by Peter Hall
There was another problem. I had joined Duncan on the understanding that my company would occupy the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket. I wanted an identifiable home for my plays. But just before I signed the deal, the words ‘or a comparable theatre’ were added to the contract. I was uneasy, but I signed it.
As it turned out, only Orpheus was given at the Haymarket.
The Wild Duck is one of my top dozen plays. It remains, for me, the first masterpiece of family drama; perhaps the inspiration of Chekhov. It is also, in places, painfully funny. I love Ibsen’s mordant sense of humour. His plays exploit black comedy, yet this frequently gets lost in English versions. A translated text can easily make the director feel that he is looking at the play through a frosted-glass window; he can’t quite see the original. As with John Gabriel Borkman at the National, I worked on the translation of The Wild Duck with Inga-Stina Ewbank, a Norwegian-speaking Scandinavian who, because she is a great Shakespearean scholar, is astonishingly sensitive to the nuances of English.
Norwegian is a language with a very small vocabulary. Ibsen uses the same words repeatedly to great dramatic and often comic effect. Too many English translations lose these repetitions by employing the wealth of English synonyms to give variety. Inga-Stina taught me to trust the same words; she taught me, as well, what was beneath the text.
I followed The Wild Duck with a revival of The Homecoming, twenty-five years after staging its premiere for the RSC. The play seemed more terrifying than ever. The ultimate family play; where the family inhabits a jungle.
Chapter Five
At the beginning of 1991, my association with Duncan having collapsed, Jeffrey Archer offered me the Playhouse, which he owned, as a permanent base for my company. I accepted at once. It is a lovely theatre, almost on the Embankment, and had been newly decorated. We had a successful season. Within twelve months we had presented Felicity Kendal, Paul Eddington and John Sessions in Tartuffe; Julie Walters and Ken Stott in The Rose Tattoo; Eric Porter and Maria Miles in Twelfth Night; and Deborah Warner’s Abbey Theatre production of Hedda Gabler with Fiona Shaw.
But half-way through the season, Jeffrey telephoned me to say that he had decided to sell the theatre. I was staggered and felt as if I was just part of the furniture and fittings. By the end of the year I was homeless again.
It is not, I am glad to say, difficult to find a West End stage for my work. But I still dream of a theatre I can think of as home. I know from my RSC and National years that if a theatre is associated with one policy, the place defines the work and audience loyalty grows, which is not only an economic but a creative security.
The last decade has seen ticket prices more than double in the West End, and the subsidised houses pressured by the Arts Council to charge prices as high as the market will bear. This has not yet reduced the size of the audience – but its composition has changed. Many young people can no longer afford good seats, so it is increasingly a problem to reach a new public. All the signs are that theatre going will soon be not a regular habit, but a tourist attraction or just an occasional treat.
On the other hand, the general level of creativity has increased: productions are more daring and actors more prepared to take risks than when I started. And if audiences are no longer as young, they are more sophisticated than they were. The serious London theatre audience has been made by the Royal Court, the RSC and the National. There is a core audience of fifty to a hundred thousand people that I know I can depend on when I do a play.I
I am sure that Jeffrey Archer wanted me to raise the profile of the Playhouse. But it was a big shock to lose it just as I was beginning. However, soon afterwards came the great joy of directing Four Baboons Adoring the Sun at New York’s Lincoln Center, and finding in its author, John Guare, a new friend.
When I was sent the first draft, I was very interested in what John was trying to do but not entirely sure I was reading it right. I telephoned him and asked some basic questions. He hopped on the next plane to London and we spent two days locked in conversation. The result was one of the happiest collaborations of my life.
John told me on the first night that only two pages of the original script remained unaltered from the beginning of rehearsals. We had made the piece on our feet. And for the first time in all the years I have worked in New York I felt that what mattered was the play, not the dollar.
