Peerless showman who transformed the arts
Sir Peter Hall, theatre and opera director: b Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, November 22, 1930; m(1) Leslie Caron, (2) Jacqueline Taylor, (3) Maria Ewing, (4) Nicki Frei; 4d, 2s; d London, September 11, 2017, aged 86.
Peter Hall was a force of nature whose impact, not merely on the stage, but on the entire panoply of national cultural life, was formidable and far-reaching. In a career that spanned the Queen’s reign – he made his professional directing debut in Coronation year – Hall created the Royal Shakespeare Company and later steered the National Theatre (NT) through its most turbulent period to stability and success.
His writ ran far beyond those companies, ranging from Glyndebourne to the Royal Opera, and from funding battles with ministers to fending off accusations of champagne socialism as he drove around the country in his RollsRoyce and criss-crossed the Atlantic by Concorde.
As the most important figure in British theatre for half a century, Hall came under fire from the left for being elitist and from the right for being a spendthrift. He even upset the Queen, who was unamused by a specially commissioned fanfare version of the national anthem for the opening of the NT on the South Bank in 1976. She ‘‘shuddered as if she had sipped lemon juice’’, Hall recorded in his diaries.
Yet he triumphed through various crises, both personal and professional, and was knighted in 1977, with the NT growing steadily in public esteem and affection due in no small part to his political skills.
Although Hall described himself as a lifelong ‘‘undoctrinaire socialist’’, he voted Conservative in 1979 because he thought Margaret Thatcher would ‘‘sort out the unions’’, which were causing havoc at his beloved NT. However, he was soon denouncing her government for cutting arts funding.
They butted heads again when she objected to Amadeus, one of his greatest successes, telling him she didn’t believe Mozart would ‘‘talk dirty’’. He responded by sending Mozart’s letters to Downing Street with the scatological passages carefully highlighted.
While he was a pre-eminent Shakespearean and classicist, he was also a fearless promoter of new writing, introducing Samuel Beckett to the English-speaking world and establishing Harold Pinter as the greatest playwright of the age. Yet for all his theatrical achievements, Hall’s genius was often seen at its finest in opera.
The temptation to stir the complacency of opera audiences was irresistible and Hall’s use of Soho strippers, acrobats and a menagerie of live animals for the Royal Opera’s production of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron was splendidly provocative. Covent Garden also enjoyed his world premiere staging of The Knot Garden in 1970. He spent six years at Glyndebourne, where he is best remembered for his stagings of the three Mozart/Da Ponte operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni.
If Hall’s triumphs were glittering, there were also controversies. In his early career he could be ruthless. The playwright John Osborne called him ‘‘Fu Man Chu’’; Glenda Jackson called him a ‘‘dictator’’; Michael Blakemore, an associate director at the NT, likened him to Genghis Khan; and Jonathan Miller, another associate director, called him ‘‘a ball of rancid pig’s fat’’.
Others were more generous. ‘‘Without getting overly messianic about it, he suffered so that the rest of us could lead happy lives,’’ said Nicholas Hytner, one of his successors at the NT.
As a public figure Hall was totally at home: charming, open, humorous, approachable, infinitely persuasive, and a confident, outspoken critic of any threat to the freedom or funding of the arts in general and theatre in particular. In private he was more complex. Though he was prone to bouts of despair and revealed in his autobiography that he twice contemplated suicide, he also enjoyed good food, fine wine and the company of beautiful women.
Peter Reginald Frederick Hall, an only child, was born in 1930 in Suffolk. His father, Reg, was a railway clerk who rose to become station master. Reg was ‘‘one of the wisest, nicest, least ambitious men’’ and Hall inherited his drive from Grace, his bossy and overprotective mother, who scrimped and saved to ensure he enjoyed the middle-class accoutrements of books and piano lessons.
He won a scholarship to the Perse grammar school in Cambridge. Here he played tennis, shone as a pianist and organist, and became head boy. His father’s job was a useful source of discounted rail tickets, which by the age of 12 he was using to visit London theatres.
After National Service with the RAF he read English at Cambridge. By his third year he was hooked on directing plays, describing ‘‘an almost physical sense of release and pleasure rehearsing’’. Professional engagements quickly followed in places such as Windsor and Oxford.
By 1955 he was running the Arts Theatre in Soho when the script for Beckett’s Waiting for Godot landed on his desk. His instincts told him it was an important piece, but he was unsure if he could make it work. When the play opened Hall remembered ‘‘yawns, mock snores and some barracking’’ that threatened ‘‘to erupt in rage’’, but subsided into ‘‘glum boredom’’. Most reviews were hostile, although The Times recognised its merits. The controversy transformed Hall from a 24-yearold prodigy into a theatrical sensation.
In 1957 he staged his first opera, The Moon and Sixpence by John Gardner, at Sadler’s Wells and formed his own West End producing company, the shortlived International Playwrights’ Theatre. A fistful of productions in Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre followed, including Cymbeline with Peggy Ashcroft.
While touring Hamlet in the Soviet Union in 1960, Hall, who was 29 at the time, met Sir Fordham Flower, chairman of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in a Leningrad hotel. He put to him a radical plan to create an ambitious, yearround operation called the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a second base in London, where new plays could also be staged. Flower told him: ‘‘I think you’re mad, but I’ll back you to the hilt.’’
There were several early successes. At Stratford, Hamlet with David Warner and a Troilus and Cressida with Dorothy Tutin were followed by a monumental trilogy condensing a portfolio of Shakespeare’s histories, which Hall renamed The Wars of the Roses. Promising young players were given opportunities to shine in leading roles, including Vanessa Redgrave, Peter O’Toole, Judi Dench, Ian Holm and Ian Richardson.
At the Aldwych, the RSC’s London home, transfers from Stratford were augmented with works by writers such as Jean Anouilh, Edward Albee and, above all, Pinter. All this was achieved against considerable opposition. Finances were stretched and there was animosity from the NT, led by Olivier, who argued Britain could not support two national companies.
There were even greater battles ahead when he became director of the NT in 1973, succeeding Olivier. The changeover was clumsily effected, which caused illfeeling, while the task of moving the company into its new South Bank home was a herculean one. Hold-ups in the construction delayed the opening, infuriating the large, loud and stubborn director. Backstage staff staged wildcat strikes, leading to cancelled performances. During one performance of The Double Dealer strikers appeared on stage shouting abuse.
On stage there were more than 200 productions during his 15-year tenure at the NT, 30 of them directed by Hall, including 10 world premieres. In addition to Amadeus, highlights included Pinter premieres, an adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce and Tony Harrison’s vivid new version of Aeschylus’s great trilogy, The Oresteia.
Hall once said that directors resemble ‘‘the cat who walks alone’’, and he admitted to fitting the archetype. ‘‘I’m not very good at friends because the work has come first.’’
A devout atheist, Hall was remarkably unsentimental and refused to keep ‘‘programmes, press cuttings or the memory of success’’. Surprisingly, he suggested that if he had his time again, he would have been a conductor. ‘‘I think I could have been a great musician.’’ –