by Peter Hall
I can’t believe simulated sex in films. In life, sex is not something most people watch, but something they do. Observing the writhings of two people on a screen produces feelings which are nothing at all like the feelings of making love oneself.
The noisy scandal that surrounded aspects of The Camomile Lawn now seems an inevitable part of most television drama. To get attention in a crowded market, to entice people to watch the first episode, the advance advertising and hype for any major new series has to be vast. This massive publicity is very risky. It raises high expectations. A backlash when the programme is transmitted becomes almost certain. The sex scenes in The Camomile Lawn seemed to me natural and funny, and I never thought of them as special or particularly promotable. I personally loved the series, its actors and its script. I also felt I was getting near the way I want to make films. The shots were now organic.
Chapter Eight
To be interviewed on television would have appalled people of my parents’ generation. My mother and father would have been speechless. Their bosses would have put on their best suits and posed stiffly, speaking rhetorically as if addressing a meeting. But my generation, conditioned by watching television all the time, think it quite normal to give their opinions in public.
Way back in the Fifties, I was a member of the Brains Trust. At the old Lime Grove studios, a team of three or four people first dined in a room mocked up in panelled wood like a stately home. We were then filmed while engaged in forty minutes of would-be intellectual conversation. I enjoyed the people I met more than the conversations. I remember Edith Sitwell treating me as if I was a dangerous teenager. For a time, I also appeared in some of the satirical TV shows of the Sixties, That Was the Week that Was and Not so Much a Programme …; also on Radio’s Any Questions. All this was clearly a drug for an exhibitionist. Fortunately, my theatre work took up more and more of my life and prevented me from becoming too involved.
I’ve always loved interviewing people and drawing them out. But I quickly discovered that my pleasure in public speaking and the delight I take in communicating to a live audience had very little to do with what was needed in a studio. Talking to a television camera is extraordinarily difficult. Very few people can do it and look natural. I can’t. The camera cannot be treated as a public meeting, because it is intimate; cannot be ignored because it is close to your very eyes. Every flicker of discomfort, every tension, is visible. To read an autocue without looking mesmerised is, for me, almost impossible. I am much better improvising whatever needs to be said. In the early Seventies I took over fronting Aquarius, the LWT arts magazine; and for those two years I never felt easy talking to the camera, though I was completely happy talking to the succession of fascinating people I interviewed. I remember especially two long conversations with Rubinstein when he spoke of his passions: music and women.
I suspect that I enjoy holding forth because I am enormously stimulated by having to think aloud on my feet. It helps me to share my discoveries as I make them. And that, after all, is exactly what I do at my rehearsals, whether they are for plays or operas or films.
Part Six
Extravagant Hopes?
Chapter One
I emerged from fifteen years at the National with a great deal of energy that I wanted to put to use. I formed an independent theatre company and called it, with shameless arrogance, the Peter Hall Company. It was, to begin with, backed by Duncan Weldon’s commercial set-up, Triumph Productions. Our first venture was Orpheus Descending, Tennessee Williams’s underrated Gothic masterpiece. It is an imperfect giant of a play which contains the essence of its creator. I had always wanted to stage it, and once Vanessa Redgrave agreed to play Lady (a part she was born for) I pressed ahead.
At the RSC I had directed Vanessa early in her career in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Coriolanus, and The Taming of the Shrew – but not since then. From the very beginning, she was a special creature, a golden girl who seemed to share with everyone in the audience her own youth and hopes for the future. I was briefly in love with her.
Now, thirty years later, in Orpheus Descending, I found her the most complete actress. She had the same daring I had seen in Ralph Richardson and Edith Evans. She rehearsed in a totally absorbed way, taking every suggestion, following every hint that she received from her instinct or mine. She seemed to be wired into the truth. I could only ever reject what she offered if I thought its meaning was not right for the play; never because it was false as acting. She worked without vanity or inhibition. Every day was an extraordinary adventure.
Although such endless creativity is exciting, by the time a play opens it is usual for the director and cast to have reached a solution for each scene, which then goes on developing through the run. Vanessa’s explorations are so intense that she is quite likely to change radically in performance and hardly know she has done it. But since these are changes produced by a strongly inventive imagination, it is hardly possible to object. If, though, her director has not visited a production for a couple of months, he or she may be in for a few surprises.
After a successful London run, Orpheus went to Broadway. For the first time, I was able to direct a Tennessee Williams play with a mainly American cast. I was amazed that, initially, they were more resistant to his rhythms than English actors, finding it difficult to sustain his long sentences right to the end. They wanted to split them up into short colloquial phrases in order to make them sound ‘real’. The result was to make them sound ordinary.
Astonishingly, casting had taken me just a day and a half. I left Glyndebourne – where I was rehearsing the Simon Rattle Figaro – early one Saturday morning, boarded Concorde, and arrived in New York in time for auditions at 10.30 a.m. I auditioned all morning, all afternoon, and on the Sunday morning. By lunchtime I was on Concorde going home, and back at Glyndebourne ready for work on Monday.
