Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  I was also disappointed by my production of The Cherry Orchard at the start of 1978. It had a dazzling cast: Albert Finney, Dorothy Tutin, Robert Stephens, Susan Fleetwood, Ben Kingsley and – crowning it – Ralph Richardson as Firs. Rehearsals were exhilarating. And, though it was over twenty-five years since Uncle Vanya at Cambridge, my last attempt at Chekhov, I found my belief that his comedy is about the complete and painful disregard that one character has for another still valid. But once we moved from the rehearsal room into the great spaces of the Olivier, the play simply vanished. All the interplay between the actors seemed to disappear. The Olivier is a theatre for dialectical discussion and big epic statements. Irony, ambiguity, delicacy and the eloquence of the unsaid are very difficult to convey in it.

  I followed The Cherry Orchard with Albert Finney and Dorothy Tutin in Macbeth. I didn’t want to do Macbeth again, but had promised Albert I would. It proved to me once more that a most crucial decision for any director is whether he or she really wants to do the play. It is most unlikely to succeed unless an intense appetite for the job is there. The strength of that feeling has to carry you through many weeks of stressful rehearsals. I have done rigorous intellectual tasks and I have done hard physical labour as a farm worker, but nothing I have done is anything like as hard, physically or emotionally, as directing a play. Ninagawa, the great Japanese director, has said: ‘Since I became a director, there hasn’t been a time when I didn’t have a pain in my stomach.’

  My Macbeth was honest, plain – and dull. John Bury and I tried to set an example by doing it economically. We ended up doing it boringly. The notices for me and for Albert were terrible. I was very upset for Albert. Without him, I know I would not have succeeded in getting the building open. He was staunch through all our difficulties. But after the set-back of Macbeth his attitude towards the National and towards me changed. His agent, Laurie Evans, told me that Albert felt he had been exploited. Failure always brings unhappiness, and I was saddened to realise that I had lost not only a collaborator but a friend.

  There were other antagonisms in the air that were less rational. I was riding down the Strand in a taxi after a lunch appointment when I saw placards for the Evening News plastered with a chilling announcement: A NATIONAL DISASTER. Was it Aintree or us?

  When I reached the theatre, I was handed the paper. The whole of its front page was given over to this ‘disaster’, under the headline THEATRE CHIEF PETER HALL ACCUSED. Of what? A book on the National Theatre by John Elsom was about to be published in which he made it clear that his idea of how the place should be run was very different from mine.

  It was evident that the source of the Evening News story was the material in this book, suitably hotted up. And the book itself, when it appeared, made me feel very raw-skinned, with its reiteration of extravagance and mismanagement. But it received little further attention. Harold Hobson in a review wrote that ‘the author has allowed himself to be run away with by prejudice and personal feeling’. I felt better, picked myself up and went on.

  Work kept me going, and I was supported by my friends in the profession. At home it was lonely. Jacky never mentioned the shock of the Evening News. We shielded ourselves from each other and there was a cold silence. It was an encouragement when the Board extended my contract by three years, giving me a total of another five. I felt I now had the time to sweat out the battle.

  It pleased me that, in 1978, the National was putting on more and more new plays: indeed, they began to be the most popular part of our repertory. We presented David Mamet’s American Buffalo, Edward Bond’s The Woman, and David Hare’s Plenty. I had admired David’s work ever since Knuckle. He developed into a major writer during my time at the NT, and his distinctive voice began to be heard by large audiences. Plenty was a crucial part of this, and demonstrated the strength of repertory. The notices were not good, and in the West End the play would have been lucky to last a fortnight. But I believed in it and was able to keep it on, nursing it carefully by giving it only a few performances, and those towards the end of each week. Within three months, it was drawing full houses. The public had decided they liked the play, and if it had not achieved this success on the South Bank it would never have been done in America, nor become a film.

  Plenty was introduced to me when David appeared in my office sporting what I’m sure was a deliberately torn sweater. He told me that if I would commit to doing the play, he might be prepared to let me read it, and placed it on my desk.

  He is one of the warmest and most generous men I know, but he carefully hides these qualities under an icy and prickly manner that is sardonic and flip by turns. As a writer he is fastidious in his use of words, and the same goes for his productions. The total effect is sometimes chilly, but he can be a formidable director. When I was starting at the National, he did a touring production of Trevor Griffiths’s The Party. I took him out to lunch and asked him what he would like to direct next. ‘King Lear,’ he replied without hesitation. It was the only classic play that interested him and he was not prepared to waste time, as he saw it, on doing any others. Much later, in 1986, he staged it in the Olivier, not very successfully I’m afraid, with Anthony Hopkins as Lear. The production was a combination of amazing insights and inexpertness. I was to blame: it is not a play to begin on, even if you are as talented as David.

  He is naturally paranoid, nervous and edgy. In the early days, I felt he was suspicious, wanting to cast me as the cigar-smoking producer who was waiting to stamp on his darlings. But gradually, I think, he learned to trust me.

