the eight stars that Harper and Porter cite (following trade journals and fan magazines) as the most popular in the early 1950s, John Mills, Anna Neagle, Jean Simmons, Alec Guinness and Trevor Howard have specific associations with the nation, its theatre and the international film. While the products and genres associated with Korda may, then, as Street asserts, have been more generally in decline, Harper and Porter’s research suggests that there may still have been a profitable market for them in Britain, even if it was a niche market. It would be reductive, then, to suggest that there was absolutely no economic impetus behind the making of Richard III: the film would appeal to target audiences at the level of the home market as well as to the lucrative international market, particularly in America. Following the failure of British Lion in 1954, Korda – having secured private investment for London Films – made an explicit and charged decision to ‘return to the field of “international” film-making which he had pioneered and promoted’.16 That same year London Films agreed to co-produce Richard III with Laurence Olivier Productions Limited (LOP). The film would be indelibly imbued with Korda’s vision of ‘ambitiously

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conceived colour presentations’ that fulfilled the criterion of quality, internationally aimed projects that was London Films’ hallmark.17 Asked by an official who he felt would be able to run the government-funded British Lion in the wake of his departure, Korda had wryly replied: ‘That is a very difficult question for me to answer. You see . . . I don’t grow on trees.’18 The patriotic Alexander Korda, with his propensity for big-budget, spectacular pictures that promoted the image of Britain and its film industry abroad had a vested interest in the success of Richard III. Yet, if we can understand Olivier to proffer the Shakespearean star to Korda’s wandering bark in 1955, it is also the case that the alignment with Korda was personally significant for Olivier at a time when his career and his private life were plunged into crisis following Hamlet. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in Olivier’s autobiographical account of the period between Hamlet and Richard III.

‘O me I see the ending of our house’: Richard III and Autobiography, 1948–195519 Laurence Olivier’s cablegram to John Burrell, with its reworking of Queen Elizabeth’s lament from Richard III, communicates Olivier’s response to news, received while touring in Australia and New Zealand, that (along with Ralph Richardson and Burrell) his services were no longer required as director of the Old Vic.20 As outlined earlier in this book, Olivier, Richardson and Burrell had co-directed the Old Vic company (and overseen its revival as a proxy National Theatre) since 1944. Prior to Olivier’s 1948 Antipodean tour with the Old Vic company, this much anticipated next stage in the life of the Old Vic had appeared ripe for fruition: the triumvirate had, as Olivier himself puts it, ‘been invited to an important meeting by the National Theatre people to discuss some kind of combination of our interests’.21 For Olivier, the establishment of a National Theatre was turning into something of a lifelong dream and, subsequent to the meeting, he made plans for the international tour that he believed would enable him to ‘create a new company for the Vic, [training] it into an acceptably skilled ensemble’ with the promised establishment of the National Theatre in mind.22 On learning of his dismissal whilst in Australia, Olivier cabled Burrell with the line lifted and adapted from Shakespeare’s Richard III: ‘O me I see the ending of our house’. Appropriations of Richard III are particularly prominent in Olivier’s life-writing as it relates to the period 1944–8. Specifically, the character of Richard III, with his meteoric rise and catastrophic fall, appears to provide

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Olivier with a template through which to interpret an especially turbulent stage in both his personal life and his career. Here, appropriations of the monstrous Richard III function to enable the narration of a simultaneously unmonstrous representation of selfhood, with Olivier appealing to an authorising Shakespeare through ‘the line of roles we lump together under the description “the Shakespeare man”’.23 However, while a (culturally and personally) affirming surrogation of Shakespeare is in evidence throughout this negotiation, it nevertheless remains the case that Olivier’s autobiographical constructions of a selfhood aligned to Richard III reveal a problematic conception of his identity during this period that intersects with – and sheds light on – Barber’s description of Olivier in 1955. In Confessions of an Actor, two performances of Richard III serve as bookends to the period 1944–55, beginning with John Burrell’s production for the Old Vic company in 1944 (with Olivier as Richard) and concluding with Olivier’s film in 1955. Both performances represent high points in Olivier’s career; highs that are followed, in both cases, by extreme personal and professional lows. This rise and fall structure, exemplary of the play itself, is mapped onto this section of Olivier’s autobiography: Ralph [Richardson] has remarked to me once or twice that he never had known a fellow with such extremes of good and bad luck. From 1943 my fortunes seemed to me to be quite wondrous in their goodness, their completeness, their two-fold richness . . . In 1947 my contentment seemed full to over-brimming; I have everything, I would boast, so much more than anybody could deserve . . .24

Here, prefacing an account of his contentment in 1947 with Richardson’s assessment of his tendency towards ‘extremes of good and bad luck’, Olivier alerts his readers to the fact that his autobiography will now follow his own rise and fall through the late 1940s and early 1950s, beginning at its peak with the 1944 Richard III: ‘never before had I known general approbation, expressed equally by my colleagues, the public and the critics’.25 Olivier’s triumph in the 1944 Richard III is swiftly followed by the narration of the ‘beyond-wildest-dreams acclaim’ brought by Henry V, released that same year.26 Indeed, Olivier’s Shakespearean star (and stardom) continued to rise dramatically between 1944 and 1948: in 1947, he became the youngest actor in history to receive a knighthood and, in 1948, Hamlet opened to critical acclaim. However, as Olivier’s prior Ricardian caveat suggests, this rise is followed by the anticipated fall, an ‘[extreme] of bad luck’.27 During the 1948

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tour of Australia and New Zealand, Olivier’s marriage to Vivien Leigh began to break down irrevocably. Imagined as a national couple, ‘Britain’s Theatre Royals’,28 the significance of their dual public image weighed heavily on Olivier whose ‘not-quite-dead preoccupation with respectability’ generated acute anxiety about his continued ability to function as a national icon in the wake of his marriage breakdown. Significantly, though, Olivier’s principal concern here is not so much his iconic status as it is inferred by the construct of ‘The Oliviers’ but, rather, as it is inferred by his knighthood: “My recent knighthood, bestowed just before I set out for Australia, was sacred to me too; I just could not bring myself to offer people such crude disillusionment.’29 As Peter Holland attests, Olivier’s knighthood ‘is infinitely bound up with a sense . . . of public obligation, of the duties of celebrity as defined by the national honour’.30 However, the knighthood also plays a significant role in developing – and validating – Olivier’s conception of his identity. As we have already seen, when the knighthood was bestowed in 1947, Olivier describes ‘[stalking] about Denham Studio, got up in Hamlet’s glad rags for the play scene . . . People weren’t quite sure if I was in costume or if I was always going to be dressed like that from now on.’31 Here, Olivier’s knighthood is imagined as enabling the boundaries to be blurred between the actor and the Shakespearean character so that his body is capable of citing both at the same time, on and off stage. If the knighthood can be understood both to shore up Olivier’s sense of his personal connection with Shakespeare and, more broadly, to authorise his wider cultural performance of Shakespeare, it comes as no surprise that Olivier’s anxiety about offering the public ‘crude disillusionment’ is heavily charged. Unable to reconcile the implications of his knighthood with the imminent collapse of his relationship with Leigh, Olivier infers a crisis of identity: ‘I just could not bring myself to offer people such crude disillusionment.’ In order to stabilise this crisis, he turns to the national stage in order to privilege a rather different union. The collapse of the Theatre Royals, then, is countered with an alternative marriage to the Theatre Royal as Olivier imagines his ‘affair with Richard III’.32 The ‘affair’ with Richard is conceived of as a union with the nation, a union imagined as both initiated and consummated by that first performance of Richard III in 1944: ‘As I turned to face [the audience], my heart rose to embrace this communion as to the miraculously soft warmth of a rapturous first night of love.’33 What is striking about this erotic description of the performance is that it is predicated on a sense of slippage between Olivier and Richard in which the latter becomes incidental to the performance: ‘The audience had

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come in response to some sixth sense; it was in the air . . . that people should come and see – me.’34 Yet, as he goes on to suggest, the audience are not just watching Olivier or, indeed, Olivier-as-Richard: ‘“Now is the winter . . . ” I was inside the skull, looking out through Shakespeare’s eyes’ (my emphasis).35 Olivier’s musings on the less attractive aspects of Richard’s character are immediately stabilised here by a deferral to Shakespeare, whom Olivier imagines himself embodying through the character. The gradual subordination of characterisation to the foregrounding of the actor (and the related cultural performance of Shakespeare) evidenced here is finally complete when Olivier claims that ‘I didn’t even bother to put on the limp. I thought, I’ve got them anyway, I needn’t bother with all this characterisation any more.’36 This dynamic, in which Olivier is foregrounded as a performing presence through Richard III, characterises the 1955 film. At this point in Confessions, though, it also works to signal an alternative marriage between Olivier and a national stage, a union initiated by the 1944 production of Richard III, and finally solemnised just prior to Olivier’s narration of the Australian tour. Here, his meeting with ‘the National Theatre people’ leads him to imagine a fusion with the Old Vic in which ‘they were the groom and we were the bride, but I don’t think we blushed at all’.37 In Sydney on 15 July, Olivier received the memorandum from Lord Esher, chairman of the Old Vic: . . . telling me in the brightest, jolliest terms that the Board of Governors, in view of the fact that it was now five years since we had resurrected the Old Vic, had decided that Burrell, Richardson and I must be fired from our jobs as from now . . . It was so incredible a surprise that, as in a farce, laughter was a reflex action. At the precise time I tore a cartilage in my right knee; my limp in Richard, in constantly fatigued conditions, had set up a weakness in the ‘straight’ leg . . . Why is it that in troubled times, one’s body feels called upon to jump on the bandwagon?38

In the autobiography, the simultaneous loss of the Old Vic and his anticipated role in the construction of a National Theatre leads Olivier to narrate the collapse of a bodily distinction between himself and Richard III, with Richard’s limp becoming Olivier’s own: here, reacting to his dismissal, Olivier incarnates himself as the crippled and rejected outsider. As this allusion to Richard III implies, then, the perceived breakdown of Olivier’s ‘second marriage’, his marriage to the national stage by way of the National Theatre, returns him to the forestalled crisis of identity initiated by his breakaway from Leigh. It is, however, characteristically narrated

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Figure 18 Olivier performs the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy in Hamlet (1948). See also Figure 31

through – and anchored by – an affirmation of Shakespearean selfhood. As Olivier dissolves momentarily into Richard III, the autobiographical narrative immediately returns to an overarching Shakespeare in order to reconfigure the experience: ‘I knew that I should have to exert every ounce of my energies to being as helpful as possible in the sorting out of murders most foul.’39 Olivier’s identity is narrated, here, through a simultaneous reference to the usurped King Hamlet, whose murder proclaims that ‘something is rotten in the state’, and the young Prince Hamlet, the means of restoring order.40 Significantly, this appropriation of Hamlet is further supplemented by the reappropriation of a specific performance and, importantly, the narrative provision of another body in place of the monstrous form of Richard III. Returning from Hollywood in 1952 after completing filming on Carrie, Olivier’s declining professional status and his broken relationship with Leigh leave him contemplating suicide: ‘I found myself more and more drawn to the ship’s rail and the fascination of the foam sweeping by.’41 Olivier invokes here, in his autobiographical narrative, the 1948 film Hamlet. Olivier’s Hamlet, narrating his most famous soliloquy and overlooking the crashing waves that are realised both inside and outside of his mind, is an iconic image, even by 1952. At this point in the autobiography, then, Olivier refers the reader to a specific representation that endows the autobiographical text with the image of his body in performance (Figure 18). Thus, Olivier’s narration of his thoughts of suicide actually works to fix the identity that he claims to have lost, aligning it with what is

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represented in and around the 1948 film text as a culturally authoritative signifier: Olivier as Shakespearean star. It is worth emphasising the fact that visual memory is of paramount importance to Olivier’s autobiographical project. While studies have looked into the role of photography in imagining the autobiographical subject, I have yet to find any consideration of the narrative recollection of filmic images in autobiography studies.42 In this instance in Confessions, the recollection of the filmic image as narrative enables Olivier to infer a symbiotic relationship between the Shakespearean body on screen and the ‘I’ of autobiography, where filmic images also sit alongside personal photographs. Supplementing the autobiographical narrative by referring to an embodied presence elsewhere, Olivier’s appropriations of his own Shakespearean performances enable him to write an authoritative Shakespearean star body into (and over) the autobiographical text, an effect that – as the allusion to the cinematic Hamlet attests – proves central to the stabilisation of narrative crisis. At the same time, such appropriations enable Olivier to reassert his bodily presence in the film texts themselves, a fact that evidences a creative and constitutive relationship between the cinematic text and the autobiography, each cultural production drawing on the multivalent meanings inferred by the other.43 Indeed, Olivier’s autobiographical reworkings of his body on screen should certainly refer us back to the cultural potency of that screen image in contemporary terms. Here, Olivier’s Shakespearean body on screen can be understood to represent not only, as Lieblein has argued, a normative body ‘whose excesses are a product of the actor’s choice, discipline and skill’ but also, as Hodgdon asserts, a ‘socio-aesthetic historical entity, a cultural production’.44 It is precisely this that leads me back to Alexander Korda and to the film Richard III. Showcasing performative skill through London Film’s ‘international’ format, the representation of Olivier’s Shakespearean star body in Richard III speaks directly to Olivier’s and to Korda’s unique reputations within the post-war British cultural landscape.

Richard III (1955) That Richard III was conceived of as a project of national (and international) importance is clear from a series of private cablegrams sent to Olivier from Robert Dowling in 1954. Dowling managed LOP’s affairs in America and he was responsible for providing London Films with the financial support that Korda so desperately needed following the collapse of British Lion.45 Dowling sent Olivier a Western Union cablegram on

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1 July 1954 (just before Olivier was to begin shooting Richard III) in which he expressed both his admiration and his belief that through Richard III ‘england will . . . show hollywood what it can do as against caesar . . .46 Dowling’s cable, in its imperative to ‘show hollywood’, references the tensions that characterise contemporary relations between the film industries as well as confirming that, in line with Korda’s wishes, Richard III is, from the outset, an international picture. Characteristically, Olivier understands his role in the production to accord with Dowling’s emphasis on the project as one of national endeavour. In a letter to Tarquin, now on National Service in Caterham, Olivier describes work on Richard III as ‘really gruelling . . . not as unlike yours at present as you might think’.47 Drawing a parallel with Tarquin’s national duties, Olivier gestures towards the comparable duties that he is undertaking on Richard III. This is relevant because it is through a focus on the labour undertaken by Olivier’s body, on the display of visible performative skill, that the film directly engages with contemporary formulations of Olivier’s image and related constructions of national stardom. This is made most coherent by looking at the Battle of Bosworth sequence that appears at the end of the film and so, mimicking the construction of the film text, that sequence is considered in detail at the end of this chapter. What the cablegram and the letter also emphasise, however, is the fact that the film’s national subject is inferred to be embodied definitively in its star, a fact only underscored by Dowling’s suggestive slippage between ‘Larry’ and ‘England’. Indeed, anticipating Olivier’s autobiographical project in its appropriation and displacement of Richard’s theatrical monstrosity, Richard III presents Laurence Olivier’s skilfully controlled body as a site of surrogation, a conduit through which Shakespeare is made tangible. This is immediately anticipated by the opening credits of Richard III, which move to privilege historical and (more specifically) theatrical legend over the dramatic context of the play itself. The titles scroll up and leak into the image of a tapestry that gives a brief précis of the fortunes of the House of York ‘as it inspired William Shakespeare’. This historical overview then proceeds to seamlessly scroll into a list of characters, the image transforming at once from tapestry into play text, where the names of historical personages (including David Garrick and Colley Cibber) blend with dramatic characters and, in turn, with the names of the contemporary actors and actresses who play them. From the outset, Olivier renders indistinct the boundaries between history, legend, literary text and dramatic and cinematic performance, so that his Richard III enunciates itself as a film text that encompasses the play’s history in performance and, further, its

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contribution to a national mythology. Accordingly, Olivier’s scrolling text concludes by deferring to the film’s ultimate, all-encompassing subject: not Richard III or Laurence Olivier but, in bold capitals, ‘the crown of england’. The tapestry that blazons forth these words heralds the commencement of the film by dissolving into a close shot of the crown itself. This image is recalled at the close of the film when Lord Stanley, stumbling upon Richard’s crown in the legendary hawthorn bush, lifts it high into the air where it transforms back into an image on the tapestry that comprises the closing credits. The Crown of England, then, functions as a verbal and visual device that frames the film; the image of the crown, suspended in mid-air, transforming from text to material object and back again, brackets Richard’s tragedy and, in doing so, subsumes it into a general library of ‘legends that are attached to The Crown of England’. This device works to simultaneously displace Richard’s villainy and to celebrate him as the legendary figure enunciated by the scrolling text of the film’s opening; through the image of the crown, the monstrosity of Shakespeare’s Richard is transformed into nothing short of national heroism. This effect is shored up by the fact that the opening and closing emphasis on the crown evokes the 1953 Coronation through references to another recent film: J. Arthur Rank’s documentary A Queen is Crowned (1953). A Queen is Crowned represents a triumph of Technicolor and it records for posterity a mood of national celebration and renewal; it was the most popular film of the decade.48 A Queen is Crowned is narrated by Laurence Olivier, an indication itself of the cultural capital attached to Olivier’s name by the 1950s, as well as his potency as a figure representative of the national imaginary. Richard III, in its colour and spectacle, continually cites the Coronation film and it is worth reiterating that the resultant (re)emphasis on the celebration of the British nation certainly chimes with the imperative that lies behind the concept of Korda’s international film. It therefore comes as no surprise that Olivier begins Richard III not with its famous opening soliloquy, but with a Coronation: King Edward IV’s, transposed from Henry VI, Part 3. Dramatising Edward IV’s Coronation in the opening sequences of Richard III enables Olivier to encourage a sense of temporal slippage between the golden age of Elizabethan England and the inception of a new Elizabethan age, enunciated by the 1953 Coronation. In inferring a new glorious Elizabethan age through a cinematic celebration of England’s dramatic and literary heritage, Olivier relates the celebration of monarchy and the nation (symbolised by the recurring motif of the crown) to a celebration of the national stage and its corollary, the film

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industry. Further, and as a direct result of this negotiation, the crown motif gestures towards the reimagining of monarchy on the national stage, to the body of the actor and to the legendary history of the role of Richard III. Akin to his entrance as the Elizabethan player in Henry V, then, Laurence Olivier’s body is posited from the outset of Richard III as a site through which a national performance history can be restored, reanimated and celebrated in the cinema. The object of the crown works in the film’s opening sequences to explicitly announce the significance of Olivier’s presence in this respect: as the Coronation crown is lowered onto Edward’s head, we are forced – through an immediate cut – to concentrate instead on Richard. At this point, the Coronation crown dissolves into its replica, a play crown that keys the film text’s major concern: the celebration of the national stage through the role of Richard III, a dynamic that inevitably draws attention to the extradiegetic presence of the Shakespearean star, Laurence Olivier. This impression is reinforced by the camera’s tilting down as Richard turns his head to glance towards Richardson and Gielgud as Buckingham and Clarence in a sequence that, for Jackson, announces the central focus of the film text: ‘The complicit looks exchanged between Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson assure the audience that all is well, and at the same time the play’s action, while allowing the others splendid opportunities, tells a story of Olivier’s ascendancy.’49 It is significant that the systematic intertwining and alternate privileging of actor and character noticed by Jackson here and employed throughout Richard III to, as Jackson says, tell ‘a story of Olivier’s ascendancy’, is a theatrical legacy, one that draws attention to the negotiation between Shakespearean character and the related surrogation of Shakespeare that underpins all of Olivier’s cinematic performances. While this negotiation constitutes a priority in all of Olivier’s cinematic Shakespeares, it is rendered especially lucid in Richard III because, as Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster have pointed out in relation to early modern performance practice, ‘Richard Gloucester is designed on the cutting edge between the craft of the personator and the craftiness of the personated’, representing a personation that ‘engrained in doubleness is made to unfold side by side’.50 This chimes rather beautifully with what –as Mark Glancy has shown – British film critics of the period judged to be the marker of an appropriate (national) cinematic performance style: the visible ‘manifestation of [both] the character and the actor’s skill in constructing it’.51 In the cinematic Richard III, actor and character exist in ‘productive interplay’ with one another, Olivier – as he had done at the Old Vic in 1944 – taking

