Tributes for theatre giant Sir Peter Hall
Sir Peter Hall, who has died aged 86, altered theatre’s landscape forever
Tributes were yesterday being paid to Sir Peter Hall, the Royal Shakespeare Company founder, who died on Monday aged 86. Telegraph theatre critic Dominic Cavendish writes that Sir Peter was the most important British theatre director of the past 60 years. “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the nature of his contribution to the cultural landscape,” he says. “Many leading directors plough their own furrow; Hall created a bedrock upon which soil could be heaped, tilled and harvested by himself and his peers and by successive generations.”
Sir Peter Hall was the most important British theatre director of the past 60 years. Period. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the nature of his contribution to the cultural landscape. Many leading directors plough their own furrow; Hall created a bedrock upon which soil could be heaped, tilled and harvested by himself and his peers and by successive generations.
Without him, the Royal Shakespeare Company would not have come into existence. Without him too it’s entirely possible that the National Theatre’s move to its contentious concrete home on the South Bank in the mid-seventies, at a time of industrial unrest, would have ended on a decisive note of disaster.
Even if you ignored all the work that Hall did prior to establishing the RSC in 1960, including the UK premiere of Waiting for Godot in 1955; even if you ignored all the work he did after stepping down from the National in 1988; and even if you also decided to overlook his formidable ancillary career in the world of opera, his achievement would be the stuff of legend.
At both the RSC and the NT, Hall made the institutions come to seem like indispensable components of the post-war settlement. Those who wished to snipe at the value of these subsidised powerhouses – and indeed cut their funding – found in Hall a formidable adversary, able to charm and cajole the doubters and detractors via innumerable meetings and countless interviews. He was a phenomenon behind the scenes too, prolific in his stage work.
My theatre-going life began just as he was taking his leave of the National in 1988 with a triple flourish of Shakespeare’s late plays. I remember, dimly but gratefully, his Tempest starring Michael Bryant as a pent-up and crotchety Prospero, with a young Steven Mackintosh as Ariel and a Caliban (Tony Haygarth) naked but for a genital area muzzled in a cod-piece box.
His revels ended on the South Bank, then continued as a jobbing director, and his solid line of attack on major plays of the repertoire in the commercial sphere was a minor education. I recall a bilious Warren Mitchell as Max in Pinter’s The Homecoming in the West End (1990); Peter Shaffer’s The Gift of the Gorgon (1992), a hokey macabre tragedy on a Greek island but a production that valuably starred Judi Dench; and A Streetcar Named Desire with Jessica Lange as Blanche in 1997.
Sadly, I interviewed him only once – ahead of a female re-oriented staging of Brian Clark’s Whose Life is It Anyway? starring Kim Cattrall in 2005. An imposing figure, able to talk with the practised fluency of the elder statesman, he was poignantly candid about the play’s principal theme – the right to die: “I believe
‘An imposing figure, able to talk with the practised fluency of the elder statesman’
people should have the right to die if they wish to die,” he told me. “That doesn’t mean to say I’d have the nerve or guts to do it, if I found myself in that position. But I’m 74 years old, so I spend quite a lot of time thinking about death because it can’t be far away.”
Hall remained productive for the best part of a decade after that interview; I was touched, and struck, by one short, telling detail at the end of Hall’s Twelfth Night at the National in 2011.
“A great while ago the world begun,” the late David Ryall sang-sighed as Feste, leaving a melancholy pause. “But that’s all one, our play is done,” he then concluded swiftly, suddenly packing his tambourine away, and heading off: “And we’ll strive to please you every day,” he advised the audience, as if to say: this is theatre – we get up, we carry on, we work.
Hard not to detect Hall’s own indomitable spirit invested in that unshowy, unsentimental determination to serve the theatre to the last possible gasp.