by Peter Hall
Chapter Twelve
In the spring of 1979 Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce, which had been a big success on the South Bank, opened on Broadway with its original British cast. I could not remember a new play on Broadway (and certainly not a comedy) receiving such superlative notices. We thought we had an incontrovertible hit. But American Equity had ruled that our actors could only stay for ten weeks, so I went to New York and replaced them, when those weeks were up, with a very good American cast.
The play had been doing excellent business; but now this stopped with the suddenness of a tap being turned off. The British hit without British actors was, in the most supremely fashion-conscious town in the world, unfashionable overnight. Nobody came. American Equity had turned a big success into a failure.
Throughout my career, I have been angered by the prejudiced behaviour of both British and American Equity. I have never met an actor who did not lament the awfulness of the situation. The two unions seem content merely to run protection societies. Yet our countries share a common language and we certainly benefit by understanding each other’s culture. It would enormously advantage our theatres if British plays could be done by British actors on Broadway and American plays by Americans in London. Instead, both unions are obstructionist and practise an unpleasant discrimination which allows ‘stars’ into either country without question, but which prevents lesser actors, however talented, from performing. This particularly hurts the young, and seems to me inequable in the extreme. It is as if British publishers refused to publish American books on the grounds that we have enough of our own books already. The only hope is government action on both sides of the Atlantic to insist on freedom and equality of opportunity.
That summer, at Glyndebourne, I directed Fidelio, Beethoven’s great hymn to freedom, honesty and love. Elizabeth Söderstrom created a Leonora full of strength and beauty, yet devoid of sentimentality; and Bernard Haitink paced the opera so that it grew from a small domestic singspiel to the high epic aspirations of its finale. I had done a good piece of work. Nonetheless, Glyndebourne seemed an empty place without Maria. We had made a commitment to each other during this eventful year of strikes, tensions and overwork. I was trying to plan a way of disentangling myself from my marriage. There was no way forward without many hurts. I was tormented by the thought of facing my family with another break-up.
At the National, my fellow directors – Christopher Morahan, Harold Pinter, Peter Wood, Michael Rudman and Bill Bryden – were making the theatre healthy again after the long sickness of the strike. Peter’s elegant production of Schnitzler’s Undiscovered Country brought another unfamiliar play to the Olivier. And Michael’s Death of a Salesman began the English canonisation of Arthur Miller. This also had a performance by Warren Mitchell as Willy Loman that remains with me as one of the half-dozen or so great pieces of character-acting I have seen. The personality of Loman was totally assimilated into the actor and the audience seemed to know everything about him. I would place Wilfrid Lawson in The Father, Peggy Ashcroft in The Deep Blue Sea, Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff, Judi Dench’s Cleopatra, Paul Scofield in The Government Inspector and Dustin Hoffman’s final, New York version of Shylock in that same pantheon. They were all, in a sense, imitations, in that the actors concerned were not immediately like the characters portrayed. Yet in each case they had developed and emphasised the qualities in themselves that were in the role, until they became the whole person.
In November, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus opened in the Olivier. Although Shaffer had been a friend of mine for years (and I had done one play of his, The Battle of Shrivings, not very successfully in the West End), John Dexter was clearly Shaffer’s director, having staged, dazzlingly, two of his biggest successes, The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus.
Shaffer has a questioning and vigorous spirit. His plays, in their first drafts, are sometimes slapdash and excessive, like vast oil sketches. There is often fine detail, but more that is approximate. They never, though, lack boldness, ambition and energy; and that energy sustains the essential refining that follows.
Some authors (Harold Pinter is a prime example) seldom change a word. They consider every comma before delivering their script to the director. Shaffer says he likes to ‘carve’ his text in rehearsal; there is constant cutting, shaping and altering. It is exhilarating for all concerned. But he needs actors and a director who are open to such a process and stimulated by working in that way. In the early stages the director is as much script-editor as the man who brings the play to life in the theatre.
