Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  I didn’t let up on the pace I was setting myself, however. I directed Winterlude, a strange Ruritanian comedy by John Barton, which didn’t succeed but was my first attempt to work with a writer on a new play. And I rounded off my three terms of continuous directing with a May-week production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the ADC. At last I was doing Shakespeare.

  All that I had learnt from Dadie, all that I had eagerly discussed with John Barton (a scholarly King of Navarre) was now put to use. It was a very Elizabethan production – big ruffs and formal costumes. In my memory, it looks lovely – like a Nicholas Hilliard come to life. Raymond Leppard selected the music, and he and I played it on alternate nights on a harpsichord. He played it brilliantly.

  I loved the melancholy heart of the play and its long dying fall. I think the production was atmospheric and well spoken. I now knew by experience that Shakespeare could never be fully released in the theatre unless his words were allowed to live. I also found out that artificial costumes can dehumanise a production. A lot of the subtle emotions and wit we had discovered were lost when the cast donned the ruffs and the panniers.

  As the end of my time at Cambridge drew nearer, I became only too aware that I had directed rather more productions in my last year than a professional could reasonably have expected to do in the same period. I had done next to no studying and had been warned of the consequences. Douglas Brown was especially clear-headed. He told me I was risking my degree and my future, but if the theatre was what I wanted, he would not try to stop me. I said I would take the risk. He then allowed me to miss supervisions and forget my essays. He was a real friend.

  I was completely unprepared for the examinations, and stayed up night after night studying. I nearly broke down in the middle of one paper. Somehow the adrenalin kept me going. Immediately afterwards I continued the rehearsals for Love’s Labour’s Lost.

  Once the production and the term were over, I suffered the inevitable collapse. But Cambridge hadn’t quite finished with me because I had three plays to direct for the Marlowe Society’s summer festival: Anouilh’s Antigone, Whiting’s A Penny for a Song and Pirandello’s Henry IV. These would all be played at the Cambridge Arts Theatre during late July and August. But after that? In the night watches, I wrote sixty-eight anxious letters to people in the theatre asking for any kind of work. They were all hand-written and all (I thought) precisely judged to interest the recipient. I had five replies, each regretting that there were no openings. Since then, I have always answered every letter sent to me – unless it was from an obvious madman.

  I sank into a deep depression. John Whiting was a staunch friend and gave me one or two introductions; but they led nowhere. I had little to my name but some university debts. The future was bleak.

  The exam results came. I breathed a sigh of relief at my 2:2. It was a second-class degree but I had deserved to fail.

  Cambridge had given me a great deal, but above all it had given me the opportunity to be a director. And I had found there a stimulating and loyal group of friends who were as keen on the theatre as I was. John Barton had decided to become an academic, but a galaxy of other people from my time, Peter Wood, Timothy O’Brien the designer, Toby Robertson, Tony Church, Tony White and Michael Birkett among them, were all bent on the profession.

  Cambridge had also given me a measure of confidence when I tried to write or speak. I had been an invisible member of St Catharine’s, for I had used my college as a lodging house, spending all my time in theatre circles. My attic in the roof of that lovely quadrangle had been largely uninhabited. The college had little connection with the drama. But the seventeenth-century dramatist James Shirley had been a student, and there was a Shirley Society which held Sunday-evening lectures. I didn’t go very often, but I once heard Michael Ayrton speak without a misplaced word for an hour on his belief in art. His courage in speaking without notes, in actually thinking aloud, had held the audience and made them follow him thought by thought. I resolved then always to direct, always to lecture, without reference to notes. I would try to think it out with the people I was talking to, whatever the dangers. I have stuck to this resolution. I have talked to actors about Shakespeare, to singers about Mozart and I have lectured regularly in universities. I have given Memorial addresses in St Martin-in-the-Fields and Westminster Abbey; and I have never used notes.

