by Peter Hall
Typically, the government marked this astonishing achievement by giving the National no increase in grant at all for 1987, though inflation was by then running at four per cent. Once more, it was easy to demonstrate that we were being penalised for success, and thus prevented from doing all that we could have done with a subsidy only marginally higher. A little more money would have enabled us to be a lot more productive.
Even so, it had been a lucky year and I knew it. Fortunes can change quickly in the theatre. Takings for a production can drop dramatically within days – particularly if it is attracting a specialised audience which is used up. But the reasons for failure in the theatre are legion: a sudden cold snap, a heatwave, the state of the pound and its effect on tourists, or now (horrifically) a bomb scare. Leaving these aside, any theatre conducts its own very efficient market research every night of the year: if no-one comes, we know we should not have done the play, for a play without an audience is communicating nothing. And it is no help to repeat last year’s formula for success in order to draw the crowds; this year it is unlikely to work. The public expect us to be innovative, to lead fashion, not to follow it.
Throughout my time at the National, my first anxious act every morning was to read the returns from the three theatres for the performances of the previous night. We had to play to an average of eighty per cent capacity; below that and we were below budget.
Though 1986 was lucky for us, concern for the whole theatre community continued. On top of the government’s subsidy cuts and the punishing inflation, most of the arts were desperately worried about their money from local authorities. Four hundred arts organisations had become threatened because of rate- capping. I have kept a poem, published in the New Statesman, which expresses the feeling at this time. It is by Roger Woddis who subtitled it ‘After “Bagpipe Music” by Louis MacNeice’:
RATE CAP MUSIC
It’s no go the concert-hall,
It’s no go the opera,
All they want is a darkened house
And a corpse cut up by a doctor.
Their pockets are filled with lumps of lead,
Their boots are made for kicking,
Their hearts are lined with frosted glass
And their heads with metal sheeting.
It’s no go the council grant,
It’s no go the players,
All they want is a nation starved
And robbed of its eyes and ears.
It’s no go the soaring voice,
It’s no go the dancers,
Say goodbye to the living stage
And the life that art enhances.
The pound is falling hour by hour,
The pound will fall forever,
But if you break their bloody necks,
You won’t destroy their ledgers.
That was a long while ago. The slow miserable decline has gone on, and the capacity of the arts for survival is still being severely tested. The Fringe remains full of vitality, though the quantity of work produced has shrunk. The National Theatre, so far, thrives against enormous odds, but the other national companies lurch from one crisis to another. Up and down the country, theatres are doing less. There is also less room for risk-taking and more room for the ordinary. The eroding of the fertile and profitable landscape, created by Maynard Keynes and tilled by Jennie Lee and Arnold Goodman and their successors, still continues. The waste is shameful when the potential is so great.
Chapter Twenty
David Hare’s and Howard Brenton’s Pravda was a very apt satire for us to stage during the ferment of 1985/6; but before it was put on, just in case several of the protagonists seemed suspiciously like certain members of the Establishment, I took Counsel’s advice. His opinion was that if anybody claimed to be one of the deliberately cartoon-like characters, he would have virtually no hope of proving this, and would anyway be considered a fool. Nonetheless, I warned the Board of possible problems ahead, and they asked to read the play. Their general view of it was chilly. It wasn’t libellous, they thought, but a thin and silly piece of work, most unlikely to succeed. Plays are never easy to judge in manuscript, and in this case the Board’s assessment was adrift. Pravda ran in the Olivier to capacity business for over a hundred performances, and was the biggest success the National ever had with a modern play. I loved it. Though often crude and deliberately over-the-top, it had vigour and the outrageousness of Ben Jonson. And it contained, at its centre, Anthony Hopkins’s blazing star performance as the predatory newspaper tycoon, who seduced everyone with his dangerous Afrikaans vowels.
Soon after the first night of Pravda, I had another passage of arms with John Osborne, who had often labelled me publicly as the Ghengis Khan of the South Bank. We had met – and he was predictably cordial, as always when face to face – to talk about a revival at the National of his 1957 success The Entertainer. Alan Bates was to play the role created by Olivier, and I suggested Joan Plowright might now be the right age to play Phoebe, the wife; she would be very good casting, and there was the added interest that she had originally created the role of the daughter. He agreed.
Just before rehearsals began, Osborne suddenly protested that he had never been consulted about the casting and would not have Joan in the production. It was a ‘bizarre notion that was never put to me’, he declared. The rights of the play belonged to him of course; and though terms had been agreed with his agent, John had not yet returned his signed contract. I had no alternative but to drop the project – and John achieved public humiliation of Joan, the National and me.
