Stage Blood, by Michael Blakemore – review

Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this sequel to Arguments with England, his superb first volume of memoirs, Michael Blakemore presents us with an enthralling account of his five embattled years as an associate director of the National Theatre.

When in 1970 Blakemore was offered the position by Laurence Olivier, he had a distinguished career as an actor behind him and was already well-established as a successful director.  It was an exciting time: the National was still in formation, several years away from moving into its permanent home on the South Bank; and Olivier was not only the greatest actor of his generation but a man of formidable powers of leadership, brilliantly imaginative and wholly dedicated to the theatre. Blakemore’s colleagues in the company — John Dexter, Jonathan Miller, Kenneth Tynan — were all at the top of their profession. There were bound to be problems, of course, but as Blakemore signed his contract he had little idea that he was starting on a five-year period that ‘ended by becoming the most distressing of my career’.

Dominating the first half of the book is a masterly portrait of Olivier himself. Devious and determined, infinitely seductive, Sir Laurence manipulates his colleagues with both charm and guile: ‘He was listening to me as still as a predatory animal and with a smile on his lips that was razor-blade thin.’ Olivier’s genius, and also his vulnerability as an actor, are strikingly conveyed in Blakemore’s account of rehearsing him in Long Day’s Journey into Night, one of several plays which he directs during this period.

Other members of the company are drawn with an equally penetrating eye. Kenneth Tynan, first seen hospitably dispensing champagne in his elegant house in Thurloe Square, diminishes before our eyes, his flamboyance and panache shrinking pathetically as he succumbs to the disease that is shortly to kill him.