Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  Then there is Emma, one year old as I write this. She, Nicki and I live in a tall, four-storey Victorian house. The other day Emma, excited by a new-found ability to crawl, pounded up the stairs from the basement to her own room at the very top. I walked behind, flight after flight, to be sure she wouldn’t tumble backwards. After she had arrived, triumphant, I carried her back to the basement. She immediately set off again and climbed once more right to the top of the house. I took her back. She climbed yet again.

  Very small children are the most fascinating creatures in the world. They are unpredictable, often moving, suddenly perceptive and very funny.

  Though my life remains crammed, hectic and as full of anxiety as of hope, my one sadness is that it seems to have passed in a flash. I would like it to have gone more slowly. I would even like to start again – providing I could do the same job. My work stays so great a joy that I still speed to it every day as if I were going on holiday. And, as I go, I see Emma setting off again, determined to go on climbing.

  Epilogue

  Joys and Sorrows

  Joys and Sorrows

  It is six years since I finished writing this autobiography and eleven years since I left the National Theatre. A kindly publisher has decided to re-issue the book and has asked for this chapter to update my life. I am now in my sixty-ninth year – as busy, thank goodness, and as energetic as ever. I know this cannot continue much longer. But, for the moment, this is a happy time.

  Being happy, though, is not dramatic. Contentment can make for pretty dull reading. I can only add this epilogue, hoping that the reader will forgive yet another end.

  This summer of 1999 I have sat by my favourite sea – the Aegean — and pondered in one of my favourite places: the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, a place where theatre is still a deep and fulfilling mystery. In ancient times, it was a place of healing – a shrine where body and spirit were united. The theatre healed the mind with imagination; and the body was renewed with medicines and sacrifices to the gods. All in all, it is a weird place to read your own autobiography.

  I have read it with a mixture of acceptance and embarrassment: acceptance because I often recognise the man, his childhood, his aspirations and his struggles; embarrassment because I don’t like contemplating myself. Some of my work has occasionally been noteworthy; but my life has been a struggle to find peace. And it is boring and not a little smug to say that I have now found it. It is dangerous too: hubris is the sin of the self-satisfied.

  Perhaps it is fortunate that there is a worm in my rose. How long now can I enjoy this peace? Ageing is speedy: it gallops upon you. Life never gives enough time to do, or see, or say what is needed. No one ever told me that time goes quicker the less you have of it. Age accelerates life. Why does life get quicker year by year?

  I wouldn’t have re-read this account of myself unless I had had to write this chapter. I enjoyed re-meeting the memories of my childhood. But then most people can speak vividly about their early years. It is the time when we learn to live. For the rest, the book is a record of my turbulent professional life, which tries to be as honest as a man can be who wishes to be neither libellous nor lose his friends.

  Some years ago, Stephen Fay published a biography of me called Power Play. To this day, he is hurt and bewildered that I have never read it. I simply didn’t want to. I have always liked Stephen, and I wanted to continue liking him. If his criticisms upset me, or his analysis of my motives was inaccurate, there was nothing I could I do about it. It was his view of me, not me. It is hard to realise that there is absolutely no copyright in your own life. Short of the laws of libel and slander, a writer can interpret someone else in any way they like. I have tried to tell the truth, as I know it.

  Although I am at peace, I am still regularly anxious – particularly when I am away from home. Mortality looms larger every day and the shadow it casts is disproportionally larger at seventy than it was at thirty. Yet the plump and lined face that looks back at me in the mirror does not seem to be me at all: I still feel thirty in my energies and aspirations. What happened? When did it go so quickly?

  Much has already changed for me, in the years since I left the National Theatre. I am aware that, above all, my luck has changed. One of my mother’s mantras was: ‘It is better to be born lucky than rich.’ Well, rich I have never been, but lucky, certainly. In my earlier adolescence, I wanted to become a director: I became a director. I wanted to run Stratford-upon-Avon: in my twenties, I was able to create the RSC. I won’t say that I had ambitions to run the National Theatre, but it was always a likelihood for my mature years, and it was a job that could not be refused once it was offered. It was a joy and a pain; but it was also a wonderful duty. I wanted to be part of Glyndebourne: I had twenty happy years there, ending up as Artistic Director. I wanted to be part of Covent Garden: briefly, I was. I wanted to direct opera and Shakespeare, and yet be at the heart of contemporary drama: I have done some of the most significant new plays of the past fifty years. I believed that theatre was fundamental to our democracy and to the health of future generations. I still do. I wanted to serve it: I have.