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advantage of the presentational nature of the role in order to foreground his suitability and skill as a Shakespearean star alongside and through his performance of Richard’s theatrical monstrosity.52 One of the most noticeable ways in which this ‘productive interplay’ between actor and character is emphasised in Olivier’s Richard III is through the use of shadow effects. Most readings of this film understand its consistent stress on shadow effects to function as a commentary on Richard’s tyrannical power, as representing the dark shadow that he casts over the world of the play.53 However, the shadow effects are actually much more complex than this, offering us tantalising moments wherein the actor, Laurence Olivier, is referenced or revealed to his audience through his performance as Richard. Further, and crucially, the use of shadow enables Olivier to take advantage of the inherently presentational nature of the play text not just to foreground his own skill but, also, to cite (and to appropriate) the past behaviours of prior Shakespearean performers, other celebrated Richard IIIs. This relationship between the performative past and present calls to mind Diana Taylor’s concept of the ‘repertoire’, a term that refers to the impartation of ‘live, embodied actions’ that cannot be recorded in the same way as the ‘supposedly enduring materials’ that make up an archive but that are nevertheless ‘handed down from the past [and] experienced as present’ through performance.54 In Richard III, this notion of an embodied repertoire of performance, referenced through shadow effects, proves central to the construction and celebration of Olivier’s Shakespearean star body on screen. Here, the recollection and restoration of past bodily behaviours through the surrogating body of Olivier stresses continuity through evolution, the reconciliation of an illusory ‘authentic’ past with the present and the reassuring immortality of Shakespeare. The first instance of the use of shadow as a means by which to evoke the repertoire and foreground the actor through the character occurs just after Richard’s first seduction of Anne (which is split into two sequences by Olivier). Following his direct address to the camera, Richard moves away from the door (with, like Burbage, his ‘hand continual on his dagger’55); as he does so, the camera remains stationary, watching Richard’s shadow slowly descend down the length of the door frame (Figure 19a–b). Though his body is not visible, Richard’s voice continues, emanating, it appears, from the shadow itself (Figure 19c). Focusing on a disparity between body and voice here enables Olivier to inculcate his presence-apart from Richard, to reveal or privilege the ‘secret close intent’ that characterises Weimann’s actor-character. But there is another presence-apart referenced here: while the voice that we hear emerging from the incorporeal shadow is

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Figure 19a–c Embodiment gives way to the shadow effect in Richard III

Olivier’s, it is Olivier mimicking Irving.56 Disembodied, then, it is Henry Irving’s Richard that is reanimated, recalled by Olivier’s shadow. Having established the two as distinct entities (and cited both Burbage and Irving in the process) Olivier continues to privilege shadow and body alternately in the next sequence as the camera’s focus slowly shifts from Richard’s body to his shadow and then back again. Indeed, Olivier’s release script indicates the transition from shadow to bodily representation in this sequence, emphasising the two as alternate personae in interplay with each other: ‘Richard straightens himself and moves to King’s right side. Richard’s shadow moves away towards the terrace.’57 Prior to this direction, Olivier’s/Richard’s shadow has moved across the floor of the throne room in order to whisper his ‘inductions dangerous’ into King Edward’s ear;58 at this point, the shadowy figure of Richard recalls that archetypal cinematic villain, the famous vampiric shadow of Murnau’s Nosferatu, and, in its whispering direction, it simultaneously (though distinctly) cites Laurence Olivier, the actor-director. While these doubly – or, remembering the earlier invocations of Burbage and Irving, quadruply – engrained shadows amply demonstrate the delicate balance that exists between actor and character in Richard III, it is also the case that the shadow effects work productively in conjunction with other culturally loaded signifiers in the mise-en-scène in order to enable

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Figure 20a–c Actor and character prepare side by side in Richard III

us to experience the theatrical past as the cinematic present through the suggestive coding of Laurence Olivier’s body. Richard’s second seduction of Anne offers an especially effective case in point, as Olivier presents actor and character preparing for performance quite literally (to quote Weimann and Bruster) ‘side by side’.59 In this sequence, Richard is shown preparing to enter the throne room in order to meet with King Edward. In the first frame, the shadow of the actor is shown dressing or costuming, ostentatiously pulling on gloves (Figure 20a). A second shot introduces us to the physically costumed body that, in the third shot, proceeds to lean against one of the cloister pillars and look out on to what constitutes a representational performance space, distinct from the more immediate presentational spaces employed throughout the film (Figure 20b–c). What is striking about this sequence is the sustained focus on Richard’s body and the simultaneous concealment of his face. While the cloister space

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functions as a tiring house, a backstage area that draws attention to the presence and the preparation of the performer, the undisclosed face of the performer posits the possibility, just for a moment, that we might see another famous Richard step out into the arena. Particularly, this sequence references Edmund Kean’s performance as Richard, not least because Olivier’s costume in this sequence to a remarkable extent reproduces Kean’s, a fact made clear by a comparison with Samuel Drummond’s 1814 portrait, Edmund Kean as Richard III. Most crucially, though, this cinematic sequence can be understood to quote Olivier’s account of Kean’s performance as Richard in On Acting. Here, Olivier re-performs what he himself obsessively documents as a ‘well documented tradition of the part’: It’s a well documented tradition of the part that Edmund Kean leaned his stunted body against the proscenium arch and mesmerised the audience with his eyes, taking them into his confidence or alienating them from the action at his will. What a gift to the cinema Edmund Kean would have been! – properly directed.60

If ‘Edmund Kean leaned his stunted body against the proscenium arch’, then, in his cinematic Richard III, Olivier leans his body against the cloister pillars that frame his body, too, like a proscenium arch (Figure 20c). In the autobiography, Olivier’s description of Kean works to recall his own performance as Richard in the same way that his cinematic performance, read in conjunction with the autobiography, recalls Kean’s. Indeed, it is at this point in On Acting that Olivier describes performing as Richard as being ‘inside the skull, looking out through Shakespeare’s eyes’.61 Olivier presents here an explicit image in which the bodies of Olivier, Kean and Shakespeare are suffused into an overarching Shakespearean star body in performance: Olivier’s body. Consequently, this represents another instance of the constitutive relationship that exists between the film text and the autobiography as they work interactively to produce and reproduce an image of Olivier’s Shakespearean star body. The spectacle of the Shakespearean star body is thus doubly authenticated: in the film, by the life narrative and its enunciation of an intrinsic and lived connection to Shakespeare; and in the life narrative, by the reworking of a culturally authoritative cinematic performance. Each functions in a supportive dialogue with the other. As a consequence, at this specific moment in the film text (and at that point in the autobiography), the allusions to Kean work to reference Shakespeare through the role’s rich performance history, imagining that history as embodied by, cited in, and restored through the figure of Laurence Olivier.

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As with Henry V, then, the symbolism of Olivier’s body, visually and culturally coded with signifiers of the Shakespearean past and present, is central to meaning-making in Richard III. Central, too, is the way in which Olivier’s body moves within the filmic space, which, like the other adaptations, is characterised by a mapping of Weimann’s locus and platea model on to the cinematic mise-en-scène. This cues us in to the significance of the spatial negotiation that takes place later in the Battle of Bosworth sequence but until that point Olivier exploits it in order to suggest a rupture in the mise-en-scène through which the presence of the actor-director, being revealed, can be celebrated. Thus, the platea space, associated with Richard’s direct address to the camera and, generally, with interiors or transitional spaces (windows, doors, cloisters) both gives way to and intrudes into the more representational locus, which consists of either exterior spaces or contained spaces, keyed by Richard’s gaze towards and into them. Indeed, Richard’s opening soliloquy provides a good example because it unambiguously presents us with a cinematic recreation of an early modern public playhouse space. As the Coronation party departs, the camera/spectator moves towards the closed door of the throne room, pushing the door open to reveal the throne room and to enter (Figure 21a). The suggestion is that the camera/ spectator enters a performance space, positioned as an audience member, waiting for a play to commence. On entry to Richard’s ‘theatre’ we see, indeed, a reproduction of the early modern playing space. Olivier’s Richard stands on the throne’s dais at the back of the room, the traditional space of the locus (Figure 21b). He is still, turned away from the spectator. The noise of the door shutting (the audience seated) animates Richard and he immediately establishes direct eye contact with the camera (Figure 21c).62 His eyes firmly fixed on the lens, Richard descends from the throne and moves forward towards the waiting spectator in order to address his audience directly (Figure 21d). Here, we have a single movement away from the representational space of the locus and towards the presentational space of the platea where, as Olivier remarks, ‘he speaks as though to each one of us personally’.63 What is especially significant about the establishment of the separate locus and platea spaces in the opening moments of Richard’s first soliloquy is that these spaces are underscored, not only as constituting areas for direct address, but for direction and, therefore, a specific emphasis on the figure of the actor-director. Richard, for example, announces that his performance proper shall begin when he proceeds to the door from the space of the throne room and flings it open, as though enabling access to the pit of an alternative theatre. The highly

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Figure 21a–d Opening soliloquy in Richard III

theatrical and stylised sets underline this sense of a performance space here. Stepping out, Richard’s platea-like delivery gives way to the representational space of the locus, a movement announced with Richard’s opening of the door. This is exemplary of Olivier’s use of performance space throughout the film: Richard engages in direct address from a liminal spatial position before stepping into the space that he has been observing and commenting on. He effectively prepares the scene. Indeed, the film presents a pertinent example of this platea-like emphasis on direction, a tear in the cinematic mise-en-scène, as the opening soliloquy continues, though transposed here after the encounter with Anne’s ‘honourable load’.64 Here, from the platea space of the terrace, Richard opens and closes window shutters in order to watch the plots that he has laid unfold. This very sequence constitutes a mini-production, in which Richard’s words, directed towards the camera, function as speech acts. As he lays out his plans, he opens and closes the window shutters to reveal that his ‘plots’ have come immediately to pass.65 Each window opens to reveal a series of events: Clarence’s summoning to the King; Edward’s denunciation of Clarence; and, finally, Clarence’s journey to the Tower. At the same time, the cue to action that the opening of the window indicates underlines Richard’s (and Olivier’s) role as director, as Edward and Clarence are animated, acting out Olivier’s/Richard’s commands

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Figure 22 Richard’s/Olivier’s shadow occupies the cloister pillar in Richard III

and injunctions. In this sequence each window frame itself performs the function of a proscenium arch, through which an uncanny parallel narrative is discernible: Richard directs the action of the characters within the dramatic fiction while Olivier directs the actors outside of it, both visible at the same time. The mapping of locus and platea spaces onto the cinematic mise-en-scène enables Olivier, again, to evoke that important sense of temporal slippage between the two Elizabethan ages as he juxtaposes a literary and theatrical history with a newly cinematic one. With this connected theatrical and cinematic tradition in mind, it is useful to remember here too the permeation of literary and cinematic boundaries that Olivier’s autobiographical writing engenders in its appropriations of his Shakespearean film roles. This is because Olivier’s depiction of the second seduction of Anne in Richard III offers a pertinent example of how multiple visual images are made to work together across a variety of textual and performance modes in order to structure, to support and to maintain Olivier’s Shakespearean star persona not only in relation to the cultural contexts of 1950s Britain, but into the 1980s and beyond. In this sequence, Richard’s shadow is clearly visible on one of the cloister pillars as it sits between Richard’s head and Anne’s as she is subjected to a double rhetorical assault (Figure 22). The speaking shadow of Olivier in its appearance on the pillar re-emphasises the platea function of the cloister space as well as invoking the Shakespearean star that gives

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Figure 23 Salvador Dalí, portrait of Laurence Olivier in the role of Richard III (1955)

form to Richard’s eloquence. The image, after all, recalls a very particular Shakespearean body, or bodies, in its citation of Salvador Dalí’s portrait of Olivier as Richard III (Figure 23). This is an image that Olivier also reconfigures as narrative in On Acting when he describes his performance as Richard III in the 1944 Old Vic production: ‘As we moved nearer the first night, 26 September, the voice and the character fused. Richard went with me everywhere. There he was, sitting on my shoulder – or I on his. The portrait, my personal portrait, clear as a full moon in my head.’66 What is particularly striking about Dalí’s portrait and Olivier’s reworking of it, both in the autobiography and in the film, is that the portrait

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represents a text that references, archives and stabilises a specific performance tradition signified by Olivier as Richard III. Shoring up Olivier’s performance in the film text and in the autobiography, the portrait references the costume, props and voice of a long line of Richard IIIs, remembering an inherited ‘repertoire’ of performance. Thus, the sword used by Kean and Irving is visible at the front of the portrait while, as Hodgdon describes, ‘the idea of voice (“Shakespeare” speaking through Olivier) appears as a sign of Richard which, repeated in the battling warriors and horses on the plain below, incorporates one of his most famous lines as image’.67 I would add here that the portrait’s emphasis on speech, when considered alongside the film text, might also recall Olivier’s imitation of Irving as well as the adaptation of Garrick’s and Cibber’s acting scripts within his filmic Richard III. And finally, and as Olivier makes clear in On Acting, the portrait (and the film) both remember, both archive, his 1944 performance at the New Theatre. Indeed, it is certainly the case that, despite its citation of the performative gestures of other famed Shakespearean actors, Olivier consistently remembers and incorporates his own performance history through Richard III. This is most strikingly evidenced through the physical discrepancy that is urged between actor and character, with Lieblein’s authoritative and normative Shakespearean star body privileged over the character’s monstrous form. As Casey argues, ‘Actors’ bodies form and inform every dramatic role, but this is particularly true of Richard, whose body is much of the role.’68 In both contemporary and later accounts, Olivier puts immense stress on the makeup and prosthetics that enabled him to become Richard bodily. However, as Olivier also suggests, this emphasis on the construction of Richard’s body ultimately works to underscore the presence of the actor through his performance of the character: I also had a very definite hump. It was built-up under the waistcoat and one side of the back stuck out much further than the other. It gave me a completely different shape. One’s whole personality, one’s whole appearance can often depend on a simple idea like that. But my approach was always governed by the thought that I must impress the company by doing something I’ve never done before, because if I was a success the odds were that I’d impress the audience and the critics in the same way.69

Here, mimicking the project of the film text, Olivier records how his physical displacement by way of costume or makeup is paradoxically employed in order to draw attention to his own presence, his own body.

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In Richard III, Olivier’s body is inherently marked by this doubleness, the prosthetic hump and studied limp consistently giving way to moments of athleticism that recall, instead, Olivier’s prior filmic performances as Henry V and Hamlet. This Richard runs, jumps, leaps, seduces; he fulfils what Lieblein describes as ‘our expectations of the body that plays Shakespeare’.70 With this in mind, Constance A. Brown’s reading of Richard’s staged acceptance of his crown alerts us to the way in which the cinematic recollection of Olivier’s other Shakespeare roles exists in tension with the play’s parallel discourses of monstrosity. For Brown, Richard’s swing down the bell rope to demand Buckingham’s obsequience depicts ‘the essence of Richard’s tyranny, and the tyranny of every man who ever mobilised religion to gain his own ends or had an insane lust to see someone on his knee’. All of this, Brown argues, is ‘packed into a single visual image’.71 But the sequence that Brown describes celebrates Olivier as Shakespearean performer over (or at least alongside) Brown’s focus on Richard’s despotism. The leap down from the bell rope is typical of the physicality associated with Olivier’s Shakespearean performances; specifically, it recalls his most famous physical feat: the leap from the battlements onto Claudius in the 1948 film, Hamlet. The theatricality of Olivier’s body in performance, through its citation of prior performative actions, works to draw attention to a gallery of Shakespearean roles that exceed character to focus on actor and, further, a national theatrical and cinematic performance tradition. But the tension outlined here between a self-conscious, revelatory theatricality and what Brown experiences as immersion in the cinematic diegesis also leads us back to the specific contexts of production that inform the film. This connection is most fully developed in Richard III’s final scenes and during the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field sequence. The Battle of Bosworth Field Sequence Olivier’s performance in the Battle of Bosworth Field sequence confronts the conflicting and particularly nationalistic discourses of stardom that underwrite John Barber’s assessment of his image in 1955, an assessment that is rooted in the fraught industrial landscape that had, paradoxically, worked to generate the production of Richard III. This is achieved through an emphasis on what Christine Geraghty has investigated as a sub-category of film stardom, the ‘star-as-performer’.72 For Geraghty, the ‘star-asperfomer’ reclaims ‘the cultural value’ of the film star in the face of more commodified notions of celebrity.73 This reclamation is enabled by a focus

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on acting skill that is rooted in the culturally authoritative discourses connected to the theatre: the star-as-performer is ‘associated with the high cultural values of theatrical performance, even when that performance takes place on film or television’.74 In the climatic Bosworth sequence an important and paradigmatic shift is introduced in which the emphasis on the theatrical actor-character that has up until now characterised Olivier’s performance in Richard III is subsumed into an emphasis on the filmic star-as-performer as defined by Geraghty. Oscillating between alternative theatrical and cinematic modes, Olivier’s performance in the Battle of Bosworth Field sequence articulates, through a focus on a range of acting skills, the high cultural value of the Shakespearean star and, consequently, a particularly British model of stardom that is precisely not ‘a Hollywood invention’.75 Just as Hamlet and its extratexts worked to enunciate the concept of a British national cinema by borrowing from the legitimising cultural discourses associated with the theatre, Richard III works to mobilise the concept of British stardom through the intimation of a national performance style that, informed and enriched by theatrical tradition, can be adapted to and redefined in the cinema. To do so, the film offers a celebration of cinematic theatricality, a term which I adopt here to specifically refer to a deliberately histrionic mode of performance that is represented within the diegetic space of the filmic narrative. The Battle of Bosworth Field sequence begins by marking a transition from theatrical to cinematic space. Indeed, this movement is announced explicitly by a shot that cuts from the throne and its dais (associated with the space of the locus throughout the film) to a representation of Bosworth Field. This transition is further keyed by a related shift in Olivier’s performance. What follows is a sequence that recalls the complex mediation between theatrical and cinematic space as it was articulated by the performing body in Henry V. On arrival at Bosworth Field, Richard advances towards the camera on four separate occasions as he discusses military strategy with Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell. The movement towards the camera has so far been associated with a transfer from locus to platea spaces and the initiation of direct address. However, it functions in this case to mark the disintegration of the relationship between Richard and the cinematic spectator that had previously been privileged in these spaces. In the first instance, Richard makes direct eye contact with the camera but speaks to Catesby, who occupies, with the other men, an area that would have originally been designated as a locus space (Figure 24a); in the second instance, Richard’s ‘Here will I lie tonight. / But where

