by Peter Hall
Before the Pill and before the permissive society, it was difficult to develop a stable sexual relationship. Frustration was the norm. When I was at Cambridge, competition was fierce. Cycling through the cold fenland rains to have tea at Girton became an erotic experience. What surprises me now is not that my generation had so little sex in the Fifties, but that, given the circumstances, we had any at all.
I have been married four times and had two other long-term serious commitments which were marriages in all but name. I don’t wonder that people doubt me when I say that I believe passionately in marriage, in the sharing of life completely with a partner, where each supports the other through the difficulties as well as the excitements. When I was shooting the film of Akenfield, with local East Anglian people improvising the parts, I found a fine old Suffolk character with flint-blue eyes, lantern jaw, and a faint mocking smile. He must have been in his late seventies. I asked him to have a chat with the hero, Tom, who was planning his marriage. There was no rehearsal; we rolled two cameras as they talked:
OLD MAN: I hear y’are gettin’ married, boy …
TOM: Yeah …
OLD MAN: Well, if there’s onything better in this life, then oiv never hed it.
I agree. The problem is that it is a part of life where compromise is difficult. If a relationship is not completely right, then in my case it very quickly seems to go completely wrong. The deficiencies feed on each other until finally there is nothing left. This is not to say that until I married Nicki Frei there were not spells of intense happiness and fulfilment. But it has taken me nearly a lifetime to achieve the marriage I hoped for.
After Jill, there were many attempts to get it right. Until Nicki, they all ended in pain.
Chapter Fifteen
I waited after the failure of the Goldoni to see if my career was over. I detected a slight coldness mixed with a dash of sympathy among my colleagues. I was no longer the golden boy who could do no wrong. Infallibility like that only comes once in a career – after the first success. Ever after, whoever you are and whatever you have done, you are to some degree only as good as your last play.
I waited and waited. Had John Fernald lost his trust? Blessedly he gave me another production and handed me a script based on André Gide’s The Immoralist. The play was a Broadway adaptation, and made a banal novel even more banal. It used secret homosexuality as a melodramatic titillation, much like the Victorians used drink and drunkenness. The play told the story of a bisexual – a man who on his honeymoon in North Africa found his homosexuality awakened by watching an Arab boy dance. We can smile at the melodrama now, but in 1954 the subject was taboo and it seemed important and immensely daring to stage it.
The play was of course banned. Strict censorship by the Lord Chamberlain meant that public theatres were not allowed even to mention the existence of homosexuality. But club theatres like the Arts were outside the Lord Chamberlain’s aegis. Providing you joined a theatre club, you could have your morals corrupted – and be burnt to death, for clubs were also outside the official fire regulations.
I was indignant that the theatre should be censored in a way that did not apply to publishing, broadcasting or the press. The Lord Chamberlain’s readers were mostly ex-Service officers picked, apparently, for their extremely dirty minds, since they often found filth where none was intended. I was shocked, too, by the prejudice at that time against homosexuals and by the fact that they were still, in the eyes of the law, criminals. These were causes worth joining. Plays by Ibsen, Shaw and Granville Barker had all been banned; and how many plays had been aborted before even a word was written because the dramatist knew that he would be censored?
It wasn’t easy to get actors to come to the Arts. Agents were definitely not interested in a young director who was offering no money for rehearsals – just luncheon vouchers – and eight pounds a week when playing. I discovered that the only way to cast a play was to speak directly to the actor. Through a mutual friend, I found Yvonne Mitchell’s phone number and asked her if she would do The Immoralist. She was then a considerable star of screen and stage. She agreed, and a lifelong friendship began with her and her husband, the critic and author Derek Monsey. Then another favourite actor, Michael Gough, joined the cast.
In the event, The Immoralist was a big success, though of course its subject matter meant it could not transfer to the West End. Heterosexuals swarmed to it to show their tolerance. So, naturally, did homosexuals.
