When twenty-nine-year-old Peter Hall was handed the reins at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, one of the most prestigious repertory companies in the country, late in 1959, he was hailed as the new shining light of the theatre world. His first season was shaping up very nicely, with Paul Scofield agreeing to play two of Shakespeare’s great roles: Shylock and Petruchio. Contracts were drawn up and duly signed. A couple of months before rehearsals were due to begin Scofield suddenly changed his mind and withdrew. Minus his leading man, Hall began a desperate search for a replacement.
The name of Peter O’Toole was already a familiar one to Hall, having seen him burn up the stage at Bristol as Hamlet. ‘Peter as a young man had extraordinary animalism and wit, a kind of extraordinary anarchy in his spirit on the stage. He was one of the best Hamlets I’ve ever seen for that reason; he was dangerous, really dangerous.’ What at first glance looked like a wild gamble, Hall decided to offer O’Toole Scofield’s entire line of parts. At twenty-seven this would make him the youngest ever leading man at Stratford.
Before his hectic Shakespearean duties, Siân took O’Toole to Wales for a short break, and to introduce him to her relatives. He was an instant smash. The Phillips clan had scarcely seen anyone like him and many of the men folk stayed up all night sharing jars with him and shooting the breeze. But even a country cottage O’Toole could turn into a disaster area. One night he suddenly decided to do the cooking himself, although Siân had never seen him actually do anything in a kitchen before. He declared French toast a particular O’Toole speciality; minutes later the stove exploded into flames.
Arriving in Stratford the couple rented a picturesque Edwardian house called Mount Pleasant (immediately christened ‘Mount Unpleasant’ by O’Toole), not far from Ann Hathaway’s cottage. Here O’Toole began preparations for his first major role, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, poring over books on Jewish law and traditions, and reading the whole of the Old Testament. Actor Donald Douglas recalls that it was obvious from the beginning that O’Toole already had an aura of stardom about him. ‘Not in a grand way, but full of charisma and confidence.’ For Hall, the first thing he noticed was that the great O’Toole conk he’d seen at Bristol, which would have come in handy for Shylock, was no more, replaced ‘by a delicate, almost retroussé nose.’ When asked what on earth he had done, O’Toole replied, ‘I’m going to be a film star.’
Mid-way through rehearsals for Merchant, Siân gave birth to a daughter, christened Kate, in honour of Katharine Hepburn. Barred from the birth, O’Toole turned up outside the maternity ward with several other drunken actors to serenade the new arrival, but Siân was hardly in the mood to receive such musical joy and couldn’t wait for them to leave.
When O’Toole’s parents came down to ‘wet’ the baby’s head, father and son got customarily slaughtered. With everyone else upstairs in bed O’Toole junior lay spread-eagled on the floor, ‘Not asleep, but crucified.’ Patrick tried lifting his flagging son to his feet, but to no avail. Instead he opened another bottle and joined him on the floor. That’s where the pair were found the following afternoon.
Hall’s inaugural Stratford season had begun with a modest production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the beginning of April 1960. But the real fireworks were due to begin not long later with O’Toole’s Shylock. Would Hall’s gamble pay off? As the first night drew near O’Toole began to feel the pressure, fully aware of its importance, that the critics could make or break him. One morning the nerves got so bad he stayed cooped up in bed rather than attend rehearsals. When the theatre rang asking after his wellbeing he refused to take the call. On the morning of the opening night, 12 April, O’Toole was not on speaking terms with anyone, staying wrapped up in bed, insulated from the outside world until late in the afternoon when he emerged all energy and fireballs, running round the house, downing endless cups of tea, looking at his watch and generally hurrying everyone else along. Siân would later describe him that day as deliberately perching himself on the edge of a cliff, only at the last minute deciding to pull back.
Of course the performance was a triumph; standing ovations and untold curtain calls. Siân sat in that vast auditorium with tears welling up, it was the moment she realized whatever hell or madness this sod might drag her through, here was a talent worth protecting and nurturing. Rushing back home, she began to organize the after-show party but of O’Toole there was no sign. He duly turned up hours later when all the guests had gone having wandered around fields for hours in the dark searching for that ‘haystack’ of dung that had been his bed years before. In his mind he had perhaps turned it into a symbol for a past that after tonight’s triumph would soon be out of reach.
