by Peter Hall
I had hardly been near an aeroplane or an airfield during my time in the RAF. I’d felt very much like a visiting civilian. I flew far more at school in the Air Training Corps when I loved the physical sensation of small aeroplanes, and particularly the skill of gliding: the silence, the waywardness, the uncertainty about where the air currents would take you. Life in the Education Corps was pedestrian, run by a lazy bureaucracy, full of sloth and predictable narrow-mindedness. I believe that National Service had a seriously debilitating effect on the youth of Britain. Far from making men of several generations, it taught them how to be idle. To skive became a habit. Conscripts always managed to look busy because we had been trained to look as if we were doing something when in fact we were doing nothing. Most of the time, there was nothing to do. At the height of the war, the Services must have been very different, when there was purpose and energy, and everyone shared the urgent need to win. In peace, the Services were concerned not with necessity but with method – the way something was carried out. Custom and pomposity triumphed. Great soldiers are as stimulating to meet as the top of any profession – great bankers or businessmen or surgeons – but God preserve me from the average military mind, obsessed with detail and precedent. I often remembered that I was engaged to a girl who had intended to make her life in one of these alarming institutions. Should I really give up the theatre and become a teacher? Would she really give up the WRAF and become the wife of a teacher? The future was increasingly uncertain.
I flew back to London from Germany in an unpressurised Dakota and was airsick most of the way. I was due at Cambridge University within weeks. I would be a civilian once more.
Chapter Eleven
My first action when I arrived at Cambridge was to book the Amateur Dramatic Club theatre for the October two years following – the start of my third year. I said in my letter that I wanted to do an independent production. It was a contingency plan. For the sake of Jill and my engagement, I still intended to give up the theatre and my secret aspirations. But I booked the theatre, just in case things changed. I had no money to pay for an independent production, so I was by no means sure that I could honour the booking. My action was instinctive and a kind of madness; I didn’t think about it very much. It was born equally of calculation and desperation.
On my first day at Cambridge, I checked into a forbidding semi-detached house on the western outskirts of the city. It was much like Blinco Grove, but less friendly, freezing cold and on the other side of town. It was not quite what I had in mind as the start of my university career. But first-year men at St Catharine’s had to stay out in lodgings; there was no collegiate life for them.
It was foggy – a fenland October day. I went back to the college and presented my ration book at the Bursar’s office. Rationing was still in full swing and most freshmen had just done their National Service. A few had come up straight from school and seemed extraordinarily young. This was the pre-jeans society; and we certainly would not have worn army surplus garments, even if we’d owned any, since most of us had just escaped with relief from conscription. We dressed in flannels and sports jackets – if possible with large leather pads on our elbows.
I walked from St Catharine’s, through King’s, across to Clare and then across Clare Bridge. These places were all familiar from my school days. Now I was part of them. Or was I? I felt lost. I carried my gown in my hand. We had, I knew, to wear gowns in Hall, after dark, and for lectures and supervisions (the visits to our supervisor in his rooms to discuss our essays). I knew, too, that we had to be back in college at 10 p.m. and that women were not allowed on the premises after seven, unless by special permission. As time went by, and I noticed how busy people were in the afternoons, this rule appeared sillier and sillier.
On this first day, I stood and looked at the misty river. I felt inadequate. Obviously you needed a private income to enjoy this place, mutual friends from the right school and a confidence bred of your class which I simply didn’t have.
A figure crossed the bridge in the mist, and came towards me. Like me, he carried his gown, new and untorn; and like me he looked anxious. He introduced himself. His voice was reassuringly cockney. His name was Tony Church and he was bent on being an actor. We fell upon each other’s enthusiasm for the theatre as if it were a secret religion in a pagan land; and began an intermittent friendship which has lasted to this day. I have directed Tony more times than I can remember: at Cambridge, at the Oxford Playhouse, at the RSC and at the National Theatre. At Cambridge I met many people who have remained colleagues all my professional life.
