GOD AND THE ANGEL: VIVIEN LEIGH AND LAURENCE OLIVIER’S TOUR DE FORCE OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND by Shiroma Perera-Nathan, Melbourne Books, 2024
LOOKING back on the many travails that led to the breakdown of his marriage to Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier sadly concluded, ‘I lorst you in Australia’.
The famous British actor-knight was talking, of course, about the Old Vic Theatre Company’s Australian and New Zealand Tour of 1948. It was on that taxing tour, from March to September, that ‘Larry and Viv’—at the time, the most famous theatre couple in the world - drifted apart under the strain of performances and public appearances and discovered they were losing one another. Garry O’Connor’s 1984 book, Darlings of the Gods: One year in the lives of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh remains the best account we have of this fabled trip to the Antipodes. Not much has changed with the publication of a new book on the subject.
God and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s Tour De Force of Australia and New Zealand, by Shiroma Perera-Nathan, offers precious few insights into how Larry ‘lorst’ Viv on the other side of the world but it is a welcome addition to any theatre library, thanks to the well displayed pictures pressed between its glossy pages. The author, a ‘lifelong fan of Vivien Leigh’, has sourced an official tour album held at the National Library of Australia and supplemented this cache of ‘never-published before’ photographs with rarely seen material from other collections. It is indeed a treasure trove. Here, in silvery tones, are pictures of the Olivier’s sauntering down Melbourne’s Spring Street and facing the press in Sydney, furred and over-coated for a reception in Canberra and down to their togs for a swim at Perth’s Scarborough Beach. On stage in Australia, they appeared in three plays: Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Shakespeare’s Richard III. God and the Angel supplies some backstage shots but Perera-Nathan’s focus is mostly off stage where the rather regal Oliviers behaved like surrogate royals—christening ships, touring public works and giving morale boosting broadcasts.
Between engagements, there was time for a bit of R&R and there are candid snapshots to prove it: Viv napping on a boat, Larry lazing on a beach, and the whole ensemble in party mode. Surfers Paradise was their bolthole. For five evidently blissful days in the Australian winter of 1948, the Olivier’s and three work colleagues—Cecil Tennant, Roger Ramsdale and Dan Cunningham—decamped to a remote cottage at Broadbeach and escaped the prying eyes of press people. Was Surfers where Leigh’s ‘possible affair’ with Cunningham began? Perera-Nathan raises the question but doesn’t provide an answer. God and the Angel also works hard to flesh out a dangerous liaison between Leigh and Australian-born actor Peter Finch but the author can only surmise that ‘it’s more than likely that the mutual attraction between Vivien and Finch sparked at the time of their meeting in Sydney’.
Posing at Scarborough Beach
Author’s collection
Fifteen-year-old Richard Laver presenting a flower to Vivien
Private collection
Scouting for new talent was part of the thinking behind the Old Vic’s tour of Australia but its primary purpose was to demonstrate Commonwealth unity after the war. I was surprised, then, to read in God and the Angel that ‘the company was the vehicle through which Britain attempted to recolonise her Dominions’. In another chapter, the author refers to Melbourne journalists having a ‘preconceived bias’ against the distinguished visitors. No evidence is provided except to say ‘the papers devoted pages to Vivien’ after a successful Windsor Hotel press conference. God and the Angel is further diminished by inattentive editing. What exactly is ‘a timepiece of history’? Were first nighters in Melbourne really ‘dripping in jewels’? And how can anyone ‘wedge a divide’? Elsewhere, we are told that ‘Australia was a cultural backwater in 1948’ (compared to what?), that post-war Sydney had an ‘electric vibe’ (what does that mean?) and that a South Australian hotel ‘lost its life’ to wreckers.
Most egregious is the way Perera-Nathan keeps apologising for the behaviour of people in the tale she tells. ‘The ideals of the world in which they lived are antiquated’, she writes of her cast, and belong ‘to a world that was steeped in 1940’s patriarchal systems and colonialism’. Acknowledging Australia’s First Nations People is one thing. Turning the clock back and criticising a Lord Mayor for giving a speech ‘laced’ with ‘colonial and racist rhetoric’ is political correctness of the most absurd kind. The effect of these intrusions—and others which chart the rise and fall of various theatres around Australia—is to interrupt the narrative and slow its momentum.
Perera-Nathan’s enthusiasm is undeniable. Her wish is to ‘nostalgically retrace Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s footsteps during the tour’ and she succeeds in doing that with the help of remarkable photographs. But this lavishly produced book closes without resolving that all important question: did the Oliviers’ really start drifting apart in Australia? In his 1982 autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, Larry suggested they did when he wrote: ‘Somehow, somewhere on this tour I knew Vivien was lost to me’. God and the Angel promises to enlarge on this. The Sydney chapter is headed ‘Where Larry Lost Vivien’ and in it, Perera-Nathan refers to ‘the stress they were under’. ‘Vivien had started to suffer from mental and physical exhaustion’, she explains, while Olivier ‘began to withdraw from this point onwards ... some noticed a sullenness—maybe even a midlife depression’. These remarks are based on ‘correspondence and observations made by those in the company’ but can a direct line be drawn between this behaviour and the discord that later ruptured a famous marriage?
The answer is, no. In theatre, as in life, some things are best left behind the scenes.
At the press conference at Usher's Hotel
ABC publicity photos
Arriving in Brisbane’s Archerfield Airport
Author’s collection
