Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  My art master, Mr Crouch, was dry, witty, wise and a superb pianist. Where the arts were concerned, he had seen it all; and yet he was adamant that it should be seen again by each new generation. He loved the theatre and directed a school production of The Taming of the Shrew in which I played an assertive and fiercely bearded Petruchio. In preparation, he took a party of us to an Old Vic Company production of the play. Trevor Howard was the Petruchio. I thought he underplayed the part.

  My history master after Vivien Richards had been, wonder of wonders, a professional actor. John Tanfield actually knew what it was like to be on the stage, to sit in dressing rooms, to be part of the professional theatre. I grabbed every bit of theatrical gossip he could remember and chewed on it eagerly. He had not been a successful actor and, armed with a double first, had returned to teaching. I sat with him over innumerable meals while he talked theatre, his wife watching him with an ironic and understanding smile.

  He directed me as Hamlet. ‘If you speak Shakespeare quickly and rhythmically, the complications mostly take care of themselves,’ he said. ‘If you understand it, the audience will understand it too.’

  He was a tall, gangling man, with an actor’s delivery and a long horsy face. He chain-smoked in class. And he was an iconoclast to the end, always wittily suspicious of authority.

  Maurice Wollman was ruthless yet benign, and trained the brighter boys hard to pass exams. I always feel I owe my success in major examinations to his organisation of my memory. It wasn’t education, but method. But that is what examinations demand. Until I was in my thirties, I had a photographic memory; I learnt things quickly, but I also forgot them quickly.

  The inspirer of my last years at school was Douglas Brown. He was a famous old pupil of the Perse who, after his war service, had returned as an Exhibitioner to St Catharine’s, where he had taken a double first starred with distinction. He was now supervising at the university, combining it with a job at the Perse teaching Caldwell Cook’s Play-Way to the juniors. He also coached the seniors for university entrance.

  He was a small tense man with fierce concentration and an engaging grin, a zealous scoutmaster and a teacher who could inspire. He set aside a weekend each year in order to read Keats’s letters from cover to cover so that he could, as he put it, ‘experience the man’s life’. I was impressed and tried to emulate him. The senior pupils spent the summer holidays painting and decorating the Mummery for him so that it could once more resound to the cries of little boys shouting Shakespeare at each other. Douglas kept open house every Friday night: sandwiches, coffee and music. The records were still 78s, but the reproduction was electric by now. Here I first heard Britten, and was excited beyond belief by a British Council recording of Tippett’s Child of Our Time. I heard modern music which was sensual, and which appropriated Bach as readily as negro spirituals.

  Douglas was a sceptical Leavisite – by which I mean that while he respected the acumen and moral integrity of the Cambridge sage, F. R. Leavis, he was critical of his more extreme and negative opinions. Leavis sneered at talents he did not approve, such as the Georgian poets or Tennyson; but Douglas would not permit us to sneer at the great. Nonetheless, we all read Scrutiny, the magazine edited by Leavis and his wife, Queenie. And from Douglas and Leavis we learnt two important things. First, that the integrity of any artist can be judged from a close analysis of the way he expresses his work. Sloppy writing is the result of sloppy thinking; over-decorated prose or verse betrays a lack of confidence, a desire for effect. Close textual analysis therefore will always reveal the basic quality of the art. The second lesson was the importance of art itself. In an increasingly secular age, the artists were really our prophets and our priests, helping us to learn how to live. Art therefore had an absolute social purpose and an awesome responsibility to be honest. It could also improve our lives. Trashy art could well be seen as a reflection of a trashy age.

  Then there was obscenity and violence to consider. I first read James Joyce’s Ulysses when I was seventeen. I didn’t realise that I was still an East Anglian prude. It shocked me. I was violently against it. Douglas pointed out to me that the obscene, the violent and the disturbing must necessarily be part of an artist’s vocabulary. We must judge only the integrity with which they are used.

