Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  We hadn’t. The Homecoming was the one that bucked the system. It became a cult success, was garlanded with Tony Awards, and we subsequently made a film of it.

  With some trepidation, I did the play again many years later, in London in 1990. I considered a new set. But the more I thought about it, the more indispensable the original John Bury designs seemed. Finally, I felt it would be perverse and self-conscious to try to alter them; it would be change for the sake of change. We had different actors, of course, with one extraordinary exception: the superb John Normington, now almost the right age for Uncle Sam, playing the part he had created twenty-five years earlier.

  This revival showed beyond doubt that The Homecoming and its production were still living entities; and the laughter was readier than it had been in the Sixties. There are many plays that use the family as an image of society, but none I know that are as honest or savage. The play will endure, but not, of course, my staging of it; that was the product of its time. Strong productions can last for a couple of decades, as did The Homecoming. But after that, they become curiosities – period pieces that represent the past.

  The Homecoming nearly wasn’t staged by the RSC. At a meeting in Avoncliffe, held beneath the ceiling of rioting plaster cupids and flowers which Leslie had Frenchified by painting them every colour of the rainbow, the directors of the RSC gravely considered their responsibilities. Peter Brook thought the play too small for the large spaces of the Aldwych. So did John Barton. Michel St Denis felt that it was not poetic enough. Clifford Williams and Trevor Nunn were less specific, but neither said anything to stop the strong tide of objection.

  None of them wanted to direct the play. On the other hand, I did, passionately, and said as much. I thought it would be overpowering in the Aldwych with actors who, trained in Shakespeare, were uniquely able to perform a modern poetic text. Peter Brook then said that I was at the RSC to express my own tastes and prejudices; the directors had joined me because they respected these, even if they didn’t agree with all of them; and I should therefore have everyone’s backing to do what I wanted: it was my prerogative.

  The meeting perfectly illustrated why the running of a theatre cannot ultimately be democratic. But it has to treasure people’s individual obsessions even if they arouse contrary opinions: the strength of them is what makes a theatre thrive.

  Pinter is a poet whose theatre is funny, violent and lyrical. It can, as well, produce unforgettable images from its actors. I can still see the bull-like strength of Paul Rogers’s shoulders in the original Homecoming, and Vivien Merchant’s shapely legs; Warren Mitchell’s predatory eyes under the butcher’s cap in the revival; John Gielgud’s Spooner with socks peeping through his sandals in No Man’s Land and Ralph Richardson’s fall as Hirst, collapsing with the unexpectedness of a tree; the sexiness of Dorothy Tutin as she surveyed the world from her sofa in Old Times; and Penny Wilton in Betrayal, Peggy Ashcroft in Landscape and Judi Dench in A Kind of Alaska, all strongly feminine in a masculine and abrasive world.

  I have had as much joy from working with Pinter as I have had from staging Mozart and Shakespeare. Harold is a meticulous man, and a warm friend with a sharp sense of humour – though this does not, it has to be said, readily extend to himself. He has an enormous understanding of his own position. But this is not conceit. He is very special and knows it.

  In his early years, he was committed to being uncommitted. I remember that Encounter ran a symposium in the Sixties to decide whether or not we should join the Common Market. A few of us in the arts were asked to contribute a thousand words each giving our opinions. I dutifully sent in mine. Harold sent one sentence, which announced that he did not care one way or the other. That ‘not caring’ has completely reversed itself in recent years to caring very much about world events and world politics. His engagement is now intense and I respect him for it; I was shocked by his indifference when he was young. He has grown into political responsibility, while many colleagues of his generation have backed away.

  High passion lurks under his urbane, controlled exterior. It is difficult to connect some artists with their work; not Harold. His love of poetry, his precision with words, his accuracy about appointments, his fastidiousness in dress, and the threat of violence just under his charm, are inescapably the man who made the plays.

  Chapter Twelve

  I woke up one morning in the summer of 1964 to discover that I was once more a centre of newspaper attention. One of the RSC governors, Emile Littler, had attacked me and Fordie Flower for ‘presenting, harbouring and promoting’ a season of dirty plays at the Aldwych. He said that we were ruining the Royal Shakespeare Company and the theatre in general. The great ‘dirty plays’ row had begun.

  It was the middle of the silly season and there wasn’t much other news. The combination of sex and subsidy, theatre and reputation, was irresistible. The press fell on it like starving wolves, and for some three weeks the controversy howled on.

  Much of the RSC’s work in London at that time was disturbing and radical, but I would hardly have called any of it obscene. The repertory at the Aldwych contained Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade; David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come (which contained a violent ritual murder); a French surrealist farce called Victor with a central character with uncontrollable wind (the farts provided by a musician on a tuba in the wings); and, for good measure, Pinter’s The Birthday Party and Beckett’s Endgame (these last two writers were mildly surprised, I think, to find themselves the authors of dirty plays).

  The basis of the row may well have been political. Did Emile Littler want to get rid of Fordie and of me? Possibly he had his eye on the chairmanship; certainly he was worried about the effect on the West End of the growing power of the subsidised theatre.