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Figure 24a–f Narrative transition as keyed by the performing body in Richard III

tomorrow? Well, all’s one for that’76 is spoken to the camera, though concluded with Richard’s decisive turning away (Figure 24b–c); in the third instance, Richard beckons Lovell towards the camera with him, but this time does not engage in any direct contact (Figure 24d); in the final instance, Richard walks into the space of the camera which retreats above him. His eyes fixed firmly forward, the supporting cast (hitherto sectioned from Richard in the locus-like background) follow after him, swarming into and disrupting the privileged platea space (Figure 24e–f). In this sequence, the impression of separate locus and platea spaces, and the cues for particular connections and disconnections that they inferred, is dissolved. The move to cinematic representation is complete. The ultimate move from theatrical mimesis to cinematic diegesis intimated here is underscored by the extensive cutting of Richard’s soliloquy at 5.4. Olivier retains only the first lines of this soliloquy, spoken in sleep in

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order to establish Richard’s reaction to his ghostly dream: ‘Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds! / Have mercy, Jesu!’77 Neglecting to exploit the presentational opportunities offered by the remainder of the speech, its absence confirms that the direct address that has, until now, characterised Richard’s relationship to the action and to the cinematic spectator has been entirely abandoned. Consequently, the Battle of Bosworth Field sequence that follows works to foreground the heroism associated with the role of Richard III, and previously stressed through the employment of theatrical presentation techniques, through an emphasis instead on cinematic representation. This is a complex negotiation, partly keyed, as Hatchuel notes, by the borrowing of genre codes from the Western; for Hatchuel, these codes – a sunburnt landscape, an impression of scale, a nod to ‘Indians appearing progressively at the top of a Wild West narrow pass’ – work to highlight Richard’s tyranny: ‘Olivier’s specific appropriation of the Hollywood western genre represents an intriguing ideological volte-face: the figures that are rewritten as Indians represent the good side, one that chases a tyrant from power.’78 However, Olivier’s deft manipulation of Hollywood codes and conventions in the Battle of Bosworth Field sequence also works to undercut this notion, celebrating Richard’s tenacity and, relatedly, Olivier’s culturally authoritative star performance. This is achieved through the battle’s presentation as a set piece that enables Olivier to simultaneously bring together diverse theatrical and cinematic modes of expression. At Bosworth field, Richard’s competence in battle is underlined with shots of hand-to-hand combat and the retaining of the fabulously bewigged Catesby’s lines: ‘The King enacts more wonders than a man, / Daring an opposite to every danger.’79 Viewed in long shot, alone upon a scorched plain, Richard screams his most famous line: ‘A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!’80 The cinematic space (and, particularly, the visual allusions to the genre of the Western that Hatchuel recognises) co-exists with the theatrical spectacle of the Shakespearean star body in performance as Olivier is viewed at a distance, framed by the pillar-like trees with his arms outstretched and his hands upturned in a pantomimic gesture of excess. The next shot brings us close to Richard, framing him at a low angle as, covered in blood and gasping for breath, he limps past the lens; in contrast to the previous shot, this tight framing of the actorly body engenders an emphasis on the display of more naturalistic gestures that are complemented by the performance of voice, Olivier’s theatrical bellow reduced to an angry riposte directed at the unfortunate Catesby.

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Figure 25 Richard viewed in close shot at the moment of defeat in Richard III

Next, Richard is seen brandishing his sword, calling for a horse once more (this time in mid-frame) as Richmond’s soldiers advance over the hills, surrounding him on every side. As the camera pans in line with Richard’s own surveying, he turns his body to confront each new onslaught. Outflanked, surrounded, Richard is framed in a sustained closeup, blood pouring from his head, watching. Throughout the sequencewithin-a-sequence discussed here, Olivier’s Shakespearean star body in performance is brought closer to us, not through direct address, but through its cinematic framing; firstly in long shot, secondly in mid-frame and, finally, in close shot (Figure 25). At this point, William Walton’s score halts and the sounds of battle are replaced with Richard’s panting breaths. The camera pans again, keeping Richard in close-up as the acceptance of defeat plays out solely upon his face; Richard’s eyes scan the crowd, his shoulders gently slumping in order to connote resignation. Juxtaposed with the theatricality of the ‘My kingdom for a horse!’ spectacle, this represents an intensely understated mode of actorly display. Yet this particularly intimate cinematic performance is nevertheless simultaneously theatricalised, the close-up on Richard’s face emphasising Olivier’s prosthetic nose and, therefore, what James Naremore nominates as ‘the very sign of theater’; that is, ‘the vestige of a mask’.81 At the same time, the claustrophobic framing of Richard both recalls the former privileged

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relationship between spectator and theatrical actor-character, and, in its inability to connect with an unblinking Richard, emphasises its loss – a consequence of the distinctive shift into the cinematic diegesis that is heralded by Bosworth. The depiction of Richard’s death is bloody and barbaric, an execution in which Richard is outnumbered by a mob-like wave of soldiers. Held down, Richard’s throat is cut and the mob descends to stab his dying body in a vicious and bloody attack. With the young Richmond denied the glory of a final battle, the lines between good and evil are rendered unclear here in preparation for a focus on Olivier’s final climactic performance, a performance that constitutes a diegetic emphasis on, and celebration of, the star-as-performer. This is achieved through a cinematically mediated move back to theatrical presentation in order that the mob may witness Richard’s (or, rather Olivier’s) death throes. Olivier’s release script underscores this moment as an opportunity for a particularly theatrical performance of death, the attackers directed to stand back as a crowd, an audience, waiting and watching for the final act: ‘They lower their daggers and gaze down for a moment. Then all step back in revulsion, including stanley.’82 This instance accords with Naremore’s explication of ‘presentational theatrics’ in the cinema as that which is made possible only when ‘played for a fictional audience inside the film, a surrogate crowd’.83 The fact that the film as a whole does not employ this use of the surrogate crowd, but rather employs the implied cinematic spectator, only serves to underscore the emphasis in the Bosworth sequence on a final merging of the distinct theatrical and cinematic modes of performance (and of space) that are employed, and oscillated between, throughout Richard III. Here, the cultural currency associated with the theatrical spectacle of the Shakespearean star body in performance is specifically emphasised (in contrast to the rest of the film) as celebrated within the cinematic diegesis, an effect coded by the soldiers’ formation as a ‘surrogate crowd’ or audience in place of the cinematic spectator. With the audience prepared, the drawn-out extinction of the King consists of Olivier twitching spasmodically to the score in order to perform a twenty-three-second death scene that concludes with a dramatic raising of his sword (a gesture replicated from the 1944 stage production) (Figure 26). Hatchuel makes a useful observation regarding this pantomimic performance of death: Through his hyperbolic acting, Olivier seems to take delight in dying, postponing the moment of Richard’s actual death. Olivier’s exaggerated,

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Figure 26 Olivier performs Richard’s death in Richard III

repetitive gestures show how difficult it is to kill the once all-powerful tyrant, but they also recall the stage pantomime of a typical ‘Shakespearean death’, turning a cinematic death into an extremely theatrical one.84

The shift that Hatchuel notes here between the cinematic and the theatrical is extremely complex. While Hatchuel emphasises a ‘cinematic death’ that turns into ‘a typical “Shakespearean death”’, what more precisely occurs here is a slippage between two distinct modes of performance within the space of the filmic diegesis. This represents a display of cinematic theatricality that allows for a focus on the defeated character of Richard and a simultaneous foregrounding of the star-as-performer, Laurence Olivier. It constitutes a bifold juggling between the diegetic character and extradiegetic star persona that is analogous to the performative use of early modern theatrical space though, here, it is necessarily centralised within the fiction. Ultimately, the effect of Olivier’s performance in these final sequences is to posit the actor-director, within the cultural contexts of the 1950s British film industry, as the marker of a particularly British film star. The superimposition of different modes of performance that characterises the Bosworth sequence works, in emphasising the presence of the star-as-performer in Geraghty’s sense, to foreground Olivier’s image as a site for the dense articulation of differing modes, not only of performance, but of stardom.

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This impression is certainly underscored in the closing frames of the film, where the Shakespearean star body is celebrated as a signifier of national celebrity. The rough handling of Richard’s corpse, thrown across a packhorse, the body tied down with coarse rope, suggests unheroic treatment, a final undercutting of the valour espoused in the battle sequences. But, as Richard’s body is draped across the horse, Walton’s elegiac score crescendos and a different body is recalled. Here we have another (re)appropriation of a prior Shakespearean role: Hamlet. Richard’s/Olivier’s head hangs down, turned upwards towards the sky, directly citing the funeral procession from Hamlet, where the prince’s body is famously configured in the same position (Figure 27). This ultimate transition (or, rather, negotiation) between the monstrous and the heroic body underscores the film text’s overall emphasis on the embodiment of ‘legends attached to the Crown of England’ as enunciated in the opening frames, with Olivier’s Richard written into a national narrative that far exceeds the problematic characterisation of the play text. Here, a cinematic history of performance is connected to a theatrical one as Olivier’s body is inferred throughout the film text to cite not only his own history, but that of a grand performance tradition that can be traced back to the Shakespearean stage. It is in this way that Richard III’s emphasis on the star-as-performer can be most clearly understood to recuperate the notion of film stardom from extra-filmic discourses that label it as a fundamentally ‘un-British’ phenomenon.85 In light of this, it is pertinent that the subsequent shot focuses on Richard’s garter and, more precisely, the motto of the Order of the Garter, which is appropriated in the play text to rebuke Shakespeare’s Richard but that, here, functions to celebrate (and exonerate) Olivier’s King: ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense’ (‘Shame come to him that euill thinketh’).86 Through this shot, the garter is coded as a significant symbol and underlined as a motto for the film text as a whole, gesturing not only towards the legendary heroism of the role of Richard III, but towards the various cultural, industrial, biographical (and, latently, autobiographical) contexts that inform the film text. Indeed, the garter itself can be understood to constitute a polysemic image, an emblem of the multiple significations articulated through Olivier’s star persona and through his performance in the film text. For example, the film’s emphasis on the foregrounding of Laurence Olivier as a Shakespearean star might code the motto of the garter as referring to the crisis in Olivier’s star image that motivated him to co-produce the film in the first place. After all, for Olivier, Richard III had presented itself as an opportunity that came ‘just when I needed that part’, a declaration that indicates Olivier’s awareness of

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Figure 27 Olivier cites his performance as Hamlet while playing dead as Richard III

the film’s importance to the maintenance of his star image as well as gesturing towards his own engagement with that image as enunciated by the life narrative.87 On the other hand, the motto of the garter could be applied to the film’s declared intention as a national endeavour, a recuperation of the image of

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the British film industry in Hollywood. This is certainly a motive suggested by Olivier’s contributions to a 1956 article in Newsweek in which he appeared as a cover star. The front page carried the image of Dalí’s portrait under the headline ‘Sir Laurence’s Richard III: Shakespeare’s Biggest Year’, the magazine itself evoking a slippage between Olivier’s name and Shakespeare’s.88 The Newsweek article interrogates the history of the role of Richard III, recording how the ‘Elizabethan Richard Burbage made women faint with love for his repulsively attractive Richard’ while ‘The great Edmund Kean . . . was so revolting in the part that “matrons were delivered untimely in the pit”.’ Accordingly, Olivier’s performance is linked to ‘the grand tradition’ of Burbage and Kean, with Olivier’s image constituting the latest in a gallery of ‘famous Richards’. This stress on heritage and inheritance, on a ‘grand tradition’ of theatrical British stars, is appropriated by Olivier himself when he declares that he wants Richard III to be ‘the best-acted picture that ever has been made’. The connection inferred between great theatrical acting and the possibility of its representation or cinematisation on the screen – cinematic theatricality – is loyally taken up by the narrative of the article: Olivier ‘made his wish come true, with such first major theatrical luminaries as Sir John Gielgud (Clarence), Sir Ralph Richardson (Buckingham) [&c]’. Like the film text itself, the magazine article links the star (theatrical) performers of the past to those of the present in a celebration of the British film star that is juxtaposed with an obligatory denigration of Hollywood: ‘“Filming Shakespeare”, Olivier says, “you don’t have to shoot up a man’s trouser leg or photograph through keyholes . . . Hollywood developed those techniques to make up for bad acting and weak scripts.”’ Shakespeare, and Olivier as a Shakespearean star, are presented as emblems of the British cinema and of British acting as distinct from Hollywood, with the Shakespeare film inferred as a genre in which Hollywood products consistently fail against British ones and where culturally authoritative theatrical methods and modes of performance are recovered against, or reworked alongside, cinematic techniques that, in Hollywood, merely ‘make up for bad acting’. Lastly, it is especially relevant that the shot of the motto on Richard’s garter is remembered by Olivier’s film editor Helga Keller (née Cranston) as significant for a very particular reason: the ‘shot of the leg with the order of the garter was very dear to LO because of the idea of the continuation of the royalty [sic]’.89 This assertion underscores the sense of temporal slippage urged in the film text between the two Elizabethan ages and the related emphasis on the ‘story of England’ as represented both by the body of the monarch and by the performing body of the represented monarch on

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stage: the actor. But, as Olivier’s foregrounding in the film text as a site of performative embodiment traceable back to the Shakespearean stage makes clear, it also evokes the function of the actor-director as a cultural surrogate for another national body: that of the ‘national poet’ himself. Before the release of Richard III in 1955, John Barber had questioned Laurence Olivier’s viability as a British celebrity and his continuing ability to function as a surrogate for Shakespeare and figurehead for the British theatre and film industries in the 1950s. By 1955 Richard III had reinvigorated Olivier’s image, rewriting him into the national discourses that had facilitated his configuration as a Shakespearean star from 1944. But, subsequent to the film’s release, Olivier’s Shakespearean star persona was forced to undergo another significant – and entirely radical – transformation. If, as Newsweek heralded, Richard III represented Olivier’s/ Shakespeare’s ‘biggest year’ in the cinema, 1955 would also mark the beginning of a period of immense cultural change in Britain. Despite the fact that plans for a Korda-backed Macbeth were already underway, Richard III would be Laurence Olivier’s last cinematic Shakespeare adaptation.

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chapter 4

Macbeth I (1955–1960): Contexts

Between December 1955 and July 1958, Laurence Olivier was consistently engaged in planning and in negotiating funding for what would be his fourth and final cinematic Shakespeare adaptation, Macbeth. It was a project that Olivier had expressed interest in consistently (and publicly) since 1948, when he cited his intentions to produce Macbeth at the same time that Hamlet was released.1 The proposed project received much public support, Olivier’s announcement initiating a flurry of letters from fans; in 1949, an A.E. Hauford wrote to Olivier offering advice on the ‘blood-boltered’ and ‘murky’ film prospect that he had in development.2 The proposed film of Macbeth, however, proved itself to be an ‘impossible monster’, a phrase used by Olivier to describe his struggle with grasping the role, and equally applicable to the drawn-out and failed negotiations surrounding the film.3 By July 1958 Macbeth had been officially shelved, despite being in the final stages of production. Olivier recalled the five copies of the screenplay4 that had been circulated to interested parties, declaring his ‘bitter disappointment’ in the project’s collapse.5 Contemporary responses to the failed Macbeth project evoke an impression of national disgrace, imagining its cancellation in terms of a ‘shameful failure of the British cinema’.6 As a result of such formulations, Macbeth has achieved something of a mythical status in relation to the Olivier oeuvre. Since 1958 a variety of scholars and cultural commentators have speculated on just how the unrealised Macbeth might have functioned in relation to the prior Olivier canon,7 what aesthetic influences it might have drawn on,8 and what exactly the unmade film might have looked like.9 Alongside the lost prospect of the film, the apparent disappearance of the Macbeth screenplay contributed to this preoccupation with what was to have been the last of Olivier’s cinematic Shakespeare adaptations. Olivier consistently encouraged such 117

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speculation surrounding the unrealised film, responding to a request for the screenplay in 1964 by pronouncing that the only version that could be found ‘is not any better than a sketch’.10 Despite expressing the hope in 1958 that ‘one day I may be able to revive [Macbeth]’, Olivier never returned to the production and remained reticent when questioned about it, electing to remember Macbeth in terms that evoke a sense of a collective national loss, a disinherited posterity as exemplified in his declaration in On Acting: ‘posterity is dispossessed of another version of the Scottish play to compare with Orson Welles’s or Roman Polanski’s’.11 But Olivier did consign Macbeth to posterity. Whilst researching production materials for Richard III, I discovered that there were thirteen extant and hitherto unstudied versions of Olivier’s Macbeth screenplay catalogued in the Laurence Olivier Archive at the British Library. The only remnant of the screenplay that had so far been available consisted of nine lines from its conclusion, reproduced by Anthony Holden in his 1988 biography of Olivier.12 Holden had seen a copy of the screenplay belonging to Harry Andrews, who was to play Macduff, and who had apparently been overlooked when Olivier recalled five other distributed copies following Macbeth’s cancellation in 1958.13 The screenplays housed in the archive trace the production’s development from an early draft through to detailed shooting scripts. The final shooting script certainly does not correspond to Olivier’s reference to the project as a mere ‘sketch’. Rather, it offers intricate timings, set plans, set designs and technical notes alongside a finalised script that incorporates Olivier’s amendments to the second draft screenplay. A reading of all of the catalogued manuscripts confirms that Olivier’s cuts to the play text (unlike those of Hamlet) are minimal. The only significant cuts and conflations concern the excision of the role of Young Siward and the conflation of the part of Caithness with that of Angus; in terms of sequences, Olivier dispenses with Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy, with Malcolm’s allusions to the healing of the King’s Evil (4.3) and with Hecate and the entirety of 3.5. Meanwhile, Lennox’s encounter with the Lord at 3.6 is transformed into a meeting between Ross, Macduff and Lennox at Fife. A study of the final shooting script reveals that the running time for Macbeth would, like that of Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III, reach approximately 155 minutes. The manuscripts are available to view in the Laurence Olivier Archive and are catalogued as follows:

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Table 1 Olivier’s Macbeth manuscripts: archival schema 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

Technical breakdown (Add. 80534). Annotated first draft screenplay (Add. 80535). First draft screenplay (Add. 80536): typed without annotations. Duplicate first draft screenplay (Add. 80537): unbound with extensive annotations in Olivier’s hand that are then typed up into the second draft. Second draft screenplay (Add. 80538): dated 20.6.58. The only screenplay to be dated. No annotations. Duplicate of second draft screenplay (Add. 80539): contains annotations that are not in Olivier’s hand. Duplicate of second draft screenplay (Add. 80540): contains annotations that are not in Olivier’s hand. Duplicate of second draft screenplay (Add. 80541): contains annotations that are not in Olivier’s hand. Duplicate of second draft screenplay (Add. 80542): contains extensive annotations in Olivier’s hand and forms the basis of the shooting script. To be referred to as ‘working shooting script’. Duplicate of second draft screenplay (Add. 80543): no annotations. Shooting script (Add. 80544): unbound with detailed directions for camera movement and including locations, studio sets and special effect notes. Minor changes from the second draft screenplay affecting directions but no apparent changes to the script. Shooting script (Add. 80545): unbound; includes scene timings annotated in pencil and extra directional annotations in a hand that is not Olivier’s. Shooting script (Add. 80546): Final shooting script. Includes sketches, set designs, scene compositions and detailed timings.

