Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  His other great obsession (never spoken about) was his homosexuality. I have an idea he left England in the Thirties partly because of the persecution of homosexuals. When we met, he was still married to Elsa Lanchester and they seemed to have an affectionate friendship. But the marriage was of course a cover-up, common at the time. The wife gave respectability and endorsed the appearance of heterosexuality. Underneath, though, and hidden, Charlie’s life was a succession of valets, companions and chauffeurs. Yet he made jeering anti-homosexual remarks to me whenever the opportunity arose. Did he do it to affirm that he wasn’t gay? I can hardly believe it. Was he trying to provoke me into some homophobic response? But – and this I think baffled him – I tried to be as tolerant, understanding and uncensorious as I felt. I wished that circumstances – and his own anxieties – could have given him a little peace.

  For twenty-five years up in the hills of Hollywood he had read and dreamed of Shakespeare. This passion had shored up a great deal of his waking life. He knew Shakespeare backwards, as a faithful curate knows his Bible. He had a passion, too, for the imaginative potency of the theatre – the fact that it is a game of make-believe with the audience; that if the audience is won over they will believe anything. In his study he demonstrated to me how he saw the storm scene in Lear; it was not created by a collection of noisy drums and thunder sheets. He spoke the words quietly and distantly, muted by an enormous sense of strain, drowned by an unheard wind. The eyes bulged, the voice was hoarse, and I seemed to hear the winds cracking their cheeks. I imagined the storm because I could hear every word. But it could only have been done in his study.

  I have often thought that at another time, and if he had acted the part in an intimate space, he might have been one of the great Lears. As it was, his achievement was uncertain. The pathos and the ribaldry of his unhinged mind were certainly extraordinary. But in the storm he became, on the huge stage of the Stratford theatre, an ageing actor whose voice had weakened, and who no longer had the equipment to do what was needed. He had been away too long. Playing Shakespeare is like athletics; you have to keep in training.

  Charlie had caught on to a quirky theory from a fashionable scholar. He maintained that in the Folio and Quarto editions of the plays, the erratic use of capital initial letters for certain words indicated that the actor should emphasise them. I argued that the placing of capitals was now known to be the personal and idiosyncratic choice of the Elizabethan printer. But he wouldn’t be swayed, and when Lear was being rehearsed, its director, Glen Byam Shaw, asked me to try and persuade Charlie that what he was doing was dangerous nonsense. I failed to convince him and he stuck to it doggedly, producing many strange stresses which made nonsense of the rhythm and certainly didn’t help the sense.

  Nonetheless, I learnt from Charlie a reaffirmation of what I had been brought up to believe: trust the text. If it is written by a master, it works like yeast on the audience’s imagination. And although he quarrelled with me over the verse, he taught me a lot about the structure of Shakespeare’s prose: how it is built on antithetical phrases that balance each other; above all, how the alliterative words mark the stresses, the words the actor should point. This was no scholarly fashion. In performance, it held the attention of the audience and obtained the laughs. Even now, I can hear Charlie’s relish as he said, ‘When my cue comes call me and I will answer …’ gleefully accentuating each hard c.

  Leslie shot her film, and Spartacus proceeded on its epic and dilatory way. Charlie had many days off. I sat with him and wondered at this unhappy genius while we talked Shakespeare and read Shakespeare together. Later, at Stratford, I loved rehearsing with him. But when the Dream was played, his very presence was almost unfair to the other actors. His huge moon of a face appeared to be much larger than anybody else’s. The audience would watch only him, even if he modestly retired downstage. After the Dream, he agreed to return in a couple of years to play Falstaff for me. It seemed to me casting made in heaven. He died suddenly, of cancer, before the time came.

  I also had talks in Hollywood with Olivier about Coriolanus. They were not at all like my free-ranging meetings with Laughton. Larry had a deep suspicion of intellectuals. He liked to bring things down to basics – to the hard sweat of rehearsal or the simple appeal to the audience. He had played Coriolanus before at the Old Vic in the Thirties. The critics had then found him heroic, but rather neutral, and surprisingly lacking in character.

