Free My Life in Pieces by Simon Callow Page B

Second World War; after the Vic was bombed, shestayed with the company when it transferred its operation to the New Theatre under the aegis of John Burrell, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. She and Olivier formed a strong working relationship on, among other productions in that legendary season, Richard III , Henry IV Parts One and Two and the famous double bill of Oedipus and The Critic , and she continued to work for him when in the late 1940s he became, under the banner of Laurence Olivier Productions, a commercial manager; she was stage manager on the LOP presentation of Orson Welles’s Othello in 1951, and proved more than a match for that legendary temperament. Her lifelong bond with Olivier was essentially one of camaraderie; they had once taken refuge together under a table at the National Portrait Gallery when surprised by an air raid, and something of the spirit of those days continued to characterise their relationship. When, in 1962, Olivier was appointed to the Chichester Festival Theatre as its first director, Boddington went with him, and then accompanied him to the National Theatre at the Old Vic in the following year.
    Her working partnership with Olivier was explosive, her occasionally excessive candour resulting in fierce arguments which frequently ended with him angrily dismissing her; she would be reinstated the following day amid emotional apologies and reconciliations. She remained at the National Theatre for some thirteen years after Olivier’s departure from the company and its transfer to the South Bank, providing a vital living continuity between Olivier’s regime and that of his successor Peter Hall. In truth, she was always something of an anomaly in Denys Lasdun’s great concrete emporium, with her flat sandals, her check dresses, her round spectacles and her straight up-and-down haircut, making her look for all the world like someone in charge of the tombola at a parish fête, though her vigorous use of four-letter words might have curled the vicar’s hair. (In fact, she was an ardent Roman Catholic and cycled to work every morning after having attended six o’clock mass.) She never entirely mastered the new stage technology which developed so rapidly in the 1970s: the Tannoy system was a particular pitfall for her. Giving the actors their calls, she would often forget to remove her finger from the button, thus continuing to broadcast her private thoughts to the entire theatre: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the Henry VIII company, at this afternoon’s performance the part of Cardinal Wolsey will be taken by Mr Henry Jones… I can’t think why, I worked with him twenty years ago and he was useless then.’
    It was not for her technical skills that she was cherished. It was for her sense of what the human beings involved in the process required in order to do their best work: directors, wardrobe department, make-up, stage-management team, above all, actors, of whom she was especially fond, in her no-nonsense way. ‘Marshal Boddington’ she was dubbed by the intake of ’64 (which included Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi), bluffly organising and rallying her troops. She was not a democrat, was, indeed, a famously devoted monarchist, and insisted on proper titles and a sense of the natural hierarchy within the company. Whatever she called Olivier to his face, behind his back she defended him like a tiger. Even on the impersonal South Bank, she managed to maintain a quality which is seriously imperilled in the vast theatrical organisations of today: theatre as family. Her sense of esprit de corps was profound; somewhere inside her lived the spirit of the wartime Old Vic, speaking for England – the theatre as a gallant enterprise made up of individual human beings, a human pyramid of which every member was made to feel his or her vital importance. It was an inestimable boon for actors and directors, and an inspiring example for generations of stage managers who worked with her or were