Four Baboons worked on the frontiers of dramatic technique. It mixed direct audience address with naturalistic wise-cracking scenes; and a commentator – the God Eros – interpreted the follies of the characters through twenty-eight short musical numbers. We received the blessing of Broadway – a clutch of Tony nominations – but the play only ran its allotted time at the Lincoln Center and didn’t, alas, move elsewhere. I know, nonetheless, that I shall be living for years on the things I discovered while directing it.
In 1992, I directed at Stratford with the RSC for the first time in twenty-five years. The play was one I had always wanted to do, All’s Well that Ends Well, a complex piece of Shakespearean chamber music. The theatre was the Swan, where I had hoped to work ever since it opened in 1986. The brainchild of Trevor Nunn and the architect/designer Michael Reardon, this is the beautiful, galleried auditorium set in that part of the original old Stratford theatre which survived the fire of 1926.
The Swan lived up to my expectations in almost all respects. Its greatest virtue is its sound. Acoustically it is virtually perfect. Actors can whisper from its stage as well as shout, and the wooden interior gives a warm bloom to the voice. I didn’t, in the end, enjoy the thrust stage because it thrusts too much. It is like an enormous diving board: wonderful to progress down, but then the actor is stuck. There is nothing he can do except turn round and go back again.
The recently discovered foundations of the Rose Theatre show beyond doubt that the Elizabethan playhouse had a traverse, not a thrust stage. I have always believed this in my heart. How, I thought, could subtle verbal theatre be presented on a stage where half the audience was unable at any one moment either to see or hear the actor? The vitality of the thrust stages at Stratford, Ontario, and at Chichester comes from the constant need to keep the actors on the move, so that they are able to share out their faces and their words. But to the audience round them, restlessness damages understanding and verbal nuance. This was a happy challenge for Tyrone Guthrie (who built the stage in Ontario) because he was a genius at stage movement and had a talent for energising old texts with physical excitement. But he, too, often gave a swirling general effect, rather than specific meaning. The problem is not as bad at the Swan because the scale is so small; but it is there.
It was strange working in Stratford again – the town where such an important chapter of my life had started – and in the Swan, which stands where our enormous rehearsal room had once been. The town was changed. It was packed with tourists and noisy with the amplified voices of the guides on the coaches. But the theatre was the same, and the river, and the gardens opposite the Dirty Duck. The willow tree where I used to tie up my boat when I came by water to summer rehearsals was there still, but now huge, thick-trunked and leaning over. At every corner, I expected to see Peggy Ashcroft coming towards me, or Michel St Denis puffing his pipe. I had been back often to see plays, but not since 1968 had I worked there. And the absence of old friends made it hard to bear.
But this time at Stratford marked the arrival of someone new. It was while I was rehearsing All’s Well that curly-headed Emma was born, Nicki’s first child and my sixth.
Back in London, there were other new beginnings. I called on Bill Kenwright, the prolific and enthusiastic producer, and we decided to work together: he would finance the Peter Hall Company.
Our first offering was a new play by Stephen Poliakoff, Sienna Red. As is usual with Stephen, it was bursting with relevance and irony. Sadly, however, it didn’t speak to the audience. Whether this was the fault of my production or the text I found difficult to assess; it was probably a bit of both. We did no
t bring it into the West End after its short tour.
This was a nasty jolt for Stephen and me; and an expensive one for Bill Kenwright. It says much for his belief in me, and his generosity, that we surmounted such a hurdle and went on from there to present Wilde, Shaffer, Rattigan, Goldsmith and Aristophanes.
And there were a few film offers … Not long ago I was in Hollywood. Many meetings took place at which the person I was meeting had telephone calls. In between, he or she would listen politely to my ideas. But nothing happened. Nothing, that is, until last summer when my American agent called me in some excitement. He said a film script was on its way by special delivery from Hollywood and it was an offer. He would say no more. As soon as the script arrived, I sat down and read it eagerly. It began: ‘Interior, Kensington Palace. Night. Charles and Di are curled up on the sofa watching a video of their wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral.’ I decided to pass.