O’Toole’s performance met with near universal praise. Bernard Levin called it ‘a radiant masterpiece’, and Mervyn Jones in the Tribune wrote: ‘Peter O’Toole gives a performance as Shylock that will stand as a great chapter in theatre history.’ This was not the grotesque and crude cliché Jew of previous interpretations. For fellow cast member Donald Douglas it was a thrilling new interpretation. ‘He brought tremendous naturalism to the role. When he said to Tubal, “Ah, thou sticks a dagger in me!” It was as if he’d said, “Don’t rub it in!” In a low key, over the shoulder way.’ For audiences used to seeing older Shylocks, this was a young, vibrant and lusty Shylock. Dangerous and magnetic, too. O’Toole entranced audiences, drawing their eye even when only sitting and sharpening his knife on the sole of his shoe. Certainly Hall was fully vindicated in his choice, calling O’Toole ‘mesmeric’ in the role. ‘On opening night it was clear a new star had arrived.’
One young actor lucky enough to see the production was Derek Fowlds, later a popular actor on British television (Yes Minister, Heartbeat), and he’s never forgotten it. ‘O’Toole’s is still the best Shylock I ever saw. I thought it was the most electric performance I’d ever seen. He was a very dangerous actor, very exciting to watch.’
In those days most of the company were heavy drinkers and smokers; actors would store a bottle of beer away for the interval, no one raised an eyebrow, it was the done thing. Stephen Thorne, who had been at Stratford for three years, recalls watching O’Toole arrive in the wings with a cigarette in one hand and half a bottle of whisky in the other. He’d take a swig of the whisky and then put the bottle and the spent cigarette butt into the fire bucket before coming on. ‘On several occasions he would walk on having taken his last drag of the cigarette and turn up stage and blow the smoke into the face of the nearest actor as he passed. And you’d think, this is extraordinary behaviour, but then he would give this amazing performance.’ Sometimes, as the whole company waited onstage for his final entrance, O’Toole would lift up his robe to reveal a pair of red underpants. ‘He’d quickly drop the robe again as he strode on,’ reports Donald Douglas. ‘I reckon it probably gave him an extra bit of adrenalin!’
O’Toole used to get up to all sorts in the wings. One of his best pranks was at Bristol and his victim was a young actress called Wendy Williams. At one point in the play Wendy had to wistfully look off into the wings where O’Toole was ready to come on, only the lighting was such that all she could see was his silhouette. One night she was looking off when O’Toole methodically and quite deliberately began to undo his flies and produce a hefty and erect phallus. Wendy watched with mounting incredulity as he proceeded to snip the top off with a pair of scissors and pop it in his mouth, at which point she fainted. There was pandemonium as people rushed to see what was wrong. Coming round, she pointed in the direction of the wings – ‘Peter! Peter!’
O’Toole pleaded ignorance. ‘What’s up with Wendy?’
‘She’s fainted,’ said one of the actors. ‘What were you doing?’
O’Toole smiled. ‘I was eating a banana.’
While drinking was tolerated backstage, the real boozing came after the performance and usually in the nearby Black Swan pub, otherwise known as the Dirty Duck. There O’Toole would regularly down a yard of ale, that’s two and a half pints. ‘That was his party trick,’ says Thorne. Returning to Stratford late in the sixties he attempted to repeat the feat, without success. ‘Either I wasn’t that parched or my stomach had shrunk.’
The Black Swan had a special dispensation to stay open late for the actors and so it became everyone’s regular. After closing time the doors would be locked and the drinking carried on until two or three in the morning, when people left to continue boozing round somebody’s house, usually at the prompting of O’Toole. ‘For the younger and impressionable members of the company, myself included, it was rather like seagulls following the plough,’ recalls Thorne. ‘Drinking after hours in the Duck and going to parties, you knew you were safe if O’Toole was there, because you knew there was someone who took care of anything that came up. He was a natural leader, without being obvious, he just was.’
