Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  I therefore asked David to join us, and he came well before Richard took over. But the truth is that I do not believe in two people running a theatre on an equal footing. Actors need to know who they are working for, who in the end has the authority; and a theatre, like a newspaper, finally has to express one person’s tastes.

  David’s arrival was seen by many as a move towards separating the administration, under him, from the artistic direction. But it is a false division which seldom if ever works. In any case, David was more of an impresario than a nuts-and-bolts man. He left in 1990 to take charge of Channel 4’s film division, and the National as a result reverted to one-man rule.

  Now I knew I was going a great peace settled over me, and I spent my last two years on the South Bank working happily and well.

  In January 1987, I began rehearsing Antony and Cleopatra and had the wonderful advantage of twelve weeks in which to bring this vast and intricate masterpiece to the stage. Judi Dench honoured a pact we’d made many years before by agreeing to play the fiendishly difficult part of Cleopatra; and, with her genius for self-deprecation, warned me on the first day of rehearsal that I might have taken on more than I had bargained for. ‘You have cast Cleopatra with a menopausal dwarf,’ she told me cheerfully.

  In the event, however, she created the greatest Cleopatra I have seen – wilful, dangerous, feminine, and shifting in mood and movement like quicksilver.

  The Antony of Tony Hopkins was, from the start, a great man in dangerous decline. Tony has a restless temperament, and this often leads him to dislike what he has just done. Within months of the play closing he was telling the press what a miserable time he’d had at the NT. He had similarly rejected Olivier’s National at the Old Vic when he left it in the early Seventies for Hollywood. Then he rejected Hollywood when he came back to us for Pravda, Lear and Antony. Now he is having moral doubts about his Oscar-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs.

  Antony and Cleopatra played to capacity throughout its run and was garlanded with every kind of award. I could not have hoped for a better cast, with Tim Piggott-Smith as an icily political Octavius and Michael Bryant quite superb as Enobarbus, paradoxically making a soldier of few words live by speaking the verse impeccably.

  Normally, sets have to be designed well before rehearsals start. This time, because we had the luxury of an especially long rehearsal period, Alison Chitty’s work was able to evolve organically, the usually unattainable ideal. For the first three weeks Alison sat with us and sketched furiously while we discovered the physical dynamic of each scene. Only then did she design it.

  With Antony, I had the thrilling sense of coming very close to the play. The canvas is so vast that it defies analysis. But I know nothing which reveals with richer perception the madness of love, the hypocrisy of politics, and the mystery of mortality.

  I enjoyed 1987, not simply because I remember Antony as a particular pleasure. It was also the year when A View from the Bridge was a triumph for both Alan Ayckbourn as its director and Michael Gambon in the central part. And, among other good work, we managed, by dint of Thelma Holt’s tenacity with fund-raising, to have visiting companies again: Peter Stein’s Schaubühne from West Germany; the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden in two Ingmar Bergman productions (Hamlet and Miss Julie); Ninagawa’s group from Japan; the Mayakovsky from Moscow; and the Market Theatre of Johannesburg. I seemed at last to be getting back to my original dreams for the National.

  In his review of my Diaries, in 1983 Martin Hoyle had written: ‘Though the RSC remains his glittering creation, the National Theatre may end up merely as his Frankenstein.’ By now I knew it hadn’t.

  It is true that with the RSC I was venturing where no-one had been before, and that for a young man who loved to take risks and had very little to lose it was a glorious opportunity, infinitely exciting. But the National, too, was an extraordinary and rewarding experience. In a perverse way, the fact that it was, in the beginning at least, so crises-ridden suited me. Peter Wood once said that the moment a crisis occurred, my whole being went into a state of relaxation.

  In my memory, my ten years at the RSC seem much longer than my fifteen at the National. The National was so crammed with events that it passed like lightning.

