Modern ‘buccaneer’ of British theatre
PETER HALL Founder of Royal Shakespeare Company
PETER HALL was a visionary theatre director and impresario who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and helped build Britain’s National Theatre into a producing powerhouse.
He died recently, aged 86, at a London hospital surrounded by his family, the National Theatre said. He had been suffering from dementia.
Passionate, prolific and supremely selfconfident, Hall was one of the most influential figures in British theatre since World War 2. 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.’’
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, he directed the first Englishlanguage production of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot, an avantgarde drama more experienced directors had shunned.
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 StratforduponAvon.
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.
He directed acting greats including Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins in a 1987
Anthony and Cleopatra, Dustin
Hoffman in The Merchant of
Venice in 1989 and Dench again
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2010.
He helmed his own Peter Hall Company between 1988 and 2011, led the Rose Theatre Kingston when it opened in 2003 and was director of the Glyndebourne opera festival between 1984 and 1990.
His opera work also included productions for the Royal
Opera, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where he staged Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 1983, to mark the centenary of the composer’s death.
His final production at the National Theatre was Twelfth
Night, in 2011. He was diagnosed with dementia shortly afterward.
Nicholas Hytner, who led the National Theatre between 2003 and 2015, called Hall ‘‘the great theatrical buccaneer of the 20th century.’’
‘‘Without him there would have been no Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre’s move to the South Bank might have ended in ignominious failure, and the whole idea of the theatre as a public service dedicated both to high seriousness and popularity would not have seized the public imagination,’’ Hytner said.
The National Theatre’s current director, Rufus Norris, said: ‘‘We all stand on the shoulders of giants and Peter Hall’s shoulders supported the entirety of British theatre as we know it.’’
Hall is survived by his fourth wife Nicki, six children, including director Edward Hall and actress Rebecca Hall, and nine grandchildren.