by Peter Hall
Beckett hadn’t come to the first night. He disliked going to public performances of his own plays. But once our production was well established, he slipped into the audience. He said he was pleased. He was certainly pleased that Godot had become part of people’s consciousness. The play is the major drama of the mid twentieth century. Look Back in Anger was a social and English phenomenon, and it started a national revolution: the young for the first time wanted to write plays, not novels or poems. But it was old-fashioned in its structure and technique. Beckett widened the scope of theatre for ever and the effect was international.
Sam was in no way a typical dramatist. He was neither paranoid nor arrogant. I understand very well why writers are the most difficult people to deal with in the theatre. They make something out of nothing and are haunted by that blank white page. They are also the victims of all the crazy interpretative ideas that are pushed at them; and all the vanities and insecurities, and sometimes stupidities, of the actors, directors and designers. Sam was never defensive. He was courteous, kind and had a twinkle in those cryptic Irish eyes which mocked his own opinions and everybody else’s. He was meticulously well-mannered in rehearsal, very understanding of actors and knew exactly what he wanted.
I remember the grace and precision with which he tutored Peggy Ashcroft, showing her how to hold Winnie’s powder compact in Happy Days. He had a great interest in the meaning of mime and exact physical gesture. So when I directed the play, I asked him to come for a fortnight to teach Peggy all the physical business before we began rehearsals. It is detailed in the stage directions, but could not be anything like as subtle or as intricate as his imagining.
Towards the end of my time at the National Theatre, I asked Sam if he would direct a new production of Godot. He said that he couldn’t. He had done a production at the Schiller Theatre which had taken him six months to plot, writing out the action step by step, gesture by gesture, as if he were writing a novel. He then dictated it to the actors; and they then had to make this imposition their own. They told me it had taken them many, many weeks. Paradoxically, the result was a masterpiece, though by the rules of direction it shouldn’t have been. In the Beckett archives at Reading University is an entire volume describing the precise gestures of Vladimir and Estragon in this Berlin Godot. As he said, he was a writer, not a director.
Sam’s face is one of the icons of the century. We all know the gaunt bones and the ravaged cheeks. And we know from his drama the bleak sense of isolation and despair – modern man waiting in an indifferent, uncaring universe. But in life, Sam was the warmest, most humorous person you could meet. He seemed a nihilist, but humanity would keep breaking in. He helped us pass the time realistically and unsentimentally; but he provoked a great deal of laughter.
Amazing things came out of Godot. One morning, the phone rang and a gentle, cultured American voice with a beautiful drawl asked if he could speak to Peter Hall. He said that his name was Tennessee Williams. I thought for a moment that it was a practical joke. He asked if we could have a drink together. He had seen my production and wanted to tell me that he would be happy, indeed honoured, if I would direct his plays in London. This was a gift indeed, and led quickly to stagings of Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
I received, too, a script from a young unknown playwright. He felt, having seen Godot, that I might be in sympathy with his work. The play was The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. I was very taken with it, but by this time, alas, my calendar was completely full; and when it opened at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, I was directing in New York. Flying home on the Sunday, I read Harold Hobson’s review, hailing a brilliant new dramatist. I resolved to go and see the play the following week. But I found that it had closed that Saturday evening, after four performances. Hobson had once again been the lone voice of enthusiasm. This time he had come too late.
I was also lunched by Anthony Quayle and Glen Byam Shaw. Would I, they asked, do the occasional Shakespeare production at Stratford-upon-Avon? It was a very satisfying moment as I said yes; and between 1956 and 1959 I staged five plays there as a visiting director.
In the meantime, I had a theatre to run myself. The most successful play I did at the Arts after Godot was Anouilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors. It had flopped badly in Paris and Anouilh had forbidden any more performances. But I had seen the play and liked it very much. I sent him a letter maintaining that it would be successful in London – particularly if the central part were played by Hugh Griffiths, a wonderfully sensual Welsh actor whose work he knew from Point of Departure. I added rashly that I thought the play had failed in Paris because it had been mis-directed. I elaborated the faults of the production at some length. Anouilh responded by giving me the rights for London. He also agreed about the bad production; he had, he said, done it himself.
That letter, and many others from my early years – from Sam Beckett and Tennessee Williams, from Harold Pinter and Peter Brook – were all destroyed in a fire a few years ago. I have never kept any scrap books, designs, photographs of productions, or reviews. I have always wanted to live in the present. The only things I had kept were letters. They were stored in boxes in a loft at my parents’ last home. When the house stood empty, while I was trying to sell it after their deaths, it was broken into – perhaps by schoolchildren seeking to smoke in private. They started a fire, and everything in the loft was destroyed. Sadly, therefore, this book can contain no quotations, only memories.
Chapter Seventeen
By 1956 I was getting restless. I was still at the Arts, but was brooding on how to develop what I was doing. I wanted to gather a group of actors who could work together over a substantial period and so achieve a style. But I wasn’t able to employ them for long enough on the money the Arts could afford, and despite the support of young talents, including Eric Porter and Ronnie Barker, it wasn’t possible to make it happen. So I resigned; I needed a change.
