Theatre legend Hall dies at 86
LEADING British theatre director Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has died at the age of 86, the National Theatre said yesterday.
Hall died on Monday at University College Hospital, London, surrounded by his family.
“Peter Hall was an internationally celebrated stage director and theatre impresario, whose influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparallelled,” the theatre said.
Hall’s career spanned more than half a century.
In his mid-20s, he staged the English language premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
In 1960, at 29, he founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, which he led until 1968.
Appointed director of the National Theatre in 1973, Hall was responsible for the move from the Old Vic theatre to its site on the south bank of the River Thames.
His work as a theatre director included the world premieres of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming in 1965, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979) and the London and Broadway premieres of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce (1977).
His last production at the National Theatre was Twelfth Night in 2011.
Hall, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2011, was also a renowned opera director. He was born in 1930, the son of a railway station master in Suffolk. From his local grammar school, he won a scholarship to study English at Cambridge University, where he often used the railway passes to which his father’s occupation entitled him to visit London’s theatre world.
At the age of 23, he presented his first professional production.
He became assistant director at London’s small Arts Theatre in 1954, taking over the directorship a year later.
Hall began to make his name with controversial modern plays, including Waiting for Godot.
In that production, he chose to portray the two leading characters as tramps – although there is no mention of this in the text – and it directly affected almost every subsequent production of the play.
Hall was married four times. In 1956, he hit the society columns when he married French actress Leslie Caron, star of the film Gigi.
The couple had a son and a daughter before their divorce in 1965.
Later that year, Hall married his former secretary, Jacqueline Taylor. They divorced in 1981.
Hall, knighted in 1977, married US opera singer Maria Ewing in February 1982.
His last marriage was to scriptwriter Nicky Frei.