First Knight

His black wig glossed by the footlights, the cleft-chinned, still slender actor moved across the stage with lithe vitality. In turn he flashed from eye-rolling jokester to grimacing pighead, from egotistic Roman hero to slack-jawed outcast. The actor: Sir Laurence Olivier, 52, first knight of the British theater and probably the greatest living English-language actor. The play: Coriolanus, William Shakespeare's least popular major work. The stage: Shakespeare Memorial Theater at Stratford on Avon, where critics are only too eager to fault the stars. But on opening night last week they agreed with the capacity crowd of 1,380 that this was outstanding Olivier.

With Roman clang and massiveness, Coriolanus tells the tale of an inhumanly prideful patrician who almost singlehanded repels the invading Volscians, later is rejected by the fickle people he saved, vents his contempt by joining the enemy to turn on them. At the close, Sir Laurence dangles headfirst from a ten-foot rostrum while he is stabbed to death in a blood-drenched mob scene that is powerfully--and consciously--reminiscent of the battering of Mussolini's body.

In print, the character is so frostily repellent that most grand Shakespeareans have agreed with the Romans, and exiled him. But it was in a 1938 Old Vic production of Coriolanus that a stamping, ranting Olivier bulled his way to fame. This time his performance is subtler. His Coriolanus is prickly in triumph, venomous in defeat, an uncompromising totalitarian. But Olivier also builds a credible, Nietzschean human being, a sarcastic soldier-aristocrat and sour-eyed supersnob of the type well known to the British. Wrote the London Times: "The acting of Sir Laurence Olivier has grown marvelously in power and beauty. He plays it just as well as it can be played."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.