I was happy with the production: I could sense that my work was maturing. I was beginning to know by tempo, pause and timing how I could create atmosphere.
My next production at the Arts was a much finer play, Julien Green’s South. Set at the beginning of the American Civil War, it was another homosexual tragedy, and the first production I was completely proud of in my own heart. It was a delicately written piece, hardly daring to verbalise its feelings. I found what lay under the words and orchestrated it.
In the early stages of rehearsal, the shape and pace of a scene must not be imposed. The actors should be free to create while the director helps to release their imaginations; and if that means going very fast or very slow, or taking enormous pauses, it must happen: everything must be allowed. But once the truth of the scene is found, the director becomes the editor. He must shape what has been discovered in the certain knowledge that an audience’s collective apprehension is quicker than an actor’s instinct or a director’s desire to linger over the finer moments. He must make sure every second of action earns its time upon the stage. At this point, he shapes the scene as a conductor shapes a piece of orchestral music – quickening here, slowing there, so that the audience is given variety. Not only does this give form to what the actors have created; it also provides a map which the actors can follow on those evenings – and they will happen – when inspiration is not present. By following the map, it is possible to induce creativity when none was there. South was my first production which achieved a full and justified shape. A new young critic called Bernard Levin, writing in Truth, understood what I had done. I was very pleased.
The Goldoni was now almost forgotten; it had certainly been forgiven. If I had done it after The Immoralist and South instead of before, I might not have had my next stroke of luck. John Fernald was offered the job of principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, so he decided to give up the Arts. Campbell Williams, the owner, called me into his office and asked me to run it. Suddenly, I had my own theatre in the centre of London. I was just twenty-four.
Chapter Sixteen
John Whiting was my guide to what was happening in world drama. He told me about Eugene Ionesco’s work, particularly The Bald Prima Donna and The Lesson. Their surrealistic comedy was very attractive; it struck a blow at the British theatre which often looked bogged down in time-wasting naturalism. As John Fernald left, we shared a double bill at the Arts in which I directed The Lesson and John an André Obey play about the Trojan War called Sacrifice to the Wind. The Ionesco, the first to be seen in London, brought abuse, laughter and rage. The author came over and gazed at the production like an amused gnome who wanted to blow everything up, not because he particularly disapproved of it but because it would be fun. It was the first time I had met a complete anarchist and I greatly enjoyed the experience. For thirty-five years, Ionesco told this story: ‘When the young English director Peter Hall was directing The Lesson, he objected that the Professor kills forty pupils during the day. The girl who arrives for her lesson in the play is the forty-first. “Wouldn’t it be more credible,” asked Peter, “if he’d only killed three or four?”’ This, Ionesco would say, is an example of the English love of understatement.
There is no truth whatsoever in his story. But I appreciated Ionesco.
After The Lesson, I took a deep breath and directed a revival of Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill’s great but finally earthbound attempt to write a modern Greek tragedy. It was my first try at an epic event. Ever since I had seen Richardson and Olivier
do the two parts of Henry IV in one day, I had believed in big occasions in the theatre. It was a belief that later led me to The Wars of the Roses trilogy and to the seven History Plays at Stratford; and, at the National Theatre, to both parts of Tamburlaine the Great, to The Oresteia and to the cycle of the three Late Plays of Shakespeare.
Mourning Becomes Electra disappointed the critics; they objected not to the production but to the play. O’Neill is a great architect of drama, but not often a great writer of dialogue. He seems to half realise his deficiencies and loads the page with long stage directions describing the high emotions of the characters. The actors are instructed to be scornful, to make their voices quiver and to look sad and angry at the same time; all these instructions betray O’Neill’s anxiety. Descriptive stage directions are dangerous for actors; they encourage applied results – not acting processes. I would like to see Mourning Becomes Electra with the stage directions ignored and the emotions underplayed. A realistic approach might well reveal far more, and be more in tune with the under-stated naturalism of O’Neill’s dialogue.