  Now, though, with a career to make, I had to face up to a number of negatives. My love affair with Jill had been intense; but it had gone wrong simply because of the extent to which my ambitions consumed me – a taste of terrible things to come. I had put my parents through a deeply anxious time; I was in debt and worried about money; I was always in top gear, overworked, overstretched, overenthusiastic. Part of me would have liked to take things easily and wait – but I couldn’t. Sometimes, too, I felt an incompetent, with only a glancing knowledge of many things. I was an unfulfilled, unsuccessful scholar, an unfinished musician, an untrained administrator and an appalling linguist. I knew how to act, but knew I had no talent for it. I knew I could talk to amateur actors and help them develop; but could I talk to professionals? I was also aware that I was a cliché: the working-class boy who had turned himself into a phoney member of the middle classes. I didn’t belong with my parents or relations, but I didn’t quite belong with my new friends. I knew I would only feel confident if I made a success of my profession. For the second time, I contemplated suicide. I was desperate.

  I threw myself into rehearsals for the summer festival and tried to forget the black void that awaited me once it was over. The plays earned me some more London notices. Reports of Pirandello’s Henry IV caught the eye of Alec Clunes, the director and actor who ran the Arts Theatre Club in London. In those days there was no fringe, but there were a number of club theatres which worked outside the licensing authorities or the writ of the censor, the Lord Chamberlain. These theatres did provocative or banned plays and difficult classics. The Arts was the best; in fact, a critic had dubbed it ‘our pocket-sized national theatre’.

  Alec Clunes was a talented and scholarly man, an excellent actor and an able director. He invited my Henry IV to the Arts Theatre for a fortnight at the end of August. Even then, I knew that this was incredibly, not to say indecently, lucky. Our reception was good, and the morning after the first night, I had a phone call from John Counsel, the director of the Windsor Rep. A fortnight later I was directing Somerset Maugham’s The Letter for him. I had jumped the abyss, made the leap from amateur to professional. To my surprise, the actors didn’t seem that different in their methods or in their attitudes. They were less likely to want to work all the hours God made – but I thought that was sensible. They listened to me; they allowed me to shape the scenes; I was accepted.

  It had been a near thing, though. If the invitation to London hadn’t come, what would have happened? Would I have survived? Would I have persevered in the theatre? In the early years, you need enormous luck. I had been granted it. As a consequence – and however foolish it may appear – I have always felt guilty.

  Alec Clunes was in the process of selling the Arts. The new owner was Campbell Williams, formerly chairman of Keith Prowse, the ticket agency, and an investor in theatre productions. He had engaged John Fernald to be his new director. Alec, as a leaving gesture, suggested that I be kept on to assist by reading scripts and being a general dogsbody. Campbell Williams proposed a salary of seven pounds a week and luncheon vouchers – just enough to live on. But the miracle (and I believe this too was suggested by Alec) was that I was also to be allowed to work in regional repertory theatres if I could get guest jobs, which from time to time I did.

  The black hole was no longer at my feet. I have often approached it in subsequent years, but have seldom been so close to its brink. Nor have I been out of work since, though I still fear it could happen; it is the common condition of my profession.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I found a place to live in London. Felicity, the mother of Toby Robertson, had
a basement in a large house off Kensington Church Street. I moved into it for a minimal sum and lived with a large anthracite boiler, rancid and acid smelling, which made it difficult to sleep, even to breathe. Felicity fed me and encouraged me and my luck held. She was, among other things, a writer and adaptor of radio plays. Most of all she was an enthusiast, with a warm heart and many eccentric loves and hates – one of those life forces that the theatre seems blessedly to attract.

