by Peter Hall
Though when these talks took place the National Theatre was still not much more than an unrealised dream, nonetheless, what most of those who were campaigning for it thought, but didn’t say, was that when and if the RSC arrived in London, it might be an embarrassing competitor, both artistically and for funds.
It was at this time, in 1959, while I was directing Olivier in Coriolanus at Stratford, that he invited me to be his number two at the National Theatre. I was flattered but said that I would sooner be my own number one. Larry told me he didn’t think the government would subsidise two national theatres. I said I thought it should and could. And so matters were left.
By 1960, it was clear that the National Theatre was at last going to happen. That was also the year when the RSC began performing under its new title and working in London as well as in Stratford. And in the same year a committee was set up to prepare the National Theatre’s proposals for the government. Fordie and I were invited to join, which we gladly did; and a series of complicated meetings began.
By the end of 1960, a memorandum had gone to the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposing an amalgamation. The National would be made up of a company of 150 actors, divided into three groups: one would appear at the National to be built on the South Bank; one at Stratford; and one would tour. The Old Vic would be used for a young company, or for experimental work. Meanwhile, the existing Old Vic Company and the RSC would receive subsidy to build up a team of suitable actors.
It is almost unbelievable to remember it now, but Fordie and I had actually agreed that for the sake of the theatre as a whole a gradual amalgamation was a correct and wise decision.
Then, in March 1961, the government announced that there would be no National Theatre after all. Instead, it intended to subsidise the Old Vic, Stratford and a group of regional repertory companies; and Lord Cottesloe, the chairman of the Arts Council, wrote asking us to submit figures for a three-year grant. But the lobbying for the National Theatre continued unabated; and the whole scheme was suddenly resuscitated when the London County Council, under the leadership of Isaac Hayward, offered funding. It was a sufficiently large sum to make Selwyn Lloyd, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, change his mind about the entire National Theatre idea. It was on again.
This was the age when big was beautiful: small firms amalgamating to make a vast firm, such as British Leyland, was considered admirable. The new plan, blessed by the chancellor, embraced not only the amalgamation of the Old Vic, Stratford and the coming National Theatre, but threw in for good measure a huge new opera house as well. It was to be administered artistically by three directors – one from Stratford, one from the Old Vic and one from Sadler’s Wells – and they would all report to a general director, who was to be Laurence Olivier. The South Bank, thanks to the munificence of the LCC, would boast a new theatre and a new opera house.
By now the full cost of running the RSC as an ensemble (even one that did very good business) was becoming evident; our savings were running out. However, we made plans for the second part of 1961 and for 1962 based on the subsidy we had been told we were going to get. We were therefore appalled to receive in July 1961 a letter from the chairman of the Arts Council, saying that everything was changed because of the chancellor’s new plans. The RSC would not now receive any grant until the whole new scheme had been finally agreed by all the parties concerned, plus the government and the LCC. This process, Lord Cottesloe wrote, ‘may of course take some considerable time to complete’.
Fordie and I were dumbfounded. First of all it looked as if we were being blackmailed by the withholding of the grant; as if we had either to agree to the ‘British Leyland’ solution, or to become a small regional festival. Also, we had, increasingly, no taste for this new grandiose scheme – the arrival of the opera house had been the last straw. We became more and more sure that the new conglomerate would produce work without particularity and character. Fordie, because of the betrayal over the grant and the blackmail it implied, finally revolted. He said to me, ‘Let’s get out. Stratford cannot be governed by remote control.’ I thought he was absolutely right. I believed the new plan to be a mad compromise which would result in a huge departmental store of drama, designed to please all parties, but which would in fact diminish them all.
We pulled out. And there is no doubt that the RSC’s money troubles with the government and the Arts Council for the next thirty years all stemmed from this very risky decision. The company has never had an easy time financially. But it has existed, whereas it might have been stillborn. And it has created a triumphant procession of productions.
In 1962 and 1963 the RSC hit wonderful artistic form in Stratford and at the Aldwych. This greatly aggravated the anxieties of the National Theatre lobby. The prospect of competition increasingly scared many of them, including Olivier and Lord Chandos, and they clearly wanted us out of London. Our attempts to gain subsidy were frustrated at every turn. The times were dangerous.