Take for example the party Thorne held at the cottage he was renting. In the early hours of the morning there was a furious banging on the front door. O’Toole was nearest and opened it to reveal an old man hammering away with the handle of a sickle. ‘Oh my God, who is this, Father Time.’ The man didn’t see the joke, he was demanding that everybody shut up because he couldn’t sleep. O’Toole suggested the silly sod close his windows and slammed the door shut and the party carried on. Half an hour later there was another knock at the back door this time, it was two policemen demanding to see whoever it was who had the altercation with the old man. O’Toole was sent for and led by the coppers into the backyard. ‘Ten minutes later somebody peered through the curtains to see how they were getting on,’ says Thorne. ‘And Peter had a bottle of Scotch and three glasses and the policemen were sitting down drinking and laughing with him. And then off they went quietly home and that was that.’
It was at Stratford where O’Toole’s reputation as a hell-raiser was sealed and he earned the title of ‘the wild man of Stratford’. At one after-show party he held court on stage sitting on a throne, sustained by two pedal bins on either side of him, one full of beer, the other of hard liquor into which he would alternately scoop a pint mug. Ex-RADA chum Roy Kinnear once watched O’Toole down a bottle of whisky without pausing for breath. It was behaviour like this that made people flock to the town in the hope of seeing this outrageous bunch of actors in the flesh. At one point, according to Stephen Thorne, O’Toole was told by Peter Hall that he was a bad influence on the company. ‘That didn’t go down very well with Peter, I can tell you.’
Not everyone in the company was so taken by its new star. Denholm Elliott, himself a boozer, was so nervous around the bombastic O’Toole that he could hardly bear to be in the same room. ‘I get awfully nervous with the kind of actor who looks as though he might be about to hit you, even though he never does.’ On-stage there was little respite, with Elliott finding O’Toole ‘very, very difficult’ to perform with. ‘He acts at you and it becomes a sort of battle. He is just completely overpowering.’
It is interesting to note at this juncture how the O’Toole ‘personality’, for he was above everything else a personality, did seem to grate with some people. While a good deal of his colleagues seem to have found him a charismatic actor, to others he was a narcissistic and ruthless prima donna. There is a sense here that O’Toole was already becoming affected by power and success, which only served to accentuate the two extremes of his persona.
Another actor who found O’Toole, shall we say, a little intimidating, was a young Ian Holm. ‘Probably because he was so melodramatically different, so alien to me. He had an independent manner, confidence, star quality and an air of ruined glory.’ Holm recalled Peter Hall confiding in him that he thought O’Toole had the ‘sparks of genius’, even though he was a loose cannon when it came to authority. ‘There was something unconsciously gladiatorial and threatening about him,’ said Holm. ‘I developed into a company man and chipped in, whereas O’Toole never seemed as if he could take direction, just telling the director how he was going to do a scene, and then doing it. He was an enigma wrapped in charisma and sprinkled with booze.’ Holm theorized that while the booze encouraged O’Toole’s gift, it also in the end dissolved his talent, ‘helping to create the louche, genially insolent shaman that he became. In many ways he was an actor from the nineteenth century; strangely ridiculous, often riveting, and unpredictably raw.’
Other actors, though, felt instinctively drawn to O’Toole, such as Dublin-born Jack MacGowran, a former member of the Abbey Theatre. MacGowran liked his liquor every bit as much as O’Toole and often exhibited the most bizarre behaviour. ‘I remember one evening,’ says Stephen Thorne, ‘MacGowran having to be carried across a bridge by Peter because he was fearful there were trolls underneath and he wouldn’t cross back into Stratford unless he was carried.’
By this stage O’Toole’s drinking had become reckless. Playing Shylock one night, during the intense court scene, O’Toole spied a packet of fags close to the front of the stage. ‘I was wondering what they were doing there, my cue came and I was off, “Now we have expressed our darker purpose …” It was the wrong play. I’d gone into King Lear.’
