It was always ‘the Scottish Play’, never Macbeth. O’Toole simply would not countenance its name being uttered. Whether he took the curse that is supposed to haunt productions of this piece seriously or pandered to the old theatrical superstition, who knows, but he did take it to extremes. Frawley Becker, the dialogue coach, remembers arriving at O’Toole’s trailer on the set of Night of the Generals in 1966 on a sunny but cloudy morning in Warsaw. Taking inspiration from the fluctuating weather he thought a quick burst of Shakespeare was in order: ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ Pleased with himself, Becker watched as O’Toole’s face recoiled in horror, as if some horrendous spirit had just passed over the threshold. ‘Do you not know that you must never quote the Scottish gentleman?’
‘You mean Mac …’
‘The Scottish gentleman!’ O’Toole blasted, giving even more theatrical bent to his voice than usual. ‘He must never be named! And never a line from that play may be spoken, except in the theatre where it is being performed or rehearsed.’
‘What happens if Mac …’ Becker stopped himself just in time. ‘If the play is quoted?’
‘Great misfortune follows,’ said O’Toole. There was an uncomfortable silence before he spoke again. ‘I forgive you because you are American, and as such I assume you do not know the traditions of the English stage!’ O’Toole then went on to explain that the last time lines of dialogue from ‘the Scottish Play’ had been quoted on one of his film sets, Lord Jim, a boat full of extras capsized in a river. Becker never did find out if anyone drowned.
By the close of the seventies the Old Vic theatre was heading for financial ruination, rumours abounded that it might have to close down. What it needed was a box-office attraction to bring the crowds back through the door. O’Toole had last performed on the London stage in 1965 and in a newspaper interview spoke of his desire to return, somewhere like the Old Vic, a theatre that held a very special place in his heart. It was where, as a drama student, he had come to watch the likes of Guinness and Olivier ply their trade, ‘All working for buttons.’
Reading these comments with interest was Toby Robertson, head of the Old Vic Company. Getting in touch, he wanted to know exactly what the actor had in mind. There was a long-cherished ambition to do Macbeth, a play O’Toole believed to be the precursor of practically all gothic literature, a text that positively crackled with evil, and in his opinion Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. Perhaps it could form part of a short season that might also include another favourite, Uncle Vanya, which O’Toole fancied having a crack at directing himself. Robertson was in no position to refuse and O’Toole was hired in early 1980. He was also granted associate director status, with his own office on the premises.
Very quickly doubts spread about O’Toole’s health. Would he be capable of playing such a physically demanding role as Macbeth night after night, while at the same time preparing another play? It was not an unreasonable concern, but when it was raised at a meeting O’Toole reacted angrily and stormed out. In the end he was forced to bow to pressure and Uncle Vanya was dropped.
While he was away filming Masada events took a dramatic turn. Robertson was unceremoniously sacked by the Old Vic’s board and replaced as artistic director by the actor Timothy West. Pragmatic by nature, West was nervous of O’Toole’s reputation and that the actor’s contract at the Old Vic allowed him total artistic control over the Macbeth production. He feared a disaster.
For weeks O’Toole was holed up at his house in Clifden carrying out his customarily methodical research and preparation. Running along the beach in front of his house carrying heavy logs of wood, chanting the lines of the play, trying to get the rhythm of the speeches right, he was like a prize fighter getting into shape, fully aware that this undertaking brought with it huge risks and expectations. That was fine. He was fully committed.
For director, O’Toole asked Jack Gold, having worked well with him on Man Friday. But Gold had been offered a movie and decided he’d be on safer ground doing that. ‘Peter was very much his own man when he got into a part, particularly on stage; it was difficult enough on film. And I think I was much too inexperienced in stage work to direct a major piece like that.’ Gold is under no illusions that he made the right choice and was never tempted to watch the final result. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to see it.’
With directors proving either unavailable or scared off by O’Toole, actor turned film director Bryan Forbes was eventually chosen, a man who had never pretended to be anything other than an actor’s director and who once said: ‘In the last analysis, everything has to be subservient to the actor.’ Music to O’Toole’s ears to be sure.
Together O’Toole and Forbes assembled a large cast that mixed established players such as Dudley Sutton and Brian Blessed with rising talents such as Clive Wood and Frances Tomelty, chosen to play Lady Macbeth after O’Toole’s suggestion of Meryl Streep was rejected as being impractical. Rehearsals began in August 1980 in a blaze of publicity. Christopher Fulford, in his first professional job as an actor, remembers O’Toole arriving for the press call and walking onto the stage to the accompaniment of a band of Irish pipers. But already storm clouds were forming. Kevin Quarmby was another young actor not long out of drama school, who had long idolized O’Toole, but what he saw on that first day of rehearsal shocked him. ‘Here was someone in his late forties but my immediate thought was, my God this guy looks old. Incredibly lined, and thin. Let’s say O’Toole didn’t look like he was in the peak of health. But he was amazingly imposing – you were scared shitless.’