In the spring of 1962, John Goodwin urged me to give an exclusive interview to Ronald Hastings, theatre correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, in order to make public that unless we received a grant we would have to leave the Aldwych and retreat to Stratford. The story was given a great deal of space, and as soon as it appeared John suggested that I sent copies to leading drama critics, saying that our situation was indeed desperate. The result was extraordinary, including a letter to the Telegraph from eleven senior critics calling on the government to keep us in London. Newspaper comment drawing attention to our case continued to blaze away all through that summer. Questions were asked in the House.
Finally, T. C. Worsley, in the Financial Times, let the cat out of the bag. He wrote, ‘Perhaps it is time to be blunt. There are ugly rumours about that some of those who negotiated the National Theatre scheme would not be sorry (to put it no lower) to see Peter Hall’s RSC out of London.’ I was greatly heartened by such support from the media, though it has to be said that unless the work we were doing had justified it, it would not have happened.
By the end of 1962, Fordie and I could at least draw breath. We were free of the grandiose National Theatre muddle and we had been given a subsidy. It was a small one of £47,000, but a beginning. It came, however, with a Treasury qualification warning us that though the RSC might decide to operate on a national theatre level, this would not guarantee us a future subsidy consistent with such a level. This minute has been quoted at the RSC for the last thirty years.
We had saved the Aldwych, but in doing so had made enemies. The National Theatre, with a subsidy five times the size of ours, opened at the Old Vic in the autumn of 1963, and immediately the pressure to get us out of London, this time by squeezing our grant, hotted up. If the ‘dirty plays’ row had come before our great run of productions in ’62 and ’63 rather than after, I doubt whether we could have withstood the onslaught. It would have given too much ammunition to our opponents. The Wars of the Roses and Brook’s King Lear were crucial to our future. They had received the kind of acclaim that cannot be argued with; and success breeds success. More and more talent came to the RSC: it was a magnet which attracted young actors, designers and writers – Glenda Jackson, Nicol Williamson, Sally Jacobs, David Rudkin. Also, I signed up, within a few months of each other, two young directors who were to lead the company over the next twenty-five years, Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands.
I don’t believe that theatre is made by buildings; theatre is made by people and the work they create. But governments are reassured by buildings, as they are by institutions, and if one is there then something has to be put into it. I was aware that we were very vulnerable on that score because if we lost the Aldwych and couldn’t find another suitable London home, the whole idea of the RSC could collapse. This was long before Trevor Nunn’s invention of the Swan and the Other Place as additions to the main theatre at Stratford, thus establishing there the most comprehensive theatrical plant in the country.
I thought that if we could achieve a purpose-built theatr
e in London which was ours, and born out of the RSC aesthetic, our future would be that much surer. The first idea was to rebuild the Mercury Theatre in Ladbroke Grove, but the site was not adequate for a decent stage. So, after many fits and starts, the RSC signed an agreement with the City of London to become tenants of the new Barbican Theatre. John Bury and I set to work to design it and found in Joe Chamberlain an architect with what was, to us, a rare advantage. He believed in listening to the theatre people and allowed them to dictate the needs of the auditorium.
I love the Barbican Theatre because it is created from ideas shared by John and myself. I do not, however, love the Barbican Arts Centre. In the long hours we spent working on the auditorium and stage, we had little idea that an inhuman environment like a second-rate airport was going to surround us.
Meanwhile, Olivier, offering an olive branch, had asked Michel St Denis, Peter Brook and myself to join the National Theatre Building Committee, which was chaired by Lord Cottesloe. Michel, Peter, George Devine and I wanted only two auditoria – a large open-stage and a flexible studio theatre. But Olivier and Tynan, supported by John Dexter, insisted that there must be a proscenium theatre too. There was a good deal of axe-grinding, and some vague talk that such an auditorium was necessary for revivals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plays. Tynan declared that if a proscenium theatre was good enough for Brecht, it should be good enough for the National Theatre. Olivier wondered whether, without a proscenium theatre, the Comédie Française would play at the NT when invited to London. So the Lyttelton Theatre became part of the overall design without any strong aesthetic need. Nobody was desperately for it, and I think this is revealed, now that it exists, by its largely impersonal character. The Olivier and Cottesloe are triumphantly original; but the Lyttelton is merely large and acceptable.
