Tag: Olivier

Set Design and Long Day’s Journey Into Night

When the play ends it is well past midnight. The three men, exhausted by drink and confession, are spaced about the living room in the semi-darkness like gutted animals. Over their heads the addicted mother moves around the upstairs rooms rummaging among her belongings for trophies of her lost youth. She has been offstage for the entire fourth act. The men are suddenly alerted by her footsteps as she starts to come downstairs. O’Neill has meticulously prepared for this moment, drip-feeding the audience little by little with the information that will give it power. It is one of the most extraordinary moments of theatre in twentieth-century drama, and the most honestly earned, and it is achieved simply by someone turning on an electric light.

I need to digress for a moment to describe our set in a little more detail. It consisted of a living room beyond which, through folding doors, was a more formal space with a suite of furniture and a piano. The position of the four folding doors was slightly different for each scene. In the last act only one of the panels was open and the piano was out of sight. Michael Annals had supplied a wonderful detail to his design. Above the folding doors was a fanlight of fretworked wood. When the light was turned on by someone whom we cannot yet see but can only be the mother, the pattern of the fanlight reared up out of the darkness and a column of light spilled into the room through the one open panel. In performance, both onstage and in the auditorium, there was a silence so dense with anticipation that you felt you could slice it.

Then suddenly, out of sight, we hear the piano being played, a clumsy, childish attempt at a Chopin waltz. I’d insisted on live music, preferably played on a piano that needed tuning, and we’d engaged the vocal coach, Chuck Mallett, to supply it, which he did with great skill, mimicking the arthritic fingers which were meant to be doing the playing. The music abruptly stops and the audience’s anticipation is now informed by misgiving. The mother, holding her wedding dress over one arm, steps into the open panel of light. Connie looked exactly as O’Neill describes her: ‘The uncanny thing is that her face appears so youthful. It is a marble mask of girlish innocence.’ Lost in the past and oblivious of her family she begins to recount her life as a young girl in the care of the nuns at her convent. She drifts across the room not addressing but by turns in the proximity of each member of her family. Finally I had her arrive stage right beside the rocking chair, which in the previous scene had been displaced from its usual position close by the oval table and now stood isolated some yards away. As Mary recalls her girlish vocation to be a nun she sinks into the rocker, facing the audience.

Stage Blood: Five tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre
Michael Blakemore

Laurence Olivier on Oedipus


So at dinner in the Worsley Arms, over the sole and white Burgundy, we discussed the terrible scream that blinded Oedipus gave at the New Theatre just after the Second World War.
‘It wasn’t an “ah”, or an “ugh” — more an “err”,’ he said.
‘What was wonderful,’ I remembered, ‘was the endless pause, before you felt the pain.’
‘Hardly new. It’s exactly the same as timing a double-take in comedy. You know what I had to do to make that pain sound real? I had to think of animals. I thought of foxes screaming. With their paws caught in the teeth of a trap.’ He held out his wrists, stiff and helpless. ‘And then I heard about how they catch ermine. It was a great help to me when I heard about that.’
‘How do they catch ermine?’
‘You don’t know?’ Lord Olivier looked at me in amazement. ‘In the Arctic they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it.’ He became a small, thirsty animal. ‘And his tongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that when I screamed as Oedipus.’

In Character: Interviews w/ Some Most Influential Remarkable Men Women Our Time
John Mortimer

Photos from: Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography
Laurence Olivier

See also: Olivier – Richard III, Jed Harris inspiration

Laurence Olivier Trying on New Role

In the case of Long Day’s Journey one of his strategies to help him learn the lines ahead of rehearsals was to gather his fellow actors together for a series of readings of the entire play. Since the idea was that these readings should be uninterrupted I was a fairly redundant presence, but they proved useful in identifying and agreeing on certain cuts.

The first of these readings was decidedly uneasy. We were all nervous and Olivier, like the rest of the cast, was a long way from the performance he would eventually give. However, since everything he did had size, so did his present awkwardness. I was reminded of those occasions in his office at the end of a working day when he would produce a bottle of non-vintage champagne (his preferred tipple) from the fridge beside his desk and invite those present to join him. After a glass or two he would sometimes embark on some anecdote replete with impersonations and funny voices but with such excessive energy that you wanted to open a window. Those qualities of sinew and muscle that can kick a performance right to the back of a large auditorium so that everyone experiences much the same thing and which are essential to great stage acting can seem inappropriate and even embarrassing in more intimate spaces, where nuance and suggestion carry greater force.

After the reading Denis Quilley said to me, with concern rather than criticism, ‘Sir’s American accent is a bit all-over-the-place, isn’t it?’ I think we were all a little taken aback by the clumsiness of his reading. He was like a man in a straitjacket vigorously trying to punch his way free. This was unusual. His reputation was for coming to rehearsals knowing exactly what he wanted to do. On the first day of Othello he had electrified the room by giving a reading as full-throttled as a finished performance.

Stage Blood: Five tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre
Michael Blakemore

Olivier gets a lesson from Tyrone Guthrie

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“Something significant happened to me a short time before I played Richard. I was in Manchester playing Sergius in Arms and the Man. One night, Tyrone Guthrie came to see it, and after the show he and I began walking back to the hotel together. I remember the spot vividly: we were under the canopy at the front of the opera house. I still think of it whenever I’m in Manchester, walking to the studio from the Midland Hotel. He stopped and said, “Liked you very much.”
And I said, “Thank you. Thanks very much.”
Hearing my tone, he asked, “What’s the matter Don’t you like the part?”
To which I replied, “Really, Tony, if you weren’t so tall I’d hit you.”
He then asked me, “Don’t you love Sergius?”
I replied, “Are you out of your mind? How can you love a ridiculous fool of a man like that?”
At which he observed, “Well, of course, if you can’t love him, you’ll never be any good as him, will you?” Words of wisdom. I hadn’t looked at it in that way before. It taught me a great lesson.”

On Acting, Laurence Olivier