It was a strange rehearsal period. O’Toole had arrived already word perfect and had asked Forbes not to give him any direction until the third week. ‘To a great extent he had already set his performance,’ claimed Forbes. But doubts were raised very early on about the path O’Toole was taking. In the opinion of Quarmby, who now writes and lectures on Shakespeare, O’Toole’s delivery was tortured, idiosyncratic and laboured. ‘It was like listening to a mature public schoolboy being forced to recite Shakespeare in class.’ Christopher Fulford, however, remembers things differently. ‘Peter did his soliloquies holding his coffee mug and cigarette, and did them I thought brilliantly. There was a sense of grandeur to his performance, even in rehearsal.’
Over the coming weeks many in the company hoped that some concession to contemporary naturalism in Shakespeare performance would creep into O’Toole’s delivery. In fact it evolved not a jot, according to Quarmby. ‘I can still hear him doing every line, because I was on stage practically all the time, and the delivery was absolutely the same from the moment of rehearsals right to the very last night. His exclamatory style remained firmly rooted in the tradition of the lead actor controlling the stage, as exemplified by Donald Wolfit’s post-war touring Shakespeare productions.’
Other creative decisions were also coming under scrutiny, not least the madcap suggestion of employing inflatable scenery. O’Toole had an interest in an Irish company that had invented a revolutionary concept in stage design, scenery that could be erected and then dismantled to fit into the boot of a car. A demonstration was called for on the Old Vic stage, but all West and his fellow board members could see was what looked like an assortment of black bin liners haphazardly stuck together inflated by a generator producing enough noise to rival a 747 jet engine. Even O’Toole had to admit defeat and booted the inventor and his contraption out of the stage door.
Forbes quickly took the decision to hire a film-set designer with no theatrical experience, one of many film buddies that were coming in; jobs for the boys. The most dangerous of these was the fight director, who was an Irish stuntman O’Toole had befriended on Zulu Dawn. Quarmby has never forgotten his first fight rehearsal when he was given a spear and told, ‘Right, now Kevin, get this spear and you thrust it at the bastard, just thrust it at the bastard.’ Within two minutes Quarmby had accidentally pierced the jeans of his opponent, who cried out, ‘Stop, I am not working like this. I refuse to work like this.’ Everyone was a little more wary after that. ‘But we did have very realistic fights,’ says Quarmby. ‘Because there was absolutely no proper stage choreography. It was, let’s make it look as dangerous as possible by making it as dangerous as possible. It was pretty scary.’
Backstage, too, swords were drawn. From the off O’Toole and West appeared to be poles apart in both temperament and in their approach to theatre. It didn’t help that O’Toole kept referring to West as ‘Miss Piggy’. Theirs was a relationship Forbes described as like that of a warring husband and wife ripe for divorce living under the same roof. Paranoid, O’Toole believed West was out to sabotage his production and banned him from rehearsals. West in turn was worried about O’Toole’s erratic behaviour, not helped by his drug use, a situation the cast were fully aware of. ‘Let’s say he was sailing very close to the wind,’ says Quarmby. Actress Susan Engel saw it first-hand. ‘He was stoned out of his mind, seriously stoned. And that’s tragic.’ Susan, who had worked with O’Toole years before at Bristol, had been asked to play Lady Macduff, a role she didn’t care for much, but went to see O’Toole anyway. ‘And he was non compos mentis. He was very excited about the play and had all these completely mad ideas but I couldn’t actually follow what he was saying. It was very sad.’
By now even Forbes was beginning to harbour a few misgivings, particularly over his star’s obsession with making this the bloodiest Macbeth on record. ‘Do you know how many times the word blood appears in the text, old darling?’ O’Toole said to Forbes one day, before volunteering the information that, ‘If you stab a living man, blood spurts seventeen feet.’ There was also the double-handed sword he was having made of the finest Toledo steel for his duel with Macduff. When this fearsome weapon finally arrived at the theatre his co-star visibly paled. In the end it proved too heavy and O’Toole armed himself instead with a flimsy aluminium sword to conserve energy, which after each encounter became increasingly bent, not helped by his sometimes using it to practise his cricket swing.
