Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  It is a dangerous cliché that people only value what they pay for. I believe that if good art were cheap – really cheap – the need for it would grow enormously. At the end of the war, the idea of subsidy embraced the intention to make the arts available to as many people as possible, especially those who could not otherwise afford it. That idea has been lost. Now the Arts Council tells its clients that they must get the market rate – without apparently realising that the market rate often keeps out the very people who are longing to come in. I think it obscene that today Covent Garden charges £120 and more for a good ticket. The Royal Opera House should have a subsidy that enables it to charge dramatically lower prices. Then its audience would be drawn from the whole population. At the moment, every taxpayer is subsidising opera goers who are already wealthy.

  Early in the year, Maria and I were married in New York, and in May our daughter, Rebecca, was born. I found being a parent in my fifties a pleasure even more intense than when I had been younger. All my children rallied round and shared our joy at the arrival of a new baby. Also, I did more of the actual looking after than I had ever done before.

  Although there were depressing lows in my roller-coaster life with Maria, there were dazzling heights – and I thought I was beginning to understand her and her talent. I realised that she was not in the least interested in fame. What she cared about was, and still is, perfection. If she did not get it, she felt ill. It was a difficult burden for her to bear.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The most notorious flop of my career, Jean Seberg, happened in the winter of 1983. The year before, the American composer Marvin Hamlish had invited me to direct it on Broadway. ‘Get me the Amadeus guy,’ he was reported as saying. However, my contract with the National allowed me to work only on theatre productions which originated there. So I suggested to Hamlish that we stage Seberg in the Olivier. I thought it would be rewarding for the NT to try to construct a musical from its very beginnings. It had a serious and interesting theme: a society which, because it lacked religious or royal totems, made film stars its objects of worship, sometimes with tragic consequences.

  Jean Seberg was a girl from the Midwest of America turned into a star before her talent had developed and who, broken as a result, committed suicide in Paris in 1979. She had political affiliations, particularly with the Black Panther movement, and was persecuted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover.

  I had liked Hamlish’s music for A Chorus Line, though I hadn’t liked the show itself, which seemed to me, as theatre, to reek of Broadway double standards: it castigated the star system, but ended up celebrating it. For Seberg, the words were by different people: Christopher Adler had written the lyrics and the book was by Julian Barry, the screenwriter.

  The production was announced six months before we went into rehearsal and immediately provoked hostility after the normally open-minded Michael Billington had suggested in the Guardian that the subsidised National Theatre was financing the tryout of a Broadway musical with public money. This set off an avalanche of comment which, long before we opened, labelled the enterprise as a shocking misuse of public funds. I went into the attack. I asked if the NT should avoid works which looked as though they might have commercial potential. I said that if we went along with such a notion, any new play offered to us by an established and popular dramatist – be he Stoppard or Ayckbourn, Shaffer or Pinter, David Hare or Christopher Hampton – would have to be refused. But the antagonism mounted and no argument worked. I stressed that Seberg widened the range of our repertory and continued our demonstrable interest in new American drama; that I hoped it would bring in a new audience, as Guys and Dolls had done. Finally, I pointed out that because we had negotiated a stake in all later productions of the show (as we had done, for instance, with Amadeus) it would, if liked, make money for the National.

  The hostile publicity fed on itself, and there were a number of untrue newspaper stories about rows backstage. To make matters worse, one of the leading actors, David Ryall, broke his ankle and the opening had to he delayed. By the time the first night came, only a presentation of the Second Coming would have lived down the climate of disapproval. The show opened after twenty-two packed-out previews. But it was not liked by most of the critics, and their notices made it sound rather glum. After that, public interest fell away, though we managed to nurse the production in the repertory for four months.

  Paradoxically, the work we did on Seberg in rehearsal was an exciting experience and taught me much about musical structure and story-telling. So why did it fail? The cast was talented, and nineteen-year-old Kelly Hunter, fragile yet tough, was memorable as the young Jean.

  There was something about Seberg that audiences rejected. They couldn’t, I believe, bear the contrast between Marvin’s glittering, showy music and the pain of the story. I thought this contrast worked. It was also, perhaps, a mistake to tell the story with two heroines – an old Seberg and a young Seberg: the audience did not know whom to identify with.

  I’m sure it was not a mistake to do the show at the National; but clearly – and this was my misjudgement – it was the wrong time to try. Once we were launched on the production, however, there could be no turning back. One thing is certain: nothing fails like the failure of a musical.

