Every actor in London must have tuned in yesterday to Radio Four’s Reunion programme, the excellent series presented by Sue McGregor that last visited the theatre in a trip down memory lane with members of the Liverpool Everyman company in the early 1970s — Julie Walters, Alison Steadman, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethewaite, Bernard Hill and Antony Sher.

Even more illustrious was yesterday’s quintet of witnesses to the early days of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic — Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon and director William Gaskill.

Jogging over the heath beforehand I bumped into my neighbours Jennie Stoller and Gemma Jones rushing home to catch the programme, while Simon Callow was obviously still in character as Pozzo  in Waiting for Godot (opening soon in the West End) with two brown boxers, as opposed to Lucky, straining at the leash.

Callow of course was working in the Old Vic box office during this magical period, and I was buying slip seats in the gallery for three shillings, or two shillings to stand at the back of the stalls for Olivier’s Othello, the greatest performance by anyone in anything I have ever seen.

Gaskill revealed that he only agreed to direct The Recruiting Officer if he could have Maggie Smith in it ( he’d seen her as Lady Plyant in Congreve’s The Double Dealer at the Vic in 1959); she never knew this, she said, so she took the opportunity to thank Bill  “very much” for arranging her time at the National “otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it.”

Both she and the great Gambon were moved to tears during the course of the programme, Maggie when she listened to a playback of her Desdemona singing the willow song and said that she felt so sad at how much she’d lost; Gambon when he re-imagined the voice and gestures of Olivier — “I can hear him now.”

Gambon also told the marvellous story of auditioning for Olivier as Richard III, unmindful that the part was claimed in perpetuity by the boss “What are you going to do…Buckingham, Catesby?”; ”No, Richard III”), and Joan Plowright recalled touring Chekhov to Bradford and being told at the stage door, “We like stuff with a bit of meat in it.”    

And Gambon implied that a certain amount of corpsing was involved in following Derek Jacobi on to the stage wearing little more than gold body paint, a few medallions “and an early Cilla BLack wig” in The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

“We were an actors’ theatre,” said Gaskill, making a clear distinction with the RSC and its Cambridge academic directors and their preoccupation with verse speaking. And understudying was taken very seriously indeed.

On tape, Olivier said that he never liked the Old Vic as a theatre very much, with its smell of tea and dead cats, and Gaskill described the cramped office conditions in Aquinas Street, the famous prefab Nissan hut with one long corridor and walls so paper thin that no-one ever kept any secrets of casting or production plans.

Nobody thought that working conditions in the new National or the Barbican were any improvement. Gaskill was even nostalgic about the demise of the Lord Chamberlain in 1968: “Having an enemy is very important, and some of the energy evaporated when he went. It made life easier, but also less exciting.”

Maggie left when Olivier offered her a choice of Viola in Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It. She chose Viola but Olivier went ahead anyway with an all-male As You, a slight indication of their simmering rivalry; only Maggie ever got the better of Olivier on stage, and he knew it.

The voices of Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller, Kenneth Tynan, Michael Blakemore and Tom Stoppard all registered, making the 45-minute programme a dense treasure trove of testimony, drenched in the best kind of nostalgia.

Maggie is not a sentimental person, but she briefly became so in recalling her great friend “Johnny Moffatt” saying “this is how I always imagined how it would be but never thought it would be…it was our education; we all wanted to act, and to act well.”

Jacobi said it was a magic, golden time for him — “Larry was so generous and supportive, a father figure, mentor, colleague and a friend ” — and Gambon simply said he was so proud to have been there, “it’s not been the same since.”

Joan Plowright, Olivier’s widow, summed it up. “It was a great buzz there, but times have changed. Peter Hall said to me when he took over that the National can’t be a fortress any more. It must be open to everyone, and I guess that’s where it’s gone…”

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