Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  I knew this wasn’t going to work for Leslie. Quite apart from the dubious stability of her relationship with Warren Beatty, I did not believe she would make a permanent new life in Hollywood. It was a place, as I well knew, that she both admired and loathed. She was a fierce European. The oscillations would be certain to continue: she would go on moving constantly between the two continents and the children would be caught up in these hectic changes.

  Who could I go to for advice? John Roberts, the RSC’s general manager at the Aldwych, always knew the best professional advisers – whether they were lawyers, dentists or chiropodists. He recommended a top solicitor with an awesome record of victories in difficult divorce cases. This was a person whose extravagant personality would not have been out of place in Dickens or Gogol. He wore full make-up even in broad daylight, very skilfully applied. He was brilliant and had amazing clarity of thought; he was also, I felt, ruthless and cynical. I didn’t like him.

  He asked me what I wanted for my children. I said I would like them to be Europeans and educated in England or France. I stressed that I hated the idea of them being dragged from country to country, from film set to film set, and that, most of all, I didn’t want them brought up in Los Angeles, a place as foreign to me as anywhere I have ever been.

  He told me that if Leslie took Jenny and Christopher to America, no court there would ever be likely to allow them out of their mother’s control, particularly if the father was living thousands of miles away. Then came his main point: unless he served a notice on Leslie as she stepped off the plane, making the children wards of court, I had no chance whatsoever of influencing any aspect of their future. I said I didn’t want to go to such lengths. He emphasised that Leslie could bring them up in America and educate them how and where she liked; that it was up to me to decide, but if I decided not to take his advice, I needn’t ask him for help later on.

  I had until next day to make up my mind, and I spent a sleepless night frantically worrying what to do. I despise revenge. Was I taking this stand against Leslie to pay her back for loving Warren Beatty? I thought I wasn’t – but I needed to be absolutely sure of my motives. By the morning, I believed I knew what was best, and told the solicitor to go ahead. As Leslie arrived she was presented with papers under which Christopher and Jenny could not leave the country without the courts’ permission.

  The legal battle dragged on as legal battles always do. I hate the law. Victory depends on who can play the game in the quickest and most cool-handed way.

  After more than a year, I was given custody – an amazing verdict at that time. Fathers were not generally so favoured. There was no feeling of triumph in the victory; I was just relieved that the children could grow up and go to school in England. They lived primarily with me, spending their holidays with Leslie, wherever she might be in the world. They early became much-travelled, international children. But at least they had stability in their education. What happened certainly affected their lives adversely, but how far they have been damaged is difficult to say. They were surrounded by love and care from both of us, and they had a good education at Bedales, both ending up at Cambridge with Exhibitions.

  Leslie’s affair with Warren Beatty was short-lived. But the fact that I had taken legal action to keep the children, whom she adored, and had succeeded in my attempt, was something she found very hard to forgive. Only many years later did we become friends again. We now remember the good times and not the bad times. Three grandchildren have put our quarrels into perspective.I

  The break-up had its comic side. My alarming solicitor had warned me that Leslie would be advised to fight with every weapon. In the eyes of the law, therefore, my own conduct had to be discreet, not to say blameless. He told me to keep a weather eye on the rear-view mirror of my car; and when walking always to take note of who was behind me. He predicted that I would be watched and followed. I thought he was letting his professional fantasies go to his head. He wasn’t. These were the days when the law insisted that there had to be a good party and a bad in any divorce; the conflict was black and white. So Leslie was constrained to hire a team of private detectives in order to prove that I was an undesirable and unsuitable father. My solicitor countered by talking about her as if he was judging her by Old Testament principles: she was a scarlet woman.