Note: These are my own observations regarding the manuscripts and differ from the way that they are catalogued by the British Library. The annotated first draft, for example, is catalogued by the library as a second draft.

It is likely that Olivier began preparing the first draft of the screenplay before August 195714 (when he visited Scotland to scout for locations) and that all manuscripts (including second draft screenplay and shooting scripts) belong to the period prior to August 1958: the production was cancelled in early July, with notices sent out from the fourth day of that month. There is no third draft; the thirteen manuscripts consist of duplicates of the first draft, duplicates of a second draft and shooting scripts based on the second draft. Some of these are annotated in Olivier’s hand, some in an unidentified hand and some are clean copies. The only draft that is dated is the fifth in this schema, noted as 20 June 1958. This suggests that the shooting scripts (with the exception of the ninth, which shows the workings that transform the second draft into the shooting script) were conceptualised very late in the production and possibly completed just

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days before its cancellation (and possibly even after its cancellation).15 It also suggests that the five copies of the script that were disseminated to interested parties and recalled by Olivier from 8 July 1958 were second draft screenplays – perhaps constituting five of the six duplicates now housed in the archive. Of the four shooting scripts, one is annotated by a hand other than Olivier’s, but the first (the ninth manuscript in the collection) certainly belongs to Olivier, offering alternate directions pencilled in his handwriting alongside the typed script of the second draft. This manuscript – which I will call Olivier’s working shooting script – forms the basis of the ensuing three shooting scripts. Unless otherwise specified, citations from the screenplay throughout the following two chapters are taken from the working shooting script. Any major revisions between the working shooting script and the final shooting script will be noted. It is necessary to stress here, however, that I do not want to offer any kind of final vision of Macbeth, either in this chapter (which considers the relevant production and cultural contexts pertaining to the unmade film) or in the chapter that follows (which assesses Macbeth’s creative content and its significance today, in the archive.) Instead, I want to consider the manuscripts throughout as constituting the fragmented remains of a work in progress. It is for this reason that I consider personal and professional correspondence, set designs and production budgets alongside the manuscripts, which function as part of the larger work that I am calling Olivier’s Macbeth. Approaching Macbeth through its documentary fragments invites an assessment of the project as exactly that, but it also offers a unique insight into the changing industrial-cultural landscape of 1950s and 1960s Britain and, consequently, into Olivier’s evolution as a Shakespearean star.

(Not) Producing Macbeth On 22 December 1955, Alexander Korda wrote to Cecil Tennant, Olivier’s agent and managing director of LOP, outlining the terms under which Macbeth was to be produced. Korda’s letter, on behalf of London Films Limited, agreed that ‘Sir Laurence will undertake to direct, produce and star in “Macbeth” in 1957’ and offered Olivier, in acknowledgement of his ‘great labours’ in making Richard III, a year-long holiday.16 Almost exactly a month later, on 23 January 1956, Korda died suddenly and the Macbeth project was thrown into disarray. Olivier lost a great support in Korda, whose willingness to take big risks, even against the odds, had enabled the production of Richard III and was meant to do the same for Macbeth.

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Predictably, Olivier turned to the company that had produced Henry V and Hamlet: the Rank Organisation.17 John Davis, Rank’s notorious managing director, was, throughout the late 1950s, intent on pursuing international successes, specifically targeting the US market in a dogged campaign that had begun in the post-war maelstrom of 1947 with Rank himself and that culminated exactly ten years later, with Davis’s establishment of the short-lived Rank Film Distributors of America in 1957. But Davis’s conception of the international British film was very different from Korda’s. An accountant, formally dealing with the Gaumont-Odeon cinema circuit controlled by Rank, Davis has been variously held up as the epitome of what Macnab evocatively describes as ‘the grey-suited businessmen coming to prominence in the Rank Organisation [in the late 1950s], who cared less about saving British film than showing a profit on the yearly balance sheet’.18 While Korda had emphasised the role of the international picture in shoring up and proclaiming British national identity (and the identity of the British film industry) abroad, Davis considered it summarily as a vital commodity in ensuring that Rank, during a turbulent period for the film industry, remained not only solvent, but profitable. Declining cinema admissions brought about by the rise of television (predominant among a multitude of contributing factors in the late 1950s)19 forced a response from Davis that resulted in the Rank Organisation initiating a production drive aimed squarely at the foreign market. If the UK market was difficult, Davis hoped to compensate with box office success elsewhere. Assessing Davis’s strategy at this time, Macnab accuses him of ‘abortively attempting to emulate Korda’s success in the mid-1930s’ but, distinct from Korda’s conception of the international British film as ‘truly and intensely national’, Rank’s new international epics were ‘co-productions’ in which Davis mixed star actors, directors and exotic themes in a diverse cultural melting pot that was designed to appeal to foreign markets.20 Looking at Rank’s output in the late 1950s, the international film appears to consist mainly of war and colonial-themed adventures21 and just one literary adaptation (the cornerstone among sources for Korda’s concept of the international film), A Tale of Two Cities (1958).22 In the midst of an industry that continued to witness the decline of the historical and costume film, and that was dominated by a vertically integrated organisation favouring internationally themed pictures, it is hard to see how Macbeth might appeal to Davis. But Davis was clearly interested in Macbeth as an international film. In May 1957, Cecil Tennant sent Olivier a press statement to approve that had been prepared by Davis. In the

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statement, Davis stresses the significance of the Rank Organisation’s involvement in the production of Henry V and Hamlet, an involvement that privileged Olivier’s ‘autonomy of creative decision’. He concludes: ‘It is anticipated that the picture will be of major significance in consolidating the reputation of British films overseas not only for commercial success but for high artistic merit.’23 Davis’s draft statement both reflects the Rank Organisation’s overriding interest in products that can be vociferously marketed overseas and addresses the tensions between conflicting notions of art and commerce that so characterise Davis’s reign at Rank, not only in terms of Rank’s output, but in terms of Davis’s own reputation within the industry and the media.24 Certainly, Davis was not known for encouraging ‘autonomy of creative decision’ or for privileging ‘high artistic merit’ over commercial success, as the press statement declares. Moreover, he had almost certainly seen Olivier’s proposed screenplay by this point. In a letter to Tennant dated April 1957 (and, therefore, preceding the draft press statement), Davis negotiated terms for the production of Macbeth that, though by no means generous, agreed to finance the project ‘subject to an agreed script and budget’.25 Given Davis’s no-risk reputation and the subsequent draft press statement, I think it safe to assume that Davis had received and approved Olivier’s first draft screenplay. It is likely that at least one draft had been completed by this stage in 1957.26 This is relevant because Olivier’s screenplay is decidedly uninternational if measured against Davis’s remit. Intrinsic to Olivier’s conception of the production, for example, is its Scottishness. Tennant had admonished Korda’s eagerness to begin production in 1956 on the grounds that ‘Larry feels that it is essential this film be made with locations in Scotland or Wales.’27 Olivier’s shooting script lists locations that range from ‘Misty Loch Hills, Kyle’ to Inverness, Skye and Scone and is peppered with directions that evoke a distinctly Scottish landscape.28 The final production budget for Macbeth records that Olivier expected to do eight weeks of location shooting in Scotland compared with just seven divided between the studio lots at Pinewood and Shepperton.29 Olivier had also requested the National Trust-owned heritage site Balmacara Estate as the set for Dunsinane Castle, listing the site in his technical breakdown of the screenplay alongside a note for the Art Department that warned ‘Considerable tree cutting necessary for sequence Birnham [sic] Wood move to Dunsinane’.30 And in a move reminiscent of both Henry V and Richard III, Olivier wrote to Major E.A. Billett of the War Office, requesting a maximum of 800 soldiers for two weeks’ shooting in the Kyle of Lochalsh area from the middle of September 1958.31 Finally, Macbeth was certainly not

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to constitute a cultural melting pot of actors and producers; rather, Olivier resurrected a familiar team (Alan Dent, Roger Furse, Carmen Dillon) alongside famed Scottish actors (John Laurie, Andrew Cruickshank).32 Why, then, did Davis agree to produce Olivier’s Macbeth? There are two reasons why Macbeth may have appealed to John Davis in 1957. Firstly, Macbeth would constitute a production capable of confronting current tensions relating to a perceived Americanisation of the British film industry at the level of the home market, whilst also providing Davis with a particularly British vehicle through which to publicise the cause of British films overseas. Charges of Americanisation were aimed squarely and noisily at Davis and the Rank Organisation during this period. In 1956, Stephen Watts published an article entitled ‘The Future of Film and TV in Britain’, in which he lamented the decline of Britain’s film industry through an explicit criticism of the Rank Organisation: Whether a Breaking the Sound Barrier, The Third Man, or Richard III could get itself made without a Korda around is . . . a disquieting but legitimate reflection . . . It is significant that producer-directors of [repute] have all detached themselves from the Rank allegiance; and what conclusion is to be drawn from their commitments at the time of writing? . . . this pack of leading movie makers is working either for American employers direct or on films that will set out to be international in appeal, which in this country means patterned to appeal to the American mass market.33

For Watts, it is precisely the loss of influences such as Korda (the industry’s ‘only real impresario’) and the subsequent predominance of men such as John Davis (‘an accountant’) that leaves Britain’s film industry vulnerable to an overall Americanising influence, an influence evidenced most clearly by the dual rise of television and American-British co-productions.34 It is this very tension that is addressed by Davis’s press statement and, implicitly, by the Macbeth project. Reconciling ‘commerce’ with ‘high artistic merit’, Davis’s description of Macbeth emphasises a particularly British identity for the film industry and for the Rank Organisation, a fact only underscored by the careful evocation of a prior golden age of production: a reminder that Olivier had previously produced, directed and starred in Henry V and Hamlet for Rank. Sarah Street has also noted the fact that both Henry V and Hamlet had played a significant role in ‘building up enthusiasm for British films’ during the 1940s: Davis may have had similar hopes for Macbeth, despite its divergence from Rank’s current international formula.35 The second reason why Macbeth may have appealed to Davis is that it might have been considered as representing a potentially valuable tool in

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the sale of feature films to US television. This might seem odd, particularly given Davis’s vociferous (and vocal) denunciations of screening films on television,36 but, as Su Holmes has shown, the relationship between cinema and television in the 1950s is emergent and complex, particularly in the latter part of the decade. Moreover, this specifically concerns the US market rather than the British market, and the impact of Richard III’s release on US television, and the production’s subsequent overall profits, were as yet unknown, though the event had been much trumpeted and had offered the film, and the British film industry, much publicity. Davis had had some success in selling older films to US television and, indeed, may have been awaiting news of Richard III’s reception on television, and of the impact of this upon box office revenues, following Korda’s landmark NBC deal. If this was the case, then unfortunately for Olivier, the receipt of Davis’s draft press statement coincides, as Luke McKernan notes, with ‘news of the losses made by Richard III in America’.37 In a letter to Olivier dated March 1958, Cecil Tennant regretfully informs him that ‘up to some months ago . . . “Richard III” was about £150,000 short of making a profit’.38 The losses incurred by Richard III, then, cannot have encouraged Davis and, for McKernan, it was certainly Richard III’s poor performance at the box office that induced Davis’s sudden ‘cold feet’.39 However, just as it is not entirely clear as to why Davis agreed to produce Macbeth in the first place, it is also not entirely clear as to exactly why Davis ultimately baulked at the project. Following the press statement, no further correspondence between Olivier, Tennant and Davis is catalogued in the archive or, at least, none is archived with the other Macbeth documents. Olivier himself does not cite Richard III’s poor returns as the reason for Davis’s withdrawal, although Tennant’s subsequent letters to potential financiers certainly contain a multitude of apologias that lay the blame squarely on the NBC deal.40 I think it likely that Richard III’s losses constituted one of a multitude of factors that dissuaded Davis, particularly as Olivier appears to be uncertain that Davis had completely abandoned the project as late as January 1958.41 In addition to the news regarding Richard III, then, I propose another possible determining factor in Davis’s withdrawal from Macbeth. In his autobiographies and in various interviews, Olivier claims that Davis rejected Macbeth’s proffered budget of £400,000 on the grounds that the bank rate had risen to 7 per cent in 1957.42 The bank rate, however, had increased in September 1957; that is, five months after Davis had agreed to produce Macbeth and one month before filming would begin on another Davis commission, Rank’s most expensive

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project to date: A Night to Remember (1958). A Night to Remember cost Rank £500,000, significantly more than Macbeth would have done, but it more wholly represented the type of prestige, internationally aimed production that Davis was inclined to back. Moreover, A Night to Remember, marketed as a realist text, evokes a style of filmmaking connected to the post-war British film industry and, therefore, enables Davis to assert a particularly British identity for the Rank Organisation, whilst widening audience appeal and transcending the niche market of Macbeth. Ultimately, given that the Rank Organisation was also scaling down its production output in order to focus on the more profitable areas of distribution and exhibition during the late 1950s, Macbeth’s appeal, when considered alongside the prospect of A Night to Remember, appears somewhat diminished. The latter project must have been given the final go-ahead by Davis around September 1957 (the final draft script was completed in August).43 Harper and Porter conclude that, in financing the expensive A Night to Remember, Davis must have been ‘unaware that the bank rate had just increased by 2%’.44 Not according to Olivier. The epitome of Rank’s international film, the expensive A Night to Remember may well have sunk Macbeth. This possibility, alongside Olivier’s continued difficulty in attracting finance for the Macbeth project, raises questions about the viability of the Shakespearean feature film as a flagship product for the British film industry in the late 1950s. Not only did Macbeth fail to navigate the volatile industrial and economic conditions that characterised the home market at this time, but it sat awkwardly with – even in opposition to – a parallel and fundamental shift in Britain’s cultural landscape. Olivier had planned to ‘revive’ Macbeth in the near future: production budgets were still being issued as late as 14 July 1958, almost three weeks after Macbeth had been officially shelved. But within the wider cinematic and theatrical contexts of 1950s Britain, Olivier’s Macbeth was, ultimately, unfeasible. More than that, Olivier-as-Macbeth could not fulfil the demands that this new era required of him as a Shakespearean star. Indeed, Olivier’s image undergoes a revolutionary transformation from 1957. Tracing this process of transformation through a series of contemporary documents including fan letters, press comment and interviews sheds further light on the place of Macbeth in relation to what is also a radically changing theatrical and cinematic culture. Most crucially, though, it reveals that it is precisely the loss of Macbeth that enables Olivier’s Shakespearean star image to evolve in response and, ultimately, to reach the apex of its national-cultural power by 1963.

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The Entertainer (1957, 1960) From April to May 1957 – as Macbeth was first being drafted – Laurence Olivier played the part of Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Royal Court Theatre. Following the run at the Royal Court, Olivier toured with the production between September and November of the same year, performing at the Palace Theatre and the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, the New Theatre in Oxford and the Hippodrome in Brighton. During this tour Olivier received various correspondences from members of the public reacting to his appearance in the play. As demonstrated by the following representative examples, many of the writers express dismay. From South Kensington, Dr Blaikie reminds Olivier of his precious cultural status as an ‘Idol’ of British nationhood, advising him of the harm that he is doing by giving weight to a play that ‘sneers at all our decencies, our country, our loyalties & religion’.45 Olive Hinchman, meanwhile, writes from Wolverhampton to plead with Olivier to reflect upon the ‘degradation’ that he is subjecting himself to in The Entertainer; contrasting his work in Osborne’s play with her fond recollections of watching him perform as Romeo, Lear, Richard III and Antony, she charges him: ‘For heavens’ sake, re-dedicate yourself, & go back to Shakespeare.’46 Isabel Scott of Dunbartonshire turns her attention more broadly to the nation at large, remarking on the ‘disservice’ that Olivier is doing to his ‘country and its people’ while, in a similar vein, Mrs Glen of Glasgow admonishes Olivier for allowing his name to be ‘used and exploited by forces that are not for the good of this country’.47 The deeply felt response to witnessing Olivier-as-Archie-Rice contained within these letters highlights the continuing potency of Olivier’s image as a locus for representing ideas about nationhood in Britain in the late 1950s. But they do so by alerting us to a seismic change that is perceived to have occurred in that image. Indeed, the letter writers suggest that there is something traitorous about Olivier’s casting as Archie Rice and they struggle to reconcile their understanding of the particular values connoted by ‘Laurence Olivier’ with the resignification of those values in The Entertainer. They have been deliberately provoked: the role of the seedy vaudevillian Rice had been especially written for Olivier and the play’s focus on the dying tradition of the music hall as a metaphor for the declining British Empire constitutes a self-conscious engagement on Osborne’s part with Olivier’s Shakespearean star image. Unsurprisingly, then, the discomforting nature of Olivier’s metamorphosis also represents a particular preoccupation of the contemporary media, providing the

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subject for a series of commentaries spanning The Entertainer’s theatrical run in 1957 and its cinematic release in 1960 (both directed by Tony Richardson). Two press comments in particular stand out. In October 1958, The Daily Sketch published an article entitled ‘Two Sides of the Face’, in which its author put forward the suggestion that there are ‘two Oliviers’. The Sketch’s suggestion, that ‘Laurence Olivier’ might simultaneously represent two very different, and apparently conflicting, personae is then reasserted three years later in 1961 by Alan Pryce-Jones in Theatre Arts magazine: Olivier ‘has divided himself, to begin with, into two pieces sharply contrasted – one being labelled Sir Laurence and the other Larry’.48 Unlike the letter writers, the journalist at the Daily Sketch and Pryce-Jones do not read Olivier’s post-Rice image straightforwardly – that is, in terms of rude incompatibility; instead, they read the different significations articulated by that image as co-existing. The suggestion that Olivier has achieved some kind of synchronised division of himself has its origins in and develops from the flurry of bemused yet positive media responses to Olivier’s first appearance in the 1957 theatrical production of The Entertainer, a selection of which appears in Table 2. These press comments, like the ‘fan’ letters, register incredulity at Olivier’s appearance in The Entertainer, remarking on the apparent incompatibility of ‘Sir Laurence Olivier’ with Archie Rice, the ‘Knight’ (a) with the ‘hoofer’ (c). But they also present these concepts as exisiting side by side (a, c, e). Indeed, the dual personae of ‘Sir Laurence’ and ‘Larry’ proposed by Pryce-Jones in 1961 can be variously mapped onto the series of juxtapositions made by these diverse publications during Olivier’s tour in The Entertainer. With this in mind, Pryce-Jones’s subsequent assertion that a reconciliation of these ‘two pieces’ of Laurence Olivier would be ‘to the benefit of the contemporary stage’ is significant, not least because it chimes with Richard Dyer’s claim that particular star images can work to reconcile or navigate seemingly unworkable contradictions within a given culture.50 Certainly, when we consider these press comments alongside the letters that Olivier received from the public, it appears that as a Shakespearean star signifying so differently in The Entertainer, Laurence Olivier comes to articulate a particular set of unworkable contradictions within British culture during the late 1950s. To be specific, Olivier’s image in and around The Entertainer works to cite conflicting and contradictory ideas about nationhood that can be imagined as being articulated by two major and distinct events: the Coronation (1953) and the Suez Crisis (1956).51

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(a) A Knight at the Music Hall. Plays and Players, October 1957 (b) . . . there is a kind of shock in finding one of our leading players doing a vaudeville act. Glasgow Bulletin, November 1957 (c) I give you Sir Laurence Olivier – hoofer! Daily Express, April 1957 (d) It is not the kind of part in which one would expect to find Sir Laurence Olivier. Edinburgh Evening News, 11 November 1957 (e) Meet Sir Laurence Olivier – music-hall comedian, singer and tap-dancer. Edinburgh Evening News, 12 November 1957 (f) Sir Laurence Olivier has almost crossed the frontiers of the theatre. Weekly Scotsman, 16 November 1957

