by Peter Hall
To our surprise and delight, this rough venture in the open air helped us to define the style of the play. It was public advocacy, each character asking the approval of the audience for his or her actions. And when Tamburlaine finally inaugurated the Olivier in early October, Albert, surviving severe bronchitis, was magnificent. The drama took the stage and sang. We had successfully launched the second and largest and, in my view, most exciting of our three theatres.
Three weeks later, however, we had to negotiate another big occasion: the official opening of the new building in the presence of the Queen and an auditorium packed with assorted grandees. Because of the constant building delays, my plans had kept changing, and all I could salvage which seemed suitable was a light, short, seemingly amusing comedy by Goldoni, Il Campiello. Bill Bryden directed it in the Olivier for half of the official audience, while the other half watched Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers in the Lyttelton. They arrived in torrential rain, a dismal start which foreshadowed a nightmare evening. Its only bright spot was at the very beginning when Larry spoke movingly from the stage named after him; he was never, alas, well enough to appear on it again.
The Goldoni was a disaster. So was the special fanfare version of God Save the Queen which Harry Birtwistle had commissioned from Howarth Davies. Harry and I had thought it sounded well, if somewhat progressive, when rehearsed. But on the night it was horrible. The Queen visibly shuddered as if she had sipped lemon juice. The band had been augmented at the last moment by trumpeters of the Household Cavalry who provided many shrill and nervous mistakes, heightening, if anything, the modernity of the arrangement. The royal opening had made a piece of history by being about as big a flop as could be imagined.
Although we were by now in the late autumn of 1976, the Cottesloe was still unfinished. Not until the following spring, in March, were we able to use it. It began life with Ken Campbell’s and Chris Langham’s Illuminatus, an eight-hour epic by the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool. This was original, anarchic and funny, and I was delighted to have something at the National which represented the Fringe.
As time passed, the Cottesloe proved to be the most flexible and, to many, the most interesting of our three theatres. It is a space where new work can be done at not too high a risk, and without it we would have cut ourselves off from new writing. A new play put on in the Olivier or the Lyttelton has to be not only fully achieved but of a certain size.
Unbelievably, the Arts Council early on had tried their best to remove the Cottesloe from the architect’s designs: they believed the Fringe and the Royal Court provided sufficient studio-type auditoriums. But Denys Lasdun knew something which nobody else did, and made sure that the area set aside for the Cottesloe, deep in the bowels of the building, was kept. It was (appropriately) part of the foundations.
So by the spring of 1977, I thought I had completed my obstacle course. I had got through it: the National was open, and working, and full. But Jacky told a friend that I often woke in the middle of the night, shouting.
There were great compensations, however. In the year the Cottesloe opened I collaborated for the first time with Alan Ayckbourn. I had invited him and a number of other leading dramatists to write new plays for our start on the South Bank. Harold Pinter, Robert Bolt, John Osborne, David Hare, Stephen Poliakoff and Howard Brenton had all delivered; Alan’s contribution was Bedroom Farce which we directed together.
Its announcement caused a severe attack of pious indignation in the press. Was it right, they sniffed, for the National Theatre to stage such a commercial writer? I was furious. I had long believed that Alan was one of our major dramatists. To social historians in the twenty-first century his plays will be essential reading if they are to understand what it was like to live in Britain in the Seventies and Eighties. I found it impossible to accept the argument of the press. A subsidised theatre does not exist to do only those plays that are so difficult (and possibly so boring) that nobody else will put them on. It is there to cherish excellence in every form.
Staging Bedroom Farce alongside Alan allowed me to appreciate his extraordinary skill as a director. At that time he had not directed in London – only at his small theatre in Scarborough. But during the next fifteen years, his work at the National established him as a consummate director of other people’s plays as well as his own. He also emerged over those NT years as a great dramatist, and was increasingly recognised as such.
Alan’s working methods are by now well charted. Before he even begins to write a play he has to know what he will call it, the cast, and when rehearsals start. He also has to know that the date of the first night has been announced and that tickets are on sale. Deadlines galvanise him into action: he recognises that he can best write within a set period and when there is no escape from the task.
I count Alan as a friend both in work and in life. He has helped me through several severe personal crises. And unlike many great writers of comedy, he is not only genuinely witty, but compassionate. He is very shy, as are many theatre people, and sometimes I am sure the black dogs of melancholy attack his spirit – though this is always well-hidden. An acute understanding of the bleakness of life is underneath all the laughter in his plays; and loneliness, embarrassment and the intrinsic absurdity of sex are his themes.
He is a complex man of the theatre, and his plays have a profound sense of what works, born of an experience comparable to Molière’s or Goldoni’s. All these men tested their work on a live audience. Alan’s great strength is that he never stays still: his plays go on developing, offering a deeper and often darker vision.
His dialogue is meticulous in word and punctuation. It sounds naturalistic, but it has a rhythm and choice of vocabulary which are entirely his. This precise text both supports the actors and limits them. What an Ayckbourn character must do is very clearly prescribed, and the actor cannot move out of this without spoiling the rhythm of the play and the truth of the comedy. Thus, inexpert actors are made better by the clarity and precision of his writing, whereas imaginative actors can find playing him a little restricting, once they have succeeded in fulfilling his considerable demands. This ability to define his characters within exact limits is something that Alan shares with all the masters. We are a fortunate age to have had our own Molière.