A frazzled brain was one thing, but Siân genuinely feared for his survival beyond the season. She might wake and find him asleep downstairs intoxicated in an armchair, having obviously driven back home from the pub or the theatre drunk. There were rows, sometimes lasting hours. After one heated argument Siân discovered O’Toole walking precariously on the roof of the house. Surely this couldn’t continue if Siân was to keep her sanity. Pretty quickly in their relationship Siân had identified a dark side in O’Toole’s psyche, one that enjoyed leaving chaos in his wake. He was someone who expected the household to run to his volatile whim and Siân came to understand that ‘clever women never nagged. Clever women dodged the flying crockery and went away to where they could get some peaceful sleep and never in the morning referred to the excesses of the night before.’
It was difficult sometimes. When drunk, O’Toole could be savage in the things he said, and Siân learnt quickly not to take personally the hurtful diatribes aimed in her direction whenever her husband was under the influence. He also developed an unreasonable objection to her previous sex life; the sheer temerity of having had lovers before they’d even met. O’Toole would think nothing of raising the subject, sometimes in the company of others, resulting in her public humiliation.
At one point she could take it no longer and left. O’Toole’s old RADA colleague Gary Raymond was staying with them in Stratford at the time. ‘They had this almighty row and her parents came to pick her up from Wales. Peter was distraught, really quite distraught. He was potty about Siân, he really was.’ She returned after a few days.
Professionally O’Toole was proving to be the hit of the season, with people queuing up all night for tickets to see him. In his Daily Express column Peter Evans posed the question: ‘Is this the next Olivier?’ It would have been quite natural for O’Toole to have gone off on some raving ego trip, but Stephen Thorne saw no real noticeable change in him. ‘I think Peter Hall was a bit nonplussed by it all, though, in that he rather thought that the spotlight would be on him as the new leading light of Stratford, and O’Toole came along and swept the whole thing out of his grasp.’
The BBC even sent an interviewer down to profile this rising star, though it was immediately clear the fellow hadn’t done much research. ‘Well, what have you done?’
‘Eh,’ said a startled O’Toole.
‘Let’s see,’ he scanned his rough notes. ‘There was that army thing. Come on, come on, what else have you done?’
O’Toole had had enough of this. ‘Well, I played the Dame in Puss in Boots once.’
The BBC man’s face turned sour. ‘Look, we don’t have to do this interview, you know.’
‘In that case, I suggest you fuck off.’
O’Toole’s second leading role of the season was Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. Hall had cast fifty-two-year-old Dame Peggy Ashcroft opposite him as Kate, much to the actress’s discomfort – she felt she was far too old. Her misgivings soon evaporated when they played a few scenes together and sparks flew. O’Toole warmed immediately to Peggy upon discovering a shared passion for cricket. One great Peggy story has her appearing in a matinee when England were playing at Lord’s: the stage manager whispered from the wings, ‘All out for a hundred and twenty,’ and she blasted out, ‘Oh fuck!’ in the middle of her lines.
Rehearsals, however, did not go well when O’Toole clashed with director John Barton. He went on to have a distinguished career in the theatre, but was then a junior don from Cambridge who Hall had invited to join him at the Memorial Theatre. While Barton had some excellent ideas, it was his overly academic approach, the intellectualizing of everything, that O’Toole took umbrage with. ‘Peter became difficult,’ remembers Stephen Thorne. ‘Not taking direction or suggestions. And then I think Dame Peggy realized that unless something was done the production was going to collapse in a great heap. In the end Jack MacGowran went to see Peter Hall and said, “If John Barton doesn’t go, we do.” ‘ Reluctantly Hall had to take over the final stages of rehearsal.
The production was another huge success when it opened that June. O’Toole’s on-stage chemistry with Peggy was positively electric, helped greatly by the fact she had developed real romantic feelings for him. Susan Engel came to see her old Bristol colleague and heard the gossip about Peggy. ‘She was in love with him, she worshipped him and she adored him. And she loved acting with him because he was so superb as Petruchio. He had the audience in the palm of his hand. It was dazzling.’