Stephen Lacey has usefully pointed out that while the ‘cultural moment’ of the Coronation proffered a secure and prestigious representation of the nation, the moment pertaining to the Suez Crisis appeared to expose the reality of the crumbling national image that lay behind that representation: indeed, 1956 ‘offered images of dissent, instability, fracture and powerlessness’.52 It is precisely this conflict between past and present and related contradictory images of Britain that becomes mapped onto the ‘two faces’ or ‘two pieces’ of Laurence Olivier following his incongruous appearance in Osborne’s The Entertainer, a play transparently set against the background of the Suez Crisis. Indeed, if we return to the selection of letters sent to Olivier, it is clear that this is precisely how Dr Blaikie, Olive Hinchman, Isabel Scott and Mrs Glen read Olivier-as-Archie-Rice. Olive Hinchman’s letter is particularly enlightening here because it gestures beyond The Entertainer and towards the wider impact that changing concepts of nationhood have on British theatrical and cinematic culture. Hinchman’s injunction that Olivier ‘go back to Shakespeare’ represents a command typical of many of the letters received by Olivier in 1957. In pleading with Olivier to ‘go back’, Hinchman appeals for a return to the recent theatrical past and, in doing so, she simultaneously appeals for an alternative representation of nationhood. Desiring the Laurence Olivier of Richard III or The Sleeping Prince (dir. Olivier, 1953) over the Laurence Olivier of The Entertainer, Hinchman criticises Olivier for failing to live up to his past and, in doing so, she articulates a wider contemporary cultural

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dilemma: the inability to reconcile notions of Britain’s national prestige (so lately celebrated with the Coronation) with the decline of the British Empire, underscored by the nation’s problematic role in the Suez Crisis. Starring in plays representative of both of these disparate epochs, Olivier’s divided image cites conflicting ideas about nationhood during the 1950s because it traces an analogous shift in British theatrical culture between 1953 and 1957. The Entertainer, then, belongs to a New Wave of British theatre that is popularly imagined as ushered in with the Royal Court Theatre’s production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger on 8 May 1956.53 While the term ‘British New Wave’ is commonly used to refer to early 1960s British cinema, I use it here to accommodate late 1950s and early 1960s British theatre as well. The critical tendency to consider these theatrical and cinematic New Wave(s) separately overlooks the interactive and parallel relationship between the stage and the screen during this period, a relationship that the failure of Macbeth certainly speaks to (and one that needs to be acknowledged as part of Macbeth’s story). In terms of the 1956 stage, the period of dramatic activity that precedes the New Wave (from the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953) tends to be characterised, here by Kenneth Tynan, as a national ‘vacuum’, dominated by ‘Loamshire’54 plays reflecting nothing but ‘the general impotence of [British] theatre’.55 For Tynan, the New Wave is thus an urgent necessity, administering to the shameful, sickly state of the pre-1956 stage by ‘[lancing] a boil that has plagued our theatre for many years’.56 If the pre-1956 British stage is associated with a loss of theatrical prestige, the New Wave is thus imagined to gesture towards the restoration of that prestige. However, and as Dan Rebellato points out, the New Wave also represents a need for an assertion of British culture that extends beyond the national stage to encompass the wider cultural preoccupations associated with Britain’s loss of ‘Empire status’.57 Indeed, that readings of the state of the national stage speak to the wider state of the national image is made crystal clear by another of Tynan’s useful and evocative contemporary descriptions: ‘English drama is like the Suez canal: a means of communication, made hazardous by a myriad sunken wrecks.’58 While recent critics, notably Rebellato (1956), Shellard (British Theatre Since the War; ‘Adaptable Terence Rattigan’) and Christopher Innes, have challenged Tynan’s generalising view of this period, it nevertheless neatly gestures towards the way in which British theatre of the 1950s is imagined in contemporary discourses as divided into two distinct theatrical epochs: pre- and post-1956. And it is this imagining of

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a historical-cultural division that is relevant for our purposes here and for an understanding of how the parallel division of Laurence Olivier into ‘two pieces’ or ‘two faces’ is made to work in relation to what is a simultaneous moment of national crisis and cultural assertion (to the detriment of the proposed cinematic Macbeth). Tynan certainly intuits the significance of Olivier’s role here: ‘The theatrical Establishment has bowed to it [the theatrical revolution], as witness the significant day when Sir Laurence Olivier . . . asked Mr. Osborne to write a part for him.’59 To appropriate Pryce-Jones’s terms and reorient them in relation to Tynan’s statement, if ‘Sir Laurence’ symbolises the old theatrical establishment (with its related connotations of the old Empire) and an outmoded theatrical era, it becomes clear that ‘Larry’ is capable of signalling its evolution, representing the drama and institutions of the New Wave and the promised reconfiguration of (and persistence of) theatrical – and national – prestige.60 Further, if ‘Laurence Olivier’ can be seen to articulate a set of unworkable contradictions within 1950s British culture, then it is also the case, as Pryce-Jones and Tynan both suggest, that ‘Laurence Olivier’ – cleft by Archie Rice into ‘Sir Laurence’ and ‘Larry’ – can move to reconcile these contradictions, presenting a site both of reflection and of reassuring resolution. Crucially, as contemporary interviews with Olivier demonstrate, this reconciliation is achieved through an emphasis on Olivier’s authenticity as a specifically Shakespearean star. What is distinctive about all of these interview extracts is that they work to understand Olivier’s presence in the role of Archie Rice in light of his prior career and of his personal life: Olivier’s answers constitute responses to questions that emphasise the importance of his past to his current success in this particular role. The interviewer from Plays and Players, for example, wonders why exactly Olivier’s performance is ‘so shatteringly true to life and sympathetic’,61 and Olivier’s replies place a stress on genuine life experiences: the fact that he ‘share[d] digs’ with vaudevillians when he was a jobbing actor, that he ‘[admired] Robey’,62 that the ‘atmosphere’ of The Entertainer was, as a result of his youthful trips to the music hall, ‘already a part’ of him (a, b). As a result, Olivier’s performance of Archie Rice appears to be, exactly, ‘true to life’, an illusion that not only urges Olivier’s authenticity but the authenticity of the specifically Shakespearean values that he embodies.63 It is immediately apparent, then, that the slippage that takes place in these interview extracts between Olivier and Archie Rice actually moves to refer the reader back to Shakespeare and, relatedly, to the ongoing stability and authenticity of the nation and its

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theatre at a time when the image of Great Britannia is being called into question (emblematised, in the case of The Entertainer, by the infamous Nude Britannia tableau). This is a process that we see played out in various ways through the media texts considered here and it is a process that is rendered even more potent by a significant change that occurs in Olivier’s personal life at this time. In 1958, Olivier separated from Vivien Leigh and began a relationship with Joan Plowright which was officially confirmed to the press in 1960, the year that the film adaptation of The Entertainer was released. Plowright co-starred with Olivier in the film, reprising her stage role as Rice’s daughter, Jean. Clearly, Olivier’s relationship with Plowright, when read against the function of his star image during the late 1950s, has immense symbolic value here. Plowright is a performer famously associated with New Wave drama, not only because she was a member of the English Stage Company, but because her own star image intersects with the multivariate concerns that characterise New Wave theatre, particularly in terms of diverse representations of youth, of the working class and of regionalism. Olivier himself gestures towards the oppositional theatrical discourses represented respectively by himself and Plowright when he describes meeting her prior to The Entertainer: I had eyes for no one but Joan, whose smile at this first meeting had more than a hint of mockery about it. I divined that I stood for everything that the young generation at the Royal Court would find most objectionable . . . I was titled, necessarily self-satisfied, pompous, patronising, having obviously come to visit in a spirit of condescension – I could see it all.64

As Olivier’s narrative suggests, the symbolic value of Olivier’s and Plowright’s relationship lies in the replacement of the Theatre Royals – and the rather anachronistic theatrical (and national) discourses that they represent by the late 1950s – with the emblematic union of two disparate theatrical epochs. Such an impression is strengthened by Olivier’s interpretation of this period in his autobiography as he describes the reconfiguration of what had been the ‘boredom of my . . . career’ and the ‘personal life’ that ‘was a tiresome tease to me’.65 Olivier’s relationship with Plowright strengthens the impression urged in the interview extracts that the tensions that characterise the 1950s British theatre industry and, relatedly, the nation (crystallised by the image of Olivier-as-Archie-Rice) are reassuringly embedded in a sense of Olivier’s ‘true’ Shakespearean self. Indeed, by the time that the cinematic adaptation of The Entertainer is released, Olivier’s personal life is functioning as a corollory to the change

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Table 3 Interviews with Laurence Olivier conducted during the tour of The Entertainer (1957) (a) I’ve always known the character. I used to share digs as a young actor with music-hall comedians. He’s not based on any particular person, perhaps on a mixture of two or three I saw when I was young and one or two more recently. Olivier in the Oxford Mail, November 1957 (b) The role came easily . . . partly because it was so well drawn in the play, and partly because I felt I knew Archie so well. As a professional actor, of course, the whole atmosphere of the play was already a part of me. Olivier in Plays and Players, October 1957 (c) It is not like the very early days, when a whole town or village would go wild with excitement when they heard the news that “the players” had arrived. Olivier in Plays and Players, October 1957 (d) [Archie Rice] is the most deeply absorbing part I have ever played with the exception of Macbeth. Olivier in the Daily Telegraph, January 1958

that has occurred in his professional life and, consequently, consolidating his image function in and around The Entertainer from 1957. As the various media responses to Olivier’s performance in The Entertainer show, the initially alarming shift that takes place in his image is thus consistently narrated as authorised by and anchored by a deferral to Shakespeare. Here, Olivier’s image as Archie Rice is not engaged with as a radical reworking so much as it is reinterpreted as incorporative and reconcilatory. Going back to the interview extracts, we can see that Olivier’s own responses urge this impression of reconciliation between the national/ theatrical past and present as it is articulated by his evolving image. This is achieved, too, by invoking Shakespeare. Particularly exemplary here is extract ‘c’, when Olivier narrates the failing popular theatre of the British music hall through Shakespeare, juxtaposing Hamlet (and Elsinore’s) reaction to the arrival of the players with the decline in popularity of the 1950s vaudevillian.66 The final extract reproduced in Table 3 demonstrates a similar sense of deferral to Shakespeare; here, Olivier discusses his performance as Archie Rice by juxtaposing it with his performance as Macbeth at Stratford two years previously. Macbeth, at this point, represents a role that Olivier was preparing to play again, this time on screen. Clearly, Olivier’s reference is self-interested in this sense, but it also crucially functions to incorporate Archie Rice (and, by extension, the New Wave of British theatre) into Olivier’s Shakespearean career.

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Table 4 Extracts from 1957 press reviews of The Entertainer (a) Next month he will be back to normal – touring Europe in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” Daily Express, April 1957 (b) It is a staggering performance, remarkable in itself and pretty well unique in that it is patently the result of skill, study, and imagination normally reserved for only the great classic roles. The Queen, October 1957 (c) The firm conviction and warm compassion he has brought to this role at a time when we can still recall the majestic power of his Titus and Macbeth – proves that he is in himself the complete entertainer. Plays and Players, October 1957 (d) Sooner or later, of course, the conversation with Sir ‘Larry’ turned to Shakespeare in general and to ‘Macbeth’ in particular. Edinburgh Evening News, November 1957

The wider cultural investment in reading Olivier’s image in this way is most obviously demonstrated through the final selection of extratexts in Table 4. These are taken from a series of 1957 press reviews of The Entertainer and they clearly work to develop Olivier’s own attempts in the interviews to assimilate his past and present. With the idea that ‘star images develop and change over time’ in mind, these reviews ultimately celebrate Laurence Olivier’s developing continuity and the continuity of the elements that are represented by his Shakespearean star image; specifically, continuity of theatrical and national prestige, of Shakespeare.67 The assurance that Olivier will soon be ‘back to normal’, touring in a Shakespeare production, recalls the plea in Olive Hinchman’s letter that Olivier ‘go back to Shakespeare’; the review thus suggests the continuing specificity of the values embodied by Olivier as a Shakespearean star by stressing the compatibility of his sudden change in theatrical direction with his prior career. Similarly, the extract from The Queen (b) understands Olivier-as-Archie-Rice in light of ‘the great classic roles’, seeing these as imprinted on, and inseparable from, Olivier’s performance in The Entertainer. The final two extracts function most obviously to reconcile Olivier’s past and present, gesturing towards the divergent conceptions of British theatrical culture and related images of nationhood that are held in tension by Olivier’s image. For Plays and Players, Olivier’s appearance in Osborne’s play inculcates Olivier as ‘the complete entertainer’ (my emphasis), while the Edinburgh Evening News suggests the

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literal reconciliation of the concepts of ‘Sir Laurence’ and ‘Larry’ proposed by Pryce-Jones when introducing the ultimate, integrated, persona of ‘Sir Larry’. Osborne’s engagement with Olivier’s image may have been radical but the media discourses that surround Olivier’s transformation ultimately refashion that engagement in the service of a much more conservative cultural agenda. In and around The Entertainer Laurence Olivier offers audiences, at a time of great upheaval, an impression of continuity, presenting as a site for the reconciliation of nationalcultural contradiction under the sign of Shakespeare. This is not to imply stasis: Olivier’s image certainly undergoes a noisy evolution in order to fulfil this function. More pertinently, looking at the impact that the New Wave has on British Shakespeare production during this period, it becomes clear that Olivier’s continued ability to function as a Shakespearean star is not just down to Archie Rice: it is absolutely predicated on the failure of Macbeth.

Macbeth and the New Wave In terms of the 1950s Shakespearean stage, the impact of the theatrical New Wave is evidenced in the increasing popularity of what Shellard calls ‘[reinterpretations] of classics’, purveyed most notably by Theatre Workshop after 1954.68 It is also reflected in what Robert Smallwood identifies as the ‘swing from the actors to the directors’ that takes place from the mid-1950s, a swing consistent with the shift away from starcentred performances characteristic of New Wave theatre. 69 These trends must, however, ultimately be seen to coexist with a ‘general decline’ in Shakespeare production throughout the late 1950s, in an industry increasingly focused on new writing.70 In 1956, Peter Hall published an article in Plays and Players in which the popularity of Shakespeare functions as a symptom of the inefficacy of the pre-1956 stage: ‘The theatre will continue to shrink while its audiences are given warmed up fare that is dull to their palate. It is evident that Shakespeare is much to their tastes. It is up to our dramatists to concoct a new dish for our times.’71 For Hall, this ‘new theatrical dish’ must nevertheless be inherently Shakespearean: ‘the modern drama should become more Shakespearean’.72 In demanding that modern theatre become ‘more Shakespearean’, Hall appeals for a new British drama that is more adequately representative of the nation. The assertion of a modern British theatre through Shakespeare that is suggested here by Hall’s

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article and that is evidenced, particularly after 1956, in reworkings of the plays by companies like Theatre Workshop, inevitably impacts upon Olivier’s Macbeth project. In September 1959, the Sunday Express published an article concerning Olivier’s upcoming appearance in the film adaptation of Osborne’s The Entertainer. Implicit in this article is the suggestion that Olivier’s change in career direction (intiated by the 1957 theatre production of the same play) might impact positively upon the Shakespearean feature film and, specifically, upon the abandoned Macbeth project: Professionally, then, Olivier – at 52 – is in clover. A year ago it was not so. Then he was trying, cap in hand, to raise the money to make Macbeth. It was not forthcoming. And he abandoned the project. Today, should he choose to revive it, the money is ready and waiting.73

But such a statement elides the far-reaching effects of the theatrical New Wave on contemporary productions of Shakespeare, on the types of film subsequently produced through the British film industry, and on Olivier’s star image. If we think about Olivier’s Macbeth in relation to trends in theatrical Shakespeare production during the 1950s, it is clear that these are not reflected in Olivier’s cinematic conception of the play. Very much identifiable with the prior Olivier canon, Macbeth does not represent a production that can be seen to offer a ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional stagings of Shakespeare.74 If Shakespeare is co-opted by the New Wave in order to newly articulate the nation (both in reworkings of the plays in relation to the pre-1956 stage and in appeals to a new Elizabethan age of playwrighting), then Olivier’s Macbeth belongs very much to the pre-1956 theatrical landscape. This assertion is compounded by the fact that Macbeth was staged in 1957 by Theatre Workshop, in a production designed, according to its director Joan Littlewood, specifically to ‘wipe away the dust of three hundred years’ and, with it, the apparently indelible imprint left upon Macbeth by ‘nineteenth-century sentimentalists’.75 Olivier’s Macbeth screenplays, by contrast, betray a debt to the epitome of the nineteenth-century aesthetic railed against by New Wave practitioners such as Littlewood: they are undoubtedly influenced by Irving’s 1875 and 1888 productions. While these similarities are explored more specifically in relation to the screenplays themselves in the following chapter, it is nevertheless important to think, here, about the filmic Shakespeare adaptation in relation to these wider theatrical changes precisely because of the impact that the theatrical New Wave has on the landscape of the British film industry after 1956.

