Peter Hall was a man of infinite contradictions. In public, he exuded confidence, authority and the gift for leadership that enabled him to both found the Royal Shakespeare Company and overcome the manifold crises surrounding the early days of the National Theatre. Yet, having interviewed Hall countless times over the past 40 years, I also saw that he was vulnerable, sensitive and even sometimes strangely solitary. I have a vivid memory of travelling to Athens in the mid-1980s with a party of critics to see Hall’s production of Coriolanus, with Ian McKellen, staged in the Herod Atticus theatre. One morning we announced we were going to Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. “Do you mind if I come with you?” Hall asked, almost apologetically. It was a sudden glimpse into the loneliness of a director once the task of getting the show up and running has been achieved.
Long before I got to know Hall, or even write about his work, I had followed his career. I first saw his work at Stratford in the late 1950s when a slightly chilly Love’s Labour’s Lost was followed by a blissful Twelfth Night, a symphony in russet staged in Caroline costume, and an overwhelming Coriolanus, this time with Laurence Olivier.
Given the two men’s chequered relationship when Hall succeeded Olivier at the National, it is fascinating to recall how much the young director brought out of the great actor. This was vintage Olivier who gave us a Coriolanus full of emotional power, physical audacity and withering irony.
When Hall went on to create the RSC, the production that defined the ensemble spirit of the company was undoubtedly The Wars of the Roses, which offered a conflation, achieved by John Barton, of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.
Today we expect to see the plays given in their entirety. But Hall’s production was exactly right for the early 1960s. Its cynicism about power-politics coincided with a year of Tory disarray in which Harold Macmillan’s sudden resignation provoked a period of unseemly back-stabbing. Its chauvinist portrait of the perfidious French reminded us of De Gaulle’s peremptory veto of British membership of the EEC. Even the assassination of President Kennedy seemed to chime with the work’s portrayal of power as something subject to arbitrary extinction.
Hall’s work for the RSC was vibrant, urgent and exciting. In 1965, against the advice of all his colleagues, he staged Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming in the large Aldwych theatre: a production of meticulous precision, in which actors such as Paul Rogers, Ian Holm and John Normington applied their Shakespearean expertise to the ambiguities of Pinter’s text. That same year, Hall directed a Stratford Hamlet in which a young David Warner seemed to echo the baffled alienation of a whole 60s generation. In between these productions, Hall directed Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aaron at Covent Garden with a cast of 300 and an on-stage orgy that induced me to get a standing ticket for the first night.
Hall later confessed to me that he left the RSC too early, in 1968: his work was not done but he was exhausted and he had found, in Trevor Nunn, an ideal successor. Unlike King Lear, Hall always had the capacity to relinquish power and to discover talent in the next generation. On that trip to Athens for Coriolanus, I remember Hall gave me an extraordinarily candid interview in which he said he was aiming to leave the National and wanted Richard Eyre to succeed him. “My only fear,” he said, “is that the board may think he is too leftwing.” Happily, Eyre became the duly appointed heir.
Hall’s tenure at the National from 1973 to 1988 is a subject in itself and encompasses a wide range of work. I intemperately loathed his opening masque-like production of The Tempest, when the company was still at the Old Vic, and said it was one of the worst Shakespearean productions I had ever seen: a rash statement given some of the dreck of recent years. Hall went on to do masterly productions of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Marlowe’s impossible Tamburlaine the Great. His work later went into decline with oddly neutral, unimaginative productions of Volpone, The Country Wife and The Cherry Orchard. It may have been because he was spreading himself too thin or because of the pressures in his private life.
But he brought all his operatic instinct to Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in 1979 and thereafter recovered his lost form. Jean Seberg in 1983 was a massive musical flop but Hall’s 1987 Antony and Cleopatra, with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins, was magnificent. No production I’ve seen has caught so well the idea that the play’s two principals are steeped in a self-deluding dream or rendered the language with such crystalline clarity.
Hall’s final achievement was a sequence of Shakespeare’s late plays that were very good at the National and even better when I saw them on tour in Tbilisi where they were stripped of their original set and costumes because of Soviet transport problems. It was a measure of Hall’s rapt attention to the verse, as well as to the resourcefulness of the actors, that they transcended the dearth of decor.
But what I most admired about Hall at the National was his tenacity in withstanding industrial action, persistent attacks from disappointed members of the Olivier regime and media abuse. This came to a head in 1986 with a lead story in the Sunday Times – headlined Laughing all the way to the bank – alleging that both Hall at the National and Trevor Nunn at the RSC were, in effect, exploiting their privileged position for their own commercial advantage. In fact, I think there were loopholes in directors’ contracts that the Cork enquiry into English theatre, of which I was a member, sought to address: we proposed that no director should ever make more money from a commercial transfer than the producing theatre. But what struck me at the time, and does so still, was that the Sunday Times story was intended as an assault on the subsidised sector and used Hall and Nunn as convenient whipping boys.
Shortly after this I made a long TV profile of Hall with Derek Bailey that gave me many insights into the man himself. I remember a rainy day filming at Hall’s Sussex home where his young daughter, Rebecca, showed a remarkable capacity to entertain herself. Hall was also highly critical of his early work: especially his famous 1955 Waiting for Godot which, he said, was over-decorative and filled the silences with wispy fragments of Bartók. But Hall also struck me as a mixture of the adventurous and the conservative: passionate in his belief in new writing but ultra-cautious when I challenged him on the National’s failure to promote women directors.
After he left the National, Hall’s career was peripatetic and periodically productive: he seemed like a director in need of a stable financier. He occasionally found one and did wonderful productions such as a West End Wild Duck in 1990 with Alex Jennings. But the great dream of Hall in his later years was to revivify the Old Vic, and there was a time in the mid-1990s when this started to happen. He initiated a seven-day operation, created a regular company and, with the aid of Dominic Dromgoole, made new plays part of the repertory alongside established classics. It was a bold, imaginative idea and when it fell apart, because the Old Vic’s owners decided to sell the building, Hall was palpably crushed.
Fortunately he later found a permanent home at the Theatre Royal, Bath, where he approached the standard repertory with fresh insight: never more so than in a Much Ado About Nothing that brought out the latent homosexuality in Don John’s relationship to Claudio or in a Pygmalion that caught Professor Higgins’s ruefulness, as well as delight, in seeing Eliza achieve a spirited independence.
But, inevitably, there was a certain sadness in Hall’s later years. I vividly remember doing a public interview with him at the Galway international arts festival in 2009. It was diplomatically suggested that we should meet for lunch in advance to map out the territory: something unheard of with the highly articulate Hall. On the day all went well until we touched on the subject of Shakespearean verse-speaking. “People sometimes accuse me of being …” said Hall and then suddenly words failed him. “An iambic fundamentalist?” I prompted and Hall, recovering his nerve, said “Yes, that’s it.” It was a small moment but a hint of the onset of dementia.
When I last interviewed him on his 80th birthday, he was mellow, reflective and told me that he had a lot of luck in his life and been blessed with doing the job he adored. What he didn’t say was that he had also made his own luck and left the British theatre, through his work at the RSC and the National and his unremitting championship of the subsidy principle, infinitely richer than he had found it.
