LOITERING WITH INTENT; The Apprentice

The second volume in the autobiography of the actor, writer, and bon vivant takes him from his education as a thespian at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to his adventures as a youth on the loose in London.

The second volume of O'Toole's autobiography (after The Child, 1993) begins in 1953 as O'Toole, 21, leaves the British Navy to begin his training at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. The prose is, as it was in the first volume, by turns enchanting and maddening, a mix of schoolboy high spirits and British theatrical slang, told in the rolling Irish rhythms of the practiced barroom storyteller. Just as his work in film and theater has varied from the brilliant to the histrionic, O'Toole the autobiographer is by turns charming, self-indulgent, hilarious, long-winded, obscure and witty. Readers looking for celebrities will find an anecdote or two about Richard Burton and Albert Finney, but for the most part O'Toole's method is that of Joyce by way of the pub raconteur, with the focus on the everyday details of a student's life in mid-1950s London. There are acknowledgments of his debt to his teachers at the academy, an affectionate account of his love affair with a Jewish girl from Chicago he called "the Hopi," instructions on how to wash a pair of socks without soap and on how to make a theatrical prompt book and such nutty digressions as a potted history of the English Civil War. Running throughout are O'Toole's invocations of the spirit of the 19th-century actor Edmund Kean, the symbol of O'Toole's passion for the tradition of the English stage. American readers are likely to be frustrated by the slang and the references to long-dead and obscure British theatrical figures, but they are also not likely to read a more passionate and entertaining evocation of the life of a young actor. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Slowly, slowly, but sometimes delightfully, O'Toole takes us through just his first year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in this second volume of his memoirs (after (Loitering with Intent: The Child, 1993). At the current rate of progress, fans will have to wait quite a bit longer to get to O'Toole's celebrated screen career in films such as Lawrence of Arabia and The Lion in Winter. Actors are notoriously self-obsessed, but O'Toole breaks new ground as he batters us with insignificant anecdote after anecdote on the ephemera of his life. For a few pages, this looping, discursive style is engagingly oddball, and in a profession whose practitioners are not known for their literary abilities, O'Toole's prose is certainly polished and playful, although too self- consciously Joycean at times. But as with the first volume, he is not content merely to bore and frustrate us with a laundry list of details (and, yes, he even discusses his laundry), he also feels compelled to constantly digress in all directions and at length. In particular, he never misses an opportunity to discuss the great Shakespearean actor (and presumed kindred spirit) Edmund Kean. O'Toole does have some interesting thoughts on acting and on the teaching of acting, amusingly comparing the Stanislavski Method to the game of cricket. Like many British actors, O'Toole prefers a more deliberately constructed and calibrated style of acting. As he says rather severely of rehearsals, ``[They] are no occasion for dabblings in the inexact science of nature, functions, and phenomena of the human soul and mind.'' If only he could have brought his actor's precision and discipline to his prose. There is a charming, witty, lapidary, very slim volume somewhere in here, but it is buried under minutiae. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

O'Toole chronicles his adolescent and young-adult years in a high style, full of bombast and invention. The narrative is not chronological; it is as idiosyncratic as its author. But it all has to do with his training for the person he became. So he reflects on adolescent experiences at St. Anne's Catholic School, with Mr. Peejay as teacher and mentor; O'Liver, the young friend who saw him through learning to swim and surfaces at odd junctures in the narrative; Donal MacBruin, the renowned piper who taught him to play the pipes and to dance; the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where Nell Carter, the drama teacher, and Clifford Turner, the voice teacher, were conduits to the world of his hero, his icon, Edmund Kean; and his young peers at the Royal Academy, including Albert Finney; then back to his youth with Hooky, Roly, and Willis, buddies who swim the murky, filthy canal on dares; Burly and Stringy, the toughs he plays rugby with ("Which on yeez Tooler?" ); Joyce Carey, the grand old actress who taught him the benefits of skulking, preferably in a pub, after a bad performance. It's all so brave and chipper, "give us a gaze of your wise big blue eyes." Like Shakespeare's Hal, he fought and played with the roughest, held his own, and, displaying his brand of erudition, now shares the wealth of his experiences freely. Bonnie Smothers