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British New Wave cinema (1959–63) is, as I have already suggested, significantly influenced by the theatrical New Wave that precedes and parallels it. This dynamic is best demonstrated with reference to the independent production company, Woodfall Film Productions, set up by John Osborne and Tony Richardson in 1958 specifically for the purpose of adapting New Wave plays. The ethos behind Woodfall lay, in Richardson’s words, in ‘[getting] into British films the same sort of impact and sense of life that what you can loosely call the Angry Young Man cult has had in the theatre and literary worlds’.76 The first two projects produced by Woodfall (in association with Allied Film Makers and Bryanston respectively) would be Look Back in Anger (dir. Tony Richardson, 1959) and The Entertainer (dir. Tony Richardson, 1960). Analagous to the theatrical New Wave’s opposition to the supposed commercialism of the hegemonic West End, production companies like Woodfall, Allied Film Makers and Bryanston specifically sought to challenge the commercialising and restricting power of the combines, Rank and ABPC; in doing so, they worked to revive a national film industry accused of Americanisation, to enunciate a filmic need (to appropriate Dan Rebellato) for an assertion of the ‘independence of British culture’.77 As this might suggest, affirming the independence of British culture through independent film production necessitates a rejection of specific mainstream structures, flagging up a specific aspect of New Wave film and theatre production that is particularly pertinent to Olivier’s Macbeth. One of the ways in which New Wave cinema, like New Wave theatre, defines itself against the commercial market is precisely by eschewing star-centred performances.78 This is nicely exemplified by Tony Richardson’s response when questioned as to whether or not Olivier would appear as Archie Rice in the film adaptation of Osborne’s The Entertainer: ‘Sir Laurence is very keen. The part was written for him and he is obviously the best person for it. But we shall not soften the script to please him. If he doesn’t like it, we’ll get somebody else.’79 Olivier never appears to have questioned or objected to any aspect of The Entertainer or its script; Richardson’s rebuke here works to emphasise the film as a product of the cinematic New Wave and, specifically, of an independent production company, precisely by asserting Olivier’s very insignificance as a ‘star’. Inevitably, the anti-star focus of the two New Waves clashes with the unashamedly star-centric text presented by Olivier’s Macbeth screenplays. As the next chapter documents, Macbeth offers a celebration of the Theatre Royals and the archiving of a grand Shakespearean performance, what Rattigan had described (and Olivier consistently quotes) as 1955’s ‘definitive Macbeth’.80 The assertion of

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nationhood that is predicated on the reconfiguration of the national theatre and film industries throughout the 1950s is simply not compatible with the traditional Olivier Shakespearean feature film at this point. What a consideration of the parallel landscapes of the British film and theatre industries of the 1950s ultimately tells us, then, is that Macbeth could, after 1956, only really be considered as a cinematic product that asserted British national identity abroad; that is, as an international film. But, as I have asserted throughout this contextual chapter, what is also important about the failure of Macbeth, when read against the theatrical and cinematic climates of the 1950s British creative industries, is that it is precisely its failure that enables Olivier’s image to evolve, facilitating his ability to continue functioning as a Shakespearean star. With this in mind, I would like to briefly return to the statement by Alan Pryce-Jones in which he suggests that Olivier’s image consists of ‘two pieces sharply contrasted – . . . Sir Laurence and . . . Larry’. Pryce-Jones ends his Theatre Arts article by affirming that ‘in helping the growth of contemporary theatre from a noncommercial standpoint . . . Sir Laurence and Larry may finally come together and reach their full stature as a single whole’.81 In 1962, just months after this article was published, Olivier was announced as the first director of the National Theatre. It is here that Pryce-Jones’s assertion finds its fullest expression. The transformation that occurs within Laurence Olivier’s star image over the 1950s effectively forms the basis of the National Theatre ethos, outlined by Olivier in a letter to Harold Hobson in 1962. Here, Olivier imagines the National Theatre as a space ‘in which one may see the finest acting, that will do its duty by the classics, not be nervous of innovations . . . be the pride of the elderly and the inspiration of the young’ while, at the same time, avoiding ‘falling into the trap of tarnished dullness which seems to be the inescapable mausoleum of such institutional enterprises’.82 This sense of a compromise between the past and present, so central to ideas of theatre and nation throughout the 1950s, is conveyed for the National Theatre through the Shakespearean star image of Laurence Olivier. Indeed, without a site of its own until 1975, the National Theatre can be imagined to be embodied in its first director for the next thirteen years. Olivier’s ability to function as a fleshly site for the National Theatre from 1963 speaks particularly to his national-cultural function; that is, his ability to surrogate for, to body forth, Shakespeare. Indeed, when recounting this period in his autobiography, Olivier describes his experience of the changes that occur in his star image and in his personal life from 1957 in terms of a Shakespearean ‘sea change’.83 In doing so Olivier replicates

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a familiar and characteristic response to personal crisis or upheaval: that is, its narration and stabilisation through appropriations of Shakespeare. We have seen how the cinematic Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III feed into Olivier’s autobiographical narrations of selfhood and how these, in turn, feed back into the films themselves, asking us to retrospectively read them for Olivier’s autobiographical presence. What the Macbeth screenplays reveal, however, is that this is also true of the unmade film. Accordingly, I turn in the next chapter to the screenplays themselves as archival documents that enable both a reassessment of the diverse contexts discussed here and a reappraisal of Olivier’s significance as a Shakespearean star not just in the 1950s but in the 2010s.

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chapter 5

Macbeth II (2012–): Legacy

In January 2013 the Guardian published an article in response to the news that Olivier’s Macbeth screenplays were revealed to be hiding in plain sight at the British Library, having been catalogued and made available to researchers and the public since the early 2000s.1 When I saw the Guardian piece I was intrigued by the choice of headline: ‘Fifty Years On Olivier’s Macbeth Rises from the Dead.’ The accompanying picture showed Olivier and Leigh as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the 1955 production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre directed by Glen Byam Shaw. What particularly struck me about this choice of headline was that it urged a slippage between the screenplays themselves and Olivier’s performance, his physical embodiment of Macbeth in 1955. As Olivier’s own lament suggests, the cinematic Macbeth was certainly designed to memorialise that particular production and to reproduce Olivier’s performance for posterity. However, the Guardian headline with its particular choice of words intimates something more than that: ‘Olivier’s Macbeth Rises from the Dead.’ Indeed, there is an implied reanimation here – through Macbeth – of Olivier himself and a tacit acknowledgement of the wider cultural relevance of that reanimation. The headline speaks directly to what I have argued throughout this book was – and is – Olivier’s nationalcultural function as a Shakespearean star. Certainly, Macbeth offers us a neat shorthand, a way of crystallising this idea. After all, Macbeth itself – fuelled by Olivier’s own claims – constituted until very recently a grand cultural enigma: ‘What film did we lose in Olivier’s Macbeth?’2 Solving this particular enigma by knowing Macbeth appears to give us a related access to Olivier himself, a figure who functioned throughout his lifetime to solve the ultimate cultural enigma: Shakespeare. It is this, I believe, that lies behind what was an overwhelming public response to and interest in the news of the Macbeth screenplays. Through the screenplays, through Olivier, it is Shakespeare that can ultimately be seen to ‘rise from the dead’. In this chapter, then, I want to show 139

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Figure 28 Set for ‘Banquet Scene’ in Macbeth at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 1955

how Macbeth makes most fully visible the invisible slippage that occurs between formulations of Olivier’s selfhood and his Shakespearean star image precisely because it is unmade, existing as a series of documents in the archive. Alongside an assessment of the creative content of the screenplays, I will be unpicking the complex network of communication that exists between the Macbeth screenplays, contemporary star discourses and Olivier’s life-writing. Drawing attention to this dialogue shows how Macbeth lays bare the mechanisms pertaining to a model of stardom that I have charted throughout this book as developing in and around Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare adaptations. In short, Macbeth shows us exactly how Laurence Olivier was capable, and even remains posthumously capable, of responding to that familiar national-cultural compulsion: that is, our desire to know what Shakespeare is really like.

Macbeth and Contemporary Star Discourses The Guardian article’s use of a promotional image of Olivier and Leigh from the 1955 Stratford production to stand in for the cinematic Macbeth is apt. Olivier’s Macbeth would effectively reproduce and cinematise Byam Shaw’s staging, an intention made clear in a letter sent to William Morris by Cecil Tennant. In this letter, Tennant, encouraging Morris to finance the filmic Macbeth, encloses reviews ‘from the s_u_a [sic] production of “m”, from which you will gather what a success was made’.3 Macbeth

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certainly follows the Stratford production very closely in terms of its design: with the film set in ‘approximately 1000 a.d.’, the papers relating to the proposed production suggest that the ‘expressive but severe’ Celtic costumes of the Stratford Macbeth would be replicated for the filmic Macbeth;4 and while Roger Furse’s cinematic set designs resemble the Elsinore of Hamlet (1948), they also reimagine Furse’s 1955 set for Byam Shaw’s Macbeth with its ‘impression of rude and massive halls’ (Figure 28).5 As in the prompt book for the theatrical production, Olivier’s Macbeth screenplays intimate the various ways in which this set would be used to create meaning. The thrones of the Macbeths, set side by side, are used in both productions to convey a sense of the deteriorating relationship between the two protagonists, with the cinematic mise-en-scène imagined as ‘carefully, and it matters not how self consciously, studied to show the air between the thrones’.6 However, while the Macbeth screenplays draw on the design of the Stratford production and consistently reproduce its conceptualisation of entire scenes, they also depart from it in significant ways. Here, they offer further insight into the recurring thematic concerns that underpin Olivier’s approach to adapting Shakespeare for the screen. With both this and the previous contextual chapter in mind, a cursory glance at the screenplays tells us that Olivier’s Macbeth is a project very much rooted in the pre-1956 British cultural landscape, both in dialogue with the 1955 stage production and recognisably within the tradition of Olivier’s prior Shakespeare films. It also, like Olivier’s other cinematic Shakespeares, gestures towards an established history of Shakespeare in performance, a fact that should recall Joan Littlewood’s denigration of ‘nineteenth-century sentimentalists’ and their impact on the play. In particular, it appears to be influenced by Henry Irving’s nineteenthcentury stagings. In 1949, Olivier had been sent images of six sequences from Irving’s 1888 Macbeth and it is possible that one of these included Irving’s entrance against ‘a blood-red sky’.7 Perhaps extending the homage to Irving given in Richard III, Olivier’s Macbeth is characterised throughout by a suggested blood-red colour scheme. The shadowy, misty and grey world evoked in the opening scenes of the screenplays, with its images of wet rocks and a dark screen ‘split by lightning’, is immediately penetrated by the colour of blood, the blood of the Thane of Cawdor and – as I explore in detail later – of Macbeth himself. If, as Carol Chillington Rutter suggests, ‘Shakespeare’s strategy in Macbeth seems to be to starve the spectator’s retina of stimulation then to flood it with intense exposures to colour’, Olivier’s cinematic conception of the play fully exploits this strategy.8 The shocks of red colour

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alluded to in the screenplays’ intimations of the intended mise-en-scène are used throughout the proposed film in order to underline significant dramatic moments or key scenes. Macbeth’s enraged reaction to the presence of Banquo’s ghost (which rudely appears at the banquet with ‘crown and sceptre’, occupying Macbeth’s throne) concludes, for example, with the hurling of a flagon whose (presumably red) ‘contents spill’ onto the seat.9 As Lady Macbeth jumps from Dunsinane’s ramparts to meet her death, the cinematic spectator is imagined as aligned with ‘her viewpoint’ as ‘the camera . . . hurtles down towards the ground’, a ‘dark red flash’ obliterating that view.10 This concentrated and selective use of colour is further intensified in the final scenes of the screenplay, which envisage Dunsinane’s eruption in flames and imagine a dying Macbeth sinking down into bloody red water. Whether or not this thematic use of colour was inspired by Irving’s ‘blood-red sky’, Irving’s influence can certainly be read in Olivier’s conception of Lady Macbeth’s greeting of Macbeth, in which her ‘speeding towards her husband’ ends in a ‘fast embrace’; this performative behaviour replicates that of Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth in Irving’s 1888 staging in an imitative move familiar from Olivier’s other cinematic Shakespeares.11 Further in keeping with the prior Olivier canon, the screenplays demonstrate throughout how these allusions to a grand history of Shakespearean performance are wedded to a particularly star-centric (and anti-New Wave) narrative. If Macbeth was intended to memorialise Olivier’s performance in the Stratford production, then the screenplays shore up such an emphasis by offering an increasingly Macbeth-centric text at the same time as they privilege Olivier’s actorly presence through allusions to his prior cinematic Shakespeares. The presentation of Macbeth suggested by the screenplays, for example, owes much to Olivier’s presentation of Hamlet ten years earlier in 1948 and consequently gestures towards an overall Shakespearean performance narrative that both includes and exceeds Macbeth. The screenplays’ intertextual references to Hamlet also serve to provide an interpretive framework for Macbeth’s story, as the emphasis on the troubled psychology of the tragic hero that characterises the 1955 Stratford production is made more explicit by the screenplays’ allusions to the 1948 film. This is demonstrated particularly effectively through the suggested juxtapositions of internal and external spaces that characterise Macbeth’s narrative and evoke the distinct mise-en-scène of Hamlet. The Macbeth screenplays present a dichotomy between the misty, intangible and distinctly Scottish landscape occupied by the witches and the enclosed castle spaces of Inverness and Dunsinane with their crashing portcullises. As the narrative progresses, the distinction between these

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spaces becomes much more fluid as they begin to intrude upon each other. This suggestion of a collapse between internal and external spaces functions as a corollary for the witches’ gradual occupation of Macbeth’s mind. Macbeth first encounters the witches outside on his way back from battle, but by the time that Duncan enters the gates of Inverness they have intruded into the castle space and, finally, into his mind where they are imagined to reside. Indeed, this particularly Hamletian sense of the blurred and indistinct boundaries between the external play-world and the inner workings of the mind of the protagonist is underscored by the fact that the First and Second Witches were to be doubled by Olivier and Leigh, as well as by sequences that imagine these characters dissolving into each other inside the castle walls.12 Here, the overt allusions to Hamlet that result from Olivier’s decision to depict a cinematic landscape that approximates Macbeth’s mind work both to urge the sense of a sustained focus on the heroic narrative of the protagonist that Tynan had identified in his 1955 theatre review, and, also, to suggest a sustained focus on Laurence Olivier as Shakespearean performer by gesturing towards an earlier cinematic text.13 This intended emphasis on Olivier’s extradiegetic presence is made explicit from the outset because the screenplays immediately foreground and engage with contemporary star discourses relating not just to Olivier but to Vivien Leigh or, rather, to their mutual construction as ‘The Oliviers’ or ‘Theatre Royals’. Macbeth was to be the first filmic Shakespeare adaptation in which Olivier and Leigh would appear together, a fact that is stressed frequently both in the Macbeth documents and in press reports about the planned film. Accordingly, Olivier’s conception of the opening sequence gives some idea not only of how Macbeth would be promoted through its star couple but of how that strategy bleeds into the proposed film itself. The screenplay begins with a transposition of the weird sisters’ incantation from Macbeth 4.1 in a move designed to emphasise the witches’ connection with their familiars.14 Deviating from the conception of this scene as it appeared in the 1955 production, Olivier chooses to swap the witches’ associations with these familiars, so that the Second Witch communicates with the cat/Graymalkin and the First Witch with the hedge-pig/Paddock.15 Through ‘a hurly-burly of noise and music’ a dense mist is imagined as clearing to reveal ‘a wild cat standing sentinel on the limb of a blasted oak’. This movement – the mist both obscuring and revealing – is repeated twice more, introducing ‘a hedgehog . . . huddled under the roots of the tree’. At the scene’s end each witch fades out in response to a call from these familiars, the cat and

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the hedgehog. Thus, when ‘the cat is heard again off screen’, the Second Witch (Vivien Leigh) responds, ‘I come, Graymalkin.’ As the First Witch responds to his call, Olivier suggests a ‘cross fade into the hedge-hog, who scuttles away disappearing into the heather’. What is significant about this change is that it ensures that the Second Witch (Leigh) and the First Witch (Olivier) are deliberately and respectively represented by the cat and the hedgehog.16 In his autobiography and in letters regarding Leigh, Olivier consistently imagines her as cat-like, nicknaming her ‘Puss’ and, later, recalling her ‘animal inclinations’ (an attribute that is applied to Lady Macbeth later in the screenplays).17 While this association is made clearer by referring to Confessions, such images are nevertheless contemporary, with Leigh often described as having feline qualities and regularly pictured in the press with her own Siamese cats, an association for which she was famous.18 At the same time, the ‘hedgehog’ might recall Olivier’s last cinematic Shakespearean role: as Richard III. This foregrounding of the cat and the hedgehog as animals that have contemporary connotations relating to the star personae of Olivier and Leigh is significant not just because it commands potential audiences to acknowledge the extrafilmic presence of the Oliviers but because that command has an intertextual precedent in the way in which the Oliviers were read through the 1955 Stratford Macbeth. As was to be the case with the unmade film – and as the promotional still accompanying the Guardian article attests – it was precisely the Oliviers’ casting as a star couple that proved central to the marketing of the theatrical Macbeth. Unsurprisingly, therefore, contemporary responses to the Stratford production tend to read the Macbeths as analogues for the Oliviers themselves, a tendency that spills over into and informs the screenplays. In 1955, Olivier’s performance as Macbeth was described as a spectacular return to the British stage after a long and very lamentable absence. Peter Forster in the Financial Times extolled it thus: ‘Not since 1952 have we seen Sir Laurence Olivier wearing that crown of heroic British acting which is his by right.’19 Paul Holt in the Daily Herald, meanwhile, plumped for a particularly national image when he declared of Olivier that, in Macbeth, ‘The Lion Awakes!’ However, as Holt goes on to demonstrate, Olivier’s return to form is most frequently understood in terms of a rejection of the influence of Vivien Leigh: ‘Show business gossip for the past five years has been about how Sir Laurence Olivier has deliberately been playing second fiddle to his wife, Vivien Leigh. If he was – he isn’t anymore!’20 Echoing

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Holt, John Barber’s review of the Stratford Macbeth, inspired by Olivier’s supposed Hollywoodisation, descends into an analysis of the Oliviers themselves; here, Leigh is viciously portrayed as a Lady Macbeth-like figure who has reduced and weakened the once magnificent Olivier, leaving him as nothing but ‘half of The Oliviers’.21 In such formulations, Olivier – and by implication the Shakespearean stage – is imagined as having been emasculated, made ineffectual, by Olivier’s relationship (both personal and professional) with Leigh. These are ideas that are subsequently understood to be dramatised through and resolved by the Oliviers’ respective performances as the Macbeths, where Macbeth’s rejection of Lady Macbeth on stage is reinterpreted as Olivier’s finally giving ‘his wife [a] kind of lesson in full view of the audience’ and confirming that off stage, too, ‘Larry Wears the Pants Alright.’22 While it is the case, as previously discussed, that these ideas about the Oliviers map onto wider cultural preoccupations at this time, particularly concepts of national stardom, they are additionally significant within the context of a discussion of the Macbeth screenplays because they have a clear and vital impact on the unmade film. The unmade Macbeth (designed to memorialise Olivier’s bravura theatrical performance) reproduces – and endorses – the teasing slippage between the Oliviers and the Macbeths that informs responses to the 1955 production. But it also reproduces and endorses the constructions of the Oliviers that these responses produce. Thus, if Leigh is imagined as a suffocating influence on a ‘dazzled’ Olivier in 1955, Lady Macbeth’s presence is communicated in exactly this way through the suggested camerawork, which emphasises an overwhelming and obsessively intense connection between the Macbeths. Threading between them, the camera, in travelling with Macbeth, frequently animates Lady Macbeth and initiates her constant movement towards, and into the space of, her husband. As Macbeth exits the scene in order to begin his first soliloquy, for example, the camera is imagined to recede with him and, in doing so, impels Lady Macbeth’s movement; she is immediately ‘seen to rise from the distant table and start making her way towards the camera’.23 In this suggested sequence, the camera is specifically linked to Lady Macbeth and her movement through the shadowy spaces of Dunsinane. Thus the camera searches for Macbeth, panning left to come upon him ‘in close shot moving away from the camera to lean in anguished conscience against the bedchamber doorway’. When the camera is directed to favour Macbeth as he falters in his decision to proceed with Duncan’s murder, he ‘looks up sharply’ to be confronted by ‘lady macbeth standing in the doorway staring’.24

