by Peter Hall
Figaro, in a production designed by John Gunter, opened during the summer of 1989. There was some uneasiness on the first night. Doing something new brought problems of balance and ensemble. And the singers’ throats seemed to close up even more than is usual at first performances. I sometimes wonder if music critics realise that they spend their professional lives hearing voices which, because of first-night nerves, are reduced by twenty to thirty per cent. With a play, the adrenalin released by the occasion is often helpful; it concentrates and clarifies. In opera, it inhibits; a purely physical reaction.
By the ninth or tenth performance this production was the best all-round Figaro I have ever seen. I looked forward eagerly to doing Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni.
I had settled with George Christie that – after my return to these three operas, and before the time of the rebuilding – I would give up my artistic directorship. I thought it was the right moment for Glyndebourne to have a change and for me to move on. It was all very amicable. But there is much to be said for the American doctrine that if you are going you should go at once.
Peter Sellars, the startlingly original young American director, had been asked to do The Magic Flute. I supported the idea strongly. To hold the balance in this opera between the serious and the funny is very difficult and I believed Peter might well achieve it. When I went to the first night, however, I found that every word of the dialogue had been cut. I was appalled. The Magic Flute is constructed with extreme cunning. After a section of dialogue the emotions become so intense that the character has to move again into music. Once the emotions are released, the character returns to dialogue again. What I was witnessing was not The Magic Flute at all but a deconstructed version of it. Peter Sellars had of course a perfect right to try this experiment, though I would certainly have advised him that in my view it would fail – that is, if I had known about it. What upset me was that, despite the fact that I was Glyndebourne’s artistic director, nobody had told me what Peter was doing. And he had done it at a very late stage of rehearsal.
Since I have often declared publicly my passion for trying to honour a writer’s text and a composer’s score, I was not surprised to get a huge mail asking me where my principles had gone.
I would have liked from Glyndebourne a sensible explanation and an apology. I received neither; I was told that neither was ‘appropriate’.
Though I had only a year to go before I gave up my post as artistic director, it was clear that in Glyndebourne’s eyes I had left the job already. So I resigned; a twenty-year association finished in acrimony. Perhaps I was angry and precipitate. But I couldn’t stand my most central beliefs being treated so casually. The management warned me that if I said anything to the press it might well get very ugly. I said nothing, but very ugly it became. Many unattributed stories surfaced: that the job of artistic director was not terribly important – it was only a courtesy title; that I hadn’t had very much influence; that I had been ‘deficient in my attendance’.
Glyndebourne and my friendship with George and Mary Christie was for a long time a very important and very happy part of my life. I owe George a great deal. I had done fourteen productions and there were a great many revivals of those productions.
I had to realise now that I was at the end of that particular journey.
Part Four
THE WAR THAT HAD TO BE WON
Chapter One
Being the director of the National Theatre is much like the predicament of Nelson on top of his column. You inevitably attract the attention of the pigeons. Nevertheless, I consider myself a very lucky man to have had the job.
The Royal Shakespeare Company was a straight line: I never doubted what I wanted, though I often doubted my ability to do it. The National Theatre was entirely different: it was a public task and quickly turned into a war that had to be won.
My time was so packed with action and effort that the details of board meetings, the cravenness of the Arts Council and the regular betrayals of Whitehall seem to me now like the stale gossip of many years ago. Nonetheless, certain events, certain productions and people, are exciting to remember.
I started the job with much enthusiasm. But the building in the recession-hit mid Seventies looked lavishly expensive (which it wasn’t). It also opened ludicrously late. And I, who had hitherto been spoilt by the media, was suddenly turned into a target of some derision. The newspapers wallowed in unhelpful nostalgia for ‘Larry and the dear Old Vic’. And a small number of people, led by Ken Tynan, Jonathan Miller and Michael Blakemore, chattered obsessively, both on the record and off, about my weaknesses.
Then there were the dreadful strikes: silly to look back on, yet almost unendurably painful at the time.
Censorship rows continued: Michael Bogdanov was threatened with prison for directing Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain.
I saw the Arts Council turn from an independent champion of the arts into an instrument of government, gradually reducing its support all round, and progressively weakening the idea of what a National Theatre could and should be. I had a vision which was perhaps naive.
I wanted the National Theatre to be truly national; to be available to regional theatre companies and to exchange productions with them. I believed that it should be more than a company of actors doing plays; it should be a centre available to the whole of the country’s theatre. But the Arts Council refused to view it like that, and so threw away the greatest opportunity in its history.
I saw the Trojan horse of commercial sponsorship wheeled into the subsidised arts. In a mixed economy, this seemed at first unarguable. Moreover, we were told the money thus raised was intended for new enterprises; we were promised it would never be set against the central grant. That promise was broken. Commercial sponsorship had clearly been designed to reduce the government’s commitment; and it succeeded.
I saw the Thatcher government dismantle the performing arts, spoil our education system and partially destroy our great tradition of public service broadcasting. I protested vehemently and publicly, and lived, rather like a politician, in a constant dialogue with the media.