  Edward Bond is even more touchy. There is no question about his status as a dramatist; there is also no question that his defensiveness has cut him off from the mainstream of the theatre. Yet it needs him as much as he needs it. Over the last years, he has become a proud misanthropist, distrusting most actors, and disliking most productions and all directors. He is much like John Osborne: they are both exuberantly abusive on paper, but charming and very human face to face.

  Edward can elevate class prejudice until it becomes almost racist. He didn’t want to have Sebastian Graham-Jones as his assistant director when he discovered that Sebastian had been at Harrow.

  In Glyndebourne that summer of 1978, I found yet again that a month working in Sussex, if possible on Mozart, was far better for me than a holiday at the seaside. It seemed I could still do no wrong in opera and this particular time was golden. I was adding Così fan tutte, the last and most difficult of the three Da Ponte operas, to Figaro and Don Giovanni – and I met Maria Ewing.

  I knew that my marriage to Jacky was dead and that nothing would resuscitate it. I worried about Edward and Lucy and could see no course of action that would solve the situation without pain. So I did nothing and became neurotic.

  But within less than a year of meeting Maria, the passion unleashed was so violent that I ceased to be anxious about either my family or public pressures.

  Chapter Eleven

  I had always dreamed of a theatre at the centre of society. I now had my wish: the new National was certainly that. Its high profile made it very political: it was used as an argument by both parties to grind their own axes. The extreme Left suspected it of being elitist and not community-based; the Right believed it to be a hotbed of Left-wing playwrights, and the resort of actors and directors living on subsidy.

  Throughout 1978, the fight went on to establish the National as a theatre that could justifiably claim the finance to do the job that was expected of it. In this we were greatly strengthened by the enthusiasm of the public, who by this time would have been vociferous had the NT closed.

  Putting on a play is always a social act. The choice of audience, time and place make it unavoidably a political act as well. The National with all its troubles became at this time an emblem, and a potent one, of the country itself. The ugly atmosphere of union confrontation, so unpleasant at the NT, increasingly paralysed the whole of Britain.

  The grants for the following year were announce
d in the autumn and the National was given £130,000 less than the very tight budget we had submitted. More worrying still, there was a condition attached to the grant: we had to keep all wage offers within the government’s five per cent pay policy. Our backstage staff did not accept this. Indeed, earlier they had asked for a thirty-five per cent raise. In November, they flexed their muscles with two token walkouts that caused a few cancelled performances. With the encouragement of the Board, the management sought the advice of a firm of industrial trouble-shooters. They advised that unless we could get the government’s permission to break the pay code, we might as well close.

  In the middle of this unease, I was trying to direct the premiere of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Although rehearsals kept me sane and balanced, I was constantly concerned about whether I was giving the play the concentration it deserved, especially when there were growing threats that the opening might be halted by unofficial strike action. The climax came on the morning of the first night when the stage staff told us all, including the actors, that we would have to ‘wait and see’ if we would get through the performance. This did not help the actors’ nerves, stretched already; and Harold Pinter and I sat in the audience wondering whether each cue for the small revolving stage to move – the production depended on it – would be the last.

  In the event, nothing happened. And I reckoned that Betrayal was one of my best pieces of work at the National for some time. But it was not an apt moment for a play of this kind. Michael Billington dismissed it in the Guardian as ‘the amatory exploits of upper middle-class intellectuals’. Time has shown it to be much more than that.

  A fragile peace was negotiated with the stage staff towards the end of the year. But I was convinced that chaos would soon return. Union confrontation was everywhere; it seemed a civil war in all but name was about to start. Who ran the country? Its elected representatives, or its self-perpetuating union leaders? On the day Betrayal opened, The Times printed its last copy for almost twelve months. Many thought it might be the last copy ever.

  The strike that nearly broke the National, the really big one, started on 16 March 1979. On that day about seventy backstage workers walked out, beginning an unofficial strike over work shifts and pay that lasted ten weeks. It cost us – apart from the horrible expense of spirit – about £250,000 and initially closed all three theatres. But by the time it petered out in late May, few actual performances had been lost. Rather than not perform, we presented the plays in limited decor, or in the wrong sets (the staff who should have changed them were outside the building); sometimes in the wrong theatre. The actors had refused to support the strikers, so we were able to keep partial faith with the public, though audiences, even at the reduced prices, were often small.

  After three weeks of negotiation, the strikers were dismissed. All were offered reinstatement if they signed a guarantee to take no more unofficial action, and eventually some did sign. But outside the theatre, over the next painful month and more, there was a permanent picket, complete with the full impedimenta of industrial action – including huts and braziers. It was a sight that was becoming a nightly cliché on television news.

  The absurdity was that the union had declared the picket official, yet lacked the courage to declare the same about the strike.

  I hated it all: the naked hostility between the factions; the breaking up of friendships and of decencies; the sheer hypocrisy of some of the strikers and the cowardice of their union in not disciplining them and upholding agreements. Trust disappeared and with it any respect for the truth. I loathed seeing my father’s progressive ideals perverted into blatant self-interest.