Chapter Thirteen
In 1966, after two years of severely pinched subsidies, the crisis came: money was running out. I quote from an interview I gave in the late Sixties to David Addenbrooke for his book on the RSC: ‘Looking back on his Stratford years, Peter Hall saw 1966 as the year of his biggest mistake: “In 1966, the Arts Council and Lord Goodman said: ‘There’s no more money – you can’t have an increase.’ And we did a season of revivals … in order to try and mark time. You can’t mark time in the theatre. That was my biggest mistake … I just saw it as a never-ending battle for subsidy. I thought it would go on for ever … And I made the mistake of compromising when I should not have compromised. I should have announced a season of new productions.”’
Arnold Goodman had by now succeeded Lord Cottesloe as Arts Council chairman. He genuinely felt that London could not support two national theatres, and that things would be better all round if we returned to Warwickshire. We managed to stay at the Aldwych, but the season of revivals at Stratford was a humiliation and some of the life went out of the actors. I wondered what I had to do in order to convince the government and the Arts Council that we were worthwhile.
Then, as now, Arnold Goodman was known as The Great Mr Fixit: ace settler of quarrels; solicitor and advisor to prime ministers. He was apolitical and yet all-political in that he could seemingly arrange anything. For many years he was the man in the background, but when he ran the Arts Council with Jennie Lee as his Arts Minister he became a public figure and transformed the arts. He did not, however, help the RSC.
In the summer of 1966, and in the middle of these fights, Fordie, who had been seriously ill for some months, died of cancer. I was desolated. And things changed. The new chairman, George Farmer, was a precise accountant, and no gambler; I think I always worried him. Also, not long after Fordie’s death, news came that the Barbican, scheduled to open in 1970, would be delayed. (It was in fact another ten years before it was finished.) Then in 1967 I directed one of my most disastrous productions: a Macbeth with Paul Scofield and Vivien Merchant. Throughout rehearsals I had shingles. Run-down and depressed, I found myself disillusioned, tired and daunted by the thought of a future spent chiefly fighting for money – now without Fordie – against a National Theatre that would always be better placed to get it. In 1968, I decided to leave the RSC, and proposed Trevor Nunn as my successor. Within six weeks I had gone.
Something else contributed to my need to go. I felt restless artistically. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays – a rich number; but many of them come round with monotonous regularity in the Stratford season, which needs five or six every year. Already, I was seeing new productions that were less good than interpretations of some eight or ten years earlier. I also wanted to direct more films; I had recently made two, one of them with my old friend Michael Birkett producing. I wanted to do more opera. Above all, I suppose, I wanted to stretch my wings.
I think now, from my own point of view, that it was a mistake to leave the RSC. I could have asked for a year’s sabbatical and then gone back. But I felt burnt out. And I seemed to be in a situation that had no solution except departure. I also knew that fate had given me a brilliant successor in the young Trevor Nunn. Passing on the RSC to Trevor and, much later, the National to Richard Eyre are, I believe, among the best things I have done.
I intended to go on working for the RSC from time to time, so Jacky and I and the children moved from Avoncliffe to Wallingford, a place chosen because it was half-way between London and Stratford. It was a very modern-looking house, built in the Fifties. The garden had a lake where Christopher and I fished for trout which Jacky cooked. I began to make another paradise, only this time it was aggressively contemporary, with a Peter Logan sculpture in the garden, a Wendy Taylor gazebo by the lake and a Joe Tilson hanging in the hall – all extremely Sixties. I was embracing my time. And looking forward to a fresh start.
I quickly had a surprising phone call from Lord Goodman asking me to join the Arts Council. I agreed eagerly, and the friendship that as a result grew between us is one of the most valued of my life. An attractive quality in Arnold which the public do not see is that it is in his nature always to champion the underdog and fight for lost causes (he clearly regarded the RSC as neither!). He represents the law, but is suspicious of it. More than anything else, he respects humanity and common sense. He is generous with his time and on several occasions has helped me out of troubles without any benefit to himself.