  Leslie’s detectives proved less than efficient, however. By mistake, they sent detailed reports of my doings to me instead of to her. The reports were full of innuendo and smouldering, scarcely concealed, outrage. To be well-dressed or to go to an expensive restaurant was, by implication, the beginning of a moral collapse. One report delighted me. It recorded my behaviour on a Sunday evening. Everything I did was an insult to the Sabbath. I left my ‘large Stratford house’ driving an ‘open British racing-green Jaguar sports car’, proceeded to the theatre, parked and went inside. There were many lights on in the building. ‘Sounds of music, chatter and laughter were audible, and several young women, some of them in a state of undress’ were hanging out of various windows. The watcher speculated that some kind of party appeared to be in progress. He recorded that I stayed until nearly midnight. The ‘party’ I had been attending was the dress rehearsal of Richard III.

  Our divorce finally came through in 1965. I was sad that a magical relationship had ended, but I could not be sad that we had met. As young people, we developed and challenged each other in many ways. I became more European, and had my eyes opened to the visual world. I also became less snobbishly certain that British art, particularly British theatre, was the best. As an outsider, I had always had a reluctance, if not an inability, to spend time enjoying myself if it had no purpose, partly, perhaps, because I am an East Anglian puritan. Leslie tempered that, and I became a little better at living.

  For her part, Leslie eagerly absorbed British traditions, gardens, furniture, British irony and humour. I admired her sophistication, her Frenchness and her beauty. Above all, I admired her courage. For she had – indeed she still has – an indomitable will. In 1991, at the age of nearly sixty, she appeared in the American musical Grand Hotel on the Berlin stage. Not only did she have to go back to dancing at a time when most dancers have long retired; she also learnt German, acted in it and sang in public for the first time. She did all this, I am sure, because she won’t be beaten. She always loved a challenge.

  I haven’t much of a memory for pain or unhappiness. I sometimes, indeed, neglect to remember who my enemies are. In spite of all the strain and the hurry, I am content to recall the good things of the Fifties and Sixties: the miracle of being completely in love; the miracle of two beautiful children. For a short time, then, both privately and publicly, I had the joy of complete achievement.

  Chapter Ten

  In 1965 I directed the David Warner Hamlet at Stratford; Moses and Aaron at Covent Garden; and Pinter’s The Homecoming and Gogol’s The Government Inspector, with Paul Scofield in the name part, at the Aldwych. It was one of my best years of work. Professionally I was riding high.

  In my personal life, I began again. Through the anguish of the break-up, I had been sustained by a love affair with Jacqueline Taylor, an attractive and funny girl who had worked at Stratford since the late Fifties. She was first a secretary in the production department, then moved to the press office, and finally ran my life as my assistant. She was intelligent, but she had no pretensions to being an intellectual. I liked her practicality, her down-to-earth approach to life, her strong likes and good instincts.

  She loved the theatre, and because she knew what I did and why and how I did it, she understood and supported my obsessive work rate. I thought at the time that this would always be so.

  In the year that my divorce from Leslie came through, Jacky and I married. It seemed a new start. There was no rival career to cram into our over-full life, for Jacky left her job and left it gladly. No siren Hollywood voices called her away on long agonising separations. She loved children and initially was quite wonderful with Christopher and Jennifer. She w
ent out of her way to help them; she knew how important it was for them to have security.

  Yet before long, the very things that had been the strengths of our marriage became the weaknesses. I hadn’t realised that Jacky was not as strong as she gave out, that in fact she worried far more than I knew about the daily ebb and flow of disaster and crisis which is the basis of all theatre life. You cannot come home from a day running a theatre and report a predominance of good news. Success is transitory and difficulty the norm. Tales of broken contracts, changed minds, sudden feuds and unexpected failures are much more likely than the warm glow of success that show business likes to project to the public.

  Jacky took this constant hurly-burly very personally, and I was too preoccupied to recognise that it caused her genuine distress. During a decade of anxiously suffering my hectic existence, she became gradually more aloof. By the mid Seventies, her imperviousness seemed complete. And by that time I had become a singularly unpopular figure, much attacked. The young lion of the Sixties, who could do no wrong, was long forgotten. I had succeeded a great figure, Laurence Olivier, as director of the National Theatre, and had the task of moving the company from the modest Old Vic to its vast new home on the South Bank. It was a hugely expensive building relative to the Old Vic, and it was opened to the public right in the middle of an appalling economic slump. I was the focus for some venomous criticism.