  Some time after I left, Roy Strong did a detailed survey on radio about government funding for the arts. He found against the National and the RSC: ‘Everybody thinks we ought to have these centres of excellence … but the tide is not going the way of these big old war-horses. They will be maintained, but the excitement, the push, the drive, will be with the wider cultural spread throughout the country.’

  I do not believe this is remotely true. Innovation continues to be the main characteristic of our two national theatres. Also, they keep alive the repertory of the past; give opportunities to new writers; train actors, directors, designers and technicians; and carry out essential studio research. Most of all, they bring on tomorrow’s audience.

  I believe if we had not had the RSC and the National, London would have become much like Broadway, with plastic musicals running for decades, few new plays, and many dark theatres.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My last piece of work at the National was a cycle of Shakespeare’s Late Plays Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

  I had been taught as a boy that the Late Plays were Shakespeare’s return, as an ageing man, to the romantic fairy stories of his youth, with The Tempest, the culmination, seen as a gentle and nostalgic farewell to his art. Every age reads what it needs into Shakespeare; and if the Late Plays are cut and softened in production it is possible to end up with a sentimental view. But study of the texts cannot support it.

  The Tempest is Shakespeare’s Faust play; it is terrifyingly blasphemous. A man who is a politician as well as an artist has the temerity to cast himself as God. He judges and punishes those who have done wrong to him, finally engineering a cosmic act of forgiveness. He calls for heavenly music to heal his enemies; and it is provided. Any ambiguity in the play is, I am sure, the result of Shakespeare being unable to write precisely what he meant: the stringent laws against blasphemy at that time would have prevented him.

  The Winter’s Tale finishes with similar uncertainty. Many questions are in the air, and there is still much for the characters to discuss and understand if fragile love and trust are to be reborn.

  The plays may be fairy stories, in which nightmare cruelties abound, but they do not end happily. Throughout rehearsals I found myself emphasising the degree to which they deal with extremes, especially emotional extremes. They are not works of gentle resignation but, like all archetypal stories, hard-edged, sharp and absolute. All three plays look fiercely at lust, jealousy and betrayal. In Cymbeline, a woman wakes by what she thinks is her husband’s headless corpse.

  In that production and in the programme, Imogen was called Innogen, following the new Oxford spelling. Innogen means ‘innocent person’ – an appropriate conceit in a play where the hero is called Posthumous. The m in the first printed text is clearly a misprint for double nn; and there is no recorded reference to the name ‘Imogen’ before this play.

  Some of my closest colleagues helped me to realise the Late Plays: Michael Bryant, Tim Piggott-Smith and Basil Henson were among a group of actors who, I knew, could deliver what was needed. Alison Chitty was the designer, Harry Birtwistle the composer. Right at the start, however, we had a problem. Wendy Morgan, my Innogen and Miranda, had just had a baby and found working on these two big roles, plus the demands of young motherhood, too much to deal with. She asked to be released and I had to search for a replacement.

  I’m not a great party goer; I greatly prefer dinner with a few people I am fond of to waving with vague goodwill at fifty people I hardly know. But at a Christmas party given by Duncan Weldon (who was going to back my productions when I left the National) I met Sarah Miles. I knew her slightly, and knew Robert Bolt, her husband, very well indeed. As we chatted, I began to wonder if Sa
rah could play Innogen. She had had no experience in Shakespeare, but I admired the daring honesty of her film performances. The next week I auditioned her and gave her the part.

  Within days I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. Sarah learnt the meaning of Innogen’s verse with aptitude, and she worked hard to breathe in the right places and to develop her voice. But she had great difficulty in delivering the words as spontaneous descriptions of her feelings. Too often she sounded false, not to say calculating, and her tempo was very slow. I realised that her strength as an actress was in conveying emotions below and beyond the words. On film you can see what she is thinking and this makes her a great asset to the camera. But Shakespeare expresses everything by what he says. His characters have an ability to describe and illustrate what they are feeling as they are feeling it. So his actors have to give the impression of creating the text while they experience the emotion. This is hard; and it has nothing to do with naturalistic acting, where feeling is always paramount, and what is actually said often masks or disguises it.