I suppose that this was his intention because no-one has ever been able to discover another motive. Even if the NT had confirmed every conversation in writing (and maybe it was a fault that we hadn’t), I am fairly sure he would still have found some other means of upsetting the applecart. He is driven by demons which are probably hell for him. But they are also hell for anybody else who has the misfortune of getting too close.
Joan, instead, played the lead in Mrs Warren’s Profession in the Lyttelton, and gave a brilliant performance. At last she was at the new National Theatre.
I went on accusing the Arts Council, publicly as well as privately, of feebleness right up to the end of my time at the National. In 1986 and 1987 there was again no increase at all in the NT’s grant despite inflation. And in 1988, my last year, our increase was 1.3 per cent with inflation at 3.2 per cent. We still managed to balance our books – just. But, like every other theatre in the country, we were forced to become less and less productive.
Commercial sponsorship was the only answer. And in 1986, for the first time at the NT, a main house production, The Threepenny Opera, had been paid for by an outside firm. There is certainly a case for the use of sponsorship for experimental work (what industry would call research and development) but the National has a clear responsibility, under the government, to provide a strong, varied central repertory. It is totally wrong that this work should exist at the whim of commercial patronage. It should be fully subsidised by the state, which brought the theatre into being by Act of Parliament.
We were soon beset by absurdities. We found it impossible to raise money for the Jacobean play ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore because sponsors were fearful of being besmirched by its title. And though we had better luck with my production of Antony and Cleopatra, which Ladbroke’s sponsored, they put up a large marquee in the foyer to give pre-performance champagne to their guests, who then came in late, loudly interrupting the crucial early scenes. They were not play goers, but party goers.
My public objections to sponsorship, and how it was being used to cut grants, exasperated the new arts minister, Richard Luce. He took my colleagues and me to task for having a ‘welfare-state mentality’.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the spring of 1986, the chairman of the Arts Council, William Rees-Mogg, told the chairman of the National Theatre, Max Rayne, and the chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Geoffrey Cass, that there were bad rumours in th
e air about the way Trevor Nunn and I were running our organisations. There was concern about the time we took off and the money we had earned on the commercial exploitation of our own productions. There were darker, unspecified allegations.
I didn’t think Trevor or I should worry. We certainly made money when our own subsidised work was transferred by an independent producer into the commercial theatre. But this was only following an approved practice that existed throughout the profession, not only for directors but actors, writers, designers, fight-arrangers, lighting designers. Everyone went on to a new contract when commercial interests were making money out of their subsidised work.
At this time, a really big star could reckon on earning between five and six hundred pounds a week at the National. As the star of a huge West End success it was possible for him or her to take home £8,000 a week. I was earning £1,000 a week at the National as its director. A commercial hit on my normal percentage of box office would bring me up to £3,000 a week. Broadway earnings were even higher.
As far as Trevor and I were concerned, what transferred, what the terms were, how much money we got, everything, was set by market-forces and monitored in detail by our respective Boards as well as by the Arts Council. Time off, too, had to be approved by our Boards; indeed, Trevor had for some time wanted to leave the RSC but had been persuaded to stay on a part-time basis.
In June Trevor and I were at Glyndebourne. I was directing Simon Boccanegra and he was reviving his superb Porgy and Bess. The Sunday Times Insight team asked if they could do a joint interview with us early one morning before rehearsals to talk about the virtues and dangers of sponsorship. Trevor was hesitant, but I thought it would be a good idea for us to speak together on such a vexed subject.
However, the two reporters – after the photographer had taken a jolly picture of us laughing together in the garden of Glyndebourne – had next to nothing to ask about sponsorship. Instead, they surprised us with a series of charges. We had both made, they said, a lot of money out of commercial transfers, in my case Amadeus (in Trevor’s, Les Misérables), claiming – wrongly – that I’d made more from the transfer than the NT had. They said that we both spent long periods away doing outside work. There was also an implication that I had been engaged in some sort of conspiracy to reduce the National’s financial stake in Shaffer’s Yonadab if it went to Broadway (which it didn’t) in order to increase my own as its director. This last charge was based on their description of a meeting with the Shubert Organization (which had never happened).
The following Sunday, the jolly photograph of Trevor and me appeared in The Sunday Times over a massive story with the headline ‘Laughing All the Way to the Bank’.
That morning, I was invited to defend myself on The World This Weekend, but I wanted time to think. I cooked the Sunday lunch instead. Two days later, I gave a press conference at the National to set the record straight. Soon afterwards an article of mine was printed in The Sunday Times answering the accusations. But there still remained the professional slur and the implications of conspiracy. Trevor and I both sued for libel amidst enormous press coverage. Spitting Image showed us both riding on a gravy train.
