Dramatists are entitled to distort the facts. However, Austin Pendleton, in this speculative piece about Orson Welles’s ill-fated attempt to direct Laurence Olivier in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 1960, indulges in what I’d call prosaic licence: by that I mean that his flights of fancy are far less interesting than recorded reality.
Pendleton’s conceit is that Kenneth Tynan fixed the Welles-Olivier partnership and attended rehearsals: the truth is that Tynan was still an Observer critic at the time and found himself forced to attack two artists he profoundly worshipped.
But, even if one takes the play as a mix of showbiz gossip and uninspired guesswork about the clash of two gigantic egos, it still strikes me as fatally partial. Welles, whom Pendleton worked with, is seen as a troubled genius filled with plans but forever haunted by his supposed failure to live up to Citizen Kane. Olivier, on the other hand, is viewed as a conniving bastard unable to take direction and incapable of playing Ionesco’s nondescript hero. The truth, I suspect, was more complicated than that.
If the play is an uneasy mix of fact and fantasy, Alice Hamilton’s production seems equally divided. Some of the cast impersonate their real-life models: others, such as Louise Ford as Joan Plowright, stubbornly don’t. The best performance comes from John Hodgkinson who, as Welles, is both rotund and orotund and filled with the exasperation of the professionally thwarted.
Adrian Lukis, meanwhile, offers a clipped, cartoonish outline of Olivier, Gina Bellman is allowed to convey Vivien Leigh’s manic depression but not her warm intelligence, and Edward Bennett as Tynan is left hovering impotently on the sidelines. Frankly, I didn’t believe a word of it.
• At Southwark Playhouse until 25 July. Box office: 020-7407 0234.