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As the screenplays progress, they show how the suggested camerawork tracks the deterioration of the Macbeths’ marriage from tender intimacy (through intercutting close shots) to crushing claustrophobia (as in the example described here) and, ultimately, to final separation. Here Olivier employs ‘deep long shots’, framing Lady Macbeth far in the distance and, of course, emphasising in the banquet room scenes how the mise-en-scène should be ‘carefully, and it matters not how self consciously, studied to show the air between the thrones’. It is when Macbeth’s connection to Lady Macbeth is finally severed that the shift to a central focus on the psychological development of the tragic hero – and to Olivier’s star performance – becomes complete. But, in line with the Stratford reviews, this is achieved at the expense of Lady Macbeth/Leigh whose role is appropriated as a means by which to displace and distance this heroic Macbeth from his crimes. In the screenplays, the only act of violence in which Macbeth is imagined to physically engage (barring his final duel with Macduff) is the brutal murder of the Thane of Cawdor as depicted in the opening scenes of the final shooting script; here, Cawdor’s head is framed ‘close in foreground’ as ‘macbeth’s axe is seen to come down upon it and apparently through it’.25 This sequence is in keeping with Olivier’s conception of Macbeth’s character as one for whom ‘the mere fact of killing without moral implications has always been his business’.26 Accordingly, Macbeth’s murder of Duncan was not intended to be represented either visually or verbally, with Olivier severely cutting Macbeth’s ‘dagger’ soliloquy in all manuscripts. Or, at least, Duncan’s murder was not to be visually represented as being committed by Macbeth. Dennis Bartholomeusz notes that Macbeth’s ‘dagger’ soliloquy proved ‘remarkably successful’ in the 1955 Stratford production that the film text ostensibly memorialises, but Olivier entirely (and uncharacteristically) foregoes the opportunity to re-present this successful stage moment in his cinematic Macbeth.27 Dispensing with the famous opening lines, the scene in Olivier’s working shooting script begins at ‘Now o’er the one half-world / Nature seems dead . . . ’.28 Macbeth’s voice is heard in voiceover as his description of ‘withered Murder’ pacing ‘With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design’ is narrated over the image of Lady Macbeth, whose hands are viewed wresting the daggers from Duncan’s grooms before bearing them towards the sleeping figure of the King, where she ‘[gazes] intently down at her uncle as if about to plunge the knives into him’.29 Bringing ‘all her forces to bear to fulfil her purpose’, Lady Macbeth is only stalled by the

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shriek of an owl.30 After the crime has been committed by Macbeth, it is Lady Macbeth whom Olivier envisions standing over Duncan’s dead body, where ‘in horrid fascination’ she ‘[places] one of her hands in the King’s blood’.31 The displacement of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan onto Lady Macbeth preserves the heroic narrative that Olivier privileges in the screenplays, shifting the blame for Macbeth’s downfall onto the ambition and coercion of his wife.32 Lady Macbeth, who, though guiltless of the crime is nevertheless much more visually implicated in Duncan’s murder than Macbeth, is thus subject to the heroic narrative of her husband just as Leigh frequently appears to be in reviews of the Oliviers’ 1955 performances. Acknowledging that the Macbeth screenplays draw on contemporary star discourses in this way generates an awareness of how the image of the Oliviers themselves is so tightly embedded into the representation of the Macbeths in the unmade film. However, this relationship is revealed to be much more complex and culturally charged when we read it in relation to Olivier’s autobiographical writing and his characteristic tendency to stabilise personal and professional crises by narrating them through a Shakespearean lens. It is here that we can most clearly see how Macbeth exposes the mechanisms that are at work in the construction of Laurence Olivier’s Shakespearean stardom. This is because as contemporary documents that are being consistently reworked during 1957–8, the Macbeth screenplays enable Olivier to dramatise the breakdown of his marriage to Leigh, and Leigh’s ongoing mental illness, through the story of the Macbeths. Consequently, when Olivier comes to recount this period in the autobiography, he does so by reappropriating and reworking narrative images from the screenplays. Here, the unmade Macbeth comes, as it were, back from the future in order to contribute to the truth narrative of Olivier’s memoir.

Macbeth and the Autobiography In Confessions, Olivier offers two visions of himself as Macbeth, one pertaining to the role as played in 1937 (dir. Michel St Denis) and the other as played in 1955 (dir. Glen Byam Shaw). Olivier maps these two incarnations of Macbeth onto the respective periods of his life that he is describing in the autobiographical narrative. In the first instance, Olivier describes himself as too young and immature for the part, lacking both prowess and self-knowledge: ‘Macbeth was looming up in December [1937], and I had to steel myself for it, set my shoulders, brace my tights,

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put on my chain-mail jockstrap and hope for the best . . . This was my first study of Macbeth, and I was not an unparalleled success.’33 In the second instance, Olivier stresses the relevance of his own life experiences in finally enabling him to satisfactorily ‘grapple with that impossible monster’, Macbeth: I had just turned thirty the previous time that I had tried [Macbeth] . . . it is obvious that experience of acting is predominantly valuable, but experience of life has special gifts to offer. I was now forty-eight, in the plenitude, as one kind writer said, of my powers . . . I had at that time, most importantly of all, lungs like organ bellows, vocal power and range that no infection could seemingly affect, and bodily expression balanced by a technique that could control all physical expressiveness from dead stillness to an almost acrobatic agility; my performances were apt to have, if anything, too much vitality.34

It is notable, then, that the two Macbeths represented respectively by the thirty-year-old and forty-eight-year-old Olivier in Confessions also frame Olivier’s Macbeth screenplay. Our first introduction to Macbeth shows him in battle, defeating the errant Thane of Cawdor. Following this encounter, and prior to his first engagement with the witches, this young and agile Macbeth is offered a supernatural vision of his own death as he stands at the edge of a vast pit, looking down. At the bottom of the pit the head and shoulders of a figure ‘at his last gasp of life’ emerge from a pool of water: close, we find a much aged Macbeth, his hair somewhat whitened, his visage scarred by torments of the hell in which he has lived his life. As he stares up towards the top of the pit we see in his expression the realisation of the completing point of fortune’s whim . . . coming back to our first macbeth, we find him staring downwards, appalled and fascinated by what appears to be the end of himself.35

This image of the two Macbeths facing one another, the elder imagined as changed by ‘his life’, the other young, armoured and at the beginning of his career, resonates with Olivier’s bookending of the two performances in Confessions. In doing so it underscores an important connection between the unmade film and the life narrative. Read alongside Confessions, the screenplay’s representation of the two Macbeths suggests something more than the documenting of the 1955 performance, alluding to the development of Olivier’s career on the national stage and to his evolution through various incarnations of Shakespearean roles and, specifically, here, through Macbeth. However, the experiences imagined as informing Olivier’s performances of Macbeth in the autobiographical narrative are also intimately connected to his experiences with Vivien Leigh.

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In Confessions, Olivier narrates his relationship to Leigh through appropriations of Shakespearean lovers and, as their relationship evolves, these morph from Romeo and Juliet, to Hamlet and Ophelia and, finally, to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.36 It is following Leigh’s diagnosis with manic depression in 1953 that Olivier, tracing her psychiatric treatment, specifically aligns Leigh with Lady Macbeth; but he does so through a reappropriation of images presented in the Macbeth manuscripts. Lady Macbeth’s entrance, reading Macbeth’s letter, recalls a series of images that are later applied to Leigh by Olivier in Confessions. The introduction to Lady Macbeth’s ‘dim’ bedchamber and the focus on ‘her hands’ that ‘play in tender affection’ on Macbeth’s letter, for example, parallel Olivier’s account of the beginning of Leigh’s descent into depression in America, where he finds Leigh in their ‘oppressive’ and ‘dark’ bedroom ‘wringing her hands’.37 The simultaneous citation of Lady Macbeth and Vivien Leigh that is suggested throughout the draft screenplays is also emphasised by Olivier’s suggested use of space and light in this sequence. The bedchamber is ‘lighted by thin shafts of sunlight which stream through the narrow slits in the walls’.38 Walking through the chamber, Lady Macbeth pauses to read from the letter in one of the shafts of light; as she narrates the line ‘they made themselves air, into which they vanish’d’, she vanishes too, moving out of the light.39 While this movement reiterates Lady Macbeth’s doubling with the Second Witch, it also serves to suggest a sense of scenic rupture, in which Leigh is alternately on and off screen; that is, she moves into the spotlight and speaks as Lady Macbeth, before moving into the darkness, and its silence, waiting to perform again. She does so, this time in the second shaft of light (which illuminates her hands).40 Passing into darkness once more, Lady Macbeth finally emerges fully into the light, ‘framed majestically in the window’.41 The sense of Leigh’s being both on and off screen, alternately moving in light and shade, can be seen to gesture towards her actorly presence. Like Jean Simmons’s Ophelia in the 1948 Hamlet, Leigh’s Lady Macbeth is imagined as continually framed in transitional spaces; here, these constitute the spaces between the shafts of light, as well as the space of the window frame, where a ‘c.s [close shot] of Lady M from outside the window’ focuses on her face: she is ‘transfixed in her imaginings’.42 The image of the ‘transfixed’ face of Lady Macbeth, framed by the bedchamber window, recalls an image of Leigh offered by Olivier in Confessions: When I arrived . . . I was told I would find her outside on an upstairs balcony . . . She was leaning with her elbows upon the railing and her face in

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The similarity between this image and the one offered in the screenplay is emphasised by the fact that the screenplay’s original direction – here crossed out – sees Lady Macbeth advance out onto ‘a parapet overlooking the landscape’.44 It is also an image that is reproduced prior to Lady Macbeth’s suicide, when, ‘eyes [searching]’ for Macbeth, she jumps from the parapet.45 However, it is in the first draft of the screenplay that the suggestion of a specific correlation between Olivier’s conception of Lady Macbeth’s decline into madness and his contemporary experiences of life with Vivien Leigh is given its most explicit enunciation. In August 1956, Leigh suffered a highly publicised miscarriage, having recently announced to the press that she was to have a baby at forty-two; Olivier describes her pregnancy in Confessions as representing a deliberate attempt at saving their failing marriage: a friend ‘asked why in God’s name I had never given Vivien a child; that would surely be the answer to our problems, and would transform her life and remake her as a person. Everything suddenly made sense . . . ’46 In Confessions, Leigh’s ‘wounding miscarriage’, when it comes, finally signifies the end of ‘The Oliviers’ and initiates Olivier’s final break away from Leigh, who is now described as irreparably ‘hysterical’.47 It is during this transitional period (and just months after Leigh’s miscarriage) that Olivier begins scripting the Macbeth screenplays, and the earliest draft is clearly impacted by these events. Removed from the later manuscripts, Olivier’s first draft depicts Lady Macbeth’s miscarriage and subsequent irreparable breakdown. Just as Olivier records in Confessions that Leigh’s pregnancy was the result of a final attempt to bridge the growing gulf between them, to ‘solve all our problems’, so Olivier’s Lady Macbeth ‘leans across the space’ that separates her from her husband in order to reveal the news of her pregnancy ‘in the tremulous hope that it will cure all ills’.48 While Macbeth’s face lights up with ‘triumphant strength’ in response to this news, the mise-en-scène grows darker, bathed in an ‘eerie and gloomy light’.49 This sense of foreboding is increased by Olivier’s subsequent representation of the witches’ apparitions;50 here, Olivier’s presentation of the vision of the ‘Bloody Child’ offers a grotesque parody of birth that is linked explicitly with the Second Witch, Lady Macbeth’s double, and, also, Vivien Leigh’s:51 The cauldron. The three witches plunge their hands into the boiling mass and bring forth a baby just born and covered with blood, its navel cord

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roughly torn and hanging suspended. By the end of this action, the camera should favour the second witch.52

Olivier retains this image (and its association with the Second Witch) in all of the later screenplays, but in the first draft it precedes the representation of the loss of Lady Macbeth’s baby. Here, Seyton moves towards a battleready Macbeth with ‘a bundle in his arms’, watched by Lady Macbeth from the ramparts of the castle. Lady Macbeth is envisaged here as on the verge of collapse, exhausted in spirit and fundamentally changed: ‘Her face betrays that her mind now only inhabits the most cavernous kind of morbidity. She regards the scene below with an elemental kind of animal curiosity.’ After witnessing Macbeth digging a grave for the baby, a ‘cut back to lady macbeth’ imagines that ‘After a last, long, curiously purposeful look at the rough little grave, she turns, smiling in a child-like way, and allows her-self to be led into the bedchamber.’53 The significance of the loss of the baby is emphasised by the way in which Olivier links this event with the fact that Lady Macbeth’s ‘mind now only inhabits the most cavernous kind of morbidity’ (my emphasis). It is also implied in the representation of Lady Macbeth’s suicide, as she gazes ‘with curious longing down towards the little mound at the foot of the castle walls’ before jumping from the parapet.54 In later versions, her gaze lands on Macbeth prior to her suicide. The relevance of these scenes to contemporary events is made clearer by the fact that this particular scene, depicting Macbeth burying the corpse as his wife looks on, offers a series of images that Olivier later reproduces in Confessions and applies to Leigh. The ‘elemental kind of animal curiosity’ suggested here recalls Olivier’s descriptions of Leigh’s ‘animal inclinations’, while Lady Macbeth’s ‘childlike’ appearance in this scene evokes Olivier’s account of the beginning of Leigh’s 1953 breakdown, indicated by a ‘funny little, child-like, clinging need for protection’.55 Finally, Olivier’s direction in the screenplay that the collapse of the Macbeths’ relationship should be conveyed through an emphasis on ‘the air between the thrones’ is recalled in Olivier’s account of the failure of his marriage to Leigh in the autobiography: ‘I would have to find another means of inspiration; this one’s throne was empty.’56 An examination of the creative content of the Macbeth screenplays demonstrably calls attention to the extraordinarily complex network of communication that exists between the unmade film, contemporary star discourses and Olivier’s autobiographical material. This is not a simplistic mapping of the screenplay onto the autobiography but rather a complex negotiation and dialogue between a multitude of different texts.

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The dialogue that exists between these materials flags up for us once more how a sense of Olivier’s selfhood is inextricably bound up with wider formulations of his Shakespearean star image and its cultural significations. It is this, of course, in its generation of an authenticity effect, that enables Olivier’s image to be mapped onto Shakespeare. And it is this that returns me to my recurring theme; that is, that Laurence Olivier is capable of telling us what Shakespeare is really like. In 1948 Olivier claimed that he could make a Shakespeare film ‘just as Shakespeare himself, were he living now, might make it’.57 It is exactly this promise that underpins the intense public interest that has been generated in Laurence Olivier’s unmade Macbeth. However, while the Macbeth screenplays lay bare the very mechanisms that produce Laurence Olivier as a Shakespearean star during his lifetime, the Guardian’s interpretation that ‘Fifty years on Olivier’s Macbeth Rises from the Dead’ asks us to think about what that might mean today, in the 2010s. What can Macbeth, as a work that develops, revises and informs the star image, tell us about Laurence Olivier now?

‘Fifty Years on Olivier’s Macbeth Rises from the Dead’: A Performance in the Archive The Guardian headline, because it enacts a slippage between the screenplays and Olivier himself, asks us to imagine a doubled Olivier: as Macbeth in the 1950s and, fifty years on, as Macbeth today. In creating a second, shadowy Olivier, the headline ghoulishly marks the absence of Olivier’s actual performance, dramatising an inability, despite the recovery of the screenplays, to witness Olivier’s physical manifestation of Macbeth. However, while we are inevitably ‘dispossessed’, to adopt Olivier’s own term, of his performance of Macbeth on screen, the unmade Macbeth nevertheless offers up a very notable performance in the archive. Rebecca Schneider has challenged notions of the archive as a space in which performance is imagined to disappear, to ‘not remain’ (my emphasis), asserting that an adherence to the ‘logic of the archive’ inevitably prohibits ‘other modes of remembering, that might be situated precisely in the ways in which performance remains, but remains differently’.58 This idea intersects productively with Diana Taylor’s work. Interrogating the tension that exists between Schneider’s ‘logic of the archive’ and the ephemerality of performance, Taylor argues for a conception of performance as that which ‘persists’ through the ‘non archival system of transfer’ identified as ‘the repertoire’.59 As we have seen, Laurence Olivier’s

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repertoire consists of the performative re-citations of prior bodily behaviours that are reworked consistently in his stage and screen performances of Shakespeare; but Olivier’s repertoire also incorporates the bodily gestures and performative behaviours of prior Shakespearean stage performers, most notably Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving. As a result, Olivier is imagined in his lifetime as embodying a performance tradition that can be traced back to the Shakespearean stage. Taylor claims that, despite the fact that archive and repertoire consistently interact, ‘the tendency has been to banish the repertoire to the past’.60 However, Macbeth, as a series of documents relating to an unmade film, projects Olivier’s repertoire into the present through the archive. Matthew Reason has argued that stage detritus can function as a live performance archive, celebrating the fluidity of memory over traditional notions of archival authenticity. Here, ‘the memory of the performance . . . is represented by remains, with all the fragmented traces prompting fragmented memories’.61 This is how the Macbeth screenplays, as production detritus, work within the archive. The screenplays draw on Olivier’s performance history, reproducing direct images from the prior cinematic canon as narrative. In doing so, these fragmented remains of prior performances appeal to the ‘fragmented memories’ of the researcher as cinematic and/or theatrical spectator.62 As a result, the narrative of the screenplays can be supplemented with individual recollections of Olivier’s performing body, a dynamic that inscribes performance into the archival text. Olivier’s filmic performance of Macbeth may not be accessible, but in this way, and in the archive, the manuscripts can be seen to regenerate or reiterate Olivier’s performance of the Shakespearean body across stage and screen. Indeed, if the archive enunciates cultural memory, it is performed here through individual engagements with the Macbeth screenplays as artefacts. As I have suggested, of all Olivier’s filmic Shakespeares, Macbeth most consistently draws on Hamlet. The screenplays’ intimations of mise-en-sc ène and camerawork (tracking shots; an interplay of shadow and light; tight low-angle shots; stop-start movement linked to the protagonist) certainly evoke the distinct and singular milieu of Hamlet. However, alongside this evocation of a particularly familiar mise-en-scène, the screenplays consistently reproduce specific performative moments or gestural behaviours from the prior Olivier canon, including, but not limited to, Hamlet. On screen, such reappropriations would no doubt have worked to celebrate Olivier’s Macbeth alongside his former cinematic roles, offering a general gallery of famed Shakespearean performances. Un-filmed and in the archive, the narrative reproduction of gestural behaviours familiar

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from prior cinematic performances works instead to recall these performances, acting as referents that remember (and re-member) Olivier’s performing body in action through an engagement with reader/spectator memory. The first example of such an evocation occurs prior to and during Macbeth’s first soliloquy. Here, Olivier envisions Macbeth’s voice reverberating off-screen while his ‘expression echoes’ the voiceover.63 This treatment of the soliloquy, constituting an intent focus on Olivier’s facial expressions as he reacts to his words in voiceover, is memorably employed in both Henry V and Hamlet. It thus constitutes a well-known feature of Olivier’s cinematic repertoire. If the narrative reproduction of Olivier’s repertoire recalls his body in performance through an appeal to memory, then when the screenplays draw attention to ‘macbeth’s expression’ here, it is Olivier’s performance as Henry V on the eve of Agincourt and/or Hamlet as he rages in his opening soliloquy that might be recalled by the researcher in the space of the archive (Figure 29).64 As this suggests, the screenplays relating to Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth will inform current understandings of – and impact upon readings of – Olivier’s prior cinematic oeuvre; but Olivier’s Macbeth also significantly contributes to a cultural history of Shakespeare in performance that encompasses and exceeds Olivier’s own, despite (and because of) its status as a series of non-filmic documents. Accordingly, the second instance that I want to discuss here demonstrates how the reproduction of familiar performative behaviours in Olivier’s Macbeth manuscripts remembers a performance tradition that incorporates and exceeds Olivier’s own performance history. As Duncan crowns Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland, Macbeth’s ambition is communicated through a reference to Olivier’s filmic Richard III: the camera moves close behind the two heads of macbeth and lady macbeth, unearthly still in the foreground, between whom can just be seen the king placing the coronet upon malcolm’s head.65

This narrativised image, then, reworks one of the opening scenes of Richard III, where the camera is positioned just behind Olivier’s Richard as he watches Edward’s Coronation. Here, the crown can just be seen between Richard’s raised arms as it is lowered on to the King’s head (Figure 30).