Dexter had done all this on Equus, but when it came to Amadeus he said he was only prepared to do the same again if he was rewarded with an unusually large percentage of the play’s world earnings. This was not only a precedent for directors in the future, it looked unreasonable. There was a quarrel between Shaffer and Dexter which I tried very hard to heal for most of the summer. I spent hours in the phone box at Glyndebourne on hot summer evenings speaking to one or the other. What I could not say was that from the moment I had read Amadeus I had wanted to direct it myself. The play fascinated me. It was about a composer I worshipped, and also dealt with one of the strangest of paradoxes to anybody who works among artists: that talent is randomly given and need not, indeed often does not, inhabit a decent person.
I did all I could to keep Dexter and Shaffer together, but in the end they split with simply no chance of reconciliation. After an interval, Peter asked me if I would direct the play, and I gladly agreed. Happily, John Dexter and I remained friends. He continued to work at the National and I worked for him a couple of times at the Metropolitan Opera, where for five years he was director of productions.
In August, Peter Shaffer and I took a quick trip to Vienna and to Salzburg in order to seal our partnership, talk through the play, and refresh ourselves about Mozart. There was, as well, a personal reason why I wanted to be in Salzburg. Maria was singing Cherubino there. It would be possible to see her and discuss our problems. As Peter and I drank Viennese white wine like lemonade, I explained the painful intricacies of my private life. He didn’t judge; he listened. It was all a friend could do; and it was a help.
A month or so later I found myself immersed in rehearsals of Amadeus, with a cast which included Paul Scofield as Salieri, Felicity Kendal as Constanza, and Simon Callow as Mozart. Shaffer worked with his usual exuberance and creativity, but I think we all sensed that we were on a dangerous enterprise. Some of my colleagues had not been too keen on the play (one of them wrote it off as a dramatised sleeve-note for a record). We were also very conscious of the traps immortalised by Hollywood bio-pics: ‘Good morning, Beethoven. Have you seen Haydn today?’ How do you deal with historical giants without ludicrous name-dropping? How does a man called Mozart even make his first entrance? Peter Shaffer hit upon an idea. Unannounced, a small, pallid, large-eyed man in a showy wig and a showy set of clothes runs on and freezes. He is pretending to be a cat and stands immobile waiting for a mouse. He is playing a childish game, and Constanza is the mouse. Mozart was on stage.
Another big problem was the music itself. If we once let Mozart’s music into the play, its potency would make it the overriding experience of the evening. Yet the music clearly had to be there to demonstrate his genius as against the ordinary talent of Salieri. Harrison Birtwistle had an original and subtle solution. He took pieces of Mozart, treated them electronically, and they became a delicate remembrance of the C minor Mass, rather than the C minor Mass itself. The public heard no distortion – only a distancing.
The first time a new play meets an audience is its greatest test. However anxious the circumstances, however rough the work, there is in that couple of hours an immediate awareness of whether the piece is speaking to the public and whether – however provoking its subject matter – it attracts them. The first preview of Amadeus left us in no doubt. Although we continued to work on the play for the next year and a half, making quite substantial changes right up to its opening on Broadway, we knew from th
at very first evening that the public adored it.
As a writer, Peter has a remarkably popular gift. Again and again, he takes an intricate metaphysical argument and, by bold speeches and strong emblems, makes it appeal to vast numbers of people. His dialogue is sinewy, antithetical and energetic. Clause tumbles on clause, qualifying and redefining. His characters speak as he speaks – in a torrent of words and with a delight in complexity. Shaffer has to be played fast. Then what is being said emerges clearly from the abundance of qualifications; then the scene ‘holds’ – like a plate spinning on top of a rod. To change the image, his plays are like movies that must be run at the right speed. If they go slowly, they jerk incoherently from one thought to another and can seem pretentious and contradictory. At the right speed, they offer the joy of actually discovering a thought.
