by Peter Hall
I remember hearing my appointment as the next director at Stratford formally announced on the radio one night in the autumn of 1958. I was driving through Warwickshire on my way from London. The next morning I was to re-rehearse Twelfth Night for the Stratford company’s visit to Russia that winter. As I listened, I felt sick with apprehension. Now I had what I’d longed for. But could I do it? Would Fordie and the Board let me do it? I had been appointed, but the fundamental changes that I wanted to make had not yet been agreed. They were merely hazy ideas floating in the air. Could I insist on what I wanted? Had I the muscle? Did Fordie’s vagueness mean support or uncertainty?
Even a month or two later, when we all boarded the chartered Aeroflot plane bound for Russia, I was still uncertain of where I stood.
Peter Brook’s Hamlet with Paul Scofield had ventured to the USSR two years earlier – the first theatre company to breach the Iron Curtain. But we were the first since the Revolution to go with a full repertoire. As well as Twelfth Night, we took Hamlet with Michael Redgrave and Coral Browne, and Romeo and Juliet with Dorothy Tutin and Richard Johnson. Leslie wasn’t with me. There were two babies to be cared for at home; and wives, unless they were members of the company, were not encouraged to come.
Over the three weeks we were there our eleven performances in Leningrad and our fifteen at the Moscow Art Theatre were greeted with almost hysterical enthusiasm. Audiences were not just applauding our work, but the opportunity, long lost, to communicate with another society, another culture. The desperate eagerness of their response was very moving.
The contrast between the beauty of Leningrad itself and the depressed and broken spirit of the people was distressing. Everyone was cautious and inhibited because everyone was frightened. They wouldn’t say what they actually thought.
The cold burnt the cheeks, the river Neva was frozen solid and the snow on the streets (perpetually cleared by hefty figures who looked like bulging sacks but were in fact women of a certain age) muffled the sound of what little traffic there was.
Khrushchev had just decreed that the Russians drank too much, so alcohol was almost impossible to find. The actors in their desperate search for drink discovered an illegal dive where rough vodka was sold. It looked like a setting for the Lower Depths, but was filled with the sound of accordions and laughter. The hotel had no vodka, only a disgusting root beer; the meals were equally disgusting, worse than school dinners. Bad eggs were regularly cracked open at breakfast. The only time I really enjoyed eating was travelling from Leningrad to Moscow on the old Red Arrow Express, all brass and leather and red-shaded lights. At the end of each carriage, caviar was served with coarse bread and tea, provided by a lady with a samovar.
Our Leningrad hotel was splendid but run-down. It was all very Edwardian. A large woman policed each floor, sitting immovably at a table in the corridor, checking our comings and goings. It wasn’t until I had returned to London and was able to walk around unprogrammed that I realised fully the chill horror of this obsessive supervision. Every minute of our lives was organised. We were not allowed to go anywhere or meet anyone without a minder or an interpreter. We were shepherded like a dangerous flock, even to and from our own performances.
I wanted to see a lot of theatre, but my request caused official consternation. I was allowed to go to the ballet because they were proud of that: it was fantasy and nothing to do with reality. But they weren’t too sure about anything else. I began to see why. The plays were either classics embalmed in the style of 1900, or cheerful modern dramas, mindless in their propaganda. Theatre was not allowed to mean anything; if it did it might challenge the existing order. I was sent to a jolly musical which took place in a Black Sea holiday camp. The juvenile leads were played by extremely old actors and actresses heavily made up.
I talked to the director of the Gorky Theatre and, with my head full of the ensemble I hoped to make at Stratford, asked him about the contract of employment among his actors. He told me they had ample pensions, wonderful conditions and a job for life. What happened, I asked, if any of them should feel they were being miscast? He answered (this was all through the ameliorating medium of the interpreter) that, as far as he was aware, miscasting did not occur in his theatre. I suggested that actors often felt they were either miscast or undercast, it was in the nature of the job; to aspire to parts that might be beyond their range was surely a healthy sign? ‘But,’ he said, ‘if any actors are unhappy with us, they can resign and leave within two weeks.’ ‘Then what?’ I asked. ‘Do they apply to another theatre?’ ‘No,’ came the reply. ‘They cease to be actors.’