  Douglas was a great man who always made me feel inadequate. Compared to him, I hadn’t read enough, done enough, or used my time well enough. My mother liked him but was wary. She found him bookish. He could, in her opinion, have done with a little life. He loved the theatre, but made me feel that it was impure and, compared with the precision of music, recklessly generalised in its interpretations. I believe he would find the theatre has more intellectual honesty now, intermittent though that can still be.

  After a brilliant period supervising at Cambridge, Douglas went as a lecturer to Reading University. From there, in the early Sixties, he was appointed Professor of English at the new University of York. As he took up the post, he died of leukaemia. It seemed as if his passion for learning had consumed him. He left behind a distinguished little monograph on Thomas Hardy; not very much to mark the passage of a great man.

  In my last two years at school I was so active I nearly burst. I acted, edited the school magazine, and read and read and read. I also became head boy. It was a joy to help run the place. I discovered that administration could be exciting. I wasn’t an outsider any more – almost. I was so greedy for experience that it hurt. Most of that experience came through the performing arts.

  Did I know what I wanted to be? I most certainly did; and I had known it in my soul since I was fourteen. I was going to be a director in the theatre. I was going to be the man who organised the fantasies, and who sometimes, perhaps, invented them. I must have had a confused idea about what a director in the theatre actually did. I went out of my way to act, but I never wanted to be an actor. I just wanted to know what it felt like. The job I wanted was to make all the fantasies happen. And I kept my ambition secret.

  When pressed, I would confess that I would like to go into the theatre. People reacted with pain or horror or surprise: they thought I wanted to be an actor. I had read Gordon Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre (which is still the best job description of a director that I know); and, with a certain amount of bewilderment, the books by and about Stanislavsky. I read Granville Barker; I read about Shakespeare’s Globe; and I read every book I could find about Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic, Miss Horniman in Manchester, Barry Jackson in Birmingham, Terence Gray at the Festival Theatre Cambridge, and Norman Marshall at the Little Theatre in London. I devoured theatre magazines and every scrap about drama in the newspapers. I lived in the public library. I was following a secret agenda which was mapped out partly by plan and partly by instinct.

  My parents always wanted me to be a teacher. It is therefore hardly surprising that in my adolescence I was already indifferent to what is one of the most crucial jobs in our society. I thought that the best way to launch myself into the theatrical profession would be from the amateur theatre world of university – Oxford or Cambridge. Many, I knew, had done just that. If I failed, I could then become a teacher. But Michael Redgrave, Marius Goring, Robert Speight, Hugh Hunt, George Devine and Peter Brook hadn’t failed; perhaps I wouldn’t either.

  I still have a recurrent nightmare. It visited me first when I was twenty-seven and had just been appointed the Director of the Stratford theatre. In my dream, I am indeed a teacher. As English master, I am directing the school play. It is usually Julius Caesar, with a rabble of small boys I can neither control nor inspire. During a particularly noisy riot, I overhear one whispering to another: ‘They say he used to direct at Stratford, but I don’t believe it.’ I wake up sweating…

  It is a great blessing to know what you want to do and to have the passion that makes you do it. That certainty, however, has an undertow of agony; perhaps you will not get the chance to do what you want to do; or worse, perhaps you will be incapable of doing it. So to be able to
do it when you are at last given the chance is the greatest blessing of all. But this ability is never certain, never constant; it is always in doubt. The most talented seem prey to the worst fears. Peggy Ashcroft always had something very near a breakdown before she achieved her great performances – it only lasted a few hours, but it was an intense collapse. Laurence Olivier suffered paralysing stage fright for many years. And all the writers I know are haunted by the spectre of the blank page.

  The theatre keeps you humble and it keeps you young; you learn your job to the very end, and always feel unsure with every new job: ‘Can I still do it? Shall I be found out?’