  Happily, no damage came from this puritan fit. Fordie and I emerged much strengthened by it, and plays and their content became, for once, front-page news. The RSC was widely seen as progressive and daring – and the box office boomed.

  Most important of all, the debate about the very existence of the Lord Chamberlain hotted up. It began to look more and more absurd that the theatre was gagged by an official of the Court (a practice two hundred years old) and that playwrights did not have the same freedoms as novelists, journalists or broadcasters whose only curb was, rightly, the law of the land.

  I prepared an anthology of verse for one of our special poetry evenings at the Aldwych. It included a poem by e. e. cummings which had the word ‘shit’ in the last line. The Lord Chamberlain promptly banned it. So we printed it in the programme (which was not against the law). At the performance, the house-lights were raised when the poem should have been spoken, and the audience were asked to read it silently to themselves. The RSC made front-page news again.

  Meanwhile, Emile Littler had presented a rather salacious play about the Dilke case, a famous nineteenth-century sex-and-politics scandal. This prompted BBC television, in a show called Not So Much a Programme – More a Way of Life, to include an item in which an actor, made up as Littler, sang a ditty about not liking other people’s dirty plays, only his own. Incandescent with rage, Littler sued the BBC in a long and costly case which he eventually won.

  At the trial, I had been in the witness box, subpoenaed for the defence. I became so overexcited about the perniciousness of stage censorship that I began arguing with the judge. ‘Mr Hall,’ said he, ‘when both of us are talking at once, you must be silent.’

  All this was part of the silly Sixties. But like much of the craziness of that decade, there were serious issues at stake. The cause of free speech and an open society was being advanced. Also, the excitements did not stop with the ‘dirty plays’ flare-up and the scandals of the orgy scene in Moses and Aaron at Covent Garden. For while sex in the theatre was one thing, being politically provocative on the stage was quite another.

  In 1966 Peter Brook developed for the RSC a show fiercely critical of American involvement in Vietnam, when such views were well ahead of their time. He gave
it the punning title, US. There was nothing in it that the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobald, could directly censor but he was unhappy about the enterprise. I was invited for an after-hours drink at St James’s Palace: sherry and a chat. Lord Cobald asked me whether I thought it right for a major theatre company in receipt of public money to present something which was critical of a great ally with whom we had a special relationship. I said that if the writers, the directors and other artists involved sincerely believed what they were saying, and had reached their judgements responsibly, the short answer had to be yes. To my mind, I said, the theatre had every right to be as polemical as the press and, if need be, as prejudiced. I didn’t forget to mention freedom of speech …

  The Lord Chamberlain pondered. He was clearly not pleased. He then warned me that he would be having a word with my chairman, and that the purpose of this would be to advise the cancellation of the show. He also reminded me that the president of the RSC was Anthony Eden, well known for his fervent support of American intervention in Vietnam. I thanked him for his frankness and left.

  Once more, I had reason to be grateful for the wisdom and strength of Fordie. He was outraged at this unofficial interference, told me to go ahead with the production and discussed the whole problem with the Board, getting their full backing. He then went further. Anthony Eden was due to retire as our president in about six months. To prevent him being in an embarrassing position when we did the show, Fordie explained the situation to him, and gently hastened his retirement.

  Shaping events by just ‘having a word’ in private is still the habit of the Establishment. Fortunately, we now have a more disrespectful press to publicise these contortions.

  I wish I could write that US was a triumph, but that wouldn’t be true. It succeeded in its aim of stirring up feeling about an escalating war which, as yet, had not registered with the British public. The play angered, embarrassed and impressed people in fairly equal measure. The text by Adrian Mitchell, Denis Cannan and Michael Kustow was a tough mixture of documentary material, accusatory lyrics and conventional playwriting. Peter’s production had strong images and moments of extraordinary beauty. It was a savage, ferocious piece. But it contained several eccentricities.

  At the end, the cast covered their heads with brown paper bags and moved as if blinded, some descending from the stage to wander among the puzzled and irritated audience. The actors annoyed the audience still further by silencing any applause. On the first night, the long, uneasy moment that followed was only broken when Peter Cook bawled from the circle, ‘Are you waiting for us, or are we waiting for you?’

  Peter Brook showed a typically Machiavellian streak the day the notices appeared. Much was made in them of the last few minutes, in which a member of the cast, Michael Williams, stepped to the front of the stage and released a box full of butterflies into the auditorium. He then picked up a butterfly and set fire to it with a cigarette lighter. It was an action precisely calculated to horrify the British.

  Within hours of the press reports, the RSPCA telephoned John Goodwin at the Aldwych demanding that the episode be cut; hundreds of their members were complaining. Peter was told and looked thoughtful. ‘I will tell you a secret only the actor and I know,’ he said to John. ‘The butterfly he burns is actually made of paper. Why not explain that to the RSPCA? But add that if they give our secret away to anyone at all, it is bound to become public. And if that happens, from then on we will burn a live butterfly.’

  The blackmail worked. There was not another word from the RSPCA and people went on believing what they were meant to believe.