In former days – the days of Jennie Lee and Arnold Goodman or, later, of David Eccles and Patrick Gibson – the Minister of the Arts and the chairman of the Arts Council would almost certainly have rushed to the defence of Trevor and myself, pointing out that we had done nothing whatsoever out of order. On this occasion there was not a word. Hearteningly, many others had rallied round (Judi Dench wrote me a dashing postcard: ‘Dear Peter, Fuck the Press, Love Judi’). But I cannot easily forgive either Richard Luce or William Rees-Mogg for their silence, or for implying by it that there was something to investigate. The overall effect of the article had certainly tended to discredit the subsidised arts, as well as Trevor and myself. But that presumably was its aim, like similar, personalised attacks on the BBC which had been going on from time to time over the previous four or five years.
Much of what The Sunday Times said was of the unfair, knockabout kind that inevitably comes with public life. Anonymous sources and unknown friends were liberally quoted. But I sued only to disprove the especially damaging Yonadab conspiracy charge. I ran, however, into an enormous snag. I could not legally confine my case to that alone. The Sunday Times, I was warned, were planning to use all their accusations as defence – and that could well spin the court proceedings out over many weeks. Even if I conducted my own case, thus saving on lawyers’ fees, I had to be prepared for hundreds of thousands of pounds of costs in the event of not winning; and perhaps even if I won. In other words, to sue would be crazy unless I had half a million pounds that I could afford to lose. I had a house in Chelsea worth about £250,000. And that was all. My extended family and alimony had seen to that. Finally, I withdrew my libel action.
Trevor kept up his intention to sue for years. He was obsessive about it, as I had been for a time. At one point it was rumoured that he was setting spies on Andrew Neil, The Sunday Times editor, and that Neil had responded by setting spies on him. Or the other way round. It was an image that gave gleeful gossip to London chatterers. In the end, though, Trevor also withdrew. The paper, at his insistence, had printed a piece clarifying, as they put it, what they had written. It was, I suppose, the nearest the media ever get to a climb-down.
In May 1988, eight months after I had abandoned my libel action, I was interviewed on BBC Radio for the Today programme. Under pressure, I was unwise enough to make some highly critical remarks about The Sunday Times. The next day, the paper threatened to sue unless they had an apology and a complete withdrawal. They said that my remarks were a slur on the integrity of a fine group of journalists. The BBC made a complete apology, and I had no alternative but to admit my remarks were intemperate. I was, however, able to stress that there had been no conspiracy over Yonadab.
The whole painful business proved to me beyond doubt that suing for libel is a gamble that can only be taken by wealthy organisations or by individual people who are extremely rich. What was printed in The Sunday Times, though I suffered no serious lasting effect from it, has stuck in the memories of some people and been, now and again, a disconcerting irritant to me. So far-flung is the power of newspaper cuttings that when I was promoting my film She’s Been Away in Japan in 1990, the first subject brought up at a press conference was The Sunday Times and my earnings, so many years before, from Amadeus.
Amadeus was far and away the most commercial production I have been involved with, and made me the only big money I have ever earned. My royalties for the five years it played Broadway, the West End and commercial tours (including a tiny share of the producers’ profits – I had nothing from the film) amounted to some £700,000. The author and the producers made, of course, much more. The NT itself has so far made over £2 million from the play and the film.
Chapter Twenty-Two
On 4 September 1986 I wrote a letter to Max Rayne saying that it was ‘my formal and firm decision’ not to continue at the National when my contract expired in just over two years; and as the contract required that I suggest a successor, I proposed Richard Eyre. I added that the matter was now urgent as planning for 1988/9 had to start in some six months’ time. All this felt exactly right. By the end of 1988 I would have completed fifteen years at the NT and it was time for a change.
To my great delight, the Board endorsed my suggestion of Richard. But there were the inevitable contortions about the appointment. The Arts Council, under pressure from the government, insisted the job be advertised. I also feared considerable opposition to Richard from the Establishment: he had, perhaps, shown his left-wing sympathies too openly in anti-Thatcher films such as The Ploughman’s Lunch and Tumbledown. However, reports in the press that he was my choice had, it seemed, effectively discouraged other applicants. There were only four, one mad and another a Belgian who, though he had no experience in the theatre, wrote that he’d always been interested in British drama.
But Richard’s appointment was secure, an achievement at that time. He had made only one proviso. He wanted an administrative director jointly to share the responsibility with him; specifically David Aukin, a talented producer who had run Hampstead Theatre with Michael Rudman and then made a considerable success of the Haymarket in Leicester.
Both the NT and the RSC had by now become huge organisations, desperately doing, in my view, too much in order to justify their subsidies. In consequence, the job of director appeared to need help at the highest level, an administrative wizard who would lighten the load.