Donald Albery engaged me to direct Anita Loos’s stage adaptation of Colette’s novel Gigi in the West End. The name part was to be played by Leslie Caron. At that time, she was a big Hollywood star, known everywhere for her performance in the film An American in Paris. I had seen her first when she was fifteen, a star even then, dancing in London with Roland Petit’s Ballet des Champs Élysées. In Les Rencontres, she was the Sphinx set in the middle of an extraordinary design by Christian Bérard – it was as if a Renoir waif had strayed on to the stage and surprised us with her animal ferocity.
Then I saw her films. I was half in love with her before I met her.
I enjoyed the rehearsals. I liked Leslie’s sense of humour and her tenacity. Ballet dancers are trained to work with a doggedness that is not found in actors or opera singers, and she would work until she dropped. We got on wonderfully. She brought me Europe and America; and I brought her music and literature and some of the riches of English culture.
The play did a long pre-London tour. By the time it reached Oxford, we knew we were very much in love. It was glorious – and worrying. I wasn’t sure I could deal with Hollywood and her international stardom; I wasn’t even sure I could deal with French in-laws. I felt provincial again.
Gigi was a reasonable success, continuing for six months, and we married during the run. At a lunch we had after the ceremony were a few friends and relations: Leslie’s small feisty grandmother over from France; my parents; John Barton; and Tony Armstrong-Jones who took some pictures on the understanding that he could flog one of them to Fleet Street. Then Leslie left to do the evening performance.
Our first home was the Montague Place flat which I had shared with John Barton. Later we moved to Hyde Park Square where we had our first baby, Christopher. And in 1957, we settled in a beautiful house in Montpelier Square, which we bought freehold for the huge sum of £14,000; there Jennifer was born.
The positive side of our marriage was the excitement and the fun and the joy of having two bright and beautiful children; the negative was the anxiety produced by two hyperactive pe
ople leading diverse and demanding careers. I was always in a great hurry; and Leslie, quite understandably, was equally worried, mainly about keeping her position as an international film star. She had to be in Hollywood; I needed to be in England.
MGM offered me a job in Hollywood as a trainee director. Whether this was real, or just a ploy by the moguls to keep Leslie happy, I never tested, because in 1958 something extraordinary happened. It was a dream realised. I was asked to succeed Glen Byam Shaw at Stratford, taking over from the 1960 season. I could not say no to that.
I told Leslie my news and she begged me not to do it.
Chapter Eighteen
France was central to my life while I was married to Leslie. It didn’t help my stumbling French to be suddenly part of an haut-bourgeois family who to my surprised ear spoke their language with a shrill upper-class English accent. But Leslie brought me new friends. Lila de Nobili, the great designer, was among them. Her work was supremely romantic, but never camp. She had a child’s vision, an ability to look sadly at the world as if it were disintegrating into an over-ripe autumn of browns, yellows and golds, with the occasional splash of blue or orange to show where the energy had been before the fall. Her sets were a cunning amalgam of painted cloths and gauzes. She knew all the tricks of the classic Italian scene painters; hers was a theatre of illusion, dark shadows and glowing highlights.
I brought Lila to Stratford in 1957 and she designed Cymbeline for me. In subsequent years, she did Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. She did not, as was normal, have her backcloths painted on the frame at the back of the theatre. She painted them herself on the floor of a village hall on the outskirts of the town. Armed with endless buckets of brown, beige, and cream pigment, and wearing dirty pink bedroom slippers with pink pompoms thickly encrusted with paint, she walked over the spread-out cloths, making great puddles of colour, and occasionally splattering the shadows with gold. It was alarming to watch her because I could see no picture, no coherence and no shape. Yet hung on the stage, and at the right distance from the audience, these cloths became a magic world.
I loved Lila, and she, I think, loved Leslie and me. She appeared to be not in this world; but she was actually a shrewd observer of other people’s follies. She loved to giggle with us while she sketched our two children. She was a recluse, living only for her occasional forays into the theatre, and for her few friends – Raymond Roulleau, the French director, Visconti and Zeffirelli, and Maria Callas. I met them all with her.
Callas, to meet, was shy, sweet and unsure. The shy personality only became a tiger in performance, appearing to appropriate the orchestra so that all its force and passion seemed to come out of her still, relaxed body. She, more than anyone, revolutionised operatic acting with her concentration.
Lila was a great painter: she turned paint into light. She still lives, but she leads an isolated nun-like existence in Paris, doesn’t answer letters or take phone calls, and for many years has resolutely avoided the pressure of theatre work.
I was walking along the Quai d’Orsay recently with Nicki when an old woman with a shawl over her head and a shopping basket in her hand brushed past me, turned and ran down the next street. She was hunched and private, and I hardly noticed her. But I thought the face was familiar and paused. Suddenly I was sure it was Lila. I ran after her, but she had vanished.
When Peggy Ashcroft died, she left me a costume design of herself as Imogen which Lila had given her in 1957. I keep it in memory of an actress of genius; and of a designer who taught me a great deal. Her stage was an enchanted place of extreme light and shade. But the figures that walked in it had the homespun texture of life. She would go regularly to the flea market in Paris to buy old materials to use for her costumes. I learnt from her that however impressionistic the background of the stage, the foreground must have a texture as honest as the actors’ own skins.
