The colossus of British theatre who founded the RSC
“He loved the ‘strange alchemy’ of an ensemble: ‘making everyone better than any of them knew they had it in them to be’”
Some 25 years ago, as Peter Hall was turning 60, he was asked if he had any special concerns about the future. He said that he was feeling happy and fulfilled – but there was a blot on the landscape. What was that, asked his interviewer, The Times’s Benedict Nightingale. “Death,” Hall replied. He could not stand to think of the work he loved coming to an end. With a delight in the theatre that was almost childlike, all he wanted to do was to keep rehearsing plays and operas. “People say the theatre’s so oldfashioned, so clumsy,” he continued. “I say, give me six actors, three days and a room, and I’ll create something that could fire your imagination.”
A colossus of the British theatre, Sir Peter Hall, who has died aged 86, will be chiefly remembered for two great achievements, said the Daily Mail: founding the Royal Shakespeare Company, and bringing the National Theatre to life in its current home on the South Bank. Though capable of great charm, and renowned for his powers of persuasion, Hall could be brutal in pursuit of his vision – and he made enemies in his own field. Jonathan Miller once called him a “ball of rancid pig’s fat”, while John Osborne referred to him as “Fu Manchu” and left instructions that he shouldn’t attend his funeral. And as an outspoken champion of the subsidised arts, Hall also fought many battles with what he considered a philistine government. “How much longer have we got to give money to awful people like Peter Hall?” Margaret Thatcher famously demanded (though he had voted for her in 1979). His private life was complex. He was married four times, and suffered a series of breakdowns. Yet he was resilient, and possessed of seemingly boundless energy, and was responsible for some 300 productions. These ranged from the avant-garde – he directed the first English language production of Waiting for Godot – to the crowd-pleasing: his staging of Amadeus was one of the National’s biggest hits. He directed Elaine Paige in the West End and 19 operas for the Glyndebourne Festival.
Born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1930, Peter Hall was the son of a station master, Reg, and grew up in a house with neither electricity nor running water. His parents encouraged a love of theatre and music, and when the family moved to Cambridge, his mother persuaded him to sit for a scholarship to The Perse School, where he starred in a production of Hamlet. At St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, he shed his Suffolk accent and, he said, “turned into a phoney member of the middle class”.
His skills as an impresario were evident early on, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian, when, during the War, he marshalled his friends into a band. But the “crucial event of his adolescence” was seeing Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford when he was 15; it was directed by Peter Brook, who was himself only 21. At that moment, Hall – who would cycle to Stratford with a tent on his back to see the latest productions – resolved not only to become a Shakespearean director, but to run a theatre. In his third year at Cambridge, he began staging plays that attracted London critics. He discovered his love of the rehearsal process, said The Daily Telegraph – and the “strange alchemy” that takes place in an ensemble. “The actors, the director and everyone concerned take strength from each other, and by working together, make themselves better, more perceptive and more talented than any of them knew they had it in them to be.”
By the age of 24, he was running the Arts Theatre in London. It was here that he was sent the script for Godot. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what some of it means,” he told the cast. “I think it may be dramatically effective, but there’s no way of finding out until the first night.” In the event, there was a lot of harrumphing and some angry barracking, he recalled, before the audience settled down into “glum boredom”. Most of the critics were baffled, but Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan were enthusiastic, and in the ensuing Godot- mania, Hall became famous. Tennessee Williams asked him to direct the first London productions of Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and, in 1956, he directed Gigi and married its star, Leslie Caron. They divorced nine years later.
Hall made his directing debut at Stratford at the age of 25, and in 1960, aged 29, he was appointed artistic director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; this he then transformed into a year-round operation, the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a second base at the Aldwych in London. His successes at Stratford included David Warner’s Hamlet and John Barton’s The Wars of the Roses. In London, he staged new works by Harold Pinter. Among the actors whose careers he promoted were Vanessa Redgrave, Ian Richardson and Ian Holm. He first directed Judi Dench in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1962, said The Daily Telegraph; almost 50 years later, she reprised her role as Titania at the Rose Theatre Kingston, “another theatre he helped spirit into life”.
Hall’s workload was relentless, and in the mid-1960s he suffered a nervous breakdown. Yet he returned to the fray, said The Times; and by the time he handed the reins to Trevor Nunn, in 1968, the RSC was an established “jewel in the nation’s crown”. He took over the National in 1973, succeeding Laurence Olivier, and oversaw its move to the South Bank. His timing was inauspicious. With Britain in recession, the subsidised arts were under threat; and he had to contend with a hostile media, building delays and a series of strikes. (The theatre was picketed, and during one performance striking workers invaded the stage.) Yet he persevered, and though there were duds, he had many triumphs too, including the world premieres of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce, Pinter’s Betrayal and No Man’s Land (the latter starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson), and Tony Harrison’s bold rendition of The Oresteia. Meanwhile, he had married twice more: his second wife was Jacqueline Taylor, his former personal assistant; his third was the opera singer Maria Ewing. He was finally married to Nicki Frei, who survives him, along with his six children and nine grandchildren.
Hall did not, as he hoped, “keel over in the playhouse”; his final production at the National was Twelfth Night, to mark his 80th birthday. At around that time, he was diagnosed with dementia. He spent his final years at the Charterhouse, an almshouse in a former medieval monastery in the City of London.
Four years have passed since Ryanair boss Michael O’leary stood up at the AGM and vowed to stop doing things that might, in his words, “unnecessarily piss people off”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. Being “nicer” helped Ryanair triple its share price. But imagine the “personal” toll exacted on the once proudly obnoxious O’leary. “How refreshing”, then, to see him “back to his old passenger wind-up routine” this week. The airline’s abrupt cancellation of some 2,100 flights (or about 2% of its services) over the next six weeks threw the plans of some 400,000 ticket holders into chaos – because Ryanair took days to confirm exactly which flights were being chopped.
The flight cull – apparently needed to restore “punctuality” after Ryanair “messed up” its pilot holiday rota – will cost some s20m (£17.7m) in compensation up front, said Bradley Gerrard in The Daily Telegraph. Some analysts reckon on a further s100m hit once “reputation damage” is factored in. Ryanair’s hotchpotch of explanations wasn’t exactly reassuring – analysts at RBC likened it to a list of “football manager excuses” – and nor was news of a mass exodus of 140 pilots to Scandinavian rival Norwegian.
Ryanair’s shares fell by 2.4% on the news, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. That seems “overly gentle”. The short-term impact on profits may be modest, but “the airline’s “chaotic handling of events suggests the tale is far from over”. It’s one thing cancelling 2% of flights, “but why alarm those booked on the 98% that will fly?” In the very long run, O’leary will probably come out smiling. “He usually does.” But at a time when once frillier rivals such as BA are slashing costs and passenger perks, this big dent in Ryanair’s hard-earned halo looks set to cost the airline dear.