Chapter Eight
Granville Barker is Britain’s unsung dramatist. He was clearly our first great director, and his Prefaces to Shakespeare remain the most practical guide among all the countless books on that over-scrutinised subject. Without Granville Barker’s inspiration, there probably would not be a National Theatre. He articulated what it could do and campaigned for its existence throughout his life. So one of the joys of my early period at the NT was getting Bill Gaskill to stage The Madras House. The production was beautiful, the text full of rich paradox, and Bill sustained the wit with a perfect sense of early twentieth-century society.
Another joy was my friend Maximilian Schell’s production of Tales from the Vienna Woods by Ödön von Horváth – a major European dramatist being performed in England for the first time.
It is unlikely that either of these productions could have happened without the existence of a national theatre. The same is certainly true of a major reclamation begun by Bill Bryden around this time. On a bright, cold Easter Saturday in 1977 (it even snowed a little) he directed The Crucifixion outside the theatre on its river terraces. This was the start of a project that was to grow into an epic trilogy, brilliantly adapted by Tony Harrison from the ancient English Mystery Plays. The designs were by Bill Dudley, and the Albion Band provided the music.
It brought medieval drama back to life, and was developed by Bill over eight years into the three-play cycle known as The Mysteries, which moved from The Creation to Doomsday. It was performed as a promenade production in the Cottesloe with audiences mingling among the performers and creating natural playing spaces for the action. But it all began that cold Easter Saturday on the terraces when the absorbed crowds visibly flinched as J
esus was nailed to the Cross.
It was an astonishing afternoon that made me glad I had been able to resist the Board members who had urged me not only to fire Bill after the disaster of Il Campiello at our Royal opening, but were proposing themselves as a play-reading committee to safeguard the National against future flops.
I had admired Bill’s talents since seeing, some years earlier, a production in Scotland of a play he had written himself called Willie Rough. He is a director who needs particular conditions. For him, work in the theatre has to be work among friends; he has to feel himself to be the genial captain of the team in order to give of his best. Many thought that when rehearsing he did more good work on the play in the Green Room bar than in the rehearsal room. His Cottesloe company was matey, boozy and extremely male.
Bill’s strengths are his obsessions: he is totally loyal to his friends and to his ideas. And he did wonderful productions in the Cottesloe – from Mamet to O’Neill and from Lark Rise to The Mysteries. When occasionally he moved into the larger spaces of the Lyttelton or the Olivier, the impact was less powerful.
I have always been bad at knowing what will shock people in the theatre – I suppose because I am not shocked myself by anything that is honest to the meaning of a piece. In 1977, Tony Harrison and Harrison Birtwistle collaborated on Bow Down. The play contained strong language and disturbing situations, but seemed to me to have integrity. Princess Margaret did not take the same view. She saw it on a semi-official visit, and despatched a message to Max Rayne forcefully expressing her extreme displeasure. He was greatly perturbed. My belief that living theatre should provoke, and Max’s fear that provocative theatre might not win or keep us our necessary friends, now and again came between him and me. Max was broadminded himself; but he was continually anxious because he well understood that others might not be. The Bow Down trouble blew over, but the royal disapproval was often referred to as a cautionary tale.
However, even I was worried (though enchanted) when I saw the preview of a Cottesloe pantomime based on The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was deliberately rude, crude, and high-spirited. Michael Bogdanov directed it with exuberance, and it had in David Rappaport an extraordinary dwarf performer who at one point made a human missile of himself, hurling his tiny body at a series of vast locked doors. There was community singing when the audience joined in the lyric, ‘Bums and tits, bums and tits – having it away’. At a later performance this was objected to by a lady as chauvinism; she led the audience in an alternative version, ‘bums and pricks’. I sat at the preview in some trepidation. Christ, I thought, this is the National’s family Christmas show! But the packed house of children, my own among them, were helpless with giggles and adored it. Indeed Edward and Lucy sang ‘bums and tits’ for some time regularly at breakfast. It was obviously a children’s dream-come-true to sing rude words in public at the National Theatre; and to see adults being as rude as themselves. I wondered who would write to the chairman about it. Surprisingly, no-one did.
Chapter Nine
I was trying at this time to do something I attempted more than once over the years. It wasn’t enough, I thought, to seek the best actors, the best plays and the best directors. By doing that I was well on the way to turning the building into a high-class cultural department store. What I wanted was to provide the place with an identifiable aesthetic. I knew from my RSC years that a cohesive company of actors, concentrating mainly on one dramatist, could forge a recognisable style. But that was an impossible objective for the National. Its brief was to stage plays from Aeschylus to Brenton; moreover, we had three theatres that were entirely different, with nothing in common architecturally. They shared only one characteristic: a need to be filled with audiences at every performance.
It seemed to me from the beginning that a division, either into separate companies within each theatre, or into separate companies that moved around our three stages, was the only way to achieve particularity. Our actors numbered over a hundred – too many to develop an ensemble feeling. I was very aware that our best productions at the RSC had been done by a group of some thirty or forty people, the absolute maximum if the actors are to know each other and thus work well together.
