Exactly one year to the day after his death, Peter Hall has been given a double-headed, star-studded tribute, first at Westminster Abbey and then at the National Theatre.
As the two buildings, one spiritual and the other secular, rang with his praises on Tuesday, one got a strong sense of the titanic achievement of a man who, as director, producer and impresario, did more than anyone to shape postwar British theatre.
What struck one about the thanksgiving service at the abbey was the sheer aesthetic beauty of the proceedings: something you felt Hall himself would have appreciated. The London Philharmonic Orchestra played Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli with sublime grace. The voices of the Monteverdi Choir seemed to float from the heavens as they sang Bach. But there was also puckish humour as Sir Thomas Allen ended the Serenade from Mozart’s Don Giovanni with a gentle caress as if ardently seeking his loved one.
Hall’s passion for music came eloquently across but there were also tributes from David Hare and Trevor Nunn. Hare hymned Hall’s endorsement of living dramatists – especially during his directorship of the National Theatre – and reeled off a long list of admittedly “male, pale” writers who benefited from his support. As Hare pointed out, in any conflict between the world at large and the artist, Hall was always to be found on the side of the artist.
Nunn, who said he became a disciple of Hall when he heard him lecture at Cambridge in 1960, cunningly adapted Hamlet’s speech on “What a piece of work is man”.
But perhaps what moved one most was the sight of some of the great actors who had worked with Hall. When Dame Judi Dench read Cleopatra’s paean to the dead Antony and cried “For his bounty, there was no winter in it”, she made the words echo through the abbey like a tribute to Hall himself.
Vanessa Redgrave, in a passage from Corinthians, reiterated the word “love” as if it were the source of life. And David Suchet did not so much read as storm, with some fruity Olivier cadences, through the passage in Amadeus where Salieri realises he has heard the voice of God issuing through the obscene child that is Mozart.
I can’t believe anyone emerged from that experience in the abbey without feeling enriched by the power of words and music; which is what Hall would have wished.
The second part of the celebration, which took place in the Olivier theatre, was a mixture of pictorial record, public performance and personal reminiscence. But the most powerful presence was that of Hall himself when captured on film. At one point, he was seen in an interview angrily combating the doom-mongers and nay-sayers who predicted the National, when it opened in 1976, would be a disaster.
“It’s there for good,” cried Hall. “Imagine England without Westminster Abbey.” At that point the audience, most of whom had been in the abbey that morning, broke into spontaneous cheers.
Among others, Richard Eyre spoke about how Hall changed his life and about the impact, on a theatrical innocent like himself, of the 1960s production of The Wars Of the Roses. Bill Kenwright, who as a commercial producer worked with Hall on and off for a decade, spoke of their relationship as if it were a romance and explained how he would barter with Hall over casting like a carpet-seller in a Moroccan souk. Thea Sharrock as a director and Dan Stevens as an actor also testified to Hall’s constant encouragement of the young and willingness to listen to their ideas.
Sometimes these tributes to the theatrical dead can seem mawkish and overblown. That was not the case here because the evidence of Hall’s legacy lies all about. It is there in the National itself – “the house that Peter built” as the current director Rufus Norris called it – and in the endurance of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which Hall founded.
It is there, too, in the acceptance by the government, however unwillingly, of the principle of subsidy of the arts. And it is there in the record of productions Hall created. To watch, in one afternoon, Alan Dobie and James Laurenson in Waiting For Godot, Greg Hicks in The Oresteia and Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in No Man’s Land– a Pinter play that Hall pioneered – was to be reminded of one simple fact: though often attacked in his lifetime as a Machiavellian politician, Hall was a visionary who wanted the best in all the arts to be available to the widest possible number.
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This article was amended on 13 September 2018. An earlier version said that Sir Peter Hall was the National Theatre’s first director, an honour held by Sir Laurence Olivier.
