by Peter Hall
In the agonising fifteen months before the case came to court at the Old Bailey in March 1982, the misery inflicted on Michael and his family was enormous. He was a man marked by the press, his children were tormented at school, and he had several packets of excreta pushed through his letter box. All this was borne by him and his wife Patsy with extraordinary strength of mind.
On the third day of the trial, however, Ian Kennedy, Mrs Whitehouse’s counsel, suddenly and dramatically abandoned the prosecution. ‘I cannot continue to try an honourable man,’ he said. The attorney general had to invoke an obscure legal procedure, nolle prosequi, which means ‘unwilling to proceed’. The case presented by the defence counsel, Jeremy Hutchinson, centred on the distinction between illusion and reality. Was Michael Bogdanov, as the director of the play, creating a real act of gross indecency, or only the illusion of one?
If Michael had been convicted he could have spent up to two years in prison. As it was, he walked out of the court free and the state paid his costs; Mary Whitehouse had to pay her own. It was a victory – of a sort.
The NT Board behaved in an exemplary way over The Romans in Britain. A leading theatre in any country is prone to play safe, and there is an inbuilt temptation to make sure that it ruffles nobody’s sensibilities. Board members would indeed sometimes sigh when I told them of a coming controversial play and say, ‘Yes, yes … but surely not at the National!’ I always urged vehemently against this qualification. Without controversial work in the repertory, we would be evading our social responsibilities and becoming merely a fixture of the establishment, unwilling to deal with new and dissenting issues or young writers or to attract young audiences.
Richard Eyre had an anxious moment soon after succeeding me at the NT. This was caused by something as innocuous as the Queen being a principal character in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution. The Board liked the play but thought the reigning monarch should not be portrayed on the stage of the National, though apparently any other theatre would be fine. Richard talked this over with me and wondered whether it was a reason to resign. Fortunately it did not come to that; but at the time I said that such a situation must always be a reason for resigning. What plays are staged ought not to be decided by committee, or tempered by compromise. The surest way of driving away an audience is to inhibit the director’s taste; that is what gives a theatre personality.
Chapter Fourteen
In 1981 I at last directed The Oresteia. It had been a long eight years coming, for it was in 1973 that I first determined to stage Aeschylus’s masterpiece and Tony Harrison started work on the translation. The task proved slow, and there were then postponements while I wrestled with strikes.
I had learned the art of the mask from Michel St Denis. The Greek stage is in itself a mask: hideous murders and violence happen behind the scenes; the terror is imagined. In the same way, Greek tragedians, because they were masked, could deal with passions so extreme they would be intolerable if expressed naturalistically. Any actor knows that if he weeps the audience does not; but if he stifles overwhelming emotion he will win sympathy and understanding. A child trying desperately not to cry is always more moving than a child who cries. The mask allows that particular containment of exorbitant feelings.
A simple exercise is the beginning of all mask work. A variety of masks are placed on a table. Each actor is asked to choose one that appeals. The actor looks at the mask very carefully. Then he looks at his own face and the mask side by side in a full-length mirror. He drops his head and puts on the mask. Now comes the traumatic moment. The actor slowly looks up into the full-length mirror and confronts his new character. He sees a person totally unlike himself and he must use this moment to become what he sees. He looks for a few seconds – no more. Then he accepts the changed person in front of him and follows its characteristics, allowing it to affect the way he talks, walks, thinks and feels.
There is only one proviso. Every actor has the ability to recognise acutely what it feels like to be untrue, to be acting badly. If the mask provokes him to this dishonesty, however briefly, he must immediately take it off.
Normally the image he sees liberates him; it can occasionally make him comprehend a whole new world. By the use of the mask, the actor can change his age, his bearing, his physique – even his sexuality. He can reveal areas of his personality he did not know existed. But they are parts of him; otherwise he is pretending and therefore being false. True acting is a revelation of self, not an imitation of somebody else, and the mask enormously helps the process.
The mask properly used does not obscure but reveal. In tragedy, it makes possible the expression of hysterical emotions which would be disturbing and unacceptable with the naked face. And in comedy, it releases an anarchic energy – alarming, bawdy and frequently childlike – which expresses the absurdities of human behaviour as vividly as a good caricature.
In a sense, any demanding form in the theatre is a mask: a precise and balanced Mozart aria; the discipline of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameters. Hamlet’s advice to the Players tells us that even in the greatest passion the actor must ‘beget a smoothness’. And that smoothness is obtained by endorsing the form – the mask.
The Greeks brought a sophisticated cunning into the architecture of their theatres as well as into their drama. When Denys Lasdun and I visited Epidaurus in the early Seventies for a television programme about the National, he pointed out the secret wonders of the place. Although the vast auditorium, cut into the side of a hill, appears to be a regular fan-shape, bisected by the straight lines of the aisles, none of it is, in fact, geometrically perfect. The design of the human body is never precisely symmetrical, and neither is the design of Epidaurus (or, for that matter, the Parthenon). It seems as if the Greeks deliberately bent the form, so that geometry was humanised. The Romans scorned such artifice. For example, the Herodias Atticus in Athens, where I staged my 1984 NT production of Coriolanus, is of an absolutely pure geometric design; and there is no doubt that the Greek auditorium is the richer experience.
