ABSTRACT
The tramps in the British Waiting for Godot was lovable that they were picked up by television in The Arthur Haynes Show. Ionesco's Rhinoceros played to capacity houses in 1960 and transferred for a West End run. The reason for its success was the presence in the cast of Sir Laurence Olivier, who played Berenger. His name was a great attraction, but not enough in itself to ensure success. He failed badly as Fred Midway in David Turner's Semi-Detached in which the comic actor Leonard Rossiter made his name. Olivier took a long time to get adjusted to the rights and wrongs of state subsidies. His background was in the commercial theatre and private charitable ventures, such as the Old Vic, but he had acted in war-time films where the national interest was self-evident. Olivier had the instincts of an actor-manager and one of his ambitions was to preserve the centrality of the actor in the National Theatre (NT).