  I had grown used to directors, at the end of their first week of rehearsals, asking me if they could fire this or that actor. I always refused, taking the view that if they had cast the actor, they should persevere with him or her. Only if every attempt had been made to avert failure should the actor be replaced. So I persevered with Sarah. I had known many actors break through the barrier she was up against. But as she worked harder and harder, the problem became worse and worse. The spring of the verse, the skill needed to speak trippingly on the tongue, eluded her.

  Finally, I realised Sarah just couldn’t do it, and I had to tell her so. It must have been a horrible experience for her. I know it was a bewildering one for Robert Bolt; I lost a friend. But fine actors can be incapable of playing Shakespeare, just as fine opera singers can embarrass when singing Cole Porter. It is not a judgement on their talent; only on their ability to achieve a particular style of expression.

  Geraldine James took over Innogen at frighteningly short notice and gave a beautiful performance. She had no time to worry about the technique; she had the instinct, and simply practised the verse round the clock.

  My daughter Jennifer, who had steadily made a good career for herself as an actress since she came down from Cambridge, played Miranda in The Tempest and had a success in the part. But she left the play before the run was over. To this day I don’t quite know why. I do know she felt there was great pressure on her as my daughter; and her action caused, I’m afraid, immense bad feeling in the company.

  It is hard for children when their parents are frequently in the public eye. I know that all my children have found this difficult in some measure, but for Jenny it has been a real trial, and she has tried to cure herself of the feeling by writing about it. The divorces have hurt her, too, and that, together with a good dose of the discontented Pamment blood, has caused her much unhappiness. She is immensely talented both as a writer and actress; and she is a superlative mother. But she has yet to find her place. As a child, Jenny would never take an examination unless she believed she would pass it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The years around my sixtieth birthday in 1990 – those before, when I was preparing to leave the National, and those after, culminating in the birth of my sixth child, Emma – have been a period of expanding horizons in my work and, most of all, of the greatest happiness personally. I owe much of this to Nicki.

  Nicki trained as a lawyer and she loved the law while it remained an intellectual puzzle in text books. But when she came to apply it to people she left the profession, for she was horrified to find she was dealing not with right and wrong, but with the quirks and oddities of a specialised game.

  She has a practical attitude to each day and gets as much out of it as she can. When she had to tell her father, a devout Catholic, that she was contemplating marriage with a man who had already had three wives, she was prepared for some distress. Being a wit and a realist, she told her father that I was uxurious – someone who believed in marriage, and had therefore spent a lifetime trying to get it right.

  The randomness of life alarms me. If Nicki hadn’t decided against becoming a barrister we would never have met. When she gave up the law, she went to Riverside Studios as a temporary switchboard operator. She wanted to do something in the arts. But it was the time of Thatcher’s cuts and the place was on the verge of bankruptcy. Many staff were leaving to find other work; indeed anyone with a mortgage was advised to go. Within three weeks, Nicki had been promoted from the switchboard to running Riverside’s publicity. There she caught the eye of John Goodwin, joined his press office team at the National, and worked with me on all my productions from Antony and Cleopatra to the end of my time at the NT.

  If none of this had happened, I suppose I would still be alone. I hate loneliness. Each of my marriages has been an attempt to share my life completely with another person; and each attempt before Nicki has, in the end, produced an agonising loneliness.

  Nicki and I married in September 1990, soon after my divorce from Maria. She is thirty years younger than I am. When I was creating the RSC she was a baby. But this distance of years seems to give an increased edge and pleasure to our relationship. We know that we haven’t all that amount of time left. So far, our marriage has everything I’ve always hoped for; I say ‘so far’ not because I can imagine disaster – this time the possibility never crosses my mind – but because intense love is so strong, and at the same time so fragile, it can never be taken for granted.