  In a way I have been spoilt. So these last twelve years have been a surprise. No longer have I been so easily blessed professionally. Yet by contrast, my personal life has been transformed into a time of great happiness. After four attempts, I have achieved the marriage that I have always dreamed of. Apollo and Dionysus have got together and made my perfect woman in Nicki — someone I could love passionately and yet argue with eloquently. Do I sound smug again? Am I risking, if not the mockery of the gods, the scorn of the sceptical? Yes, of course. But I must be truthful even though happiness is uncommercial.

  But the happiness is not unalloyed. There is thirty years’ difference in age between Nicki and me; so an in-built sadness, the sense of shortage of time, is inescapably there. I have a daughter of seven who I shall be lucky to see as a grown-up. I have five other talented children and five grandchildren who I shall be heartbroken to leave. This only child of the Thirties is delighted to find himself head of a small tribe.

  My six children all get on; they all love each other. Much of this is due to Nicki’s wisdom and openness. My two eldest children are older than her, yet she welcomes them. She welcomes my ex-wives. It is not productive to turn old love into resentment, and she knows this. There is real friendship in my family. Thanks to her, I am now closer to my children than I have ever been.

  This vision of amity will make many reflect that there must be a nastier side to this story. There isn’t. Cynicism is the normal response to any positive statement at the end of this horrible century, so it isn’t easy for me to state that my extended family is a joy to me, my marriage a strength and that I am hungry for each day. I just can’t bear that it must soon stop.

  But if I have enjoyed twelve years of personal happiness, I have also had to learn to live for the first time with major professional rejections. I have had flops in the past: no one can be a director for nearly fifty years and not make some real mistakes. But generally speaking my career, with all its ups and downs, its failures and its triumphs, has been extraordinarily lucky. I would have to admit that professionally I have led a charmed existence. This has changed since I left the National Theatre.

  I left that extraordinary job with some clear ambitions. I wanted to run my own company — doing plays that might end up on Broadway or touring Europe. I hoped indeed that the company would develop into a small, expert ensemble of actors in one theatre in London, where I could work out my aesthetic according to my dreams of fifty years ago. I wanted to begin again.

  I thought I would do less opera — one every eighteen months or two years. Opera works on a different time-scale to the theatre and directors are often booked three years in advance. The production then stands like a block of concrete in the schedule, making any other adjustments impossible. I also wanted to do a great deal more Shakespeare. I had created the RSC on rigorous principles of verse-speaking. I want
ed to pass some of this on. Edith Evans had been William Poel’s Cressida when she was seventeen. He taught Harley Granville Barker. Poel was the great revolutionary theatre director at the turn of the century, who claimed that his witty, lean verse-speaking techniques went back to Garrick and beyond. Edith taught me what he said. And George Rylands at Cambridge taught me the same techniques in the Marlowe Society. This was not a way of speaking Shakespeare; it was the way. Like all methods, it needs assimilating by every generation and above all it needs personalising, so that it is creative for the individual actor. But as a technique, it is finally not to be questioned. It always works and it is always right. There are about fifty actors in England and half a dozen directors who live and breathe this technique and make it sing. There are not enough of them to ensure the future.

  I dreamed of a Shakespeare studio where I could teach verse and the basic dramaturgy of Shakespeare — how scene follows scene and contrasts in tone, atmosphere and meaning with what surrounds it. The rhythm of the play as a piece of drama and what the verse reveals about the speaking of it of course defines the basic meaning of the play. Yet the dramatic and rhetorical structure is never even considered at the universities. Shakespeare is instead material for analysis. Everything is reduced to a cold consideration of the word – something done in the study, and never experienced in the white heat of the stage.