  At Worthing I did an obscure American thriller called The Man, and found that I had seven days in which to stage it from start to finish. In weekly rep the actors not only performed this week’s play every night, they also rehearsed next week’s play from the Tuesday. It was read in the morning and Act I was staged in the afternoon. Acts II and III were staged on Wednesday. On Thursday morning the company worked through Act I, which by some miracle was now approximately learnt; but Thursday afternoon was a matinée, so it was useless to the director because his actors were otherwise engaged. On Friday Acts II and III were worked through; and on Saturday morning the whole play had a run-through. The actors then did a matinée and evening performance of this week’s play. On Sunday the company had the day off, though in reality they would be desperately learning their lines; also, last week’s set was taken down and next week’s set put up – often being built and painted at the same time. On Monday morning the director lit the play; on Monday afternoon there was a dress rehearsal; and on Monday night the play opened. The whole process then began again.

  Most British theatre in the Forties and Fifties was weekly rep. Though ruthless, it produced a whole generation of expert actors who survived by constantly refining their craft. Perhaps Paul Eddington should stand as its hero, for he is the most consummate craftsman I know.I Weekly rep had the energy of theatre at its rawest. It also had immediate judgement from its audience. I once asked the distinguished film and television writer Ken Taylor how he had developed such a strong sense of narrative in his scripts. He said he had been on the book as stage manager at Leatherhead for many long years, so was at once aware, by listening, when a play lost its audience and the story died. He always tried to analyse why. The narrative sense he gained from this gave us The Jewel in the Crown.

  But for a director, weekly rep was another matter. Keeping order was about as much as could be done. The cast couldn’t cope with ideas (they hadn’t the time), they just needed to get the play on. I learnt nothing from the experience except compassion for the actors.

  I was busy throughout 1954, eking out a living at the Arts, and directing now and again at the Oxford Playhouse, Windsor and Worthing. As my prosperity increased, I left my anthracite boiler in Kensington and moved to a pleasant basement room by the canal in Little Venice; then to two rooms behind St Thomas’s Hospital on the south side of Westminster Bridge; then finally to a rather grand flat in Montague Place which I shared with John Barton. On leaving Cambridge in 1953, John and Toby Robertson, Peter Wood and myself, with Colin George and Gordon Gostelow from Oxford, had formed the Elizabethan Theatre Company. We toured small theatres and school halls giving plain, well-spoken Shakespeare. So in addition to my part-time work in London and the reps, I was able to direct frugal productions of Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.

  I also managed to combine my job at the Arts with six happy months, towards the end of 1954, as director of the Oxford Playhouse. I had an extraordinarily talented company, including Billie Whitelaw, Ronnie Barker, Michael Bates, Derek Francis and Tony Church. There were also two assistant stage managers with acting ambitions. Their names were Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins. Both now claim that I gave the best parts to the other. Eileen also maintains that I sacked her for having a continuous cold. In an extravagantly praised Christmas show I directed, entitled Listen to the Wind, with music by Vivian Ellis, Maggie Smith played the damp West Wind in green make-up and with drooping inflections. From the very beginning, she had a lethal sense of the ridiculous. I also accompanied her on the piano when she sang ‘The boy I love is up in the gallery’ as part of our Victorian Music Hall programme. She was clearly going to be a star.

  Oxford in the mid Fifties was not unlike Cambridge. I was always either in the theatre or, rather unwillingly, in the pub that conveniently butted right up to the stage door. A diet of Scotch eggs, cheese, pickled onions, and late-night curries at the local Taj Mahal kept my digestion in a state of turmoil. In truth, I was hardly aware of Oxford itself. But that goes for directing anything anywhere: if you are immersed in a production in London or Stratford, New York or Los Angeles, Bayreuth or Glyndebourne, there is little time to appreciate much else.

  By now, I was not just the script reader at the Arts; in the spring of 1954, I was invited to do a production. Mindful of Alec Clunes’s great days there, I chose an international classic, Lorca’s Blood Wedding. I loved Lorca’s ability to mix surrealistic poetic theatre with the concrete depiction of peasant life. I can’t have had any idea of the risk I was running in putting on this difficult play. I surreptitiously rewrote the only translation – an appalling mixture of windy poetics and American slang – and hoped for the best. It was enough of a success to fill the theatre for a month, and to my delight Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times noticed a new director. He described how I had created a living forest on a tiny stage: the entire cast held freshly cut tree branches which they swayed gently in a mass of backlight. Lionel Jeffries made his name playing the father. He had been out of work for months and told me that if I didn’t give him the job he was going to become a policeman. He hasn’t stopped working since, mainly on the screen. He is that rarity in England, an eccentric, sexy character actor who takes enormous risks. I wish he had appeared more often on the stage.