There is nothing remarkable about this particular lunacy, except that I managed to select so fast an almost perfect company. It was true that I already had Kevin Anderson as well as Vanessa; but to have been able to add players such as Tammy Grimes and Anne Twomey was miraculous. There is a dispiriting reason for this: good actors are readily available in New York because so few plays are being done. It is certainly not possible to cast with such ease in London.
We had great difficulty in getting a theatre on Broadway, and this, I’m sure, was because of Vanessa’s very vocal support of the Palestinians. Broadway is fundamentally a Jewish province, and I went through several agonising meetings where no theatre owner was courageous enough to admit this. Other reasons for not doing the play were given. Suddenly the set was too big, or the cast too numerous. One, bafflingly, said that when he saw the play in London he had hoped for some real Tennessee Williams writing but hadn’t heard any. I pointed to Frank Rich’s New York Times notice of the London Orpheus which was a fanfare for Vanessa as a great actress. He answered that Rich can break a production but not make one, and that anyway there were several American actresses who could do the part just as well. I stuck to my guns, and in the end Jimmy Nederlander presented the play with panache and enthusiasm.
Something else caused me trouble. There is now hardly a play on Broadway, even in the smallest theatre, that does not use amplified sound. This is needed mainly because of the appallingly loud air conditioning. So loud was it at the Neil Simon Theater for the first preview of Orpheus that I had it turned off. Unfortunately, this coincided with a warm Fall evening. By the interval, the temperature was stifling and as the second act began there was an eruption from the stalls with much waving of programmes and cries of: ‘Turn up the air conditioning.’
I ran down the aisle, leapt on the stage, and conducted an impromptu public meeting. The indignation subsided only when I suggested taking a vote on whether the audience would prefer to hear the play or be cool. Fifteen people stalked out, but the majority were for staying and sweating.
Next day there was a story in the New York Times about the air-conditioning
riots. To my delight, men arrived and carried out maintenance at the Neil Simon Theater for the first time in years. I like to think this was my contribution towards quieter and better-serviced installations on Broadway.
Chapter Two
Before we began rehearsing Orpheus, and during the height of my midsummer madness with Nicki, I had been telephoned by Dustin Hoffman. He was in England and we met. He said he needed some advice: did I think he could play Shakespeare? I said he had a rich and resonant voice, a fine sense of rhythm, and providing he first developed the technique and didn’t just hurl himself into the task on a tide of feeling, he ought to do it brilliantly. He looked at me with those big, streetwise eyes: ‘Do you think I could play Hamlet?’ ‘No,’ I replied. ‘No? ’ He was surprised. ‘You’re too old for Hamlet, and anyway an American actor who thinks he can take on Hamlet as his first Shakespearean role is like a hill climber who thinks he can shin up Everest.’
He was delighted. ‘It’s good to get a frank opinion,’ he said.
I told him that if he wanted to do Shakespeare he should pick one of the really showy character parts which are not play-carrying. The rest of the cast do the work for you, and you make all the effect. I suggested that he should look at Shylock and Malvolio, and Angelo in Measure for Measure.
We chose The Merchant of Venice, though there was a little flurry of liberal anxiety in Dustin about the play’s supposed anti-Semitism. It is not taught in many American schools for that reason – which is insane. The very heart of the play is a vivid demonstration of the perils of racism, and how it can poison the persecutor as well as the persecuted.
Dustin is as obsessed as Vanessa, living and breathing his work twenty-four hours a day. He rehearsed as if he were performing, as if the cameras were always rolling on him. At the end of a six-hour rehearsal he was completely shattered. But he would go home, shower and rest, and then return to the script, often calling me late at night to discuss some point or other.
He has a quick intelligence and a superb ear. Within a few hours he was moving around in Shakespeare’s verse and making it his own. By the time he had played Shylock in London, and taken it to Broadway, he was giving the finest performance of the part I have seen. It balanced the tragic with the villainous, the mean with the comic, the pathetic with the predator. He was an entire and fallible man made evil by persecution.
I am saddened that I will not work with him again – for I do not think I will. Just before the end of the run in New York, he telephoned me and said he wanted to bring television cameras in to do a quick recording of the last two or three performances for video; the best takes from each would then be cut together. I explained that I hated the idea, it needed more time and care; and the video was stopped. This did not go down well. Dustin returned to Hollywood and the world of mega-millions and I have never heard from him since. Phone calls are not returned and letters go unanswered. Sam Cohn, my agent, remarked about the reigning stars of Hollywood that you don’t fuck with them lightly.
The Merchant, also presented by Jimmy Nederlander, was a sell-out on Broadway for seventeen weeks. Its success, as in London, was largely due to Dustin; but, as well, to a group of actors, particularly Geraldine James as Portia, who made the text immediate and lucid. At an early performance in New York I heard a woman behind me say: ‘Of course it’s been modernised, I can understand it.’