I have had two more experiences of Shaffer plays. One I staged while still at the National, Yonadab, which did not achieve its promise. Neither Shaffer nor I developed our work on it enough. Peter then rewrote it brilliantly and it was scheduled for production on Broadway by the Shuberts. But it never happened: I imagine it was thought too risky in Broadway’s current fearfulness. Then, in 1992, I directed The Gift of the Gorgon for the RSC. I found this a challenging play for any author to have created – certainly in his mid-sixties. Its subject is the very nature of revenge. We praise Greek tragedy for its terrible catharsis, when blood must have blood. Yet we think it inhuman to execute modern terrorists. As the IRA bombs continue to kill men, women and children indiscriminately, Shaffer’s finger is still on the pulse of our society, making the theatre once again a place to debate its moral dilemmas.
1979 was a watershed year for the National. Relative peace and creativity marked my remaining nine years there. Early in 1980 Maria came to London with everything she possessed in the world packed into her suitcases. We found a little early nineteenth-century house in Bramerton Street and started to make our life together. I felt there was great hope for the future after the raw experiences of the past twelve months. There had been the guilt and the misery of telling Edward and Lucy; the anguish I caused to Jacky, even though she must have felt relief at no longer having to live a sham. But changes in life seem inevitably to bring pain: I can only say that I have suffered it as well as provoked it. I made my children very uneasy, if not unhappy, at this time. I could not settle for a miserable marriage. Our divorce finally came through at the end of 1981.
Soon after Maria had arrived in London she went off to Geneva to sing in The Barber of Seville. I took a long weekend to be with her and found myself, as I had with Leslie, quite happy to be the companion of the star. From now on, I often spent weekends in some European capital where Maria was singing. I once even flew to Chicago on a Friday night and returned on the Sunday so that I could be at an important first night of hers. When the spring came, we went to Eden Roc in the South of France for a few days of luxury. Holidays had never been part of my way of life; I was beginning to relax a little.
In January, Trevor Nunn had taken Peter Brook and me to see the progress that had been made on the Barbican Theatre – now, unbelievably, ten years late. What John Bury and I had conceived all those years ago looked, I thought, good; and, to my mind, it has proved to be the best theatre in London for large-scale Shakespeare. Sadly, though, I have never worked there. Trevor wanted me to do one of the productions at its opening in 1982 (he even proposed Peter Pan), but the NT Board, in one of its rare moments of pig-headedness, refused me permission on the grounds that the differences between the two companies would become blurred. I thought this was short-sighted.
In my early years at the National, when I was still with Jacky, we lived at the Barbican, thirty-nine floors up on top of the Cromwell Tower. Way beneath us we could see the whole sweep of the river and the dome of St Paul’s. Though our real home was at Wallingford, the Barbican apartment was very convenient for the South Bank; and from our vantage point we could watch the Arts Centre being built below us. But as it grew I became increasingly disenchanted with the place. Along with the silence and the sense of exhilaration that went with living so high was the added benefit that I couldn’t see the brutal architecture of the Centre unless I looked down.
Larry Olivier lived at the top of a similar, sky-scraping block in Victoria. One night he phoned me and, competitive as always, wondered who was higher, he or I. He told me he would flash his lights on and off, and I was to tell him if I could see them. I couldn’t …
The 1981 Evening Standard drama awards were held in the Olivier. I was given a special trophy for ‘Twenty-Five Years of Service to the Theatre’. The press were no longer dubbing me as beleaguered. I wrote in my Diaries: ‘Two years ago the Standard was crucifying me, so I hope the presentation statue has a little blood on it.’
The last forty years have seen a proliferation of awards, for achievements ranging from poetry to bee-keeping. Awards are like school prizes, very gratifying to collect yet finally meaningless. There is clearly no ‘best’ anything, and the whole business has now become merely a marketing tool. Awards have had the thoroughly bad effect of concentrating the market; in making one a winner, they brand all the rest as losers.