Epidaurus still feels what it was originally – a holy place, a place of healing. The audience look from their stone benches down on to the stage and beyond it to the riches of the Greek landscape. This vision of the country is part of the theatre.
Epidaurus also possesses mythical acoustics. When I took The Oresteia there in 1982, and The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline six years later, every word of these difficult texts was heard by some fifteen thousand people at each performance. There was no amplification, yet no need to shout. Providing the ends of the lines were sustained and the consonants kept distinct, the sound was crystal clear.
The production of The Oresteia was partly based on an understanding of how Epidaurus had influenced Denys Lasdun in designing the Olivier. It seems to me now that while the Olivier is a great theatre, it bears as much relation to Epidaurus as St Pancras Station does to Venice. But inspiration has to have a beginning. Lasdun had a vision of a fine modern theatre after he saw those great stone benches at Epidaurus, sweeping round in a half circle.
The Oresteia took us six months. We started from the very beginning and investigated how we could do classical drama in the twentieth century and still respect its form. We discovered a great deal. I soon realised that, for me, Greek plays are impossible without the mask. Because of its primitive origins, we are now inclined to patronise the mask in the theatre. But I found that its very mystery solved not only the problem of expressing unbearable feeling, but also how to make the unending laments of the Greek Chorus understandable to a modern audience.
We decided that the Chorus would not, as is usual, all speak together. More than two voices speaking at the same time is incomprehensible unless they are mechanically drilled, and the effect then is inhuman and generalised. The fifteen actors comprising our Chorus wore copies of the same full mask of an old man. If one actor spoke a line while the rest of the Chorus acted it, it seemed as if the whole group had spoken. One voi
ce was easy to understand. The thought was then taken up, qualified and expanded by other single voices. It worked.
The same fifteen male actors who made up the Chorus also played all the roles, men and women. When terrible tragedy struck the chief protagonists – Orestes, Clytemnestra, or Agamemnon – they could wail in the most primal anguish because their emotions were contained by the form and discipline of the full mask.
During the first days of wearing their masks – which were created individually for each actor by the designer of the production, Jocelyn Herbert – the cast found it difficult to speak. Like infants learning to talk, the actors began with grunts and gibberish and progressed until they used words. We had to rehearse the text independently, without the mask. After weeks of improvisation, it was possible to bring the two together, to persuade the characters to speak the text without disruption while masked.
The cast was all male; but this was not an attempt at historical accuracy. The three plays that make up The Oresteia are very much a man’s view of woman as seen at a moment when matriarchy had given way to a male-dominated society. Tony Harrison and I felt that the sexuality of the plays needed abstracting in order to be fully understood. In the primitive world that Aeschylus portrayed, a masked man dressed as Clytemnestra is paradoxically more womanly than a woman.
Each day we worked on a dozen lines of Tony’s strong, alliterative translation. We improvised to release the feeling, and then returned to the text to find the pulse, the tempo, that would express the emotions and support the verbal rhythms. Then Harrison Birtwistle took our findings home that night and composed around them, thus completing a further small chunk of the enterprise.
Harry Birtwistle had been the National’s head of music from the beginning of my time there; and apart from his great work in that position, his contribution to the associate directors’ meetings was unique. He would sit for long periods without saying a word and then suddenly offer a solution to a problem with the conviction of a man who seldom has any doubt. The NT gave Harry security over the ten years he developed into a great composer. But what he gave us, not only by writing scores but by his vision, was far more valuable than anything he was ever paid.
The four-and-a-half hours of The Oresteia ends with the lighting of a flame. This is both actual and metaphoric; it is the resolution of the trilogy, as light is brought into the darkness. The GLC, however, banned this enlightenment; they saw it as a fire risk: a naked flame on the stage could only be used for a specific purpose in a story, like the burning of incriminating evidence. They suggested an electric torch. I appealed, and the case was taken to the magistrates’ court at Horseferry Road. To my delight, we were allowed our flame. The magistrate had studied The Oresteia at school and fondly quoted the relevant Greek passage.
The production opened in the late autumn of 1981. The critics, though fascinated, were divided. A few of them couldn’t get past the masks. But I knew we had made something live which in my lifetime had been dead; that the fusion of text and music, mask and movement, had created an experience both primitive and tragic. And audiences were genuinely affected.
Immediately after the first night I telephoned John Goodwin from Geneva – I was there for the weekend to hear Maria sing. John mentioned he’d heard that James Fenton of The Sunday Times had loved it and was going again. So emotional was I about The Oresteia that I distinctly remember replying that I’d hate James Fenton to like my work. Fenton is a considerable poet; but he was at that time a bogeyman among the critics. He seemed to enjoy acting the terrorist, and had conducted a single-handed campaign against Amadeus – which, among the critics, he was virtually alone in disliking – by printing a thumbnail attack on it in The Sunday Times theatre listings every week of its run for a year. He didn’t affect the box office. But he did give Shaffer a weekly upset.
