SPECTAT THE OR
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GRAND FINALE
The deaths within a few days of each other of the near-contemporaries, Lord Olivier and Herbert von Karajan, give rise to gloomy reflections on the passing of greatness. Both lived long lives that seem to connect us with a sort of Golden Age into which they were born: the London of Sir Henry Irving, the Vienna of Richard Strauss.
Both men were, in addition, perfec- tionists; wilful and sometimes dictato- rial, they were great impresarios as well as artists, and always knew what would play well They had an almost hypnotic stage presence that made them seem 'larger than life.' Shall we look upon their like again? In terms of 'charisma', we probably shall. Charisma is a fairly cheap commodi- ty, historically speaking, and it is conferred upon a favoured few in each generation who stand out, sometimes for obscure reasons, from the ruck of the merely competent among public performers. But what both Olivier and Karajan possessed of greatness was more than just charisma. It was something which we really may have seen the last of: an ability to make grand gestures without seeming either self- conscious and pretentious on the one hand or self-parodying and ironic on the other.
Perhaps this is because of the two men's roots in an age when grand gestures were More common: an age popularly supposed, because it would not tolerate an actor's saying 'fuck' on the stage, to be more buttoned up than our own, which will not tolerate his saying 'love', without irony. It is this knowingness, this cheap sophistica- tion, which justifies the fear that we really shall never know another Olivier.
George Steiner, commenting on his re- cent book, Real Presences, has said that we live in
an age of embarrassment: about the major experiences of death, love, self-sacrifice, madness. The great phrase 'Come off it', could, in fact, make Beethoven stop the ninth symphony and Michelangelo the Sis- tine ceiling. The fact that one quite frequently has the urge to say 'Come off it' to Professor Steiner himself does not affect the truth of his remark. It is the fear of that embarrass- ment that lies behind the ironic, self- referential style of the younger generation of actors. But Olivier was one to whom even the most cynical never found it easy to say 'Come off it'; he was the man with the 'real presence' that could not be denied.
At the same time Olivier was, as Laur- ence Kitchin said, 'an actor unusually responsive to climates of history outside the theatre' — including the vogue for anti-heroism and text-subverting irony. How else could he have presented to us so convincingly Archie Rice as well as Henry V? He had to know to what qualities in them his contemporaries would respond. Commenting on his own style of acting, Olivier said that,
If you have succeeded in the initial moments, either by a very strong stamp of characterisa- tion so they recognise you as a real guy, or by a quiet approach, then I think there's no end to where you can lead in size of acting a little later in the evening. God knows, you have to be enormously big as Othello. It has to be big stuff.... I don't know: it may be that this is a time which refuses to look greatness full in the face. Perhaps it will tolerate it only with an oblique look.
In fact, Olivier's Othello was deeply flawed by its adherence to the distinctively modern, ironic, view of the character propounded by T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis in some of their most unlovely critical moments, just as, previously, his Hamlet had suffered from its association with the psychoanalytical interpretation of Ernest Jones. But nobody could deny it was big stuff. His willingness to take risks, to be outrageous, enabled him to lead his audience to an heroic view even of these pathetic victims of infantile lusts, self- deception and savage appetites.
That was the wonder of Olivier: that he could so completely absorb even ridicu- lously extreme forms of contemporary prejudice and yet make them seem univer- sal, that he could so ruthlessly deny his characters grandeur and yet make them seem grand.
In this he was like Philip Larkin, another genius whose loss seems irre- placeable. Larkin was perhaps our last 'great' poet as Olivier was our last 'great' actor, and for the same reasons: because he brought us as close to the grand artistic statement about 'the major experiences' as we are ever again likely to be able to get. In fact, Larkin's best known line (apart, perhaps from the one in which he said 'fuck'), 'What will survive of .us is love', is often quoted without the disclaimer by which it is almost, but not quite, qualified out of existence: 'Our almost instinct almost true'. Perhaps both he and Olivier would have taken a sly pleasure in the fact that what survives of them is the shadow of a greatness that neither they nor their contemporaries believed in.
Paul Johnson is abroad and will resume his column next week.
Michael Heath will also return next week.
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