Oddly, HRH Princess Margaret paid a visit to one rehearsal and during a break the subject of blood came up yet again in conversation. ‘What you need is some Kensington gore,’ the Princess volunteered, the stuff deployed in the old Hammer horror films. ‘We use it all the time in St John’s Ambulance demonstrations. It’s very realistic.’ Forbes saw O’Toole’s eyes light up.
Red appeared to be the production’s motif, since O’Toole had insisted his dressing room be painted blood red from floor to ceiling. He also had a lumbering Irish minder posted outside at all times. ‘This guy would have killed anyone for Peter, there’s absolutely no doubt,’ says Quarmby. Christopher Fulford, too, has memories of this gentleman, who rode shotgun with O’Toole at all times. ‘He was very genial to me and not at all unpleasant. But there were all sorts of rumours flying around about him.’
It was fairly obvious that Forbes was helpless when faced with this ego-driven onslaught, and so O’Toole’s personal vision for the play went gloriously unchecked, with members of the cast simply not used to being mere satellite figures to O’Toole. Enquiring what they should be thinking when Macbeth raves at the ghost of Banquo in the banquet scene, O’Toole’s sharp reply was: ‘You should be looking at me, dear, I’m the star.’ As Quarmby describes it, ‘His sole purpose for being in the play was to be the star. There wasn’t a vision for the play, there was a concept of Peter O’Toole is a great star and everything must be done to ensure that all focus is on him at every moment.’
As a result rehearsals became factionalized, with individuals discussing and answering amongst themselves questions of character, motivation and textual nuance. In essence it had become an unbalanced production, in that you had the principal actor playing one thing and the majority of the company playing something else and they were so far apart that nothing would make them gel. ‘It was an inevitable car crash that was going to happen with a huge star of the old school,’ says Quarmby. Forbes put it simpler. ‘It was an imbalance between Peter and some of the less experienced actors, some of whom were understandably in awe of him.’ There were those in the O’Toole camp and those firmly outside of it.
One decision of O’Toole’s that Forbes was powerless to overturn was the abandonment of the traditional portrayal of the three witches as hideous old crones and instead having them as voluptuous sirens dressed in silken robes. The fact that O’Toole was having an affair with the young actress playing the first witch, after the recent collapse of his relationship with Malinche Verdugo, almost certainly had no influence upon his decision. Her name was Trudie Styler and she and O’Toole were the subject of much gossip amongst the cast.
From the start O’Toole wanted to create a sense of occasion and a sense of adventure and had tried to get to know each one of the cast on a personal level. In the middle of rehearsals Christopher Fulford recalls being invited to Guyon House and told to prepare a sonnet. ‘We had chilli con carne in his kitchen and before that we’d sat in his study. He’d got me a couple of beers, he wasn’t drinking, and he had me doing this sonnet with a clock to my ear to get the rhythm of the sonnet. And as far as I know he’d done something similar with everyone in the company.’
As the opening night approached, relations between O’Toole and West had deteriorated so badly that they were now only communicating through intermediaries. Barred he may have been from rehearsals, but West insisted on his right to watch the first dress rehearsal and was appalled by what he witnessed. It wasn’t just that it was hopelessly old-fashioned, but there seemed to be absolutely no artistic vision either, no concept, least of all anything imaginative or relevant in O’Toole’s performance, who delivered the lines as if his foot was tied to iambic pentameter. He pleaded with Forbes that radical changes needed to be made to avert a full-scale disaster but the director felt that to confront O’Toole now ‘would provoke an explosion that could destroy us all’. After West tried and failed to get a meeting with O’Toole he insisted on a brief statement being inserted into the theatre programme declaring that this Macbeth was under the direct artistic control of Peter O’Toole and not the Old Vic; in other words he’d washed his hands of it.
On the opening night, 3 September 1980, as the audience took their seats with twenty minutes to curtain up, Forbes walked into O’Toole’s dressing room and was stunned to find him stark naked except for a Gauloise in his mouth. ‘Peter, old son, aren’t you leaving it a bit late to get into costume?’
‘Can’t wear them, darling,’ replied O’Toole. ‘They’re hopeless.’
‘Ah!’ Forbes exclaimed, with a rising sense of panic. ‘We don’t have much alternative, do we? But let me see what I can do.’
Outside, Forbes grabbed Brian Blessed, who was playing Banquo. As a loose friend of O’Toole’s he was Forbes’ only hope.
‘Do you think his bottle’s gone?’ said Blessed.
‘God help us if it has,’ said Forbes.
‘Leave him to me. Can’t promise what he’ll look like, but I’ll get him on.’