  I also hoped to make one or two personal films. I wanted to try to write again not only with the pen, but with the camera. Akenfield had given me prospects which I had never followed up.

  I have pursued all these objectives in the years since I left the National Theatre. I have had some healthy successes – the Stephen Dillane Hamlet, The Oedipus Plays at Epidaurus, An Ideal Husband at four theatres in London before a run on Broadway and in Australia; the revisiting of Waiting for Godot after forty-two years (I think this is the best production I have ever done: the one where the author’s intentions and the director’s abilities came closest to fusing). It has been a productive and stimulating time. In eleven years, I have done some twenty-five plays, four operas, two TV series, and four films. I have collaborated on four translations, written this autobiography and worked with Nicki on several film and television scripts. Busy I have certainly been. I suppose we all try to keep death at bay by trying to achieve. My detractors often say that there is something desperate about my life. But I love pressure and that is my joy: I am a director and my fulfilment in life is to direct – every day if possible. Providing I have time to prepare (which means knowing what I am doing well in advance so that I can study it and read it and finally know it) I am perfectly happy to go from one thing to another. I do not like stopping; my batteries recharge by continuing.

  Once the childhood has been told, books of this sort usually disintegrate into lists of achievements. The childhood is interesting because it defines how the seeds were planted and how they grew. But once there is fruition (in my case, once I became a director) the procession of productions – one a failure, one a success, one nothing either way – becomes enervating and, unless the reader has seen the work, tedious to read about.

  I was fascinated therefore to discover that there are strands in my activities, unconscious till this moment, which are clearly discernible, especially in these last years. There have been seven Shakespeare productions. I was proud of the Dustin Hoffman Merchant, the Stephen Dillane Hamlet, and it was a joy to try my first Lear, Measure, and All’s Well. I believe I have directed some twenty-eight of the plays now, several of them several times. I have no ambition to complete the canon; I can only do a Shakespeare play when the cast and the place where it is to be created combine to make it in some sense a contemporary and necessary experience. All the same, I like to do one Shakespeare a year. And several still beckon me – As You Like It and Much Ado; Timon of Athens, King John and, above all, Titus Andronicus. And although I did them in the Sixties, I yearn to return to the two Henry IVs. They remain my favourite plays.

  There are other strands. I have begun to understand the wit and wisdom of Molière. Translated plays are always difficult: the director has a feeling that he is looking through frosted glass at something that should be more distinct. Ranjit Bolt has enabled me to find my way to Molière. Ranjit is a genius with words and has the flexibility of the good theatre person (he will always re-tune a line for clarity or to affirm a laugh). I have discovered that at the heart of every major scene in Molière is a basic comedy routine – something that he doubtless learned through all those years of touring as a seventeenth-century comedian. It was something that Eric Sykes could well understand when he came to play the clown for me in School for Wives. Paul Eddington, Felicity Kendal, John Sessions and above all Peter Bowles have all helped me to Molière. Ranjit Bolt, man of many languages, also did an extraordinary version of Lysistrata. It had the Greeks roaring with laughter for two seasons running at the Herodius Atticus Theatre in Athens and then at Epidaurus. Ranjit also provided me with new translations of the two Oedipus plays when I returned to the National Theatre towards the end of Richard Eyre’s tenure. They were also played at Epidaurus. My love affair with Greece – and with the mask — has continued.

  Ibsen has also continued to obsess me. I have done The Wild Duck and The Master Builder, continuing my collaboration in the translations with Inga-Stina Ewbank, which I began long years ago at the National with John Gabriel Borkman. There was a joyous Seagull with Tom Stoppard and three Tennessee Williams plays – Orpheus Descending, The Rose Tattoo, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee wrote complex parts for women and I was blessed with three great actresses – Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters and Jessica Lange.

  As well as Godot, I have revisited a few other favourite plays. I did The Homecoming again with Warren Mitchell; and Amadeus again after nearly twenty years. Paradoxically, The Homecoming was only achieved by using the same set. Amadeus needed completely reconceiving, with different designs. It seems to me now more a memory play than a performance presented by Salieri. It was also (and this was the extraordinary thing after such an interval of time) rewritten by Peter Shaffer in the Act II confrontation with great passion. His rewrite inspired David Suchet and Michael Sheen into performances which were amazing. And after twenty years, the play was revealed as a great humanist statement. This quality had always been there, lurking behind the melodrama; but Shaffer was now able to make it clear.

