Sir Peter Hall
16 OBITUARIES
Theatre, film and opera director
radical in a counter-cultural way. One of his greatest early acts of largesse at the National, however, was to allow director Ken Campbell and his Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool to open the Cottesloe space with their 12-hour staging of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s hippy sci-fi conspiracy trilogy, Illuminatus!
Hall epitomised a period in English theatre when the doors of the institutions were opening up, and young Turks of yore were growing up in public to define a new and very different kind of theatrical establishment.
Peter Hall was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, as the only child of Grace and Reginald. After a family move to Cambridge, Hall won a scholarship to the Perse School, where he played Hamlet and became head boy. A further scholarship to read English at Cambridge followed national service, by which time he was already in love with theatre.
He staged his first professional production, W Somerset Maugham’s The Letter, in 1953. After graduating he ran Oxford Playhouse, and became assistant director at the Arts Theatre London, which he found himself running aged 24. Hall was already making his mark before Waiting For Godot, but the production changed everything, both for Beckett and himself.
Hall launched his career on the West End and Broadway, directing the London premieres of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. and took over at Stratford, which led to the formal founding of the RSC in 1961. Hall directed The Wars Of The Roses, John Barton’s epic conflation of Shakespeare’s history plays, but also brought in contemporary playwrights, staging the premiere of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Exhausted, Hall left the RSC in 1968, passing the baton to Trevor Nunn.
In between the RSC and the National, Hall directed opera and films. While the former productions saw him internationally renowned, the latter had little to distinguish them. Only The Camomile Lawn, the 1992 TV adaptation of Mary Wesley’s novel, stood out.
Hall eventually took over as artistic director of the National as the company prepared to move out of the Old Vic. He arrived in 1973, during a time of political and industrial unrest, and opened its three auditoriums one by one as the others were being built.
Hall directed 33 productions for the NT until his departure in 1988. These included the world premieres of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Betrayal, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce, and Tony Harrison’s 1981 version of The Oresteia. Hall later directed his own version of Animal Farm (in 1984, no less) and Antony and Cleopatra with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins.
After the NT, Hall launched the Peter Hall company, which produced more than 60 plays, often with starry casts, including Vanessa Redgrave in Orpheus Descending and Dustin Hoffman in The Merchant Of Venice.
He married four times, finding stability with his fourth wife, Nicki Frei. He went on to work with all six of his children as performers, directors and producers. Hall won numerous awards, including a CBE in 1963, while he was knighted in 1977.
“On my gravestone I want: ‘Created the RSC’”, he once said in an interview, adding that “You can then put a footnote: ‘He opened the South Bank.’” Both of these and many other things besides changed the fabric of British cultural life forever.
Hall is survived by his wife, Nicki Frei, and his six children, Christopher, Jennifer, Edward, Lucy, Rebecca and Emma.