By now it was time for a holiday. I had no current girlfriend, so I went alone to Spain. I have always found a holiday without a purpose unendurable, and packed my bag with all twelve volumes of Remembrance of Things Past – a work I had not read. I lay on a beach and surrendered myself to this intricate marathon. I was in the middle of book ten when a telegram arrived: ‘Business on Mourning Becomes Electra failing. Please return immediately to begin rehearsals of next production.’ I have still not finished Proust’s masterpiece.
I returned to direct Waiting for Godot, the world premiere in English of Samuel Beckett’s play. I, and everybody else at the Arts, thought the enterprise was a huge gamble. The text had arrived in my little cupboard of an office several weeks earlier and in the most conventional way possible – through the post. With it was a letter from Donald Albery, a leading West End manager, asking if I would like to stage it. Attempts to set it up in the West End had completely failed. Many luminaries, Gielgud, Richardson and Guinness among them, had refused to appear in it.
It was at that time running in a tiny theatre in Paris. As director of the Arts, I went to Paris every three or four months because it was then the centre of theatre. I had met Julien Green and Jean Anouilh there; also Henri de Montherlant, in a pretentiously empty room on the Quai d’Orsay furnished with busts of Roman emperors which looked much like his own head. But I hadn’t met Beckett. Nor had I seen Waiting for Godot. To be truthful, I had only just known of him and his play.
I had read it during a long meal-break at the technical rehearsals for Mourning Becomes Electra. It needed four men, a boy, and a tree that was bare in the first act but sprouted leaves in the second. I found it enormously appealing, and written by a master. This was poetic theatre. What do I mean by poetic? Well, it wasn’t sequinned with applied adjectives like Christopher Fry, or with dry ironic platitudes like T. S. Eliot. Here was a voice, a rhythm, a shape that was very particular: lyrical, yet colloquial; funny, yet mystical. Though expressed in natural speech, unpretentious and believable, it was much more than natural speech: there was a haunting sub-text.
Waiting for Godot is an inversion of a normal play: for the first time, lack of action becomes the action. And the play is a rich metaphor: all of us are, by the act of living, waiting; certainly waiting for death and, perhaps, waiting also for some answer to our existence. I didn’t think whether it would be a success or not; I certainly didn’t worry about whether it was important or not. I just felt a strong desire to realise it on the stage. All the time, I came back to the sensual pleasure of the evocative writing, to its unique rhythm and tone. I have nightmares, even now: suppose I had turned the play down and then lived to realise what I had rejected?
It wasn’t easy to cast. Actors were baffled by the long passages of seemingly inconsequential dialogue. They did not see that it was funny and human. I finally engaged Paul Daneman, Peter Bull, Peter Woodthorpe and Timothy Bateson. It would be an exaggeration to say they were enthusiastic. They worked hard, but sometimes they thought they were in a kind of con job – that Beckett was having us on; that the play was a suit of Emperor’s New Clothes. Rehearsals, though, revealed in it much comedy and a dark seam of terror. I had from the start thought of Vladimir and Estragon as tramps. It has been pointed out since that there is nothing to indicate this in the text and the observation came as something of a shock. They seemed then – and they still seem – tramps to me: two men waiting in a limitless landscape for something to turn up while chewing the odd carrot to pass the time.
On the first night, very little went right. After half an hour, there were yawns and mock snores and some barracking. Later on, the audience nearly erupted into open hostility but then decided not to bother and settled instead into still, glum boredom. A few people laughed with genuine recognition; and the same few applauded enthusiastically at the end. It was a mixed reception, with the mixture very definitely on the side of failure.
When the performance finished, I met my new and extremely smooth international agent, a man who had promised great things for me in London and America. He was puce with rage and for the first time in our relationship expressed a strong opinion. ‘Well, you’ve done it now,’ he spluttered. ‘We were just getting you going, we have the meeting with Tennents, and the possibility of Broadway, and you go and do an awful thing like this.’ I decided then and there that he was not for me. I’ve never been very good at hiding my feelings if my beliefs were threatened. By now, I believed passionately in Beckett and in Waiting for Godot. Nonetheless, I was suddenly frightened – which I had not been as the curtain fell.