The Christmas after we were married, Leslie and I went to New York – my first trip to America. I had been asked to direct The Rope Dancers by Morton Wishengrad on Broadway the following autumn, an interesting if rather melodramatic story of an emigrant family at the turn of the century. I was going to the States to cast and prepare it.
Flying the Atlantic in 1956 was still something of an adventure. Heathrow was a series of temporary huts, and the journey took twenty hours or more with stops at Shannon and Goose Bay. This was the pre-jet age, and we slept comfortably in bunks, wearing pyjamas, while the four engines throbbed through the long night on either side of us. It was much less tiring than modern air travel and, although it took longer, there was more space.
We got off the plane just before dawn, drove into the city and then down Broadway into Times Square as the light was brightening. I had an extraordinary feeling of having been there before – I suspect because of all the American movies I had grown up with. Films are great colonisers. Hollywood has helped America take over the world, and has made the way straight for McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. It is strange that politicians and businessmen do not realise the colonising power of art. It is a certain way to create a market.
Leslie and I finished our ghostly tour round Times Square and checked into the Algonquin Hotel. Sleep by then was essential. Two hours later, Leslie woke with an excruciating pain in her stomach. She was six months pregnant, so we were both very alarmed. Soon we were speeding down Fifth Avenue in an ambulance while I held her hand tightly; she was in agony. When we arrived at the hospital I had some difficulty proving we had the necessary money for whatever treatment was needed. Only when Leslie was recognised as the famous movie star did all financial problems fade.
The doctor was an hysteric, and, pending tests, warned us that an immediate abortion might be necessary. We insisted on a second opinion. In time, another specialist came and diagnosed a large stone in the gall bladder. In a few days, Leslie was completely recovered and Christopher was saved.
New York in the Fifties was clean and bright and hard-edged. Except for the Bowery – a horrific area of extreme poverty and garbage, most of it human – prosperity and newness seemed everywhere. The city had not yet achieved its current state of cracked and dirty senility which makes a visitor fear it is about to fall to the ground. There were operas and concerts at the beautiful old Metropolitan Opera – now, disgracefully, pulled down. And there were plays and plays and yet more plays. It is hardly possible in the Nineties to think of New York as a mecca for playgoers; but that’s what it was in the Fifties. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were bursting with creative energy; Elia Kazan was directing; Harold Clurman reviewed in the Nation; and Boris Aronson and Jo Mielziner were designing. There was something to see every night – and it usually asserted that the theatre was a place of imagination, colour, light and metaphor. Turgid naturalism was increasingly left to television and the cinema; the theatre was liberated. It was returning to its imaginative roots.
Roger Stevens, the producer of The Rope Dancers, was always introduced as the man who had once bought and sold the Empire State Building. Producers, in my experience, are a very complex breed. They have the power to hire and fire; and theirs is the choice of the creative team, which is what matters. But if they make a mistake there is very little they can do about it except remove their choice. To attempt to alter an artist when he is at work is rather like trying to reform your partner in a marriage; it never succeeds.
Producers understandably tend to resent the fact that they have to raise all the money, and then watch others spend it. Though they select the artists, they have to stand on the sidelines while the artists have the fun. If they interfere, they become a writer or director or actor manqué. Roger Stevens had none of these insecurities. He was a truly great producer whose manner was that of an old-style patron. He picked the people and then let them get on with it. I did several plays for him in New York, and in London, and he was never anything but a support.
My newly-acquired New York agent was Audrey Wood. She was a power in t
he mighty Music Corporation of America, and had nurtured the talents of Tennessee Williams, Bill Inge and many others. She referred to me as ‘young man’, with a reproving air, as if she suspected I was just about to do something reprehensible. But I think she was proud of me, and I was certainly proud of her. She was under five feet, precise, and extremely well-read. She was always immaculately turned out, her head crowned with a tiny hat and her hands clad in a crisp pair of gloves. Her husband and former business partner, Bill Liebling, was equally diminutive. His mocking friendly smile was overhung by a large black Homburg hat; he appeared to be straight out of Damon Runyon. They were an incongruous couple: an Edith Wharton wit on the arm of a wise-cracker from Broadway.
It is, I’m sure, difficult to be an agent, and certainly I have known several better at acquiring clients than promoting them. It is a job where it is easy to talk big and then do nothing. In a profession riddled with insecurity, an actor can often believe that his fortunes would improve if he had the right agent. But no agent can make jobs where none exist. An agent is a bit like a pimp – always protecting the whore and constantly telling her (when custom declines) that her looks are not as bad as she thinks. Part of the job, certainly, is to reassure. But the measure of achievement is of course to strike the biggest deal. Agents can therefore easily become totally fixated by success. A few keep their integrity and rarely put the dollar before the development of talent. Audrey Wood and Sam Cohn, the current big wheel of ICM in New York, achieved this. I am lucky to have worked with both of them.
