page_title: Ralph Richardson
section_title: Old Vic, 1930–32
hierarchical_section_title: Ralph Richardson / Life and career / Old Vic, 1930–32
caption_attribution_description: Old Vic
context_page_description: Sir Ralph David Richardson was an English actor who, along with his contemporaries Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, and Laurence Olivier, dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He worked in films throughout most of his career, and played more than sixty cinema roles. From an artistic but not theatrical background, Richardson had no thought of a stage career until a production of Hamlet in Brighton inspired him to become an actor. He learned his craft in the 1920s with a touring company and later the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. In 1931 he joined the Old Vic, playing mostly Shakespearean roles. He led the company the following season, succeeding Gielgud, who had taught him much about stage technique. After he left the company, a series of leading roles took him to stardom in the West End and on Broadway.
  In the 1940s, together with Olivier and John Burrell, Richardson was the co-director of the Old Vic company. There, his most celebrated roles included Peer Gynt and Falstaff.
context_section_description: In 1930 Richardson, with some misgivings, accepted an invitation to join The Old Vic company. The theatre, in an unfashionable location south of the Thames, had offered inexpensive tickets for opera and drama under its proprietor Lilian Baylis since 1912. Its profile had been raised considerably by Baylis's producer, Harcourt Williams, who in 1929 persuaded the young West End star John Gielgud to lead the drama company. For the following season Williams wanted Richardson to join, with a view to succeeding Gielgud from 1931 to 1932. Richardson agreed, though he was not sure of his own suitability for a mainly Shakespearean repertoire, and was not enthusiastic about working with Gielgud: "I found his clothes extravagant, I found his conversation flippant. He was the New Young Man of his time and I didn't like him."
  The first production of the season was Henry IV, Part 1, with Gielgud as Hotspur and Richardson as Prince Hal; the latter was thought by The Daily Telegraph "vivacious, but a figure of modern comedy rather than Shakespeare." Richardson's notices, and the relationship of the two leading men, improved markedly when Gielgud, who was playing Prospero, helped Richardson with his performance as Caliban in The Tempest:
  He gave me about two hundred ideas, as he usually does, twenty-five of which I eagerly seized on, and when I went away I thought, "This chap, you know, I don't like him very much but by God he knows something about this here play." ... And then out of that we formed a friendship.
  The friendship and professional association lasted until the end of Richardson's life. Gielgud wrote in 1983, "Besides cherishing our long years of work together in the theatre, where he was such an inspiring and generous partner, I grew to love him in private life as a great gentleman, a rare spirit, fair and balanced, devotedly loyal and tolerant and, as a companion, bursting with vitality, curiosity and humour." Among Richardson's other parts in his first Old Vic season, Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra gained particularly good notices. The Morning Post commented that it placed him in the first rank of Shakespearean actors. At the beginning of 1931 Baylis re-opened Sadler's Wells Theatre with a production of Twelfth Night starring Gielgud as Malvolio and Richardson as Sir Toby Belch. W. A. Darlington in The Daily Telegraph wrote of Richardson's "ripe, rich and mellow Sir Toby, [which] I would go many miles to see again."
  During the summer break between the Old Vic 1930–31 and 1931–32 seasons, Richardson played at the Malvern Festival, under the direction of his old Birmingham director, Ayliff. Salaries at the Old Vic and the Festival were not large, and Richardson was glad of a job as an extra in the 1931 film Dreyfus. As his wife's condition worsened he needed to pay for more and more nursing; she was looked after in a succession of hospitals and care homes.
  Succeeding Gielgud as leading man at the Old Vic, Richardson had a varied season, in which there were conspicuous successes interspersed with critical failures. James Agate was not convinced by him as the domineering Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew; in Julius Caesar the whole cast received tepid reviews. In Othello Richardson divided the critics. He emphasised the plausible charm of the murderous Iago to a degree that Agate thought "very good Richardson, but indifferent Shakespeare", whereas The Times said, "He never stalked or hissed like a plain villain, and, in fact, we have seldom seen a man smile and smile and be a villain so adequately." His biggest success of the season was as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both Agate and Darlington commented on how the actor transformed the character from the bumbling workman to the magically changed creature on whom Titania dotes. Agate wrote that most of those who had played the part hitherto "seem to have thought Bottom, with the ass's head on, was the same Bottom, only funnier. Shakespeare says he was 'translated', and Mr Richardson translated him." With Sybil Thorndike as a guest star and Richardson as Ralph, The
caption: The Old Vic (photographed in 2012)
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