  Julian Barry and I have worked together since and he has remained a friend. Marvin Hamlish has not, alas. So often in the theatre disaster separates, success binds.

  Earlier in 1983, another flop had caused me great heartache. In May, Harold Pinter staged a revival of Giradoux’s The Trojan War Will Not Take Place. Somehow he missed the ironic style of the piece, and it was badly received. Soon afterwards he resigned as an associate director of the National and, surprising in such a private man, announced publicly that ‘the fundamental problem with the NT is that its artistic director spends a great deal of his time elsewhere,’ and that ‘he and the Board had failed to appoint a deputy to him entrusted with full artistic responsibility in Peter Hall’s absence.’

  Harold was speaking about my sabbatical in Bayreuth, which coincided with his rehearsals. I lost, for the time being, one of my closest friends and collaborators.

  The split was made worse when my Diaries came out that autumn. I thought I had written about Harold with the love and care I have always felt for him. But he didn’t. He did not make it up for eight years.

  The publication of my Diaries presented me with a new experience and it was not entirely comfortable: my character was reviewed in public. ‘You should have thought of that before,’ said my mother.

  When I left the RSC in 1968, I possessed no records at all of that period, not even notes about my own productions. And when sleuthing academics, theatre historians and friends asked me about those years I had to confess that, despite having a good memory, I had forgotten many of the details. I was determined not to make the same mistake at the NT.

  Between March 1972, when I was invited to launch the National on the South Bank, and January 1980, I spent half an hour early every morning dictating the happenings of the previous day into a small tape recorder. After a while I began to enjoy this; it became an essential habit, almost a daily confessional. I never listened afterwards to the tapes, nor – although they were typed for me – read them. I wanted them to stay as they were, uncorrected, probably inconsistent in places, but a record that might some time be useful. They were never intended for publication. Then one day I mentioned their existence to John Goodwin. He was very interested, asked to read them, and came back to say he thought that if they were shortened they would tell an intriguing story. Two years later, he showed me his edited version, condensed from well over a million words. I was as startled as when I see myself on TV or hear my own voice on the radio. The man in the diaries seemed someone else, someone I only partly recognised, full of contradictions; and what I read showed a hectic, at times somewhat desperate, life – no doubt because each morning, as I dictated, the drama and the bad things had been uppermost in my mind. Not so evi
dent were the rehearsals that had gone wonderfully well, my friendships among the people I worked with, and the satisfaction I had felt at the way we had, together, fought and won the battle to open the National.

  Over the years, the Diaries have won me many friends. Theatre directors all over the world, from Elia Kazan to Ninagawa, have said how glad they are that someone has put into print the wonder and the purgatory of running a big theatre company.

  At the time, they produced every possible kind of review, from heartening approval, to zestful character assassination by John Osborne in The Sunday Times.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the October of 1983, Ralph Richardson died. He was acting for the NT in Eduardo de Filippo’s Inner Voices and had had a slight stroke. When told by his doctor that he would not be able to live a full life in the future, he turned over and I think decided to die. It took two days. He was eighty-one. I felt I had lost a second father. That evening, the leading actor in each of the National’s three theatres asked for a minute’s silence in which the audience and those on stage could remember him.

  His greatness as an actor is undisputed and happily survives in innumerable films. He created characters who revealed the poetry of ordinariness. He always said he had a potato face, but underneath that face was an ardent, imaginative soul, and his audiences recognised it. That is what made him the finest of Cyranos. He understood eccentrics, perhaps because he was an eccentric himself, with his love of Bentleys, motorbikes and hamsters. He was the best Falstaff I have seen.

  I adored working with him, though his inventiveness could make rehearsals an alarming experience. Most actors rehearse giving about eighty per cent, indicating what they will do in performance. Ralph created the thing itself: he could plug into the character and then instantaneously drop it, commenting on what he had just done, usually in a deprecating manner. He had the ability, in rehearsal, to associate completely with the character from the start. In my experience he shared this commitment only with Edith Evans and Vanessa Redgrave.