I mused on this conversation. I was already sensing that an ensemble such as I dreamed of could not be permanent – that it would have to change with circumstances and with the development of the individual actors. But how could one keep them together without the sanctions of a police state? The old romantic idea that an actor could play Hamlet one night and the butler the next has an in-built flaw: there are many butlers needed in the repertory, but only one Hamlet.
Soon after my visit to Russia, I had a conversation with Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow and leader of the fabled Berliner Ensemble. Every British theatre person I knew was in awe of the talent of the Ensemble, and particularly of the weight and richness of the middle-aged actors playing the small parts. Weigel startled me by attacking their spoilt, lazy-cat ways. She said that all they ever wanted to do was to appear in plays on television for vast amounts of money. Indeed, only by letting them do television could she keep them happy. Pride in the Ensemble and in playing a small part in a big play came very low in their priorities.
In Russia, our actors had endless meetings with representatives of the actors’ union, the writers’ union, the artists’ union. Toasts were drunk to better understanding and to cultural exchange. But there was, alas, little understanding and no exchange was possible, only an emotional yearning between the two nationalities; a sad recognition of what might nave been if we had been meeting in freedom. We could only see what they wanted us to see. They could only say what they were permitted to say.
Coral Browne was playing Gertrude. Guy Burgess, the spy who had absconded, sought her out and some of us met him. He was drunk and shy yet belligerent. Years later, Alan Bennett’s brilliant television play An Englishman Abroad, beautifully directed by John Schlesinger, took for its theme the meeting between Coral and Burgess, and uncannily conveyed the off-beat, rather nightmarish nature of our whole visit.
I had known something of what to expect. Peter Daubeny had earlier brought the Moscow Art Theatre to London and we had seen magnificent players working in productions that certainly cast a spell but were so old they seemed fixed in amber. Without question, these had a compelling and historic fascination. But I couldn’t escape the thought that in the frightened, atrophied Soviet Union there was no possibility of thinking freshly, no possibility of original theatre work, because nothing radical or challenging was allowed.
I asked people what they thought of Meyerhold, the great Soviet director whose expressionistic techniques still inspire the theatres of the West. My question was met with bewilderment or terror. At that time, Meyerhold was a non-person: he didn’t exist. In 1939, at a Soviet drama conference, he had made a powerful speech affirming that the theatre must be free to challenge society. He must have known that he was signing his own death warrant. A few days later, he disappeared. Even in the Fifties, it was a mystery what had happened to him. We now know that he was murdered by Stalin’s thugs. Soon afterwards, his wife was murdered too.
I had been commissioned to write two articles on the Russian theatre for the Observer, and foolishly dictated the first (which was only mildly critical) by telephone from my hotel room. Our phones were of course tapped and next day the official attitude to me was distinctly more frigid. An odd, perhaps related, episode at the end of my stay is worth telling. I was scheduled to leave Moscow ahead of the company with our press office chief John Goodwin, who was writing about the
visit for the Daily Telegraph, and Roger Wood, the photographer. But on the morning we were due to go, two uniformed guards woke us at dawn to say our departure was delayed by twenty-four hours. The same thing happened on the two subsequent mornings. Both times we were told that there was fog at the airport; yet outside the sun blazed down from a cold blue sky. After these three unexplained postponements, we were suspicious as well as exasperated. We collected our baggage together, left the hotel, miraculously found a taxi, and drove to the British Embassy to tell our story. Within hours, they had whisked us to the airport and on to a plane for Stockholm. Soviet records probably show that we still haven’t left. Was all this bureaucratic revenge? I certainly thought so at the time.