On the other hand there was much to relish. New plays predominated in our programme at the National. A generation of younger writers brought their work to us – Hare, Hampton, Poliakoff, Bond, Edgar, Tony Harrison, Mamet, Shephard – to join the generation of Pinter, Shaffer, Stoppard, Simon Gray and Ayckbourn.
I relished, too, the productions that only a National Theatre can create because they need extra time and special resources: Bill Bryden’s overwhelming Mysteries, which reclaimed medieval theatre for our age; The Oresteia, a massive undertaking achieved after six months of research and rehearsal; the luxury of three months given to staging the Judi Dench/Anthony Hopkins Antony and Cleopatra; and mounting the two parts of Tamburlaine on the same evening as a mighty diptych.
Chapter Two
To begin at the beginning, in the summer of 1971 I ran into Lord Goodman at Glyndebourne. I told him that I was about to resign from the Royal Opera. He greeted the news with delight; he said he always thought I had made a mistake in going to Covent Garden: it was possible it needed me, but he was sure I didn’t need it. He invited me to lunch in a few days’ time.
There I met Max Rayne, who had just become the new NT chairman. They asked me if I was interested in succeeding Larry at the National. The idea horrified yet also attracted me. In many ways, I did not want the job, but had a sickening feeling I would have to do it. Trevor Nunn, some years later, put my dilemma exactly: ‘If you are asked to run a national theatre, it is difficult to say no. It is as though destiny is working in your life … Peter was genuinely unable to decide.’ I was also worried about Larry. The NT had been housed at the Old Vic for eight years – a long occupation of a temporary home. Now he believed that he and his team would at last be moving, for their new, permanent home on the South Bank was due to be ready in 1973. But they had just had a bad season and Larry, after two ghastly illnesses, was fa
r from strong. It was questioned whether he could manage, or indeed would want, to stay on for the opening of the new building. He himself was havering: first he was going, then he was not.
His uncertainty, therefore, was very worrying to me, as was the thought of taking over the job of a man I revered, the giant of the theatre, who had created the National. I had no wish to be cast in the role of the usurper. It was vital, I believed, that he should head the company when they moved. It would also be his just reward.
I said I was interested, but would only talk further if Larry were present and if he were definitely resigning. And that is how things were left.
Meanwhile, I talked privately to my RSC colleagues: Peggy, Trevor, John Barton, Peter Brook. Only Peter was for it: a new challenge, he said.
Eventually, after an endless nine months, Olivier was told by Max Rayne that the Board felt it necessary to appoint a successor, that I was favoured, but that they wanted him to stay on for the move. Larry responded by sending me a generous telegram, saying in elaborate prose that he was delighted at the prospect. Yet within three weeks, he had provoked a huge ferment, indicating to a full meeting of the National Theatre Company that he hadn’t been consulted. He also, I gather, gave the impression, though without directly saying so, that he didn’t wish me as a successor. I was from the opposition; the man from the RSC. In all this he was encouraged by Ken Tynan with whom he had a curious love — hate relationship, and who was a power behind the throne.
But despite such contradictions and alarms, and after many fevered talks to and fro, my appointment was confirmed, and I took up the job at the beginning of 1973, initially working alongside Larry. I still hoped he would lead the company into the South Bank.
It was not a happy time. Larry blew hot and cold in his enthusiasm for endorsing the new theatre and the new regime; and his love of intrigue intensified the confused loyalties of the actors and staff.
It was now five years since my resignation from the RSC, but I had remained an associate director. Also, my colleagues in the company were my closest friends. I continued to have emotional meetings with them. At one point we were all so anxious to safeguard the aesthetic that we had built and cherished, so reluctant to break with the past, that the idea of some sort of amalgamation, based on a sharing of buildings, came up. It gathered head when it was seen by the guardians of public funds as a possible way to save money. Animated discussions went on. But it never really made sense, and after some months came to nothing. To Olivier, it was an attempt to make one vast organisation with me at the head and Trevor as my deputy; he felt the RSC was simply taking over the National. To George Farmer, it was clearly a takeover by the National of the RSC. I wrote in my Diaries, that it was ‘one of the silliest ideas I’ve ever been seduced by’.
Finally, we all settled down. I continued to regret leaving the RSC, and indeed regretted it more as the years passed. The old friendships held, though there were the occasional rows between the two organisations when we clashed over plays or casting, both sides behaving in a proprietorial this-one-belongs-to-me manner. Now, of course, the notion that there is such a being as an RSC actor or a National actor on an exclusive basis seems odd, even unhealthy – which means, sadly I think, that neither is a clearly defined company. By the mid Eighties, actors, directors and designers were moving freely from one to the other.
Chapter Three
Through the early Seventies it seemed to me that there were two kinds of time – real time and builders’ time. Successive delays in the construction of the NT caused frustration and distress to those of us who were trying to open the place, not helped by the fact that whenever I had to announce another hold-up I was threatened with legal action by the builders if I made any critical public comment. The worst delay was in March 1974 when, at the last moment, they admitted that their latest promise, which had guaranteed an opening in the spring of 1975, could not be kept.