  When our love affair started, in 1988, Nicki and I had hoped to keep it secret until the Late Shakespeares were launched and I was on my way out of the National. The result was some months of sickening duplicity. I do not like the hypocrisy of an affair, of being forced to dissemble. Some people find it exciting, even erotic. I don’t.

  Meanwhile, the Late Shakespeares were full of problems. The sets and costumes were behind schedule, mainly because the NT’s workshop had been closed to save money and the work had been given to outside contractors. The Salome I had done in Los Angeles was revived at Covent Garden, so I had to fit in a few rehearsals with Maria. And, as an added complication, a television crew was filming me most of the time for a documentary programme about my work at the RSC and the National.

  In the middle of all this, Michael Owen of the Evening Standard asked Nicki to have a drink with him in the National Theatre bar. While they were chatting, a photographer suddenly appeared and took a picture. Michael then taxed Nicki about our affair and said he was intending to do a story about it. She told him nothing and he asked to talk to me. I had a quick word with John Goodwin and he didn’t hesitate. ‘Deny it,’ he said. It was the first time in thirty years I had heard him advocate a lie.

  I lied with extreme misgivings (and felt guilty enough to try to make my peace with Michael Owen some months later). But, as John knew, Maria had yet to be told, also my children and my parents. There were enormous human problems still to be tackled.

  That spring and summer of 1988 were hectic: very alive because of the promise of new beginnings; nerve-wracking because so much was at stake. The three Late Shakespeares packed during their Cottesloe season, transferred to the Olivier, and toured to Russia, Japan and Greece. They were hugely successful on tour, but in London hadn’t quite lived up to the expectations aroused by such a big farewell enterprise. However, at the time the press notices were appearing, the papers were also printing massive and complimentary summaries of my work at the NT. That was nice. But I began to feel as if I were reading my own obituaries.

  In Russia we presented the three plays at the Moscow Art Theatre. The city seemed very different from my first visit there in 1958 with the Stratford company. Then it was deep winter; now it was high summer. And though the food was as terrible as ever, people were starting to talk to each other. There was a feeling of change in the air, and Gorbachev and Reagan were holding their summit. Theatre people were still chary of looking you in the eye, but were beg
inning, I think, to tell the truth. They yearned, they said, to have a mixed economy like ours in the West. They explained that their theatres were always full because the tickets were distributed through trade unions, school organisations and party structures. It was impossible to tell whether the work was appealing to the public or not; the audience would be there anyway. Ironically, they longed for the empty seats that would tell them whether they were staging the wrong things.

  We played to wildly appreciative houses, and before every performance there were mobs of people clamouring unsuccessfully to get in. It emerged that tickets had never gone on sale to the general public at all. By the time Party officials, theatre union bosses and the educational hierarchy had had their pickings there were no seats left. So Thelma Holt, the tour organiser, Nicki and I went outside the theatre each evening and gave away the NT’s nightly quota of forty tickets. The result was tears in the street.

  Cymbeline, the first in our three-play cycle, very nearly didn’t start. It had a number of entrances through the audience, and therefore the pass doors between stage and auditorium had to be left open. But one of the doors was locked and nobody could find the key. Meetings about this went on throughout the whole day before the first night. We did not uncover the truth until 5 p.m.: the key was held by the KGB. The door opened on to a secret corridor used by Party bosses, so the area was one of very high security. The door, we were informed, was never unlocked.

  I told the authorities that I understood their position, but as there were less than two hours before the play began it was impossible for me to restage the production. With great regret, I said, we would have to cancel the first night. The door was unlocked half an hour before the performance was due to begin.

  From Moscow the company went on to Georgia; then to Tokyo. On the way to Georgia, however, the trucks carrying the sets and costumes broke down. Sabotage was suspected; water had certainly been introduced by somebody into the diesel oil. The plays had to be staged with whatever could be improvised or borrowed. It was apparently a memorable occasion. The actors became extraordinarily creative because the very simplicity of the productions gave the text a new power. Many critics, including Michael Billington who was in Georgia for the Guardian, found it unforgettable.