  Jacky remained apparently strong. But the silence between us grew like a dreadful weed. She appeared not to know what was being written about me or what I was going through. She made no comment as I tried to cope with a very public purgatory. My resentment increased. I thought she didn’t care; worse, I thought she was ashamed of me. In fact, she didn’t want to hurt me or herself and thought it better to ignore my distress. I had no idea at the time. It became an agony to live with her.

  We had two lovely children, Edward born in 1967 and Lucy who arrived two years later. They adored their half-brother and sister, and a family group, with all its fun and security, developed. But this also, like the happiness I had found with Jacky, seemed inevitably to breed its own unhappiness. Jenny and Christopher lived part of their lives as the children of a famous film star travelling round the world at holiday times. The rest of the time they had a more down-to-earth existence with us. We were not very affluent – I never have been. I have worked at what I liked rather than what would make money, so we by no means had the standards of the jet set. Inevitably, Jacky became increasingly protective of her own son and daughter and what the future might hold for them. Her concern for Jenny and Christopher became noticeably less and less. I thought she was jealous of them.

  The problems multiplied and in a few years a relationship that had been full of hope was dead. The life I led wrought terrible changes in Jacky. Finally, it must have been healthy for her to have no more of me.

  Chapter Eleven

  David Warner had ambled on to the Aldwych stage to give an audition way back in 1962. I was sure even then that he would make a Hamlet. He had that authentic quality stars always possess – they are completely watchable. You need to hang on to their every word, understand their every thought, note their merest gesture.

  David’s mesmeric stage presence was confirmed by his Henry VI in The Wars of the Roses. When we came to Hamlet in 1965, he was the very embodiment of the Sixties student – tall, blond, gangling. He was passive, yet had an anarchic wit. His performance, I believe, defined the play for a decade. It completely expressed the spirit of the young of that period, gentle but dangerous. Student unrest was becoming more and more part of our daily lives as the new generation questioned and challenged the old; we were part of the culture that was marching inexorably towards 1968, the year of student revolution.

  I don’t much like records of stage performances – photographs, designs or even videotapes. Theatre is ephemeral; it should burst like a bubble once it has ceased to live before its audience. But there are times when I find myself wishing that I could re-experience performances of the past. David’s Hamlet is one of them. It lives for many people as the moment when they realised that Hamlet is always our contemporary.

  I did not try to make this happen. I had no overall theory of the play to take into the rehearsal room. I worked with the company to find the meaning of each scene and to express it as best we could. Out of that scrutiny – as it always will if honestly pursued – came a concept. And we found ourselves speaking straight to our audience. We did not, however, speak to the critics. Apart from Ronald Bryden in the New Statesman, nearly all of them were unimpressed, not to say hostile. Hamlet is always a big target, particularly if the leading actor is in his early twenties. But the public rushed to see David Warner as if his was the performance they had been waiting for.

  Something else marked the Sixties for me. A parcel arrived from Harold Pinter. Inside was a beautifully typed manuscript accompanied by a characteristically terse letter. It read: ‘This is it.’ ‘It’ was The Homecoming; and directing the play sealed a friendship with the author which, except for one serious but short-lived break, has lasted ever since.

  The production had a clarity I had long been trying to achieve. I wanted my work to be hard-edged and unsentimental – and to demonstrate that in the theatre ‘less is more’; it seemed to me that economy and selection intensified drama and made it more vivid. John Bury’s set was inspired by Magritte, and in the huge, bleached, antiseptic room which he designed, the green apples on the sideboard were the only splash of colour. Nothing was on stage unless it had a specific meaning.