  Ralph Richardson defeated the fears; he liked long runs: he was able to go on practising. He often told me that he loved the nightly expectation of going down to the theatre. He felt like a woodcarver trying to repeat an ever more delicate decoration. He would re-carve his performance each night, making it a little finer, a little more economical. Some nights, the knife would slip and he would spoil a whole section. He knew that perfection was impossible, but the important thing was to continue carving. If the run was happy, the carving would improve, though the improvement might be hardly discernible from performance to performance.

  The end of the war and the election of a Labour government in 1945 gave new hope to families like mine. My father thought that a golden age had come: a welfare state where people cared for education and for health and where the railways were nationalised. I noticed a renaissance in the arts too. The Council for the Encouragement of the Arts became The Arts Council, and the Third Programme arrived. I sat in my little room under the eaves of Shelford station and listened eagerly to the radio, my own now, bought from my earnings from odd-jobs. I feasted on music and drama – Shaw, Shakespeare, John Webster. Nothing widened my horizons so much as the Third Programme. It was frequently demanding and difficult, but it challenged, and I was stimulated as well as entertained. There was a jibe current at its foundation that it was merely dons talking to dons. I would love to hear it again instead of the current inanities which move ever down-market in the desperate pursuit of popularity.

  In my last three years at the Perse school, I set a pace which has continued all my life. I have frequently been called a workaholic, though I have never been able to understand why an obsessive pleasure in work should be seen as an indulgence. I love high activity; I enjoy being extended. I have always worked on many things at once. Whatever abilities I lack, I know I have the gift of complete concentration on the thing in hand at the moment I am doing it. I can then forget about it and move on with equal concentration to something else. The variety itself generates energy. I discovered in the Sixties, through a routine medical examination, that my body has a tendency to manufacture too much adrenalin. I have consequently developed an adrenalin addiction; consciously or unconsciously, I put myself into situations where high quantities of adrenalin are produced. I’m sure this is why I like constant work, and why I don’t much enjoy my rare holidays unless I have a task: something to write or something to study. Otherwise, I am apt to sit staring morosely at the horizon. My engine either functions at full speed or it stops altogether, and then I suffer a truly terrible depression.

  My eldest son, Christopher, who was born with an altogether more phlegmatic temperament, asked me when he was ten why I worked so hard. ‘What are you trying to prove?’ he said. I told him I was not trying to prove anything: I like working hard. A hard day’s directing gives me a peace that I still enjoy, a physical satisfaction.

  I enjoyed myself so much during the intense activity of my last years at school that I began to question all the hours spent sleeping; they seemed an awful waste of time. I tried systematically to cut them down, but I couldn’t get below five hours; four induced collapse.

  The last major hurdle at school was the Cambridge scholarship examination. I sat it before my Higher Certificate rather than after. It was regarded as a trial run. If I failed, I could always have a second chance. After the examination, I was called for an interview at St Catharine’s College. The senior tutor there was Tom Henn, the distinguished Yeats scholar. He could easily reduce himself to tears by intoning great verse. This seemed surprising in an Anglo-Irish military man.

  His rooms were filled with dogs and pipe smoke. I remember him dressed in baggy tweeds in an environment that was more like a country gentleman’s study than a Cambridge don’s. Fly-fishing rods and double-barrelled guns nestled alongside the letters of Maude Gonne and the journals of Lady Gregory.

  At the scholarship interview, he questioned me about the theatre – and the floodgates of my enthusiasm opened. He had heard of my exploits as Petruchio at school, and asked me to deliver the wooing speech. I launched into ‘You lie in faith, for you are called plain Kate …’ My ringing voice woke up the spaniels.

  I was also asked about my literary and critical enthusiasms. Douglas Brown had schooled me carefully; I was not to mention Leavis. Tom Henn was of the other camp – the King’s group centred round F. L. Lucas and George Rylands. Their approach to literature was romantic, not social, and much less based on textual analysis. Their reactions were personal and emotional, and they distrusted Leavis.

