Visionary British theatre director Peter Hall dies at 86

Peter Hall, a visionary theatre director and impresario who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and helped build Britain’s National Theatre into a producing powerhouse, has died. He was 86.

Hall died Monday at a London hospital surrounded by his family, The National Theatre said Tuesday. He had been suffering from dementia.

Passionate, prolific and supremely self-confident, Hall was one of the most influential figures in British theatre since World War II. Richard Eyre, one of his successors at the National Theatre, said he “created the template of the modern director - part magus, part impresario, part celebrity.”

Patrick Stewart, who performed with the RSC as a young actor, tweeted that Hall “transformed classical and modern U.K. theatre and gave me a career.”

Born in eastern England 1930, the son of a railway stationmaster, Hall began directing as a student at Cambridge University.

In 1955, when he was 25, Hall directed the first Englishlanguage production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” an avant-garde drama more experienced directors had shunned.

It wasn’t an immediate success. Hall later recalled that “on the line, ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful,’ a very English voice said loudly: ‘Hear! hear!”’

But it brought Hall to wide notice, and the play soon came to be seen as transformational, paving the way for Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and other rebellious playwrights.

Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960, when he was just 29, and led it for eight years, establishing a company of talented actors, directors and designers with bases in London

and Stratford-upon-Avon.

He became director of the National Theatre in 1973, overseeing the company’s problemplagued move into a striking concrete complex beside the River Thames - accomplished with a mix of attention to detail and iron will that gained him both praise and criticism.

He led the National until 1988, directing productions including his own adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” the premieres of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” and “Betrayal” and Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” which went on to take Broadway by storm.

Hall twice won Tony Awards for best director, for “Amadeus” and Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1977.

AP PHOTO/DAVID ZALUBOWSKI, FILE In this 2000 file photo, Sir Peter Hall, director of the epic play “Tantalus,” poses with one of the suits of armor being prepared for use in the 10 1/2hour play at the Denver, Colo., Center for the Performing Arts. Hall, founder of the Royal...