  My friendship with Harold began when, after seeing Waiting for Godot, he sent me The Birthday Party. I couldn’t do it; nor could I do his next play, The Caretaker. So we didn’t actually work together until his one-acter, The Collection, was staged at the Aldwych in 1962. And as time went by we discovered a remarkable similarity of taste and thought.

  The Homecoming is a big and terrifying play about survival in the jungle of the family. But rehearsing it was a joy; the rhythmic certainties which I found in Shakespeare and Beckett I found in quite a different way in Pinter. A director cannot question this writer’s form, he can only endorse it; he has to work backwards, discovering a feeling which will support that form. It is exactly like a singer learning the notes and then creating a feeling which will match those notes.

  I was as rigorous with the actors over Pinter’s punctuation as I was with them over Shakespeare’s line endings. I even held a ‘dot-and-pause’ rehearsal. Pinter marks his texts with three different notations. The longest break is marked silence: the character comes out of it in a different state to when he or she began it; the next is marked pause, which is a crisis point, filled with the unsaid; and the shortest is marked with three dots, which is a plain hesitation. The actors had to understand why there were these differences. They chafed a little, but finally accepted that what was not said often spoke as forcefully as the words themselves. The breaks represented a journey in the actor’s emotions, sometimes a surprising transition.

  I learnt something else from The Homecoming which helped me through the eleven Pinter premieres that I subsequently directed. The words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other; and, in defence, to conceal feelings. Pinter is always a cockney, albeit sometimes a very well-bred one. The essence of his work is ‘taking the piss’: deriding an antagonist while treating him with extreme friendliness and charm. Ideally, the person whose piss is being taken should be entirely unaware of the fact. London taxi drivers are experts at the technique.

  Pinter’s words are used to hide the emotions (because to show them in this jungle is to be weak). But the actors have to be aware of the ebb and flow of violence that lies below the words. Otherwise, the surface of the play will seem bland and pretentious. And the pauses will mean nothing. Actors in Pinter have to feel every moment intensely, but then disguise it. I have sometimes held rehearsals in which these sub-text feelings are deliberately brought to the surface and the
naked aggression of the characters is demonstrated. The actors then know what they are covering up. It is alarming and melodramatic. There is nonetheless lyricism, even nostalgia, in Pinter’s work, heard most eloquently at the end of Landscape and in A Kind of Alaska.

  The Homecoming proved my belief that the textual discipline of the classics could and should be applied to modern drama. Ian Holm’s superb Lenny was all the better for playing Richard Crookback throughout The Wars of the Roses.

  The first ever performance of The Homecoming was in Cardiff. Some of the audience walked out, furious, when it was suggested in the play that Ruth, the central female character – a wonderfully sexy and mysterious performance by Vivien Merchant – could only stay with the family if she ‘went on the game’. There was the same reaction the following week in Brighton. Audiences were not, initially, prepared to accept the anarchy of these people; and by the time we reached London, the public were still shocked by the horror, and found it difficult to laugh. From then on, though, the energy of the play became unstoppable. After running for eighteen months it went to America. But in Boston, as in Cardiff and Brighton, many walked out. Alexander Cohen, the producer, asked Harold to ‘fix the second act’. He didn’t know his man. Harold took his glasses off, his eyes glinting. ‘What exactly did you have in mind?’ he said. It was one of the few times I have seen a Broadway producer at a loss for words. Cohen never returned to the subject.

  The New York first night was miraculous. The cast acted with arrogance and clarity and the play consequently exerted a terrible grip. But Walter Kerr, the New York Times critic (and the only one that mattered), didn’t like it; or not enough anyway. Alexander Cohen warned me next morning that it would probably be off by the end of the week. Did he really mean that? I asked. Because if so, I was just setting up the next Stratford season and would be only too pleased to have The Homecoming actors in the Stratford company – particularly Ian Holm and Paul Rogers. Cohen was furious. ‘You have no right to talk about future plans,’ he shouted. ‘You have just had a flop on Broadway.’