By some miracle O’Toole got onto the stage, haphazardly dressed though he was, including for some bizarre reason jogging trousers and baseball boots. The costume designer was so disgusted that she was seen later that night scratching her name off all the posters outside the Old Vic. ‘There was madness in the theatre that night on both sides of the curtain,’ Forbes said. At first the audience were bewildered by what they were seeing, then as the play went on the giggles began. By the time of O’Toole’s much promised bloodbath they could contain themselves no longer. Traditionally Macbeth returns after the off-stage killing of the King with the actor having merely soaked his hands in blood. Not O’Toole. ‘In the wings was a tin bath with about a foot of Kensington gore inside it,’ recalls Quarmby. ‘Peter would stand in it and douse himself from head to foot, walk on stage with everything dripping, looking like Carrie, and say, “I have done the deed.” The effect produced on the audience wasn’t the uncomfortable laughter of people who are not sure whether something is being sent up or not, it was the laughter of disbelief and theatrical horror.’ As Forbes later confessed, ‘From that moment onwards the play was doomed.’
Absurdity followed absurdity when stage hands came on the stage to mop up the fake blood because the actors complained they were slipping in it. When the safety curtain came down some members of the audience instinctively got up to leave, requiring Forbes to announce over the tannoy, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is not an interval. I repeat, this is not an interval.’ Something had to be done and it was put to O’Toole that perhaps he had overdone it slightly. Fulford clearly remembers hearing O’Toole shouting from his dressing room: ‘No blood! No show!’
In the audience that first night was O’Toole’s old Bristol pal Patrick Dromgoole, by now a top television executive. Like the rest of the audience he watched with mounting incredulity. ‘In my view, Peter hadn’t got an angle on the part at all. He didn’t know what he was doing, it was incredible.’ Afterwards Dromgoole went to see him in his dressing room and there he saw a man, his old friend, not only physically laid low but emotionally teetering on the edge. ‘But not admitting it.’ Dromgoole brought his car round the back of the theatre and got O’Toole out, past a baying mob of journalists shouting, ‘What’s it like to be laughed at, Mr O’Toole?’
In the following morning’s newspapers the critics did not hold back. ‘The performance is not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous,’ said the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker. ‘The voice is pure Bette Davis in her Baby Jane mood, the manner is Vincent Price hamming up a Hammer horror.’ The Sunday Times’ critic called it ‘a milestone in the history of coarse acting. Mr O’Toole’s performance was deranged.’ Perhaps The Times’ Irving Wardle hit the nail on the head when he said that O’Toole’s performance evoked the kind of thing one got from Sir Donald Wolfit on a bad night. ‘I view it almost like it was the closing volleys of the barnstorming actor/manager type,’ says Quarmby. ‘The death of the Wolfits. One actually felt that you were at the funeral of that style of performer and acting.’
O’Toole realized that something was wrong when his housekeeper told him there was a scrum of journalists outside the front door. ‘What could I do?’ he later joked. ‘My shaver is electric so I could not cut my throat.’ Like the rest of the cast arriving at the theatre that night, O’Toole had to fight his way through TV crews and crowds besieging the box office for tickets that had already sold out. Although the overall mood amongst the cast was one of despondency, with many looking at each other for some kind of reassurance, O’Toole made a point of visiting every individual member of the company in their dressing room prior to curtain-up to present them each with a red rose and a private rallying cry: ‘We’ve had some bloody awful reviews, but I’m firmly committed to this production. I absolutely believe what I am doing is right. We do not change a thing. We don’t listen to those bastards. We carry on!’
While there was certainly an element of everyone rallying around and getting on with it, having to go on night after night knowing that many of the audience were there for the wrong reasons, like motorists stopping to gawp at a car accident, was a demoralizing experience. ‘There was a real sense with many of us that it was like we were going through a sort of trench warfare,’ recalls Quarmby. ‘And we were being sent over the top every night and the general leading us hadn’t got a pair of glasses and didn’t know that we were firing in the wrong direction.’ The hope remained that there would be an attempt to at least put some of the problems right. But there were no further rehearsals, nothing. ‘It was farcically, scarily organized, or disorganized,’ says Quarmby. ‘It was a trial.’
O’Toole continued to give the impression that it was all like water off a duck’s back, revelling defiantly in the controversy and criticism. ‘There has to be danger in theatre or it doesn’t work,’ he’d once said. ‘You can’t play safe.’ But inside it was tearing him apart. In a cry for help he wrote a revealing note to Patrick Dromgoole which read: ‘I’ve forgotten how to do it.’ He did feel terribly betrayed by the critics, who seemed hell-bent on giving him a really good kicking. ‘I was terribly upset for him because he was absolutely crucified over Macbeth,’ says Dromgoole. ‘And any lack of love was agonizingly painful to him. He loved being loved.’ Remarkably, out of sixty-odd performances of Macbeth, O’Toole did not miss a single one.