It is a paradox that my two bogies of the Sixties, the men who, as successive chairmen of the Arts Council, virtually drove me from the RSC, Lord Goodman and Lord Cottesloe, both became close friends. Cottesloe, in committee, plays Polonius. He appears to be a buffer, but underneath is a very shrewd operator. Working with him on the National Theatre Building Committee, I began to admire his political acumen; soon I treasured him as companion and colleague.1
In a sense, ever since I left the RSC, I have felt that I lacked a true home. I certainly don’t regret going later to the National Theatre, but only in my last seven or eight years there did it offer me anything like the creative security that Stratford gave me from the start. But if I had had that year’s sabbatical from the RSC and then gone back, I would not have had the great adventure of the National; nor perhaps the fulfilment of working at Glyndebourne.
Part Three
PRIMA LA MUSICA
Chapter One
When I was twenty-four, I applied to be Carl Ebert’s assistant. I felt that this great opera director, heir to the European tradition of Reinhardt, would have much to teach me. He interviewed me in a taxi, as he rode, frantic, from the Ritz to Victoria Station on his way to Glyndebourne.
Even in the cramped confines of a taxi, Ebert seemed an ebullient, charming personality. He had a handsome actor’s face, a ready smile, a warm manner and abundant white hair that cascaded in all directions. An interview when there isn’t much time concentrates the mind. I talked rapidly and far too much – a fault I always have at interviews. He wasn’t, I thought, much impressed by my inadequate German and patchy Italian. Victoria was reached and he rushed off to catch the train for Lewes. I wandered back to the Arts Theatre think
ing I would hear no more.
To tell the truth, I was ambivalent about the great man. His command of the language of theatre – the lights, the design, the grouping of the characters on stage – was extremely impressive. But he had an irritating habit, common then in Europe, of illustrating the music; by which I mean drilling the singers for hours to walk and gesture precisely to the time and pulse of the score. This had a tendency to make everybody act like Mickey Mouse. At its best it could give vigour to comedy; but it trivialised operas such as Così fan tutte, and made it hard for Rossini to lift above the facetious. It was, however, the style of the day and Ebert was the master of it. His work was wonderfully specific. He didn’t leave the singers attitudinising with generalised emotions.
Two weeks later, I received an offer of the job. But in that two weeks my life had changed. I had been asked to take over from John Fernald as director of the Arts. Regretfully, I declined Ebert’s offer, thus delaying by twenty years the time I first worked at Glyndebourne.
I continued to go every year, however, and Glyndebourne finally, for me, was like a marriage. I fell in love there; knew great joy and great sorrow there; and, at the end, great pain and bitterness. It was like the experience of a whole lifetime and always extraordinarily vivid. The little opera house hidden in the Sussex Downs has been as important to me as Stratford-upon-Avon.
Michael Birkett introduced me to this enchanted place when we were both students at Cambridge. His father, Norman Birkett, the eminent QC and judge, had a friend who bought tickets for every performance. He must have been a rich man; he was certainly a kind one. He gave Michael two of his tickets and Michael invited me.
Michael was already in Sussex, but it was necessary for me to get myself there from Cambridgeshire. I had one of my father’s free railway passes to London, but no funds to get further. There was also the problem of dress. It was obligatory – it still is – to wear dinner jackets at Glyndebourne. As luck would have it, however, my father had splashed out on a ready-made one a couple of years before so that he could attend Rotary Club dinners. I borrowed this treasured jacket, packed it in a battered cardboard suitcase, and early in the morning set off by train to Liverpool Street and thence by bus to South London. It was a route familiar to me from my visits to my aunt in Lewisham. Once on the A23, I began to hitch-hike and was given five or six lifts, mostly by lorries. Embarrassed by my cardboard suitcase, and the thought of the dinner jacket inside that would gain me admission to one of the most élite places in the world, I only told one driver where I was going and what I was doing. He clearly thought I was as barmy as the man who had built an opera house in his garden. After that I kept quiet. At Lewes, two friendly members of the audience let me share their taxi.