  I was awarded an Exhibition in English to St Catharine’s. Tom Henn supervised me during my first year, and I visited his rooms once a week with two other students for an hour’s discussion on the essays we had written and the books we had read. I remember him elucidating an image in a Yeats poem. ‘Have you ever,’ he intoned, ‘made love – to a girl – in a cave?’ Since we had never made love to anybody, in a cave or anywhere else, we shifted in our seats uncomfortably. Men outnumbered women in Cambridge at that time by eight to one.

  I loved Tom Henn because he was eccentric and emotional. He spoke in a strange liturgical baritone chant, with Irish r’s and over-meticulous vowels. He worshipped literature and heroic achievement. He was a military man with a poet’s soul. His high emotions couldn’t comprehend the rigorous critical zeal of Leavis. I secretly attended Leavis’s lectures; but since I was directly supervised by Tom Henn, it was rather like a devout Catholic finding his day-to-day inspiration from the sermons of Luther.

  Leavis was a familiar figure in the Cambridge streets. He rode an absurdly old-fashioned tall black bicycle. His shirt collar was always wide open, even in the worst weather, and he was the original corduroys-and-open-sandals man. He wore socks with his sandals. His delivery at lectures was dry and witty, with an in-built sneer in virtually every phrase. We attended in order to be shocked and outraged at his judgements, though actually we were delighted to hear all the great reputations overturned. T. S. Eliot was suspect; so was Bloomsbury and all its works; so also, at that time, was Dickens. I consequently neglected one of my great childhood enthusiasms and substituted for Dickens the authors in Leavis’s current Great Tradition: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and D. H. Lawrence.

  With my scholarship secured a year early, I was able to restructure my last twelve months at school. Douglas Brown gave me a huge reading programme. And I was to play Hamlet in the school play.

  Hamlet obsessed me. I read a mountain of books about it. Granville Barker’s remains the best. He never forgets that the play is a play and must be judged as something that communicates on the stage.

  I never could act. In my performances, I merely drew diagrams of acting – indications of how a performance could be shaped and what it should mean. I was giving a lecture on the part; I wasn’t being it. Nonetheless, the lecture was clear, some people mistook it for acting, and my Hamlet was certainly more than the audience had been expecting at a school play. I was a success and received my first fan letters. I was gratified. But for me acting was only a means to an end.

  As term ended I was aware that the first chapter of my life was closing. I was due to begin my National Service. All my plans would have to be put in suspension for two years. University seemed a long way off. Even so, I worried; I knew I must get through Cambridge as well as I had got through
school. I was a scholarship boy of whom a great deal was demanded. There was still no money and this added to the tension. I felt I would be scrambling by my finger-nails over a wall into an alien, well-educated, well-heeled world, where I was neither expected nor welcome. And after that? I had no contacts in the theatre, nor did I have any knowledge of how to begin a career in it.

  The day after school finished I set off to West Kirby, near Liverpool. Suddenly I was 3120201 Aircraftsman Hall. Up to this point in my life, I had believed that you made your own luck by grasping every opportunity offered, however dangerous and however demanding. Whatever happened, it was up to you. But as I looked round the hut at the other eighteen-year-old trainees, who were all fucking and blinding at me as I tried to read, I felt that my luck had run out. I wasn’t going to make much of this.

  Chapter Nine

  RAF West Kirby took in boys and made them men; that’s what the NCO said. It was a brutal place, and the transformation took eight weeks. A boy in the next hut committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor. I don’t recall any newspaper reports, scandals, committees of enquiry or questions in the House. I suppose it was hushed up. Certainly the conditions were mindless enough to induce terrible despair.

  My home was a hut occupied by thirty other lads. It was presided over by an irascible and threatening corporal who was foul-mouthed and had a natural hostility to anything that was out of line, humorous or non-conformist. The food was awful, the physical demands extreme, and the intellectual stimulation nil. We were made fit: that was the only achievement. But our spirits were broken in the quest for discipline. And I became aware that a high proportion of the male population have no descriptive adjective in their vocabulary other than the word ‘fuck’. I had no moral objection to this; it just made conversation monotonous.