  He started off our meetings by amazing me; he announced that all the lines that express Coriolanus’s modesty should be cut. For instance, there is a moment when he is lauded by his General before the whole army for his prowess in battle. He finds this unbearable because he is a man so proud, so self-contained, that praise implies a kind of ownership of him. He is too proud to be loved.

  He says:

  I will go wash and when my wounds are cold

  You shall perceive whether I blush or no …

  and exits. Larry insisted that this be cut. He said it was a mock modesty fashionable with aristocratic Elizabethans, but modern audiences would find it tedious and improbable.

  I said that if we took away Coriolanus’s pride – which is mainly expressed by his conceited modesty – we would have little more than a simplified Henry V. We were still arguing at three in the morning. Finally, the thick Olivier eyebrows came down in a frown. ‘I’ll do what you say because you feel so strongly,’ he said. ‘But you are wrong.’

  So we used a fairly full text, and Larry’s performance was praised as one of his finest, the crown of the Stratford season. I was especially delighted that he was commended for his overweening pride.

  By the time I directed these two giant actors, it had already been announced that from January 1960 I was to be the new director at Stratford. The two productions were a great gift to me by Glen Byam Shaw, whose place I was taking. He generously wanted to see me launched with the best.

  In that same 1959 season, as well as Olivier and Laughton, I directed Edith Evans, Vanessa Redgrave, Albert Finney, Harry Andrews, Mary Ure and a group of marvellous young actors – Ian Holm among them – who were to be my future. I also began planning to create the Royal Shakespeare Company. I did this with my heart in my mouth. I now had to justify my ambitions and do the job. At the same time I knew that the great Stratford adventure would almost certainly spell the end of my marriage to Leslie.

  The talk of MGM offering me a job in Hollywood was heard again. I had to choose between Hollywood and Leslie, or Stratford; and I chose Stratford. Our separations began to get longer, the sadnesses between us greater. Leslie tried to help by cutting down her commitments in films. I tried by working with her in the theatre. Within five years it was all over. At the time, it felt like the price of making the Royal Shakespeare Company. No wonder my marvellous marriage failed. I never gave it time to succeed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I have a strange gap in my memory: I simply cannot recall my first-ever visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, even though from my adolescence the place had taken such a hold on my imagination. Now it was to be my home for ten years. I think I first went there in a school party. But the play I saw is a complete blank, and we may well have just toured the town. A little later, though, Peter Brook’s beautiful Watteau-like Love’s Labour’s Lost marked my memory indelibly. Its central image I remember to this day: consumptive ladies and languid courtiers listening to white pierrots playing mandolins in haunted groves.

  I made many visits to Stratford as schoolboy, RAF conscript and undergraduate. I not only grew to know the theatre, but the town and its surroundings. I spent hours in the public library, in visits to the little cinema, or in the art gallery. This last was not today’s jolly collection of T-shirts, postcards, RSC programmes and tourist souvenirs, but a deserted Gothic-revival gallery, with a musty museum smell and many rather dreary Victorian paintings. It was all that remained of the old theatre, a late nineteenth-century half-timbered fantasy which would have looked well in Disneyland. Wh
en it burnt down in 1926 Bernard Shaw sent a postcard to the governors congratulating them on its loss. But its replacement – the present theatre – seemed to me, as I stood at the back or perched in the gallery, equally chilling to the spirit: a Thirties world of chromium and veneered woods, harsh and clinical and full of straight lines. There was nothing soft or mysterious, nothing warm or reassuring or curving; the imagination felt unwelcome in such an environment. The acting area was thrust way back behind the proscenium arch, and the acoustics were as hollow as a bathroom. The whole building was like a well-designed movie palace. When the curtain went up I expected the beam from a projector suddenly to thrust its way towards the screen.

