Peter Hall was just 25 when Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot arrived on his desk, and he directed the UK premiere. He was 29 when he went to be the director of the Shakespeare Festival Theatre and transformed it into a resident ensemble, persuading the Arts Council to let his new Royal Shakespeare Company have a base in London.
There, he pursued a revolutionary policy of presenting the work of living writers like Harold Pinter, John Whiting and David Mercer on the same main stage – and with the exact same status – as that of the dead. On any night in his theatres you could see Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench and Paul Scofield and Peggy Ashcroft and Ian Holm, while he also produced some of Peter Brook’s greatest work as a director.
When he moved the National Theatre from the Old Vic to the South Bank in 1976, he welcomed every one of us who wanted theatre not just to reflect society, but also to represent it. By the time he left in 1988, Peter had turned what had seemed a shaky and expensive venture, beset with fierce enemies from Fleet Street to Downing Street, into an institution that not even the most malign government would dare to close down.
It was typical of Peter that he insisted the doors and lobbies of the National Theatre be open all day, because he wanted everyone else to enjoy the art and culture that had transformed his own life. If you now see tens of thousands of people enjoying the river between Tate Modern and County Hall, remember the open-door initiative began with him. The most musical of directors, in his spare time he managed casually to be artistic director at Glyndebourne, where he directed operas by Mozart and Benjamin Britten better than anyone else in his lifetime.
For someone who worked in public for so many years, he was a curiously private man, with a much stronger idea of loyalty than friendship. In spite of publishing carefully edited diaries, self-revelation was not his thing. In 40 years I had only one conversation with him that you could call intimate. With four wives and six children, no one was ever going to call Peter solitary. But the man who reshaped an entire industry and fought so hard for the principle of state subsidy would flee parties, preferring to go home and play the piano.
The theatre we inherit is largely his. If you dislike the British theatre as it’s currently arranged, then you will blame Peter Hall. But if you approve of it, and of its values, then you are never going to be able to thank him enough for the courage and foresight he showed in creating the stages, the financing and the structures that have enabled countless actors, writers, designers and directors to do their very best work. We owe him everything.