The next morning’s press was dreadful. The notices were outraged or uncomprehending or patronising. The Guardian reflected that this was just the sort of nonsense that could be seen in smoky basements in Berlin in the Twenties, but that we really didn’t need it now. Among my new friends who hung around the bar of the Arts was a forthright agent just starting out called Peggy Ramsay. She was already a doughty fighter who treated the world as a nest of fools that had to be manipulated either covertly or blatantly if there was to be any hope of right being done. Subsequently, she was to represent practically every important British dramatist. She knew a little about Beckett, and during my preparation for Godot had helped me find out more. I had read his novel, Watt, and had discovered something of his Irish background and his connection with James Joyce. I discussed the notices with her: the actors and I came out of the occasion well enough – but Beckett was largely derided.
Peggy urged me to send at once, that day, to Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times critic, a copy of Watt, saying that if last night’s performance had interested him he might be intrigued by this book. I did as she suggested and crossed my fingers.
Meanwhile, Campbell Williams called me into his office and announced that the play would have to come off immediately as nobody wanted to see it. I asked him to wait at least until the Sunday notices, and, after a lot of persuasion, he agreed.
Hobson’s notice began with a reference to Watt, and then developed into the kind of panegyric that theatre people imagine in paradise. He understood the play and acclaimed the arrival of an extraordinary talent who was changing the nature of drama. He then went on writing about Godot, week after week, for the next couple of months. Kenneth Tynan in the Observer liked it too; but he took time to work up a full enthusiasm.
Hobson was a Christian, though this did not prevent him being on occasion a virulent critic. He had an inclination to assess the metaphysical weight of a play; he also liked to isolate key moments of redemption or forgiveness. One of his articles on Godot defined what he took to be a deeply Christian moment – when Vladimir took off his battered bowler hat and said, ‘Christ have mercy upon us.’
When we were rehearsing, Paul Daneman had told me he was having enormous difficulty with Vladimir’s long philosophical speeches in the second act because he felt engulfed in his hat. We ran the scene
again, and on reaching ‘Christ have mercy upon us’ I stopped him and, without much directorial originality, asked him to remove his bowler.
After Hobson’s spiritual experience had been published, I found a distraught Daneman in the theatre. ‘I can’t take my hat off on that line now,’ he said. ‘The audience will be waiting for it and will feel let down.’ I urged him to continue. The notice would be forgotten in a few days, I said, and the audience would receive the moment for what it was – a plausible human action that would mean different things to different people.
Hobson saved Godot. The play quickly became the talking point of London and then an international success. It featured in cartoons and radio programmes as well as newspaper articles. I was interviewed on Panorama by a bewildered Malcolm Muggeridge who asked indignantly, on behalf of the British public, what it all meant. People abused it, walked out of it, loved it, laughed at it and wrote letters to the papers about it. It shifted people’s expectations of what a play was. Some found the change exciting, some appalling. But nobody was indifferent.
The play transferred from the Arts to the Criterion Theatre, where it had a long and successful run. And I earned my first real money. Ever since, I have believed that if you do what you like, and do it with conviction, you will finally make money in the theatre. All the evidence suggests that this is not true; in our age, it is usually trash that makes real money. But it has been a sweet delusion to live by.
I now became, for the first time, a little bit famous: the new young director, interviewed by Vogue, photographed by Tony Armstrong-Jones, and asked by Sunday newspapers how he proposed to spend Christmas.
What was my production like? I suspect that I was very near the heart of the play. It had humanity without sentimentality and a bleakness that coexisted with tenderness. It was also funny. I regret the music: there were little wisps of Bartok in the air now and then. They were underplayed, but even so they were competing with the music of one of the greatest writers of the century. I was definitely gilding the lily.
