The Theater: Olivier’s Lear

While Manhattan theatergoers took what cold comfort they could from warmed-over operettas and a blurry reprint of The Front Page, London had Laurence Olivier’s majestic production of King Lear. By early morning of the day before the opening, Londoners had queued up for gallery seats in the Old Vic’s new theater on St. Martin’s Lane. After the show a mob of howling men converged on the stage door chanting “Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? LARRY!”

Theatergoers in Manhattan who saw Olivier as Oedipus last spring knew that he had most of the makings and many of the accomplishments of a great tragic actor. Yet it was still possible to wonder whether he had quite the size of soul and voice and presence to wring the grandest roles dry. If London’s generally reliable critics were to be trusted, such doubts were no longer possible. Seldom in a decade has the London Times talked like this:

“. . . An unexpected humor, unfaltering analytical acuity, a beautifully keen emotional sensibility and such steely, abundant natural vigor as to afford that extra half-ounce of energy which compels immediate assent. . . . ‘Unfaltering! Unflagging!’—these are the epithets that his performance most obviously requires. Other actors are in this or that phase of Lear’s progress from worldly to spiritual dominion the peers of Mr. Olivier, but no actor that we can recall has matched the creative stamina which enables Mr. Olivier to rise equal to the demands of every phase.”

The News Chronicle’s Alan Dent wrote: “The emotion this great piece of acting evoked in this normally unenthusiastic breast of mine was re-echoed a thousandfold by the audience’s yell of acclamation at the end.” W. A. Darlington of the Daily Telegraph thought: “He was never less than first rate, and again and again he touched magnificent.” Other critics merely repeated this theme.

Olivier will play Lear through Christmas, with a week’s break in November, when he takes it to Paris as part of the UNESCO celebration. There will be no New York trip this year for the Old Vic, which will be busy: 1) building a new and ideally designed theater on the ruins of its blitzed birthplace; 2) starting a school of the theater, which by 1948 expects to be ready to accept American and other foreign students.

Early next year, however, Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh (who is also panicking London in her husband’s rather febrile production of The Skin of Our Teeth) will go to California. Their public explanation of the trip: Olivier wants his wife, who has only recently recovered from tuberculosis, to spend the winter in a mild climate. The likely outcome, considering the modest emoluments of stage glory: one or both will make a movie.