It was a flamboyant performance, no doubt. ‘Full of hell raiser energy and chutzpah,’ recalls Donald Douglas. In the wedding scene O’Toole arrived cheerfully playing the bagpipes. London theatre critic Felix Barker declared O’Toole a major actor in the making, ‘An actor with so much personal magnetism that he seems to be centre stage even when he is half hidden in the wings.’ Stephen Thorne can attest to that, there was something almost supernatural about O’Toole. ‘He had this sort of force field round him. On the stage you could almost feel the vibrations coming from him. It was quite extraordinary because it was almost touchable.’
It didn’t take long for O’Toole’s name to begin to spread further than the environs of Stratford and the closeted theatrical world. Eddie Fisher, the husband of Elizabeth Taylor, came backstage one night with a tantalizing offer to play opposite his wife as Count Vronsky in a planned film version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. O’Toole liked to say that he sped down to London to see Liz in her suite at the Dorchester, ‘took forty quid off her in blackjack and said I’d be delighted’. In the end the project never materialized.
It wasn’t just his name that was being spoken about, but the boozing, too. A reporter for the Evening Standard newspaper argued that while O’Toole was predicted to become one of the country’s greatest actors, one needed to add the proviso – if he doesn’t destroy himself first. O’Toole was having none of it. ‘I get drunk and disorderly and all that, but I don’t really think it’s true that there is any danger of me destroying myself.’ Yes, he admitted to a bit of hell-raising. ‘How often do I get drunk and smash up the furniture! Oh, not more than three or four times a day.’ Asked what he got from being drunk, he replied: ‘A bloody hangover and grim looks from the missus.’
By July, however, O’Toole’s drinking had finally caught up with him and he began to suffer horrendous hangovers and severe stomach pains. Worried, he saw a specialist who told him to stop drinking, or at least rein it in significantly. For the next few weeks he made a great show of drinking nothing but milk.
On stage, too, things were unravelling when he was cast in the relatively minor role of the deformed slave Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. O’Toole did not enjoy the experience. ‘I don’t think he was particularly happy with Thersites,’ recalls Donald Douglas. ‘Which surprised everyone, as it seemed like a perfect opportunity to give a totally different performance, away from the swagger of Petruchio and the tragedy of Shylock.’ In the end he didn’t quite know what to do with the character, and perhaps Hall didn’t know what to do with O’Toole in it, but he looked extraordinary in his make-up, with his flesh covered in pustules and scabs. The critics certainly sensed the actor’s unease, using words such as ‘disappointing’, ‘miscast’ and ‘ranting’ to describe his performance. O’Toole conceded the failure was all his own making. ‘I couldn’t make the words flesh.’ Perhaps he was only truly happy now when leading from the front.
Overall the season had been a huge success, and not just on the stage. In previous years at the Memorial Theatre there had been a highly visible hierarchy, you had the star actors at the top, a sort of middle rank and then everyone else, the bit-part players and the spear carriers. The O’Toole season was really the first breaking of that privileged order. ‘In the old days you didn’t really instigate conversations with the stars,’ recalls Stephen Thorne. ‘It was almost like being at public school, calling the top stars sir until you were told otherwise. The top billing and the lower orders were also paid at separate times, and after the first night there was a party for the stars while the rest of the company went to the wardrobe party. And it was O’Toole and Peggy Ashcroft who stopped all that, who said bollocks to that, we’re going to the wardrobe party with everybody else. And so those star parties fell into abeyance. It was the beginning of the actual ensemble, of we’re all in it together.’
Shortly before the season closed Peter Hall addressed the entire company, revealing his bold plan to turn Stratford’s six-month Shakespeare festival into a year-long operation built around a permanent company, with a base in London that also handled contemporary work from home and abroad. To achieve this goal Hall needed Arts Council subsidies and stars to make sure the inaugural productions were a success. Within days both O’Toole and Peggy Ashcroft had committed themselves to the creation of what was soon to become officially known as the Royal Shakespeare Company. However, an American tycoon and the Croydon-born son of Quakers were about to throw a major spanner into the works.