I was staging a whole collection of productions at the Old Vic ready for transferring on that date. Ralph Richardson said they were like aircraft circling the airfield waiting to come in when the runway was clear. But because it was now revealed that the runway wasn’t even built, plans had to be aborted and actors laid off. Delay costs mounted alarmingly. And it was not a good moment in the arts to have financial difficulties: the country was dipping into recession; inflation was going up and up. The boom of the 1960s, which had made the dream of a national theatre a reality, was well and truly over.
The troubled times made everybody fretful, and contributed to the envy much of the profession increasingly displayed towards the new National. They looked at it with suspicion and resentment. To them, it was a fat cat likely to weaken the rest of the theatre by gobbling up talent and funds. I was deeply upset by a letter forcibly expressing this which was printed in The Times in October 1974 and drawn up by Oscar Lewenstein of the Royal Court, who had persuaded thirteen other directors of subsidised theatres – among them, ironically, my successor at the NT, Richard Eyre – to sign it with him. Their fears, though understandable, were not justified. Time has shown this very clearly.
The British are a conservative people who would prefer not to have anything new; or, at best, are distinctly wary of it. New institutions, it seems, have to be tempered on the anvil of hostility. So it was perhaps not surprising that as the new National lurched towards its opening, both the Left and Right seemed united in decrying it. Shaw and Granville Barker must have whirled in their graves. There were also fierce attacks in the press, including a memorably vicious leading article in the New Statesman: ‘As cumbersome as a dreadnought … dubiously relevant to the twentieth century … naive if not actually damaging to the cause of good theatre’. I sent a spirited reply.
As much as nine years later, Stewart Trotter, the director, reviewing my Diaries, wrote: ‘The villain is not Lord Olivier, not the strikers, not the building, but the entire concept of the National Theatre itself as realised after the war.’ How dated this looks now. At the time, however, arguments in favour of a national theatre needed putting all over again. I seemed to live on the public stage, writing, arguing, making the case.
‘Change’, I wrote, ‘is of the essence of the theatre, of any dialogue with the public. But one thing is constant for me: a belief that the theatre is a living element of our community, altering its nature according to the responses it receives and modifying those responses by its work … you almost always disturb people when your theatre is alive, because art always challenges preconceptions.’
Such statements, which had fallen on willing ears in the Sixties, were, in the miserable Seventies, greeted coolly. This was helped along by those who were uneasy about my taking over the National. They saw in the RSC already one company of my making; British fair play considered it wrong there should be another.
I thought, and still think, that it was a failure on Olivier’s part that he had not chosen and developed his own successor. As the man from the opposition, I found it difficult to persuade those who had loved and admired his regime at the Vic to respond with equal enthusiasm to a new theatre that was so radically different, not only architecturally but in the style of its management.
Larry was rightly worshipped by the profession. He returned that love by flirting with his company, sometimes giving favours, sometimes withdrawing them. He was an old-style monarch who could be inspiring but also awesome and wilful.
When I joined the National, the offices were little more than cupboards, opening off a central corridor running the length of temporary huts in Aquinas Street. They were infested by rats and had holes in the roof. When it rained, buckets were placed on the floor to collect the drips. Larry progressed up and down this corridor every morning, putting his head in here and there, greeting, cajoling, flattering. He was a fascinator, and most of those working for him would have gone to the South Pole and back if he’d asked them to.
He headed a tight-knit little court, and who was in and who was out was always the main news o
f the day. Ken Tynan, who loved politics (but wasn’t good at them, mainly because his manoeuvres were transparent), thrived in this hothouse atmosphere.
But it couldn’t be like that any more. For one thing, the organisation I had to run was more than three times the size of the Vic, and we had to do many more productions. For another, I hadn’t the great actor’s extraordinary magic, which was so much a part of Larry’s personality. I hoped, however, that my style was more democratic; it was certainly more open. You cannot, of course, run a theatre without taking responsibility for all that happens, and without seeing that you have the final decision on everything that matters. Even so, healthy discussion and argument are necessary to check and challenge ultimate power. It can, however, bruise egos.
I still remember even Jonathan Miller’s confidence faltering as he tried to convince some unimpressed NT directors that it would be revealing to do The Importance of Being Earnest with an all-male cast. Harold Pinter asked him beadily what he was trying to prove. Was it, he enquired, that Wilde had actually wished that he could write a homosexual play about the pairing off of men?
I have always tried to make room for projects that my colleagues had a real fervour to do. But this idea seemed to me, and to all those present, a touch mad. It was firmly squashed.
I think these open discussions were one of the reasons why Jonathan Miller resigned – as he was to do, much to my relief, a year before we opened on the South Bank. He and Michael Blakemore, and to a lesser degree Ken Tynan, seemed to me to be enemies within. Ken had gone, by mutual agreement, soon after I was appointed. But I had kept on Michael and Jonathan in an attempt at continuity. It was very stupid of me. Like Ken, they appeared to regard me as an unwanted interloper from the RSC. They also disliked my way of working and the chemistry between us was bad. Fortunately for me, Michael was to resign a year or so after Jonathan. Once they had departed, however, they both, for years, seemed to me to lose no chance of knocking me publicly.