But in order to divide up our large company into smaller groups, I needed impresario talent. Only a few first-class directors of plays are also impresarios, or indeed want to be. I asked Stuart Burge to join me. At first he said yes, but then backed out. He had suddenly been asked to run the Royal Court which was in serious trouble. Then I asked Terry Hands, who had indicated he was ready to leave the RSC. My idea was that Terry and I should each head a crack Olivier ensemble, while Christopher Morahan ran the Lyttelton, and Bill Bryden the Cottesloe. Terry said yes, while making it clear that he wanted to be my number two. I had reservations about this. Finally, Trevor Nunn persuaded Terry to co-direct the RSC with him and this was clearly a better job.
These early frustrations were compounded by Paul Scofield. He had given a magnificent performance in the production I did of Volpone and he was also very fine in Bill Gaskill’s Madras House. I asked Paul if he would head my Olivier group, and initially he was very enthusiastic. ‘How exciting, how marvellous,’ he said. Then came the inevitable letter saying no. Paul combines a generous instinct for the new and exciting with a deep natural caution. There is often an aftermath.
Eventually, I found the solution to realising the National’s full potential: three or four separate directors each heading a company and each company giving three plays in repertory – one in the Olivier, one in the Lyttelton and one in the Cottesloe. Out of this came some superlative productions from Ayckbourn’s company, and also from the one led by Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge. The work was individual and special to each group. It provided a rich amount of roles for the actors, and thus opportunity for growth; also three very different stages on which to perform. The scheme was set up late in my time at the National and, though expensive, because it used more actors, it was beginning to flourish as I prepared to leave. I am sad that it did not continue.
Chapter Ten
In May 1977 we had another strike. This time the cause was absurd. Ralph Cooper, a plumber and shop steward who had been repeatedly warned about the quality of his work, was sacked for not fixing two wash basins. The resulting walkout closed the theatre for four days and thirteen performances were lost. Cooper was reinstated pending arbitration and then kept on because of a technicality. Seven months later he was again dismissed for inefficiency, this time successfully.
My chief memory of those lost performances is the helplessness of well-intentioned liberals like Chris Morahan, Michael Bryant and myself in the face of expert extremists. At this time, union power was sanctified and absolute, and it was genuinely difficult for managers to manage. The plumber’s strike, however, had one advantage. It prepared us for what lay ahead. We began to develop the know-how that was to help us through the disruptions by the stage staff in the coming year, led by Kon Fredericks, and the terrible strike of 1979. But well before these crises hit us, we had troubles of another kind.
The National Theatre was created by Act of Parliament, and the building was paid for by the government and by the Greater London Council. But in typical British fashion, these begetters of the dream had never settled who was to foot the bills for the upkeep of the building once it was there. Nor were its running costs ever evaluated. I suspect that those who should have worked out these figures had kept diplomatically quiet; they feared the whole enterprise would be doomed if the true running costs were known. By the autumn of 1977, the National was in appalling financial straits despite the fact that we were hugely successful with the public and our box office was booming. The trouble was caused partly by the building delays, partly by the strikes of that year and the year before, but mainly because it was only now becoming apparent that the place was hideously expensive to run before even a single play was performed.
At last, a special government grant rescued us; but we could no l
onger afford visiting companies: there just wasn’t the money. This was a bitter blow. I had wanted the National to welcome great foreign companies regularly. The RSC, in my time, had put on Peter Daubeny’s twelve illuminating World Theatre Seasons at the Aldwych. So I knew at first hand how renewing to the British theatre such work was. In the National’s first eighteen months on the South Bank, we had been able to present the TNP from Lyon in productions by Roger Planchon and Patrice Chéreau (Tartuffe and La Dispute respectively); the Schaubühne from West Berlin in Gorky’s Summerfolk, which staggered audiences and was Peter Stein’s London debut; and the astonishing Spanish actress and director Nuria Espert in Divinas Palabras.
Now all this had to end. We were caught in a bureaucratic absurdity. The British Council exists to promote British arts abroad; the Arts Council exists to promote British arts at home; but nobody exists to promote foreign art in Britain. Peter Daubeny, with fervent tenacity, had regularly blackmailed the governments of the foreign companies into paying themselves for the chance of appearing in London. Unfortunately, those days – and, sadly, Peter – had gone. Why, asked the French and the Germans, weren’t we, as the National Theatre, able to get additional funds from the British government towards the cost of presenting productions from abroad? Their own governments did, the other way round.
I tried to rehearse The Country Wife during the height of the financial crisis. To make matters worse, this was my first (and only) attempt at a Restoration comedy, so I was dealing with an unfamiliar world. Although there were pleasures along the way – among them a cast including Albert Finney, Susan Littler and Richard Johnson – the production was a failure. The energy I draw from rehearsals and can then reapply to administration just wasn’t there. Normally, I find few things more satisfying than the concentration of the rehearsal room after the hurly-burly of the office. But at this time, the task was too daunting in both departments and my work as a director unquestionably suffered.