The Oresteia vindicated itself. The scheduled twenty performances were extended to sixty-five, all of which packed; and Channel 4 filmed the production for television. It became the first Greek drama ever played in English at Epidaurus; and, I am told, has had a lasting effect on the way the Greeks recreate their plays. For me, it united my passion for form and music and mask. I am still exploring what it taught me.
Chapter Fifteen
Before The Oresteia opened, the National’s 1981 repertory had included, among much else, the complete four-and-a-half hours of Man and Superman, including the Don Juan in Hell scene, which is nearly always cut. The production was directed by Christopher Morahan, and proved that Shaw’s theatre of rational debate went well in the public space of the Olivier.
In the same year, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was staged by Nancy Meckler. This marked the first time a woman director had worked at the NT on the South Bank, thus providing much chatter among the new feminists. I was accused of running a male-dominated theatre – an accusation which was simply not true. I belong to a profession which, with its administration, stage management, designers and performers, has shown for hundreds of years less male prejudice than almost any other. It is true that, until recently, not many women were encouraged to be directors or decided to try; but then not many women were encouraged or decided to be conductors either. Things have changed in the last twenty years, though. And I rank Joan Littlewood, Buzz Goodbody and Deborah Warner among the finest directors I have known.
Joan Plowright was cast as Martha in Virginia Woolf. She appeared in it on tour in Bath, and also in previews in the Lyttelton. Then she suddenly left, officially because of a throat infection. Soon a wicked rumour was going the rounds that Larry had contrived a black joke by sending her a petition for divorce, enclosing a note saying: ‘No wife of mine will appear at Peter Hall’s National Theatre.’ True or not, Joan left. The play was delayed for a month until Margaret Tyzack successfully took over. Joan, alas, didn’t come to the National for another four years.
The National’s first ever production of a musical, Guys and Dolls, opened in the Olivier in the early spring of 1982, with Julia McKenzie, Bob Hoskins, Ian Charleson and Julie Covington. Directed by Richard Eyre, it won a huge number of awards, transferred to the West End, and gave 750 performances. So enormous was its popularity at the box office that we were able to withstand some unpleasant cuts in real terms to our grant.
When we announced the production, there was immediate alarm in the press. Was the National Theatre funded in order to present American musicals? Could English actors deliver performances that would work? Should something so obviously commercial be staged at the National? I took the view that Guys and Dolls was a masterpiece of its form – possibly the finest musical ever written – and said so. It makes me smile that the NT, as I write this, is giving a six-month run of Carousel – and not in repertory (as was Guys and Dolls), and also with the financial help of the most successful commercial impresario of our time, Cameron Mackintosh. How well our commentators have been Thatcherised.
In the summer, Richard had another big success, this time with The Beggar’s Opera in the Cottesloe. His work, as always, was meticulous; also I loved the strong, shy integrity of his personality. I began to think of him as a possible successor. Although he liked to be liked, as most of us do, I suspected that were he in charge he could be ruthless when necessary. Over the next years, I watched him with special interest.
Judi Dench came back to the National in 1982 to appear in two productions of mine: The Importance of Being Earnest and the premiere of Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska. In the Pinter, playing a woman who awakens from a sleep of many years, a sleeping ‘sickness’, she gave a performance which haunts the memories of those who saw it. In The Importance she played Lady Bracknell, and it was a revelation to bring that overblown character back to her proper age, and also to consider the true nature of the play – a satire on the upper-class marriage market. This market was a reality: if young upper-class girls did not marry well, they would have little identity and no full life. Wilde is showing their desperation – and Lady Bracknell’s.
Years later, with Bill Kenwright backing my own company in the West End, I staged a production of An Ideal Husband which developed this discovery. I believe that Wilde is popular with audiences not just because he is amusing. He was the most good-hearted and tender of men, and this quality shines through his writing. He understands love, and pain, in all their forms.
A bizarre event of this summer was a Falklands Victory Show, televised on a Sunday night with contributions from the whole of show business. Officially, it was to raise money for Falklands widows. Actually, it was to raise applause for Thatcher’s somewhat dubious finest hour. The NT was asked to do its bit and provide a number by the Hot Box Girls from Guys and Dolls. Bravely, they flatly refused to hoof it for Thatcher. Nothing could persuade them to change their mind. And because it was extra to their contracts, the management couldn’t make them; nor did we want to. In the end Frank Finlay, who was now playing Salieri in Amadeus, helped us out by making a token appearance on behalf of the National.
In 1982 we started an original experiment. A generous anonymous donor had made it possible for us to give one Bargain Night for each play in the repertory. All tickets were only two pounds. Crowds for our first offering, Guys and Dolls, had begun to gather outside the National twenty-four hours before the performance. By next morning, when the box office opened, coffee and jumble stalls had been set up, there were TV cameras, and many thousands of people stretched in queues along the South Bank as far as the eye could see. Months later, when every production had been given its single Bargain Night, it was clear that the whole series had been a revealing success.