Chapter Six
I was six, I think, when I realised that death happened to all of us. I found it difficult to believe. I was young and in another country. But now I have a sense of time running out, and of so much left to do. A vivid indication of this is my mania for books. I buy them compulsively, but already as I pass the thousands of volumes I have accumulated – too many even for the yards upon yards of bookshelves in my house – I wonder whether I shall ever open those that are still unread or reread those that I have half forgotten. I begin to think, too, of the pieces of music I will never hear, the countries I will never visit, and – of course – the plays I will never direct.
I am often appalled at the punishing pace at which I live. I hate to waste time, hate not to be doing. Why does this drive continue? Mainly, I suppose, because my adrenalin addiction makes me happy only when it is coursing through my veins. And I have the perfect job to feed that.
For six or seven hours a day I am usually rehearsing with a group of talented actors who potentially terrify me. It is up to me to hold their interest, to inspire them, and I must give unsparingly of my energy. Rehearsing is for me the habit of a lifetime, something I like to do every day. It is almost an erotic passion.
My entire working life has been – and still is – spent trying to understand the power of the theatre. The audience at a play or opera are not only involved in one of the few live experiences left that is not about passive watching and passive listening; they are being actively invited to use their imaginations in a potent game of make-believe. No good performance leaves its audience untouched. It challenges them, provokes them and makes them understand their own lives a little better. This heightened awareness is not necessarily serious, and it is certainly not always intellectual. It is visceral. A farce by Feydeau can produce it as readily as a tragedy by Aeschylus.
This communion has a slyer, sexier side. The sense of excitement, of expectation that comes before seduction, is there at the beginning of any performance. Good theatre teases and titillates. The eyes of the audience are turned on to a small space, and their gaze is frank and uncompromising – not the veiled or deferential look given to strangers during the ordinary business of life, but rather the look of ownership the lover gives to the loved one. There is lust in it, and corresponding disappointment if what is looked at fails to rouse the expected interest and attraction. All this is intensified by the darkness of the modern theatre, which helps its private and concentrated purpose.
The theatre trades in sex and sexuality. Stars are not essentially defined by acting talent. They are those with extraordinary physical presence, those whom the men and women in the audience are drawn to watch and find desirable. And the performers’ sex can be confused; in fact, some of the greatest stars seem androgynous.
We are only now starting to admit how much the waking hours of the normal adult are spent thinking about sex. To look at an attractive person is to imagine possession – and this is a feeling the stage encourages. Breasts are emphasised, legs flaunted, bottoms (particularly in the ballet) raised. Always there is the hope, the tease, of even more exposure. In the Sixties, much fashionable theatre used this tension by having actors strip off at the slightest excuse in the name of truth and honesty.
Of course, sexual excitement does not necessarily make good theatre. If it did, a strip show would be a rich experience. But I believe there is no good theatre that is not also sexual. It is no wonder the Puritans hated and feared it. The erotic may not be the end of the experience, but it certainly has to be there.
Movies – with their huge close-ups, idealised stars and dark concentration – can, to many, be sexier than the theatre: the scale is hypnotic. But to me, theatre has the edge. It is alive and now. Anything might happen.
Chapter Seven
I have had the good fortune to be able to remake myself from time to time, by the process of constant work.
At first, I was a director of new writing, the champion of Samuel Beckett, of Tennessee Williams, of John Whiting. By the mid Sixties I was regarded as a Shakespearean, and the director of Pinter. Soon after, I was seen as a fantasist because of my work in Baroque opera, while my scrutiny of Mozart and success in persuading singers to behave like human beings were heralded as a revolution. Then, as productions became more and more subjective and concept-based, I began to be thought of as a ‘realistic’ director, interested only in naturalism. From being someone who, it was said, stripped the varnish off well-loved pictures, I came, to my surprise, to be labelled a traditionalist.