Friends rallied round. Katharine Hepburn phoned with the advice, ‘If you’re going to have a disaster, have a big one.’ Burton called, too. ‘I hear you’ve had a bit of stick from the critics.’
‘Yes,’ O’Toole replied.
‘How are the houses?’
‘Packed.’
‘Then remember this, my boy, you are the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war and fuck the critics.’
‘Thank you,’ said O’Toole.
Burton went on, ‘Think of every four letter obscenity, six, eight, ten and twelve letter expletives and ram it right up their envious arses in which I’m sure there is ample room.’
‘Thank you,’ said O’Toole, no doubt touched.
Halfway through its London run Macbeth embarked on a short tour, playing Liverpool, Leeds and Bristol. The Liverpool Empire, a barn of a theatre seating around two thousand and usually reserved for mammoth musicals or rock concerts, was packed every night and the roars of laughter were even louder. In Bristol, Nat Brenner, who had just left his post as Principal of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, showed up one night and news filtered backstage that his opinion of the production was unsympathetic to say the least. ‘The word was that Nat really destroyed Peter with his comments,’ reveals Quarmby. ‘And I don’t know if it’s just in retrospect or whether I do remember Bristol being the only venue where one sensed a sort of crestfallen Peter. And I’m pretty damn sure it was after Nat came to see it.’
Christopher Fulford recalls that the play seemed to receive a more favourable response from provincial critics. And his own opinion of O’Toole’s performance hadn’t changed. ‘When I had my moments on stage with him I thought he was fantastic, absolutely fantastic. I remember coming on stage once and he had something going on in his head that was so in the moment you almost reeled back from the force of it.’
Playing Donalbain, Fulford was required to wear a wig because his own hair was too short. By the time of the tour his hair had grown sufficiently long enough that he didn’t think he needed it any more and went to see O’Toole. Knocking on his dressing-room door he entered and there was O’Toole doing press-ups on the floor. ‘Absolutely, no problem, get rid of the wig.’ He then looked at Fulford intently. ‘But you know something, you’ve got to get it a bit thicker, yes, a bit thicker.’
‘OK,’ said Fulford.
‘You know what I use?’
‘No, what’s that, Pete?’
O’Toole was dressed in his Macbeth costume and in his dressing room was a large circular table containing every conceivable spirit, plus mixers. They weren’t for him, but for guests who might pop in. On the middle of this table was a large carton of orange juice. ‘You know what I use, Christopher, orange juice.’ With that he poured some of the juice out into his cupped hand and splashed it onto his hair. ‘It’s marvellous. Marvellous,’ he said as he rubbed it all in. ‘And then he approached me to put some of the juice on my hair,’ recalls Fulford. ‘I said, “It’s all right, Peter, I’ve got some upstairs, it’s fine.” And he looked at me seriously, because he was a terribly sincere, wonderful man. I really admired him and liked him enormously. He said, “And do you know what’s so marvellous about it, Christopher?” I said, “What’s that, Peter?” He said, “It brushes out.” ’
Installed back at the Old Vic, Macbeth continued to play to sell-out crowds until it finally finished its run just before Christmas. For the cast there was no cathartic release or sense of elation. ‘One really just felt so bloody relieved that it was over,’ says Quarmby. ‘Just absolute relief of being able to close the door on that chapter.’
For O’Toole, however, the reverberations would last for years. In the short term his position at the Old Vic was untenable. Yes, Macbeth had made money, lots of money, but the bad publicity had damaged the reputation of the theatre and O’Toole, who had hoped to stage a production of King Lear next, had no choice but to resign his position as associate director and walk away.
Months later, as the scandal died down, O’Toole was able to look back more philosophically on the event and recognize it for what it was – a total fuck-up. ‘My nose starts bleeding the minute I even think about the reviews.’ It had been a chore, ‘without any question, the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.’ Not helped by the fact he’d had to deal with the emotional stress of losing his mother, who died in January 1981. ‘It’s odd to feel like an orphan at forty-eight,’ he said.
Forbes, too, was hurt by the play’s reception and the effect on O’Toole, of whom he had grown fond: ‘For I admire nothing more than true talent.’ In the end, Forbes put it all down to ‘a tragi-comedy of good intentions’.