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Figure 29 Olivier silently soliloquises as (a) Henry V and (b) Hamlet

Figure 30 Richard crowns himself in Richard III (1955)

This appropriation of Richard III elucidates Macbeth’s story at the same time as it subsumes it into an overall heroic Shakespearean narrative: the reworked image conveys Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition’ through a remembrance of the actorly body of Laurence Olivier, performing as Richard.66 However, remembering Olivier’s performance here also means remembering the other performing bodies whose past behaviours (or ‘repertoires’) had been appropriated by Olivier in the 1955 film. Therefore, the narrativised image enunciated by the Macbeth screenplays, in referencing Olivier’s performance as Richard, subsequently gestures

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towards a specific performance tradition (and to a theatrical and national heritage) that is imagined in the earlier film text as embodied by, cited in and restored through the figure of Laurence Olivier. As a result, the screenplays’ reproduction of this particular performative moment enables the researcher to replay Olivier-as-Richard and to remember the specific theatrical traditions that are ‘handed down from the past’ and ‘experienced as present’ through Olivier’s 1955 performance.67 Such an invitation to mentally replay a prior performance also demonstrates how the cinematic image functions as a referent that is by no means limited to the memorial recollection of Olivier’s cinematic performance. Indeed, this is certainly not the case for Stanley Wells, whose engagement with Olivier’s film evokes memories of Olivier’s performance as Richard in the 1944 Old Vic production: I saw Olivier play Richard III on stage, and I know how that performance fed into his film made a few years later, and I can still see the film with pleasure and admiration, but it does not substitute in my memory for the performance that I saw when I was an undergraduate.68

In considering the Macbeth screenplays as interactive archives of performance, I stress the particularly individual, entirely selective and fragmented memory of the researcher whose differing recollections of Olivier’s repertoire echo (in line with Reason’s theory of detritus) the transformative nature of performance itself, the way in which performance ‘remains differently’.69 The idea that performance ‘remains differently’ is, of course, implicit in the Guardian headline with its assertion that ‘Olivier’s Macbeth Rises from the Dead’. And it is by returning to this idea that I want to consider a final instance in which the screenplays rework a particularly striking cinematic image from Olivier’s Hamlet. The image appears as narrative in all of the Macbeth manuscripts, including the final shooting script. In reciting and reworking the most iconic sequence of Olivier’s screen career, this image evokes, through its allusions to a prior performative moment, a national tradition of Shakespearean filmmaking and a cultural performance of the Shakespearean body that incorporates and exceeds both texts. Reminiscent of Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost at the top of Olivier’s Elsinore, the screenplays envisage Macbeth’s ascent of Dunsinane’s winding staircase, followed by his emergence onto the high tower, where his second encounter with the witches will take place. This sequence aptly demonstrates the gradual implosion of internal and external spaces that I identified in relation to the narrative of the screenplays earlier. With Macbeth’s

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Figure 31 Hamlet’s brow superimposed onto the sea in Olivier’s 1948 film

expression in ‘very large close up’, the screenplays direct that a thirtysecond dissolve should take place during which ‘as if our eyes can see through his flesh, [Macbeth’s] skull at first seems to appear and smoke seems to be coming out of his nostrils’. We are now in the witches’ cavern where there ‘is still only in the alcoves left by the suggestion of his eyebrow bones the faintest glimmer of his eyes looking downwards towards the charmed pot’.70 This image replays that of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in the 1948 film, in which the camera famously intrudes into Hamlet’s skull, initiating a dissolve that equates the prince’s mind with the whirling sea (Figure 31). Here, the screenplay directs that the camera initiate a similar dissolve into the mind of Macbeth, where the witches reside. The impression of the skull (and the eyes and brow bone remaining visible on top of the vision) recalls the cavernous sets of Dunsinane/Elsinore whilst simultaneously gesturing towards both productions’ overall emphasis on the psychological development of the tragic hero. Like the other instances that I have discussed throughout this chapter, the dissolve imagined here links Olivier’s cinematic texts together, engendering a reading of Macbeth through Hamlet that assumes (and is dependent upon) a knowledge of and memory of the prior Olivier canon. Functioning as a referential ‘network of performance memory’, Macbeth’s reworked filmic images gesture beyond the documentary

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remains of the Macbeth screenplay to celebrate (and regenerate) Olivier’s cultural performance of the Shakespearean body, to enable it to ‘rise from the dead’.71 This is achieved through an engagement with the fragmented memories of the researcher as cinematic and/or theatrical spectator. Here, the Macbeth screenplays allow us to think about embodied memory as that which is transmitted not just through the body itself, but through representations of the body in action. For Diana Taylor such representations (belonging to the archive) can only ever represent the repertoire; they are ‘not a performance’.72 Olivier’s Macbeth, however, allows us to think about how such representations can act as referents that (like the repertoire) celebrate the mutable, fluid and transitory nature of both memory and performance, enabling, indeed, a kind of performance to take place, a kind of ‘liveness’ to be transmitted through the archive. Ultimately, then, the Macbeth screenplays posit performance and the memory of performance not as that which disappears from the archive, but, rather, as that which shapes its meaning. In enabling an interactive performance to take place within the archive, the Macbeth manuscripts speak to the ways in which Olivier functioned as a representative of Shakespeare and the national imaginary over a sixty-year period. Projecting Laurence Olivier from the historical and cultural contexts of the 1950s into those of the present day, they also enunciate Olivier’s continuing relevance as a Shakespearean icon and the impact that he has had as a Shakespearean star on formulations of Shakespeare in cultural memory. Thus, in returning to Olivier’s statement that ‘posterity is dispossessed’ of Macbeth, it becomes evident that, in fact, the Macbeth screenplays perform posterity in the archive.73 This is a performance that takes place by virtue of the fact that Olivier’s cinematic performance of Macbeth never did. For Olivier, this can only mean loss, absence and forgetting: ‘posterity is dispossessed of another version of the Scottish play ’.74 However, interacting with the Macbeth screenplays enables a reconfiguration of Olivier’s lament, articulating posterity not as that which is dispossessed, but, rather, as that which remembers. And it is with remembering in mind that I return here, for the last time, to where I began: Westminster Abbey.

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Epilogue Westminster Abbey, 1989

Following his death on 11 July 1989 at the age of eighty-two, Laurence Olivier’s memorial service took place at Westminster Abbey on 20 October that same year. Attracting a plethora of stage and screen glitterati (with the already noted exception of Kenneth Branagh), the memorial service was a significant media event, broadcast live on the BBC with all the ceremony of a state funeral. However, in the absence of Olivier’s body (cremated some weeks earlier in a private family service), a number of objects were laid at the Abbey altar in its stead, each carried by a theatrical luminary with some connection to the actor. Forming a solemn procession, Douglas Fairbanks carried the insignia of the Order of Merit; Michael Caine carried the Oscar that Olivier won for the 1948 Hamlet; Maggie Smith carried a silver model of the Festival Theatre, Chichester; Paul Scofield carried a silver model of the National Theatre; Derek Jacobi carried the crown that Olivier had worn in the 1955 Richard III; Jean Simmons carried the script used in the filmic Hamlet; Ian McKellen carried the laurel wreath that adorned Olivier’s 1959 Coriolanus at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; Dorothy Tutin carried the crown used by Olivier in the televised adaptation of King Lear, and, finally, Frank Finlay carried the sword used by Edmund Kean in his Richard III and that had famously been gifted to Olivier by John Gielgud.1 In lieu of his corpse, Olivier’s corpus was paraded through the Abbey, with any distinction between the physical body (the corpus as material substance) and the textual body (the corpus as a complete collection of writings or the like) made infinitely permeable. The objects that make up the corpus here claim to speak ‘Laurence Olivier’, to stand in for his body, and, in doing so, they present an archive of his life and career; but they also, inferably, signify its meaning. Functioning as a metaphor for memory, the performed archive, in representing Laurence Olivier, remembers Shakespeare. As such, the Westminster Abbey memorial service serves as 159

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a useful corollary for what this book has shown to be Laurence Olivier’s national-cultural function as a Shakespearean star from 1944.2 Understanding how the items that make up the performed archive function individually as part of a corpus that represents Laurence Olivier and remembers Shakespeare means referring to the specific cultural work, theatre productions and film texts that the items variously represent and cite. In the Westminster Abbey archival procession, Olivier’s three cinematic Shakespeare adaptations are represented by the crown (Richard III), the script (Hamlet) and a recording of the St Crispin’s Day speech from the 1944 Henry V, which, played through the Abbey’s speakers, caused Olivier’s son Richard to experience his own particularly Hamletian moment.3 Here, the film adaptations are flagged as significant landmarks in Laurence Olivier’s cultural construction as a Shakespearean star, and as texts through which to understand his final memorialisation as a national icon at Westminster Abbey. As a result, each object presented as part of the performed archive also commemorates the particular cultural moment that produced each film. In remembering the film texts, then, these items also reference the specific historical, political, industrial and cultural contexts that inform the cinematic adaptations and evolving twentieth-century constructions of Shakespeare. The crown, in remembering Olivier’s performance as Richard III, evokes the film text’s allusions to the 1953 Coronation and the suggested inauguration of a new Elizabethan age that feeds into the film’s construction of nationhood and its representation of national stardom in the cinema. The script underscores Olivier’s endeavours as an actor-director capable of bringing theatrical Shakespeare to the screen and, in doing so, remembers how Hamlet heralded a new era of British Shakespeare production, directly impacting on post-war discourses concerning the idea of a national cinema. Finally, Olivier’s voice, indelibly linked with the imagined community of the British nation in Henry V, recalls the specific wartime contexts from which Olivier’s first Shakespeare adaptation emerged and the moment at which Olivier’s construction as a distinctly Shakespearean star was solidified.4 However, it is significant that this last representation of Olivier’s voice also cites another performance: the commemorative ceremony in 1971, when Olivier stood over – or ‘reheaded’ – the newly restored tomb of the historical Henry V and read the St Crispin’s Day speech in Westminster Abbey.5 Indeed, if Olivier’s disembodied voice can be imagined to once more (and with a difference) ventriloquise Henry V’s effigy here in 1989, then the ultimate collapse into the national imaginary that this implies is underscored by the

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multi-referential function of the other objects in the Westminster Abbey corpus. With this in mind, I would like to return to Reason’s notion of stage detritus functioning as a live performance archive. At Olivier’s memorial service, the archive becomes a performance as stage detritus functions to cite the repertoire and substitute corpus for corpse, the remembrance of liveness for death. Thus, items that represent Olivier’s material achievements, the indelible mark that he has made on the national culture and its heritage through the cinema and the theatre as institutions, sit alongside objects – the crown(s), the script, the voice recording – that recall, as I have argued the Macbeth manuscripts do, Olivier’s body in action, his liveness. These objects function as referents that remember – or re-member – Olivier’s performing body, his voice, his gestures, his actions, by way of particular roles. But Olivier’s repertoire, and therefore the objects that represent it, also recall other bodies, the voices and gestures of other Shakespearean performers. In this way, the performed archive, in regenerating Olivier’s performances in the film texts, also works to cite and to celebrate an evolving Shakespearean performance tradition that is imagined as preserved through representations of Olivier’s body on screen, and perpetuated by a wide cultural knowledge of Olivier’s repertoire. For example, the crown cites the performative traditions associated with Edmund Kean and Henry Irving that are appropriated by Olivier in Richard III; the shooting script cites the image of Beerbohm Tree as King John, replayed in Olivier’s Hamlet; Olivier’s voice as Henry V, in recalling the 1944 performance, remembers Richard Burbage, the ‘Elizabethan actor’ of the film text’s opening and closing scenes. Given this, it is especially significant that, in referring the viewer to the effigy of Henry V and to Olivier’s cinematic performances of Richard III and Hamlet, the crown, the script and the voice recording also work to provide Olivier’s memorial service, through the corpus, with the performance of a particularly Shakespearean corpse. We might recall here how, in the closing frames of Richard III, Olivier’s performance as the dead Richard constitutes a reappropriation of his prior cinematic Shakespearean role as Hamlet. This is a performative behaviour also referenced by the laurel wreath and its connection to Olivier’s 1959 performance of the death of Coriolanus at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which, in turn, re-cited the equivalent behaviour from the cinematic Richard III and Hamlet (Figure 32). As objects that speak to each other through this intricate process of referential citation, the items that make up the Westminster Abbey corpus can consequently be understood to recall and replay Olivier’s cultural performance of the dead body at his memorial service.

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Figure 32 Details from Olivier’s filmic performances of the dead Richard III and Hamlet, and Coriolanus on stage in 1959

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This deferral to a performance of the dead Shakespearean body represents a complex negotiation of death – one that mimics the dramatic function of the curtain call – and that, in (however paradoxically) privileging conservation and continuity, underscores an impetus to cultural reproduction, an idea that is certainly fuelled by the conspicuous absence of Kenneth Branagh, whose shadow not so much haunts as solemnises the proceedings.6 Remembering and re-membering Laurence Olivier, the items that make up the Westminster Abbey corpus recall and archive a ‘live’ tradition of Shakespearean performance at the same time as they gesture towards the particular and varied contexts that work to inculcate Olivier as a surrogate for Shakespeare and the British nation over a sixty-year period and, with the addition of Macbeth, today. Indeed, it is at this crucial point in 1989 that the slippage between Laurence Olivier and Shakespeare that is so effectively urged through formulations of Olivier’s image, through his film adaptations and through his life-writing, finds its ultimate expression. After the relics that constitute the corpus of Laurence Olivier are paraded to the high altar, the Dean’s bidding introduces the item that will constitute the last in this procession: . . . in a while the ashes of Laurence Olivier will lie beside those of Irving and of Garrick, beneath the bust of Shakespeare, and within a stone’s throw of the graves of Henry V and the Lady Anne, Queen to Richard III.7

Laurence Olivier’s body, as the last object, the item that completes the corpus, becomes an artefact in the archive that represents and memorialises his life and work. Joseph Roach – after Kantorowicz – succinctly concludes that ‘Celebrities, like kings, have two bodies – the body natural, which decays and dies, and the body politic, which does neither.’8 If this is so, then the cataloguing and containing of Olivier’s body ‘beneath the bust of Shakespeare’, its transformation into an artefact identified by and subsumed by the image of the national poet, engenders the final collapse of Olivier’s body natural into the Shakespearean body politic. If the corpus and its transformation of stage detritus into national relics represented Laurence Olivier and remembered Shakespeare, the addition of the body as artefact, its submergence within the corpus, transforms these culturally authoritative items into an archive that – like the Macbeth documents – remembers Laurence Olivier and represents Shakespeare.

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Filmography and Theatre Productions

Filmography King John, dir. W.K.-L. Dickinson (British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1899) Hamlet, dir. Hay Plumb (Gaumont-British, 1913) Queen Christina, dir. Rouben Mamoulian (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1933) The Private Life of Henry VIII, dir. Alexander Korda (United Artists Corporation, 1933) Moscow Nights (US: I Stand Condemned), dir. Anthony Asquith (London Film Productions, 1935) As You Like It, dir. Paul Czinner (Inter-Allied Film Producers/Twentieth Century Fox, 1936) Fire Over England, dir. William K. Howard (United Artists Corporation, 1937) The Divorce of Lady X, dir. Tim Whelan (London Film Productions, 1938) The Four Feathers, dir. Zoltan Korda (Independent Film Distributors, 1939) Wuthering Heights, dir. William Wyler (United Artists Corporation, 1939) Pride and Prejudice, dir. Robert Z. Leonard (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1940) Rebecca, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (United Artists Corporation, 1940) French Without Tears, dir. Anthony Asquith (Paramount British Pictures, 1940) Lady Hamilton (US: That Hamilton Woman!), dir. Alexander Korda (United Artists Corporation, 1941) 49th Parallel, dir. Michael Powell (General Film Distributors, 1941) In Which We Serve, dir. Noel Coward, and David Lean (British Lion Film Corporation, 1942) The Demi-Paradise, dir. Anthony Asquith (General Film Distributors, 1943) Tawny Pipit, dir. Bernard Miles, and Charles Saunders (General Film Distributors, 1944) This Happy Breed, dir. David Lean (Eagle Lion Distributors Limited, 1944) Henry V, dir. Laurence Olivier (Eagle Lion Distributors Limited, 1944) Hamlet, dir. Laurence Olivier (General Film Distributors, 1948) The Magic Box, dir. John Boulting (British Lion Film Corporation, 1951) Carrie, dir. William Wyler (Paramount Pictures, 1952) A Queen is Crowned, dir. Castleton Knight (General Film Distributors, 1953) 212

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Filmography and Theatre Productions

213

O Dreamland, dir. Lindsey Anderson, 1953 (Free Cinema, BFI DVD, 2006) A Kid for Two Farthings, dir. Carol Reed (Independent Film Distributors, 1955) Storm Over the Nile, dir. Zoltan Korda, and Terence Young (Independent Film Distributors, 1955) Richard III, dir. Laurence Olivier (London Films International, 1955) Reach for the Sky, dir. Lewis Gilbert (J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1956) Ill Met by Moonlight, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1957) Campbell’s Kingdom, dir. Ralph Thomas (J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1958) The Prince and the Showgirl, dir. Laurence Olivier (Warner Bros Pictures, 1957) The Wind Cannot Read, dir. Ralph Thomas (J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1958) Windom’s Way, dir. Ronald Neame (J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1958) North West Frontier, dir. J. Lee Thompson (J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1958) Ferry to Hong Kong, dir. Lewis Gilbert (J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1959) The Entertainer, dir. Tony Richardson (British Lion Film Corporation, 1960) Othello, dir. Stuart Burg (Eagle Films, 1965) The Merchant of Venice, dir. John Sichel (Independent Television, 1973) Laurence Olivier: A Life, dir. Bob Bee (South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1982) King Lear, dir. Michael Elliott (Channel 4 Television Corporation, 1983) Henry V, dir. Kenneth Branagh (Curzon Film Distributors, 1989) Much Ado About Nothing, dir. Kenneth Branagh (Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1993) Hamlet, dir. Kenneth Branagh (Sony Pictures Entertainment, 1996) Love’s Labour’s Lost, dir. Kenneth Branagh (Pathé, 2000) My Week With Marilyn, dir. Simon Curtis (Entertainment Film Distributors, 2011)

Theatre Productions Cited Queen of Scots, dir. John Gielgud (New Theatre Company, 1934) Romeo and Juliet, dir. John Gielgud (New Theatre Company, 1935–6) Hamlet, dir. Tyrone Guthrie (Old Vic company, 1937) Macbeth, dir. Michael St Denis (Old Vic company, 1937) Richard III, dir. John Burrell (Old Vic company, 1944–5) Caesar and Cleopatra, dir. Michael Benthall (Laurence Olivier Productions, 1951) Anthony and Cleopatra, dir. Michael Benthall (Laurence Olivier Productions, 1951) The Sleeping Prince, dir. Laurence Olivier (H.M. Tennant, 1953) Twelfth Night, dir. John Gielgud (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1955) Macbeth, dir. Glen Byam Shaw (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1955) Titus Andronicus, dir. Peter Brook (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1955) Look Back in Anger, dir. Tony Richardson (English Stage Company, 1956) The Entertainer, dir. Tony Richardson (English Stage Company, 1957) Coriolanus, dir. Peter Hall (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1959) Richard III, dir. Sam Mendes (Old Vic company, 2011)

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