  I felt passionate about the position of the Arts Theatre. I had seen great performances there: Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, Jean Forbes-Robertson as Hedda Gabler, Wilfrid Lawson as the Father.

  John Fernald – buoyed up by my enthusiasm for little-known foreign drama – let me direct as my next production a Goldoni play, The Impresario from Smyrna. This again was an awful translation but it could, I thought, take the audience into a world of classic comedy which, with my Third Programme zeal, I wanted to bring to the notice of the English. However, things did not go well, and I learnt a nasty fact about a director’s life.

  A director has little idea at any stage of the proceedings just how successful a production is going to be; but by the end of the first reading, he has a very clear idea if he has made a mistake – an irrevocable mistake, I mean, in the choice of play or the choice of actors. But however awful this revelation, there is absolutely nothing he can do about it except compose his features into a let’s-get-on-with-it smile and pretend that everything is going to be all right. He is then in hell for the next four or five weeks, for he knows that everything is certainly not going to be all right. Yet there is nobody in the cast he can share his feelings with because the actors expect him to be optimistic and positive, even though they too realise in their heart of hearts that they are working on a failure. I knew that The Impresario from Smyrna was a disaster from day one. The cast was wrong for it, and the facetious and silly translation made a slight play slighter. But I battled on because I had to.

  I then experienced a delusion that afflicts all directors. Confidence rises even when you are working on the most obvious dog. Perhaps, you think to yourself, the dedication and hard work of the cast has turned the awful enterprise round? Perhaps you have been unduly pessimistic? A self-deluding hope fills the company as they approach the first night; maybe if it didn’t, they would never find the nerve to open their mouths. By the end of the Goldoni rehearsals, I was afflicted with this hope. For the first and only time in my life, I stayed up all night after the opening and went at dawn to collect the newspapers from Fleet Street. Once a professional tradition, this is no longer possible. The speed of modern technology means that most newspapers now print their reviews two days after the first night.

  I stood in Fleet St
reet that morning in the dawn light and read the most terrible set of notices imaginable. They winded me, and I had to admit they were deserved. I should not have done the play because I clearly had no idea what style it required. It is a cliché that comedy is a very serious business. And it is certainly true that you cannot direct comedy without being in touch with the heart of the play, which must be believable and recognisably human if the comedy is to have any truth. I had completely failed to find that heart. I wondered if I should ever work again.

  Flops are inevitable in any theatre career. Sometimes they are from circumstances outside your control; sometimes they are bred of your own inadequacies or miscalculations. The trick is to learn from your failures. To be recriminating or self-pitying is pointless. And since critics can only talk about what you did, and not why you did it, their comments, whether in praise or condemnation, can be very misleading. In fact, imputing motives to me is the only thing that makes me lastingly angry with critics. They cannot know why I made one choice rather than another. They can only know that, for them, I was wrong.

  I like to keep moving. I have always striven to be booked up so that I can go briskly from one job to the next, whatever might be the outcome of the present piece of work. There is a great deal to be said for this. I am a director; each day I want to direct, not wait for the phone to ring or meditate on my failings.

  I was always in love during my early years in London, just as I had been in my two last frantic years at Cambridge. I fell in love easily and regularly. I seemed incapable of having casual affairs. It was all or nothing. My intensity, I think, put girls off or, if it didn’t, landed me in serious relationships immediately, before either of us was ready. I loved women but, as an only child who had grown up in a single-sex school, I knew little about them. If a girl was very pretty, I naturally believed that she was very clever as well. I was an out-and-out romantic.