  Pinter’s rewrites on The Homecoming were of a different order. On the first day he told the cast that the line in Act I (‘But when the firm gets rid of you – you can flake off’) should be ‘But when the firm gets rid of you – you can fuck off.’ ‘I rather preferred “flake”’ said Warren Mitchell. ‘Really,’ said Harold, ‘“Fuck” is what I wrote.’ There was a Lord Chamberlain when we did the play in 1965. The censor’s pronouncements were law and they did not include ‘fuck’.

  There were some firsts. Ever since I had seen Jacques Charon and Robert Hirsch doing Feydeau at the Comédie Français in the Sixties, I had yearned to try my hand at this surrealistic comedy. Nicki and I translated An Absolute Turkey (Le Dindon) and Mind Millie for Me (Occupe-toi d’Amelie) and I entered a new world. The characters are true, but they allow themselves to be monstrous: there is no control. Feydeau’s characters are completely selfish. The comedy is harsh because they have absolutely no consideration for each other. Audiences see themselves writ large: they laugh and are exhilarated.

  I have also tried Shaw for the first time. I have been walking warily round him all my life. He was an enormous influence in forming my teenage agnostic and socialist opinions and I have always loved his talent for making ideas positively sexy on the stage. But I have felt that his characters often say what he wants them to say rather than what they would say. Pinter says that he knows that a play is in health when he can take his characters down to the local pub and offer them a drink. Shaw’s characters never achieve that independence. Yet I loved doing Major Barbara, largely because of Peter Bowles as Undershaft, David
Yelland as Cousins and a highly-charged Barbara from Gemma Redgrave.

  I want to do more Shaw. Most of all, I want to do more Harley Granville Barker. I have always admired Waste, but I didn’t realise that the 1926 version was a really great play until I directed it. Granville Barker is the most profound and subtle dramatist we have until Samuel Beckett inaugurated the golden age of twentieth-century drama; I long to do more of him.

  So the directing appetite is still healthy. There is still a long list of plays that I want to do tucked into my diary. There is Strindberg, more Shaw, O’Neill. And of course Chekhov…

  As I grow older, I inevitably lose touch with new writing. The new writers come, quite understandably, with a new generation of directors. The young Harold Pinter sent the young Peter Hall his plays. I doubt that a new writer would send his play to me now, the veteran director. So I sometimes feel, sadly, that I have stopped doing new drama.

  But in these years I have done John Guare and Peter Shaffer and Alan Bennett and Stephen Poliakoff and Simon Gray and many others. They are not new writers, but they gave me new plays. Perhaps the new writer will arrive.

  But it is true that I (in common with every other director) can’t now get a play on in the West End, unless there is a huge star attached. The financial risks are too great. So a new play has to start somewhere small and develop its commercial potential.

  I have, in these years, continued some rich relationships with actors. My life-long work with Judi Dench continued with Peter Shaffer’s fine play, The Gift of the Gorgon, and her amazing performance as De Filippo’s Filumena. She transformed herself into a middle-aged Neapolitan ex-prostitute — as remarkable an achievement as her Cleopatra. I loved working with Elaine Paige on the revival of Piaf. And Michael Pennington proved through Claudius, Waste, Trigorin, The Misanthrope and Filumena that he has become one of our greatest character actors. His prowess did not impress American Equity when it came to taking The Gift of the Gorgon to Broadway. He was not, they decreed, a star. ‘Michael who?’ they said. I have heard them say the same thing over the years about (among others) ‘Ian who?’ (McKellen), ‘Michael who?’ (Gambon) and ‘Judi who?’ (Dench). I remain convinced that it is dangerous in two democracies that share the same basic language that protectionist thinking should be imposed on artists. I didn’t want to re-cast Pennington, so The Gift of the Gorgon didn’t go to New York.