My first year was a disappointment; but then I was trying to give up the theatre. I hung sulkily around the fringes of the university dramatic societies. I was involved, but always half-heartedly, because of Jill and my ideas for a career. I tried to believe in them, but couldn’t. I also wished that I was living in college; I needed a strong new sense of place; I hated my digs. I spent a good deal of time at home, at Whittlesford, where my parents had moved, one station up the line from Shelford; another slight promotion for my father.
In the late Forties and early Fifties, Cambridge drama was highly organised and offered amazing opportunities. The productions were regarded by the arts editors of the national papers as news, and the first-string critics often travelled from London to see them. It was thought, I suppose, that anyone who survived the university rat race stood a good chance of making a mark in the profession. But drama at Cambridge was not a university department; it was run by the students and was as important for those with theatrical ambitions as the Union for would-be politicians, or Varsity and Granta for journalists. The Amateur Dramatic Club, whose productions I had often seen as a schoolboy, had a small theatre. Its stage was frequently let out to other societies, chief among them the University Actors.
The Marlowe Society put on plays (usually Shakespeare) at the Arts Theatre in the Lent term; and other productions as part of the Cambridge summer festival. The Society had a strong tradition of verse-speaking upheld by George Rylands, an English don at King’s and one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury group. He had been the office boy for Leonard and Virginia Woolf when they started the Hogarth Press. Now he was on the board of H. M. Tennent Ltd, the main West End producing management. He also directed professionally – John Gielgud in Hamlet, for instance, or Peggy Ashcroft in The Duchess of Malfi. If Cambridge had a link with the professional theatre, George Rylands – always known as ‘Dadie’ – was it. He was an enthusiastic amateur actor and I had seen him play Oedipus and Antony and Macbeth. He had a musical, emphatic voice, whose constant upward inflections sustained the sense if not the emotion. We were all given to imitating him. He was a golden man, with piercing blue eyes and a mischievous wit. At the most solemn moments he had an endearing habit of breaking into giggles. In the lecture hall a half smile would be quickly suppressed when he found the paradoxes of his own scholarship amusing. He was a gossip, a wit, a delight: an inspiration to us all. He still is – as, in his nineties, he trots round King’s.1
Drama standards at Cambridge were also set at that time by John Barton. As a freshman, I was in awe of him, but he soon became a very close friend and a colleague whom I have admired throughout my life. He is one of those extraordinary originals who give a good name to Eton – no stereotype, but an eccentric, individual and unique. The son of an extremely English family whose father was a top civil servant, he developed at school a passion for words and for play-making and performing. When I first met him, he had already wrecked his back in a legendary and dangerous duel in an ADC production of Macbeth. As I went up, he was presenting and directing his own play, That’s All One, a whimsical, comical piece, a blend of Lewis Carroll, pastiche Shakespeare and Jerome K. Jerome, with a good deal about cricket. It had music by Julian Slade and was designed by Timothy O’Brien.
John was already a fiercely professional director, expert at staging and lighting. He dominated the ADC and Marlowe committees with his rigorous de
mands, and would have no truck with amateurism. He was completely obsessed by the theatre and would work round the clock, without thought for sleep or food. He smoked continuously, fell over things, dropped cups of coffee and, to ease the enthusiasm which threatened to possess him, would chew razor blades throughout rehearsals by gently flopping them over and over on his tongue. I have seen many actors and actresses, at Cambridge and, later, at Stratford, mesmerised by that revolving blade. Occasionally, a tell-tale trickle of blood would seep out of the corner of his mouth as John elucidated a particularly difficult textual point.
Without John, I don’t think my Cambridge theatre generation would have achieved so much. He not only set standards himself, he expected others to do the same. His influence lasted for many years, even after he had gone – from Peter Wood to Jonathan Miller and from Trevor Nunn to Richard Eyre.