Chapter Two
The most important event of the Russian tour for me took place at the hotel in Leningrad. Fordie Flower and his wife Hersey were with us and I had a drink with them both in their suite after one of the performances. We fell to discussing future plans – the plans Fordie had conscientiously evaded in the past. After a while, Hersey went off to bed, but Fordie and I, in that big dusty over-decorated room, a setting fit for Diaghilev, continued talking through the night. The policy of the as yet unformed and unnamed Royal Shakespeare Company, its aims and ideals, were defined and finally accepted that night. They are still much the same today. But it was in Leningrad, in late 1958, that they took shape.
Stratford had never tried to have an ensemble – a group of actors bonded together over a length of time. A few, like the young Paul Scofield, had come up through the ranks and achieved stardom by doing two or three consecutive seasons. But usually each season was cast from scratch, and everything depended on who could be engaged to play leading roles each year. I urged upon Fordie the virtues of a company who knew each other; who supported and depended on each other; who knew whom they disliked as well as whom they admired. I explained that I didn’t mean only actors. Directors and designers, composers and writers should also be encouraged to make Stratford their creative home. I proposed that we should offer a three-year contract – though if people wished it, they could opt out for short periods to do other work. They would only stay by being allowed to go away.
I then came to the crucial part of my plan. I believed intensely that the kind of classical company I wanted to form must be not only highly trained in Shakespeare and the speaking of his verse but also in modern drama – open to the present as well as expert in the past. Only thus could we develop the kind of protean actors, alive to the issues of the day, that Shakespeare deserved and that would give his plays contemporary life. To do this, I said, we would need a second theatre, a London home, where – in addition to transfers from Stratford of the previous season’s Shakespeares – we could stage other classics and modern drama.
These were new ideas in Britain, and in that sense they were revolutionary. But they were old ideas too. My reading of Stanislavsky; my obsession with Jean Vilar’s TNP (Théâtre National Populaire) and the Barrault/Renaud Company; my talks with Michel St Denis; my study of the Berliner Ensemble – these influences had formed my thinking. Above all, I was convinced that Shakespeare demanded, as well as technical dedication, contemporary awareness if he was to continue to speak forcefully to the second half of the century.
Fordie didn’t comment very much. I think he appreciated the strength of my beliefs, but they were hardly new to him. He had heard them from me before, though not so comprehensively, nor so urgently. My passion had been increased, I think, by the appalling deadness of the Russian theatre.
I tried to put my plans in historical perspective. I reminded him of what he knew well: that a national theatre, after over a hundred years of government procrastination, was finally on the horizon; Olivier would make it happen. It would be with us, I thought, within five years. Once it was working, it could well deal a death blow to Stratford if Stratford remained as it was. Without anything like the same resources, we would be unable to compete, and might quickly wither into no more than a short summer festival for tourists. All the heavyweight actors and directors would go to the National where conditions and pay were bound to be much better.
Fordie wondered whether in fact there would be room for two national theatres, although we both knew that in France the competition between the Comédie Française and the TNP had done only good. But the point was that Stratford had to be turned into a national organisation that could compete on even terms. I was as worried as Fordie at the thought of one well-subsidised State institution, the National Theatre, being at the top of the pile.
Stratford at that time had no subsidy. It kept going by paying its actors pitiably low wages and demanding only a small proportion of their time. The top salary was sixty pounds a week – even for Laurence Olivier. Little wonder that he could give only a few months to playing in Warwickshire, with several years between his visits. Times, however, were changing. The late Fifties were the start of the great days of the Arts Council. They were not, as later, trying to plan art into existence. They were watching to see where creativity happened and were then encouraging it with extra funds. I believed the Council would support Stratford if we showed them what we could do.