I was pleased to get my Evening Standard statue for twenty-five years’ service. But this was partly because I knew beforehand that I was going to get it. The hyped, competitive drama of the Oscars, Tonys and Oliviers was avoided. When I was given a Tony for best director on Broadway for Amadeus, I had no idea whether I had won it or not. My fellow competitors and I sat at the ceremony with carefully composed faces, knowing that the TV cameras were trained on us while the results were read out. We were all primed to act generosity in defeat.
Chapter Thirteen
At the National in the summer of 1980, Galileo, with Michael Gambon in the name part, was the first Brecht play to become a big popular success in this country. Michael had a role he was born for. He was unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful. Ralph Richardson had seen what was in him, dubbing him from the first ‘The Great Gambon’. Yet four major directors whom I asked to stage the play had turned me down: they did not think Michael was a starry enough choice. Convinced they were wrong, I stuck to the actor and went on looking. My fifth choice, John Dexter, accepted, and Gambon became an immediate star, not least with his fellow actors. The dressing rooms at the National look on to a four-sided courtyard, and after the first night all the windows contained actors in various states of undress leaning out and applauding him – a unique tribute.
The notorious event of the year was The Romans in Britain which I had commissioned from Howard Brenton and liked because it was a strong indictment of imperialism that touched a contemporary nerve. It also clearly needed the epic spaces of the Olivier stage. Michael Bogdanov took on the play as director and, when the time came, delivered a clear, tough account of it.
I warned the NT Board, as I had done in similar situations in the past, that the play was politically as well as sexually contentious. And after seeing the first preview (I had also seen some late rehearsals) I told Howard and Michael that if the crucial scene of homosexual rape were to take place not front stage, as was happening, but out of sight, the play stood more chance of being reviewed as a serious piece of work. My worry was that little would be written about except the rape, and much else that was interesting would be ignored. But I didn’t press the point because they persuaded me that they had good reasons for presenting the scene as they did – it was shocking; but then it was meant to be. Next day, I had to leave for New York where I was due to put on Amadeus.
At a later preview of The Romans, Horace Cutler, the leader of the Greater London Council (which partially subsidised the National), walked out angrily with his chief whip Geoffrey Seaton, and sent me a strong letter of protest, releasing it to the press. Their action made front-page news and the story rumbled on for days, especially as the letter contained GLC threats (never realised) to suspend the NT’s grant. There were some memorable headlines: ‘
Take off this nude shocker’, ‘Hard times for the Celts’, ‘Psst … wanna see a show?’ ‘Nude show fills stalls’.
Meanwhile, our perpetual guardian of the nation’s morals, Mary Whitehouse, laid a complaint with Scotland Yard. But the police, after watching some performances, decided that a prosecution was not justified. Unlike the police, Mrs Whitehouse never saw the play; she did not, she said, wish to run the risk of sullying her mind. She sent her solicitor instead.
From New York, I defended The Romans vigorously in every part of the media that would give me space, while the Arts Council muttered about my lack of wisdom in providing ammunition for the National’s enemies at Westminster.
On the whole the notices had been cool – though Harold Hobson was impressed in The Sunday Times (so, many months later, was Bernard Levin in a big feature in The Times). Among the avalanche of letters printed in the newspapers, both of support and condemnation, was a defence of the play from Edward Bond, and another from the head of Eyre Methuen, Geoffrey Strachan: ‘It is part of the business of theatre to dramatise painful subjects,’ he wrote, ‘… a theatre that is afraid of great failures will see no great successes.’
Well into the run, controversy was still buzzing. One night a small group of hecklers in the audience threw fireworks and bags of flour at the actors, shouting, ‘Get poofs off the stage.’
Then, at Christmas, Michael Bogdanov had a summons served on him at the stage door by Mary Whitehouse’s solicitor. Having failed to get any action from the police, she was bringing a private prosecution against Michael under the sexual offences act, accusing him of ‘procuring an act of gross indecency’ in staging the rape scene. This summons was a curious interpretation of the law because the act had been designed to deal with pimping, not theatre performances.