I HAVE only once met Peter O'Toole and that was briefly. It was an evening of high, if unintended, satire in the Gaiety where one of those gala evenings was being held to celebrate the theatre's 150th anniversary.
The pompous, the pretentious and some of the plain people of Ireland had gathered there, and the occasion was being carried live on RTE television (first mistake).
Everyone was strictly enjoined that their spot was not to exceed three minutes in length, and O'Toole had told them that he was going to read from Swift's Drapier's Letters. (Second mistake, for nobody had bothered to check that there is no way that Drapier can be fitted into three minutes.)
On came our hero and launched into the piece with some panache. After 10 minutes there was no sign of him stopping. After 15 minutes the audience, which contained, as it usually does on such occasions, a high proportion of those who were only there for the beer, started to heckle.
After 20 minutes, the programme in a shambles, the television producer pulled the plug. Some time after that O'Toole ambled offstage to meet the presumably very fraught powers that were. I chanced to meet him on the staircase as he was returning to his dressing room.
"The old Dean can still shake them up!" he said, beaming ecstatically.
Somehow it summed up an actor often more famous for his bad behaviour than for the roles he has played, but who nevertheless has always inspired considerable affection.
This book, the second volume of O'Toole's memoirs, goes a long way to explaining why. Not only is its author funny, talented (many of his films notwithstanding) and a born writer, he displays an affection for his past and his cronies that is aeons away from the bitchiness and paranoia that can inform so many theatrical autobiographies.
Volume one of O'Toole's story concerned his North of England childhood, the offspring of a Scottish mother and a rather rackety bookmaker. Volume two, with a few jumps back and forward in time, is mainly concerned with his period in RADA, to which he won a scholarship after doing his national service in the navy.
London in the 1950s, still recovering from the war, is beautifully evoked here, a changing city, but still full of echoes of the past and in many ways a more attractive place than it is now. The young O'Toole roamed bohemian Soho, with its pubs and coffee houses, Seven Dials, still redolent of Dickensian low life, or the area round the Strand where Henry Irving and Edmund Kean had played.
Kean, a crippled child of the slums who rose to become the greatest, most hard drinking, most womanising actor of his day, is the figure with whom O'Toole seems to empathise most and, I the 19th century actor could ride his horse upstairs to his dressing room, the 20th century one could bring a double bed through the Underground railway.
There are descriptions of going to the theatre to see the likes of the young Richard Burton at the Old Vic, of being examined by a forthright Sybil Thorndike, of seemingly non stop girls and carousing, of living the louche life on a houseboat, which sank during a party, and of nearly killing himself by sticking a toasting fork into an electrical plug.
Ala the time, too, there were lessons, lovingly described, in speech, movement, improvisation, fencing and all manner of plays. These last, particularly his descriptions of student productions of As You Like It and Shaw's You Never Can Tell, are as illuminating and affectionate as they come.
In an age where many actors could easily be mistaken for accountants or civil servants, Peter O'Toole remains unrepentantly theatrical and, if nowadays he sometimes appears a bit of a burned out case (all that raising hell must have been exhausting), he is never respectable, never dull.
Sometimes his stream of consciousness writing, with its refusal to use surnames, can become a bit obtuse. It's no chore to persevere with the book, though. In a year perhaps over supplied with theatrical reminiscences this is, undoubtedly, the one to get. Roll on further volumes.
