Sir Donald Wolfit: The man who defied Nazi bombs to bring the Bard to the people

IT is October 1940, one month into the Blitz.

A German bombing raid has caused great damage to the Strand Theatre in London.

The back of the building lies in ruins. The demolition squad wave away a man who wants to enter the theatre but the man is having none of it.

He is the great actor-manager Donald Wolfit who has a mission to bring the works of Shakespeare to the masses.

For him, Nazi bombs are an inconvenience but nothing more.

The show must go on.

Against the advice of the theatre secretary, he insists that if the damaged curtain can rise, a performance must be given that day.

The curtain, “with many a groan and a shudder”, does rise. And the actor and his company take to the stage.

“There was no heating and no water for washing and we improvised cubby holes around the stage,” Wolfit later recalled in his autobiography.

But despite the extremely difficult circumstances, his “lunchtime Shakespeare” programme only grew in popularity.

In the second week the daily shows in the ruined theatre were playing to nearly 1,000 people.

Air-raid sirens made no difference.

“If the air-raid warning went during a performance Mary Pitcher, dressed as an Elizabethan page, walked on and cheerfully announced: ‘The warning has just gone. We shall proceed. Will those wish to leave do so as quietly as possible,’” Wolfit wrote.

On another occasion Wolfit was performing the famous To be, or not to be soliloquy from Hamlet when a siren was followed by the drone of a doodle-bug bomb.

“Just as I reached the conclusion the sound of the engine stopped and the monster fell some 100 yards behind the theatre, blowing in the scenery-dock door and rocking the heavy column like a mast in a storm. That was the nearest I ever came to having a performance interrupted by Hitler’s minions,” he declared.

It is hard to think of better examples of stiff-upper lip stoicism than reciting Shakespeare as enemy bombs are falling. It was certainly the “finest hour” not just of Britain but also of Donald Wolfit, who died 50 years ago.

His wartime King Lear was described by the leading theatre critic James Agate as “the greatest piece of Shakespearean acting” that he had ever seen.

What makes his achievements all the more worthy is that Wolfit started at the very bottom, with no family connections to help him on his way.

Born in Newark in Nottinghamshire in 1902, his father was an office clerk and his mother a nurse.

He made his stage debut at the age of seven when he played Robin Hood in his church school production. 

He set his heart on becoming an actor and joined the local amateur dramatic society, spending four years in provincial theatre. 

Wolfit travelled to London with £6 in his pocket to try to get work with a major company but had no success.

However, a letter of introduction from an actress friend to actor-manager Fred Terry was to change Wolfit’s fortunes.

Terry invited him to join his company on a salary of £4 10/-. “I walked in a daze on to Primrose Hill and when out of sight of the house threw my hat in the air and did a cartwheel,” he later wrote.

Wolfit’s fame grew and in 1937 he established his own theatre company.

It is fair to say that his performances divided opinion.

Edith Sitwell wrote that the “cosmic grandeur” of Wolfit’s Lear left her and her brother Osbert “unable to speak”.

Impresario CB Cochran hailed him as the finest actor since Sir Henry Irving.

Others thought he hammed.

The actress Hermoine Gingold quipped that while Laurence Olivier was a tour de force, Wolfit was forced to tour.

Wherever he was playing, he certainly knew how to milk an audience. For his curtain calls he would totter on exhausted and grab the curtain for dramatic effect.

“I’d be standing there thinking: ‘There’s more acting going on now than I’ve seen all evening,’’” said Alan Ayckbourn, who worked in Wolfit’s company. 

Anecdotes about the larger-than-life actor are legion.

On one occasion he had just taken a solo curtain call as King Lear and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, next week we will be offering you Hamlet. I myself shall be playing the role of the melancholy Dane and my dear lady wife shall be playing Ophelia.”

“Your wife’s an old rat-bag,” cried a voice from the auditorium.

“Nevertheless,” Wolfit continued unperturbed, “she shall still be playing Ophelia.”

On another occasion an admirer said to him: “One wonders why you don’t get your lines confused and speak bits of Lear when you’re playing Othello.”

To which Wolfit replied: “Madam, if you’re asked to play golf you don’t arrive with a tennis racket.”

Wolfit was a brilliant improviser when things went wrong on stage.

Once when a gun failed to go off, he told the other actor to kick him. As he was kicked he turned to the audience and, collapsing, cried: “The boot was poisoned!”

For Wolfit acting wasn’t just a job but his raison d’être.

“Wolfit never, ever didn’t want to go on stage,” says Ronald Harwood, whose 1980 play The Dresser was based on his experiences of working with the flamboyant thespian.

“I remember once in a play called The Wandering Jew he had a late entrance. The play began with his wife dying.

Donald used to pace up and down while she was doing her acting. ‘I can’t live any longer. She won’t die tonight, get on with it!’ Donald used to say.”

While he could be difficult, Wolfit also inspired affection.

“He developed a magnificent persona, grandiose, passionate, often pompous but also astonishingly kind and genuinely humble,” Harwood says.

Wolfit was aghast that after the outbreak of war there had been no performance of his beloved Shakespeare in London for six months. 

“This seemed to me a pitiful state of affairs for was not Shakespeare a part of the civilisation that was being fought for?” he wrote. 

Not only did he bring the Bard back to the West End, he also toured the country with his productions. He took Hamlet and Richard III to Hull while the city suffered terrible air-raids.

When not treading the boards, he served his country as a member of a Home Guard unit in Surrey.

After the war he appeared in many films, including the epic Lawrence Of Arabia, and was knighted in 1957.

The final curtain of the last of the great actor-managers came on February 17, 1968, when he died of a heart ailment, aged 65.

Of all his memorable performances probably his most important role was boosting morale in his country’s hour of need.

As Sir Donald himself put it: “I like to feel that these war years represent a victory for Shakespeare, too. We had played his great plays all over the British Isles to civilians and servicemen alike. We had done hundreds of performances in bombed London and had taken him to France, Belgium and Egypt. We had done our job.”