Peter Wood was already a fine director by the time he left Cambridge. I remember him wearing an imposing camelhair coat draped like a cloak from his shoulders. He had blond wavy hair, a superior laugh and a speedy wit. I hated him on sight. He made me feel that I was a boy from the backwoods of Suffolk with little confidence and a very uncertain style.
Peter left Cambridge at the end of my first year and obtained, through the influence of Dadie, a job as assistant stage manager and understudy with H. M. Tennent. He was engaged for Seagulls Over Sorrento, a farce with Ronald Shiner at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. We were all very impressed. But there was a catch. Peter had been made to sign a run-of-the-play contract. As the play was an enormous hit he had to stay on at the Apollo for some three or four years, by which time I was already a successful director. He then rapidly established himself as one of the most expert talents of his generation. I know nobody with a greater knowledge of comedy, comic timing, and how to place and obtain a laugh. We have been friends and worked together on and off for forty years.
I studied hard during my first year at Cambridge and resentfully kept the drama to a minimum – like a man having the occasional deep drag on a cigarette while purporting to give up smoking. I was a terrible Magnus in a freshman’s production of Shaw’s The Apple Cart, a round-faced boy pretending to be a mature, middle-aged man. I had a small part in The Enchanted Isle, Dryden’s adaptation of The Tempest, and fell in love with Purcell’s music. I played the First Citizen in the Marlowe Society’s Coriolanus and watched, fascinated, as Dadie directed with his nose firmly in the text. He was more concerned with our line endings and our iambics than with whether we were bumping into each other. John Barton compensated by being in charge of the battles.
My engagement to Jill jogged along. We met whenever we could, but her life and mine were moving separate ways. She was now a Pilot Officer and her career was flourishing. We still had a passion for making love, but seldom found anywhere private. A spring and summer of cramped cars, cold tents and rain-soaked trees and bushes failed to diminish our ardour. But by the time autumn came, we both knew our engagement was going to end. There were too many pressures on both sides pulling us apart. It was a sad break-up.
I became introspective and alarmed. I took a summer vacation job as a level-crossing keeper. My father had recommended me to British Railways and I had been successfully tested for my knowledge of the railway telegraph system. The crossing I looked after was on the main line from Cambridge to Liverpool Street. Trains were fast and frequent, but the crossing was an anomaly because its gates were normally locked against the very minor road. I sat in a hut by the railway for twelve hours at a stretch – either from six in the morning, or from six at night. A large bell mounted on the outside of the hut clanged in code the type of train that was about to pass.
On fine days, I sat in the sun and studied. It was an ideal job for a student, though I found it hard to get my mind off Jill. The road was little more than a made-up farm track. If any form of vehicle arrived, I rang up the nearby signal box to check if there were any trains about. I had to take this precaution because I had usually silenced the bell with a sock, so that it would not disturb my concentration. On the night shift, I was even more out of order. I dismantled the bell completely and slept soundly, though express goods trains constantly rushed by, six feet from my head.
One night, I was awoken by a loud banging on the door. A man’s furious face was visible through the small panel of glass, shouting. It was clear from his pounding on the door, which I had locked before going to sleep, that he was in a hurry to get his car over the crossing. It stood, lights glaring, by the gates. As I picked up the telephone to ask my friend at the signal box if it was safe to open up, two or three police cars screeched to a halt and the man ran across the fields, chased by the law. He had burgled a house, then stolen the car. I was commended for my sleepiness; I had given the police time to catch up with him.
In that same long vacation, armed with sixty pounds, an old battered tent, a primus stove and a great number of books, Tom Bergner and I set off for Italy in my beloved old Austin. Tom was a wise and witty fellow scholarship man at Caths. He had a sharp Jewish sense of humour and a great ability to mock British crustiness. He was a friend whom I would have liked to keep. He went into the Coal Board and I went into the theatre. We haven’t met since Cambridge.
Our trip lasted six weeks. We camped on a football pitch on the outskirts of Paris; we drove down the Rhone valley, explored Provence, and puttered along the Cote d’Azur into Italy and on to Florence. Money was so tight that we lived mainly on spaghetti and tomatoes cooked on our stove. I was 15 lb lighter when I returned home.