  The Stratford theatre has gone through many remodellings since, and is now a happier place for artists and audiences. But before these compromises, its Art Deco purity froze generations of performers into anonymity. It was not a theatre for subtlety. Nor was it a theatre that suited Shakespeare. The only really successful pre-war productions there were by the great Russian director, Komisarjevsky. I would guess that his energy defeated the clinical atmosphere by turning the stage into a carnival.

  The repertoire in those days consisted of up to eight or nine plays put on with terrifying rapidity after the briefest of rehearsals. First performances are inevitably tentative, and at that time, to make matters worse, previews hadn’t been invented, so the production opened ‘cold’ to the critics, unseen until then by any audiences. For the actors, this was like entering a room full of strangers, not sure if you are welcome at the party. If actors feel indifference, they tense up, try too hard, or become reserved and cautious. It is therefore not surprising that throughout the Forties and Fifties, the critics’ response to a Stratford first night was a variation of: ‘The new Shakespeare festival began yesterday and the cold wind blowing off the Avon seemed to have invaded the auditorium, paralysing actors and audience alike …’ If critics ever revisited any of the productions later in the season, they were always amazed by the warmth and energy that had developed.

  At the end of the war, the festival had been run by a splendidly robust actor of great panache, Robert Atkins. But after two years, apparently in some dudgeon, he handed in his resignation to the chairman, one of the Flowers, the famous local brewing family who had started the festival in 1876. Atkins was not a man to mince words. When he was being seen off with formal ceremony at Stratford station, he leant from the train as it drew away and thundered in his rich actor’s voice to the assembled dignitaries: ‘And what’s more, Flower’s ale is piss …’

  Stratford itself, to my East Anglian schoolboy’s eyes, was initially very foreign – a strangeness emphasised by all that Midlands red brick. I liked the church and the town hall and the half-timbered houses. I also liked the practicality of the place. A large busy timber store stood near the theatre, and there was a weekly invasion by farmers and merchants and livestock. It was a market town. It appeared respectable, even prim, and it neither liked nor approved of the actors. There were very few people about, except in the evenings when the playgoers arrived. More trains ran in those days – indeed you could still catch the train out of Stratford after the play was over. But the town and the theatre stood apart from each other, going their separate ways.

  I travelled to work in the summer by boat, speeding down the deserted river. In the winter, I walked for miles through the infinitely varied countryside, sensing all the time how much the fields and villages around Stratford are quintessentially Shakespeare. It was impossible not to feel, as season followed season, that this was the landscape that made his images – the trees, the skies, the birds, the light, the river; all part of a Warwickshire that inspired him four hundred years ago.

  When I saw Brook’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, the theatre was run by Atkins’ successor – and his polar opposite – Sir Barry Jackson: dilettante, scholar, rich man and impresario of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. For thirty years, he had shown an amazing ability for picking young talent, from Richardson and Ashcroft and Olivier to Paul Scofield and Peter Brook. Jackson made Stratford fashionable. It began to glitter. He also developed an organisation of workshops and facilities which allowed all of us who came after him to do the job. The first beneficiary, in 1948, was Anthony Quayle, a considerable actor and a man whose superb talents as a leader obviously appealed to the new chairman, Sir Fordham Flower. I can’t imagine that Fordie was ever very comfortable with the rather effete, mandarin-like Barry Jackson. Quayle’s bluff ‘man among men’ approach, bred of a good war and a keen mind, was far more his style.

  Quayle – joined in a few years by Glen Byam Shaw, who later took over alone – built on what Jackson had started. The stars began to come. By the great History Cycle of 1951, the annual Shakespeare seasons at Stratford had moved to the centre of the theatre world. Young actors, directors and designers were developing there alongside the great contemporary talents – Gielgud, Olivier, Wynyard, Ashcroft, Scofield, Vivien Leigh, Michael Redgrave, Richard Burton, Alan Badel.