The governors had about £175,000 in the bank, husbanded carefully, as an emergency fund. This was a substantial sum in 1958. It had been earned over the years from successful foreign tours and from donations by patrons and well-wishers. I knew we would never get any form of state grant whilst this fund existed. I suggested to Fordie that the money could be well spent on launching us in London. He blinked.
At the same time, I told him that I hated the name of our enterprise: the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. It sounded like a gravestone. I wanted, since the Queen was our patron, to rename the building the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and have the company known as the Royal Shakespeare Company; I thought ‘RSC’ could become as easy on the tongue as my beloved ‘TNP’. Years later, when we were well established, my old friend Bill Gaskill, who was running the Royal Court, praised me waspishly for the invention. He said the title had everything in it except God.
Much of what Fordie and I discussed that night in Leningrad was speculative; much of it instinctive. But I knew where I was going and was sure of the problems that Stratford would be facing in the future. I felt that there was a fusion of aesthetic and political need which had to be taken seriously. Fordie played his cards with care. Sometimes he seemed practically asleep. Sometimes he counselled caution and wondered whether the Board would ever wear such extreme and risky schemes. Sometimes he worried whether they would benefit Shakespeare – which was after all what the theatre was there for. Perhaps he was a bit suspicious that I just wanted to use up the resources of Stratford in order to do modern plays?
As the night was coming to an end, I believed I’d lost. It is my usual experience, at the end of dress rehearsals, of first nights, of lectures, of broadcasts, or of writing an article, to believe that I have lost. I thought I had talked too much. Perhaps – always a fault of mine – I had been too revealing about my own doubts and insecurities. It was true that if the plan was adopted and went wrong, the theatre would be broke. I admitted as much. I also had another anxiety at the back of my mind: I was wondering whether I had the strength of will to resign from Stratford before I even began if I was told my dream couldn’t be attempted. I knew my proposals were right – right for the theatre, right for me. Whether they could happen, much less whether they could succeed, were unanswered questions which scared me. One thing was certain: I was not going to run an annual Shakespeare season at Stratford with an ad hoc collection of actors and directors.
Fordie gave himself another drink. Then, full of doubts, but nonetheless convinced of the inevitability of what he was doing, he said: ‘I think you’re absolutely mad, but it’s very exciting. Let’s talk to the governors and get it moving. I’ll back you to the hilt.’ It was four in the morning.
Throughout the next eight years, until his death from cancer in 1966, Fordie never wavered in his s
upport for me and for my Leningrad ideas. He was always encouraging, and completely and utterly steady through some very difficult and wobbly times. People in the theatre and among the public are naturally inclined to think now that the RSC has always been there. But it was a revolution that made it happen, and what we were trying to do frequently met with opposition, even derision. Fordie, as chairman, stood to lose everything if we had failed. I loved him and admired him, and owe him more than I can say.
Chapter Three
The 100th season at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959 was carefully devised by Glen Byam Shaw as a star-studded occasion: Edith Evans as Volumnia and the Countess in All’s Well; Paul Robeson as Othello; Charles Laughton as Bottom and Lear; Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus. As this was the year before I succeeded Glen – in addition to directing the Dream and Coriolanus – I had to begin work on my new plans. And, amazingly, I could because, with incredible ease, Fordie had secured the Board’s sanction, skilfully preparing the ground and then having me talk to them. I was allowed to spend the savings.
I was interviewed about my aims and aspirations, and began to experience for the first time the sceptical nature of the British media. Scepticism is of course a necessary and healthy response to a world more and more run by hype and public relations. But it has the danger of withering enterprise and stifling creativity. I was quite shocked by my inability to raise enthusiasm for my ideas. There was a good deal of ‘Who does this young man think he is?’; and plentiful reminders that I had made my reputation in modern drama: why did I think I could set myself up as an expert on Shakespeare? I also noticed that actors treated me in a different way. It was part reverence, because I was the anointed leader of their future, and part suspicion, because I had yet to prove that I could do it. I rushed on, telling myself that my luck would hold.