  Peter Brook’s contribution to those RSC years was amazing. His King Lear with Paul Scofield’s definitive performance re-evaluated a great masterpiece. For the first time, audiences were persuaded that Goneril and Regan had a reasonable case against their difficult and wilful father.

  Peter’s whole approach was innovative, and the simplicity of the physical staging added immeasurably to the effect. His first design had been for a beautiful but harsh Renaissance world. The set was elaborate and the Stratford workshops had started to make it. Then Brook suddenly arrived in my office with a new model that was austere, spare, and hung with sheets of rusted iron. This was the set he used, and during the storm the huge iron sheets vibrated to make the thunder. The play became all the more powerful because it was not illustrated literally.

  Peter constantly fed European thought into the RSC. The Lear had been much influenced by the Polish scholar Jan Kott, who asserted the timeless politics of Shakespeare. Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty season followed. It was inspired by the French director Antonin Artaud, whose vision of theatre stressed violent images and formal ritual more than words. From this experimental season (done in a studio space outside the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship) developed Peter’s brilliant Aldwych production of Peter Weiss’s play The Persecution and Murder of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade – quickly shortened to Marat/Sade. It overwhelmed audiences in London and New York. Startling images, especially of Glenda Jackson, stay with me: in The Theatre of Cruelty, naked in a bath while excerpts from the Keeler trial were spoken; whipping de Sade with her hair in Marat/Sade. These thrilled many and disgusted some. Our theatre was responding to its times.

  Peter went on exploring. He brought to London the Polish director Jan Grotowski who was interested in ‘what happens to the psyche of the actor beyond the threshold of pain’. Grotowski used difficult physical exercises in order to examine his ideas and test the endurance of the actors. I spent a long evening on the telephone trying to explain to the husband of an actress why an afternoon rehearsal had seriously dislocated her back.

  Much of this seems pretentious now. But the Sixties had the energy to challenge because they dared to be foolish. They opened minds and swept away dead convention. It was good to be head of a theatre at that time.

  Founding the RSC pitchforked me into politics and I cannot pretend that I minded. Politics, and particularly politicians, have always fascinated me. Their capacity to deceive themselves, to sanction their actions as being in the public interest when they are often only to satisfy their personal ambition, seems infinite. I had seen it on stage in the conniving barons of Shakespeare’s histories; I saw it again off stage in politicians and government departments during ten years at the RSC and fifteen years running the National. Even before then, I was a member of the committee that advised the Arts Council on drama policy, learning at first hand how such gatherings went about their business. And once the RSC started, I was continually lobbying, attending meetings, writing articles, doing broadcasts. I was passionate for the cause of subsidised, ensemble theatre.

  In the early Sixties, I managed to persuade James Callaghan, then Shadow Chancellor, to issue a statement from the Opposition that Labour supported the RSC and would fund us properly when they came to power. In the polarised Thatcher years, this would have been a disaster, like breaking bread with the enemy. But in those more democratic times it was very helpful. I conclude that both political parties are generous about the arts when they are in Opposition, but once they are in power they tend to forget their promises.

  More and more, as I mixed with politicians, I became intrigued by their world. Indeed in the mid Sixties, following a hint from Jennie Lee, the ebullient and revolutionary arts minister, I thought of putting myself forward as a Labour candidate. Again, Peter Brook saved me. He said that however ephemeral and however frivolous our theatre work might be, we actually made something, and that it existed in complete terms which could undoubtedly influence people. The compromises of politics were essentially shady and, at the lower levels, had no such influence. What on earth would I do with my energy, sitting on the back benches for years? I abandoned the idea.

  I also became slowly disillusioned with government departments; surprisingly, their word was rarely their bond. Trust was always the problem with the Arts Council. The RSC was a success very qui
ckly, but there was an immediate undertow of anxiety. From the moment we expanded into London in December 1960, all our problems were related to the possible arrival, before too long, of the National Theatre. And that, of course, reflected directly on our claim for subsidy. A heated, often bitter, debate about whether the two companies could, or even should, coexist caused the RSC’s political crises during my time with them. The details are complicated but have the fascination of all Byzantine negotiations.

  In 1957, Laurence Olivier became a Trustee of the National Theatre and began to lobby strenuously for its creation. In 1958, I was offered the directorship at Stratford and put forward the policy of an ensemble company trained in the classics, but expert in modern drama, and with a London base. My thinking was certainly influenced by the possible arrival of the National Theatre; but that had been coming for nearly 150 years, and although now probable was by no means certain.

  In 1959, some time after my plans had been announced, informal talks began between the National Theatre campaigners – Olivier and the prospective chairman, Lord Chandos – and Fordham Flower and myself, about a possible amalgamation. I have read in various histories that I wanted the RSC to be the National Theatre. That is not true. I was in love with Shakespeare. Fordie and I were simply anxious to protect the Stratford tradition, and not to be crippled by a National Theatre that was likely to have disproportionately larger resources and so attract all the talent. Besides, I had always believed that the country should have two national theatres: artistic competition means better work.