The cobblestones of northern France played hell with the Austin’s springs. The engine broke down frequently, the radiator sprang a score of leaks – so did the tent. But I saw Paris for the first time; and The Winter’s Tale at the Comédie Française, the Louvre, and Boris Godunov at the Paris Opera. The richness of the French countryside made me dizzy. As we drove south from Paris to the sea I saw the colours and felt the heat of the Midi. It was a completely new experience for me. I worshipped Provence. The Cote d’Azur was a little run-down and rather empty. It felt old-fashioned – what was modern belonged to the Twenties and Thirties. The post-war boom had not yet begun.
We reached Florence and I discovered my favourite city in the world: so much human genius in so small an area, and displayed on a perfect human scale.
I had the good luck to wander round southern Europe before mass tourism began. The roads were bad, but there were very few people about. Now there are too many, and national differences are consciously emphasised to delight the package tourist. It is, alas, a world of theme parks, and tourism is a branch of show business. Our trip was primitive but as important to me as learning music or my obsession with the theatre. Sadly, though, I was still in love with Jill. She wasn’t that easy to forget. Although we had agreed not to write to each other, I haunted every poste restante office on our journey, just in case she had changed her mind. But no word came. Sometimes I was glad, sometimes devastated.
I returned to Cambridge full of determination. I presented myself to the drama groups with the energy of a phoenix confidently expecting to rise. But they could see no difference in me; I was the same sulky young man. It took me a couple of terms to get going in university theatre; and it wasn’t until my third year that I really flew. As the theatre activity increased, I did academically less and less. My degree results reflected the loss of Jill and my return to the theatre. I was assessed at the end of my first year as a First; at the end of my second year, I received a 2:1; in my third, a 2:2. Had there been a fourth year, I believe I would have failed.
My parents watched anxiously as I worked harder and harder, not to land a decent, well-pensioned job, but to become a director. Tom Henn and Douglas Brown were equally alarmed as one of their academic high-fliers threw all his prospects away.
I dug deeper into Shakespeare, with one eye more on my future needs than the needs of the examination. I learnt about the texts – about contemporary typography and printing, th
e validity of the Shakespeare editions and Elizabethan spelling and pronunciation. The Marlowe Society mounted a production of Julius Caesar in which we all attempted to speak Elizabethan. We were trained in the accent by the expert scholarship of the day, and the play was directed by Dadie and John Barton. We were hardly good enough to play Julius Caesar in our own voices, much less good enough to speak it in a foreign language; for it was foreign – as a sound, like Belfast crossed with Devon. But how could our experts be sure they had it right? There was, after all, great latitude in the scholars’ pronunciation of Chaucer’s middle English. I worried that it could be the same with Shakespeare. Yet even for those of us who had only small roles (I doubled Marullus and Metellus Cimber) it was an unforgettable experience. Learning the accent gave living proof that the resonance and assonance of Shakespeare’s text were richer and more complex than the clipped grey sounds of modern English.
When I am preparing a Shakespeare play, I still mutter the text to myself in Elizabethan. It reveals the shapes and the colours. It always makes the words wittier. Sometimes, to the incredulous delight of actors, I can be persuaded to demonstrate this arcane ability. I sound like a pedantic imitation of Ian Paisley, except the k’s are all pronounced. For instance,
Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?
becomes
Doath nut Brewters bewtless kerneel?
I nurse an ambition to direct a Shakespeare play with a completely American cast. I would like to use the richness of their vowels. Their sound is much nearer Elizabethan pronunciation than our restrained modern English. Americans usually take one of two courses with Shakespeare: either they speak Shakespeare as if they were pretending to be English, which is false and unendurable; or they ignore his shapes and try to speak him naturalistically, as modern Americans. If they learnt the rhythm and the form, and spoke the words with full-blooded American vowels, Shakespeare would live powerfully in American.
