Peter Brook
Peter was a man for all seasons – he could play any part that was needed. He told me once, “I’m going now to see somebody in the government and of course I’ll put on my pussycat face.” That is what enabled him to bring about such radical change. Consider what he did with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, which no one before him had been able to do.
When he started with the RSC, he said, “Now that I’ve got this position, I can’t do it alone,” and asked me to help him run it with the respected French director Michel Saint-Denis. I was very young at the time. It was typical of his generosity and his vision.
It’s no use being open and generous and having vision unless you have a very concrete knowledge of what’s needed: what must be changed, what the opposition could be, how far you can go and when you just have to wait patiently. He had all these gifts. Peter’s wasn’t a highbrow theatre or a lowbrow, popular theatre but the truly Shakespearean art of blending all those things.
We were very close friends. He was warm, affable, generous. The secret to Peter was that he had a great simple and engaging charm which was one of his natural assets. That’s what made him so persuasive.
Elaine Paige
Peter Hall had absolute authority and, as a heavyweight of the theatre, real presence. With those wonderful Fedora hats that he wore, he had an old-school style and always looked debonair.
After I had secured the rights to Piaf, Pam Gems’ play about the iconic French singer, I thought shall I dare ask him to direct? It was a play with music and he wasn’t known for music theatre. I wasn’t sure if he’d be keen on that – or on working with me. I introduced myself, told him I was looking for a director, and his eyes lit up and he gathered me up in his arms. He put together an amazing cast and we took it on tour then into the West End.
There were never any strong words when you worked with Peter as he created an environment that was calm and fun. He was full of gentle encouragement. But he didn’t beat around the bush either. He had the brightest mind and a clear view of what he wanted.
Later, he asked me to do Molière’s comedy The Misanthrope. He knew I wanted to develop as an actor and gave me the chance – I’ll always be grateful for that. It was my first major role in a West End show that wasn’t a musical. He told me, “It’s rhyming couplets, darling. Think of it as singing without the music.” For me, that took away the fear of doing something classical.
A few years ago there was a party for him at the National. I’ve never seen so many stars under one roof. It was a privilege to know him.
Griff Rhys Jones
Peter was an absolute smoothie, the most charming and diplomatic man. Especially with that beard, you could imagine he would have made a fantastic Elizabethan courtier.
By the time I met him, in the mid-90s, he’d left the RSC and the National but was still producing a very large number of shows. There was always something on the boil. He wanted to do a farce and he came to me with An Absolute Turkey, a Feydeau play he’d translated with his wife, Nicki Frei. He was very easy to get on with and it was fascinating to find out that he’d seen other productions I’d done. He saw everything and would make a note of which actors might be appropriate for him to bring together. I was cast with Felicity Kendal and Nick Le Prevost.
On virtually every rehearsal day, he’d arrive and say, well now, this is too long. We’ll have to cut this down. This would happen on a Monday and we’d all nod. And then we’d get to the end of the week and he still hadn’t cut it. And it would happen again the next Monday. And the next. As he’d done the translation himself, he found it difficult to cut. Feydeau’s plays are like pieces of clockwork. It’s very difficult to take them apart. Peter liked farce and went on to work with Eric Sykes on a very funny production of Molière’s The School for Wives.
We had similar backgrounds. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, I was involved with the Amateur Dramatic Club and there was a photo of him on the wall there, saying this was where he learned to make all his mistakes. There wasn’t really any school of drama at Cambridge - it’s always been the case that undergraduates have organised it for themselves and so they take on that sense of controlling the reins. He wasn’t a jobbing director. He left university with the idea that the Royal Shakespeare Company could be a showcase for his ideas and intentions. He certainly led out, from Cambridge, a line of directors like Sam Mendes and Nick Hytner who probably owed a great deal to his pioneering ability to play the politics of theatre.
Samuel West
Peter was an extraordinarily energetic, imaginative director – if you left him in the corner of a room he’d direct a play – but he was also a great campaigner. He never stopped arguing for the role of subsidised art in a civilised society and its ability to change people’s lives.
At the National he was incredibly supportive of the director Michael Bogdanov and the cast of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain at a time when the theatre was attacked on all sides for putting on what some called filth. He did what an artistic director should - he backed his team. And of course it became a very successful show in the National’s biggest theatre, the Olivier.
He left the National an immeasurably healthier place than it was when he started, which was mostly down to his ability to fill a theatre with shows that people wanted to see, or perhaps - more interestingly – shows that they didn’t know they wanted to see.
It feels contradictory to call him a traditionalist, because there wasn’t much of an agreed-on tradition before he came along. He was propelled by his desire to bring Shakespeare into the centre of the country’s life - and in that he was largely successful. He wrote a book about verse speaking and was dogmatic about the principles of spoken verse. There have been fashions since where people have worked against those principles, but the fact that there is even an argument about how Shakespeare is spoken is basically down to him.
Anyone who’s tried to run a building with three theatres in it will tell you that the first rule is don’t put anything on in the largest space that 12,000 people don’t want to see. And yet he staged, to great acclaim, Tony Harrison’s Oresteia - three long plays performed in masks and in verse. I was in my teens when I saw it, and it remains one of my most memorable theatrical evenings.
Gus Christie
Sir Peter created 19 productions for Glyndebourne. The first was La Calisto in 1970, the last was Cenerentola, in 2005. As a young boy my early memories of him were simply of this bear-like figure in the theatre. His 1973 Marriage of Figaro was the first opera to make a real impact on me. He also did the best Don Giovanni I’ve ever seen. With Thomas Allen as the Don he managed to get the perfect blend of danger, menace and charm.
He was a hugely versatile director. His characterisation and the detail were spectacular, and above all he was a fantastic story-teller. Musicians adored him - any singer loves to have someone who really challenges them and works with them to create something extraordinary, and that’s what Peter did, time and time again. His 1981 production of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, created with designer John Bury, was a work of pure magic, a perfect Glyndebourne piece. It’s still in our repertory, and was revived only last year, when audiences voted it their favourite opera of the season. I wish we could have kept all his shows but we haven’t got big enough cupboards.
When he directed Carmen for us in 1985 it was with his third wife Maria Ewing in the title role. She was a rather hot-headed Carmen, perfect for the part, but working with her could be tricky, not least for my dad [George, the then Chairman] and also for Peter, as she occasionally didn’t turn up for rehearsals. But she pulled it out of the bag, and gave a memorable performance. I’ll never forget her act-two dance with the castanets.
Peter threw himself into everything he did but always had a twinkle in his eye and a sense of humour. There was an insecurity about him too which was endearing - he knew what he was doing, but he would wrestle to get it right in the rehearsal room. He loved his food and would always arrive in time for breakfast in the canteen before rehearsals. And I remember him pontificating over many lunches about how troubled he was by the lack of subsidy for the arts. My father always said that was his tenure as artistic director - 1984-1990 - was golden era at Glyndebourne. In fact during that decade the demand for tickets grew so much that my dad made the decision to build a bigger theatre.