Chapter Three
In October 1988 both my parents died in the same week. My mother was very ill in hospital; cancer had destroyed her with extreme speed. She knew – for her intelligence still burned brightly – that this was the end, and the knowledge made her demented and angry. She struck a nurse quite viciously with the walking stick that hung from the head of her bed. It had to be taken away.
When she fell into a coma, the doctors suggested I tell my father that, though she might just regain consciousness, she would almost certainly die within ten days. I did this, and asked him to come and live with me in London after she had gone, while we sorted everything out.
‘I don’t want to talk about that now,’ he said. ‘I’d prefer just to get through the next few days.’
I arranged to collect him the following Sunday and drive him across to Oxford to see my mother. Father always took a little nap after lunch. On the Saturday, he took his nap and didn’t wake up. He died in his sleep of a heart attack and was found sitting peacefully in his chair.
My mother died on the day of my father’s funeral.
He never knew of my mother’s death and she never knew of his. She had not regained consciousness. They went together, after many years of fuss and flurry on her part, but not on his.
I think my mother’s happiest years were when she and Father ran the general store and post office at Kessingland on the Suffolk coast, after he had taken early retirement from the railway. He was chairman of the parish council and the local school. My mother knew everybody, talked to everybody, and became the presiding mother-hen of the village. She complained about it, of course. She was fed up with hearing everybody else’s troubles; and she never stopped saying how little they made from the proceeds of the shop, and how hard they worked. But she didn’t fool me; she enjoyed it all.
I worry sometimes when I remember the hours my parents spent watching epics by Shakespeare, not to speak of long elaborate operas. Mother, I suspect, put up with them as she’d put up with my reading so many books. To her, the plays and the operas, like the books, were evidence of success. I’m not so sure about Father. My parents liked the theatre rather as they liked strolling through a luxurious department store. It was exciting, even attractive; but not really for them. In the same way, though they could easily have done so in their later years, they never went abroad.
My father was revered by my children as someone particularly kind and wise. And they always adored my mother. She was very well cast as the grandmother. She continued to cook to the end, making something hot for Father every day, including huge, sweet cakes and battalions of scones.
It took me time to appreciate her. For most of my adult life I did not like her. She was pretentious, wayward and bossy; but she had a very sharp mind and an instinct for exactly what was going on which rarely let her down. If I’d had brothers or sisters, she could have shared her energy. I think she would have been happier. But then, I suppose, I would have had less of her; and perhaps never been given the chances to do all that I burned to do. I was lucky to have had her.
My father was 86 when he died. Did he decide, after he knew Mother was dying, that life was no longer worth living? I suspect so. People can die because they want to.
I find it hard to describe my father, hard to pin him down. And perhaps that was his attraction to his son and to his grandchildren, particularly the boys. We all knew that there was something perceptive and very shrewd going on behind his mask of decency and tolerance, but we couldn’t quite define what it was.
He encouraged me and was proud of me, though he was not as vociferous about it as my mother. He was moved when I was given my knighthood, but no more prepared for it than I was.
The first step to receiving an honour is a cautious letter to those chosen asking if they would accept, should it be decided that they are offered it. Because of some mistake, my letter went to my parents’ house, and Father phoned me. ‘I’ve got a very official-looking letter here, boy,’ he said. ‘Have you been in trouble with the police or something?’
Anxiously, I asked him to open the envelope. He read me what the letter said and very nearly broke down. ‘A’s a great honour, a’s all I can say. A’s a great honour,’ he kept repeating.
Mother and Father had loved and bickered for nearly sixty years. They had never been separated, not even by the war, and I don’t think either of them could have contemplated life without the other.
I felt their loss in ways I would never have suspected. Once your parents die, if you are an only child there is no-one of your blood to lean on, to find refuge with, to go home to. There is inst
ead the naked and alarming feeling that you are next in line, there is no-one between you and mortality.
In his later years, I learnt to love my father deeply all over again. I almost achieved the same with my mother; but I suppose we were too alike to find complete peace.
Chapter Four
The Peter Hall Company had started off with the idea that Alan Ayckbourn would be in partnership with me and do alternate productions. A big, large-cast play Alan wanted to direct was, however, turned down by Duncan Weldon as too expensive. Duncan was entirely within his rights, but he never fully explained his reasons to Alan, who resigned. He was a huge loss.
Thelma Holt was the producer for the Peter Hall Company. I love Thelma because she is quintessentially of the theatre. She trained as an actress, but fell into administration, and she had been with me at the National, where I was careful to give her a little empire of her own – including foreign tours and transfers – and let her get on with it. She is a noisy, one-woman band, not a collaborator. Duncan, at first, had grave reservations about employing her: producers don’t usually like other producers around. When, though, he found she took an absolute delight in getting stuck into crises, however unpleasant, he began to rely on her more and more.
Thelma is a born trouble-shooter. She will often, if there is no trouble to shoot, imagine some, so that she can go on shooting. She spent the first months of my association with Duncan telling me how difficult he was, while telling him how difficult I was. She was quite right in both instances. But it didn’t help. And the relationship between Duncan and me deteriorated. In the end, Thelma left to be on her own as an independent producer.