The same thing has happened in response to my staging of Shakespeare. I used to be known as a radical, but am considered today a classicist who is rigorous about the verse. It’s true, I do not now cut Shakespeare’s plays with the abandon that I did in the Sixties, but I cannot say my essential approach has changed – except that I hope it is better executed. I find it isn’t in me to trim my beliefs or check my instincts in order to meet the ebb and flow of fashion. My only course, providing the world will let me, is to keep working.
Though tempted when near the edge, I have never been psychoanalysed. My appetite for work does, I know, lead to recklessness and depression. I am told that people like me attempt to keep death at bay by over-achieving. Possibly. I think about death every day. But achieving is something I relish; and it is not done for power, nor for influence, nor, above all, for money.
When I was a child my family was very conscious of money – or rather the lack of it. Perhaps that is why I have never allowed it to rule my own life. I think of it as a tool that helps me to follow my obsessions, as something that buys me the luxury of being able to do this in some degree of comfort.
Though my years in the profession have brought me wonderful comradeship and loyalties, I realise that my greed for work has caused resentments and made me enemies. Many people, particularly men, have found it difficult to stomach my ambition. The subsidised arts have gradually become a branch of politics, and politics two-facedness, hypocrisy and bad-mouthing still live on. In the theatre, however, such hostilities are often only skin deep.
Chapter Eight
The world has improved during my crowded lifetime. Stupidity is still the enemy of progress, but I have seen a Fascist empire defeated, and a Russian empire (perhaps the most awful oppression in history) demolished. But my own country has become sadder and smaller. The doctrine of market forces has sanctified greed, and art and education have suffered as a consequence. We think we live in a democracy, but we do nothing of the kind. We pay for our politics by allowing special interests to dominate them – big business have financed the Tory Party and the Unions have financed Labour. Market forces, as a result, are bound to influence each party’s manifesto. While the country is largely moderate, our absurd first-past-the-post system produces extremes which do not at all reflect the wishes of the electorate. The idiotic conventions of adversarial politics bombard the public with half-truths and misrepresentations. Neither party can risk being honest; they must rather score points off each other. The mindlessness of television has reduced literacy and blunted sen
sibility; paradoxically, it has also increased awareness and knowledge. It is harder now for politicians to lie without being found out, or to conduct horrible little wars without arousing world concern.
The British are dangerously indifferent about preserving their freedoms and their institutions. Will things have to get much worse before they wake up to what they are losing?
In all this muddle, it has been refreshing to work in the arts. Art is absolute. It provides unquestionable integrity and inescapable standards.
Chapter Nine
Looking back, I see that I, the only child of a small-time country stationmaster with a family, on both sides, of farm labourers and odd-job men, have been blessed with marvellous chances. So much so that actors often accuse me of being born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Since I was born with next to nothing in my mouth I have always, I hope, worn lightly whatever successes and good fortune I have had.
Sometimes I try to trace music or theatre in my ancestry. There isn’t a sign of either, unless you count my father cheerfully singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Where this passion came from, this love for the uncertain world I ran to embrace in my early teens, remains a mystery.
I have occasionally thought how difficult it would be – since I am an atheist – to have a child who wished to be a parson; or one who hated music, or went into a world I could not possibly understand such as advanced physics. Though parents love their children no matter what, children do not always love their parents. I have been extraordinarily lucky because my children share my obsessions. And pride in our children’s abilities can be forthright; there is no need for modesty.
I have described the particular talents of Jenny and Rebecca. Christopher, my eldest, having paced himself carefully, is now emerging as a leading television and film producer. Edward is a gambler, like me, but has already made a mark as a director in the theatre and is bursting with plans. Lucy is a stage designer and is, so far, the only one of the five to refuse to work with me. She says she is not yet ready to cope. She has designed at Chichester, the Royal Court, the Gate and various reps, and is a complete original.