  A vote was taken in the end to make the strike official; it was heavily defeated. The air, apparently, was thick with cries of ‘betrayal’ from the extremists, and with fragments of torn up NATTKE union cards. Following this, Len Murray, then general secretary of the TUC, intervened and ruled that the huts outside the theatre should go. Soon after, the strike suddenly and mysteriously collapsed. The management was branded by some as right-wing and union-bashing. But there was general praise for the stand the National had made. To sustain the sacking of seventy men at this particular point in the country’s social history was fairly astounding. Alone at that time we had withstood unofficial industrial anarchy.

  Our own crisis was of course just one outcome of the Winter of Discontent. In January, Denis Healey had warned on the radio that Britain was on the brink of ruin. Even those on whom we relied for our lives – the ambulance, water and sewage workers – even those who buried the dead, were striking. After decades of abuse, the workers, having at last gained some power and the capability of protecting themselves, were, in turn, abusing that power. It was understandable; but they were led by a new cast of trade union barons whose chief aim seemed to be chaos.

  During all this turbulence, I had slept little and talked much: life was a perpetual stormy meeting. I was depressed and exhausted and had to keep reminding myself that we had achieved something at the National. For, in truth, we couldn’t say we were the out-and-out winners. Indeed, can such a claim ever be made by either side at the end of a violent disruption such as ours?

  There were comical moments, however. Soon after the strike folded some of the sacked men halted a performance of The Double Dealer by climbing on the stage shouting abuse at the management. The audience were appalled; and among them was my friend, the playwright Simon Gray, who stood up and coolly challenged the accusations. His wife went further: she stepped up to the stage to argue a point, was pushed aside by a demonstrator, and hit him hard round the face. The audience applauded and the demonstrator threatened legal action for grievous bodily harm.

  The press coverage of the strike was dramatic and, on the whole, fair. One piece, though, did not please me very much. The Evening News yet again devoted an entire front page to the NT under a blaring headline, A NATIONAL DISGRACE. The strikers had supplied the paper with a score of wild allegations about the management’s ‘extravagances’. An example was Ralph Richardson’s boots in John Gabriel Borkman, which, as an experiment, I had tried to amplify by placing small contact microphones in the heels so that his footsteps rang out ominously as he paced his vast salon. But on the wooden stage the sound had no edge, and I abandoned the idea. The Evening News claimed that this experiment (it sounded sensationally stupid in the reading) had wasted many hundreds of pounds. It hadn’t.

  Later the paper published our detailed refutation of everything we were accused of, but only, as always in these matters, tucked away on an inside page. Our complaint to the Press Council about this was upheld, though it, too, received remarkably little space.

  I love reading newspapers, but sometimes wonder why. If they are printing a story that, because I have lived through it, I know well, nine times out of ten it is factually wrong, even allowing for the political or emotional bias of the paper. We expect, indeed encourage, our newspapers to be prejudiced. But we don’t seem to mind if the need to make news and comment dramatic is often at the expense of the truth.

  The crisis of the strike had bonded us all – directors, actors, management – together, and during it much good work had been done by the general administrator, Michael Elliott. This unity marked the end of the beginning of the new building, and although it had been tough going we emerged from it healthy and trim to start a very good period of work. The same did not happen to the country. Britain went into the long deception of Margaret Thatcher, putting off for longer the recognition of who we were and what we meant in a contracting world.

  At the general election that May the country thudded to the Right. I too voted Tory – something I have never done before and have certainly not done since. Like many others, I believed the Conservatives to be the only party with the courage and the strength to sort out the unions. My father brought me up as a radical, believing in change as part of life, but he also taught me that all governments and institutions tend in time to become corrupt. The unions had become corrupt. They
were now a threat to democracy.

  Thatcher of course did sort out the unions; it is her abiding achievement. But I think few people realised in 1979 that she was going to change the face of the Tory Party as well. In the name of free-market dogma she devastated our education system, our broadcasting system and our performing arts. It is also now evident that her economic miracle was a sham founded on dismantling our manufacturing base while riding on the luck of North Sea oil and the international profitability of the City. We are paying in the Nineties for the excesses of the Eighties when, for the first time in our history, greed was turned into a shining virtue.

  During the Thatcher years, I campaigned vigorously for the arts and was not, as a consequence, popular with either the Arts Council or Downing Street. There was a story going round at the time which may well be true. One morning the prime minister heard me on the Today programme attacking the government’s short-sighted policy on subsidy. Afterwards she greeted Richard Luce, the arts minister, with the question, ‘When are we going to be able to stop giving money to awful people like Peter Hall?’

  I have had several argumentative meetings with Mrs Thatcher, public and private. It was like talking to a suspicious headmistress who feared that artiness among the boys and girls might lead to softness and possible left-wing tendencies; they should all aim to get a proper job instead. On one occasion, taking me to task for complaining in public about the state of the British theatre, she pointed out that the British theatre was famous the world over. ‘Look at Andrew Lloyd Webber,’ she said. That comment can’t, I’m sure, have had anything to do with the fact that Lloyd Webber is the richest composer in the history of music …

  I can understand even now why I voted Tory. I very much wish that I hadn’t had to.