  I first worked at Stratford in 1956, directing Love’s Labour’s Lost. It wasn’t a smart choice, since Brook’s beautiful production was still remembered. But it was a play I knew and loved from Cambridge. I moved more into my stride over the next two seasons, first with Cymbeline, in which Peggy Ashcroft was a sublime Imogen, and next with Twelfth Night.

  Twelfth Night, like all the comedies, is about growing up. I wanted to get back to its youth and to its comic heart, so I chose a young cast – Dorothy Tutin, Geraldine McEwan, Richard Johnson, Patrick Wymark, Ian Holm, and many others who were soon to become part of my life and work. The production is remembered as a definitive Twelfth Night; but at the time it was extremely controversial, even provoking outrage. This was largely because I had rethought the interpretation of Olivia, a part beautifully played by the twenty-six-year-old Geraldine McEwan. Traditionally, the character had always been portrayed as rather straight-laced and matronly. But the play is, among other things, about Olivia’s tribulations in growing up. Geraldine’s Olivia was vain, a little ditsy, not to say silly. But she was nonetheless heartbreaking – a young girl suddenly thrust into being mistress of a big household. She needed her Malvolio as much as the young Queen Victoria needed her Melbourne. I have to say that it did not occur to me that I was being revolutionary. I was simply responding to the text.

  One night towards the end of the run I was in the audience checking on the health of the production. As the interval ended, the man next to me turned and said sadly: ‘What has he done to Olivia!’ I debated with myself for a tortured second. Should I take him on? Or should I not bother? I looked at him for a long moment, shook my head, and uttered a knowing, conciliatory sigh of agreement. ‘A-a-a-ah …’ I said. It was one of my last experiences of anonymity in the auditorium of a theatre.

  Part Two

  A LITTLE BIT FAMOUS

  Chapter One

  I never found out whose idea it was that I should take over at Stratford, whether it was Glen Byam Shaw’s – which I suspect – or Fordham Flower’s.

  I was devoted to Glen. He was cultivated and elegant, like a gentlemanly schoolmaster, yet possessing a sudden and surprising ability to descend to earth and call a spade a spade, usually in robust and scatalogical terms. He was a director who was often under-praised, for he was a great craftsman. He almost always worked with Margaret Harris – called Percy – of the legendary team of designers, the Motleys, who started out in the Thirties. The team, as well as Percy, consisted of her sister Sophie and Elizabeth Montgomery. They did wonderful work, but by the Fifties, though revolutionaries of twenty years before, they had become somewhat predictable. Even so, Glen and Percy staged vigorous, honest and lucid Shakespeare that allowed great acting to flare into genius, as in the superb Redgrave/Ashcroft Antony and Cleopatra.

  Glen was foxy. Everyone who runs a theatre has to keep their own counsel, and sometimes this is seen as duplicity. Perhaps it comes with the territory. You can’t tell everybody everything a
ll the time, particularly when you’re dealing with the insecurities and vanities of talent. You try to avoid lying, but you sometimes have to withhold the truth, or some of it. Glen was a master of theatre diplomacy. He loved actors – his wife was the marvellous Angela Baddeley – and understood very well that because they did a difficult job they needed to be selfish to protect themselves. This explained, he said, why they could sometimes behave like terrible children, likely to break up the nursery.

  Fordie Flower, though clearly urbane, well-read and a rather aristocratic businessman, seemed, when I first met him, very much the ex-Second World War senior officer – a fine straightforward professional soldier. He was now back as a partner in the prosperous family brewing business. But he had another side to him which was visionary and mystic. He sometimes seemed to disappear – to go into long reveries with himself. I think he knew about demons. As a chairman, he could be maddening on small matters, because he simply couldn’t be bothered with them. But he was always wide awake on large issues. He was also brilliant at strategic thinking – and that was my good fortune.

  Following a sounding-out talk with Glen about my taking over, I had several conversations with Fordie to discuss the job in more detail. He was not exactly evasive, but the conversations could not be called conclusive. Fordie was a master at waiting. He listened and said as little as possible. I was full of plans, but he seemed neither to accept nor to reject my torrent of ideas.