  Ralph was a firm friend. I lunched with him every few weeks and I often think of him now. We were together a couple of months before he died. He said something like this (I will try to remember the words as I remember the voice): ‘I don’t think I’ve been a particularly bad person. I’ve tried to be good – as good as I can. And I’ve tried to have a bit of faith. But when I die and go up to the pearly gates, will St Peter come and open them and say “Hello, Richardson. Come in!”? You know, I don’t think so. I don’t think there’ll be anyone there at all.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The director’s job of putting a play together so that it comes to life is an intense pleasure for me, but I find a pleasure almost as great in editing a film or adapting a book for a movie or the stage. The agents for George Orwell’s estate had given me the irresistible chance of making a stage version of Animal Farm, one of those rare and original allegories that all ages respond to, like Gulliver’s Travels or Alice in Wonderland.

  I directed my adaptation in the Cottesloe in the spring of 1984. Jennifer Carey had designed fine masks for the animals; lyrics were by Adrian Mitchell and music by Richard Peaslee. The piece became an amazing success, and over the next few years was given in all three of the National’s theatres, also touring widely in Britain and abroad. Everywhere houses were full. At an International Theatre Festival in Baltimore there was a wonderful row when the American organisers, under pressure from the visiting Eastern bloc countries, made it clear that they would like us to withdraw Animal Farm from the festival because of Orwell’s anti-communist viewpoint. We refused, but not before Wole Soyinka, president of the festival, and loyally on the communists’ side, had devised an ingeniously liberal defence of their attitude. Thus the production, while invited by the festival and playing at the festival, was now designated as officially outside the festival. Orwell would have been delighted.

  In the winter of 1984, I had another crack at Coriolanus, twenty-five years after I had done it with Olivier at Stratford. Now the name part was played by Ian McKellen and I emphasised the political resonances more by using, for the first and only time in any of my Shakespeare productions, fragments of modern costume. The same thinking also led me to put the audience on to the Olivier stage – a hundred of them each night – seated at low ticket prices along the back, close to the action. Marshalled by seven or eight actors, they became the citizens of Rome at necessary points in the play. This device worked well, particularly when we went to the Herodias Atticus, the vast Roman theatre just below the Acropolis in Athens. The Greeks enjoyed taking part in the drama of politics far more than the inhibited Londoners, and were much more exuberant in their reactions.

  Chapter Nineteen

  By the autumn of 1984 – despite a strong repertory and high audience levels – a financial show-down was clearly on the way for the National.

  An examination of our figures from 1979 (when Thatcher became prime minister) revealed that while the retail price index had risen by sixty-five per cent the NT’s grant had risen by only forty-four per cent, thus failing to match inflation by a third. Unless we were given an extra £1.5 million to restore the grant and take account of inflation, we would soon have to face a major deficit.

  We made our case to the Arts Council, but in December were told that our increase for 1985/6 would not be £1.5 million but £129,000. I was worried not only about the National: the whole theatre scene was under attack. The Thatcher revolution – with grants deliberately pegged well below inflation and theatres expected to make up the shortfall by private-sector sponsorship – was beginning to bite. Plans were shrinking, experiment was threatened and morale was generally very low. The government’s promise, made in 1979, that private sponsorship would never be used as a means of reducing subsidy had been broken.

  In January, at the Evening Standard drama awards in the Guildhall, I spoke out about the state of the theatre up and down the country. The Minister for the Arts, Lord Gowrie, showed his displeasure in the House of Lords with a patronising speech, making out that I just wanted another million for the NT. This angered me, and in a letter to him I pointed out that I had not mentioned the National at all, adding, ‘I don’t believe the Arts Council, or, if I may say so, you, realise what a wasteland is developing, peopled by demoralised directors. I am not saying, “Give me a million or you are a vandal.” That would be politically naive. But I am saying, “Look out, the British theatre is disappearing.”’

  The public debate became very heated. Max Rayne and his deputy, Lord Mishcon, were increasingly anxious that I was damaging the NT by speaking out. Early in February, I accompanied them to a meeting with Gowrie who seemed to me far more concerned with pleasing Thatcher than with the creative potential of the arts.

  He obviously loathed the new NT building and, when the subject of our high running costs came up, indicated that for us to move out and occupy some old, existing theatre such as the Lyceum or Drury Lane would be much cheaper. I couldn’t believe my ears. He didn’t say what would happen to our South Bank home. Gloomily, I wondered whether he was thinking of it as an ideal business conference centre.

  The government was at last showing its true attitude towards the arts; and, in William Rees-Mogg, Thatcher had appointed a chairman of the Arts Council who was seemingly content to dismantle the subsidy structure of the previous twenty years and allow the Council to dwindle from an independent agency, fighting the cause of the artist, into a tool of government policy.

  Faced with our huge impending deficit, I persuaded the Board to take draconian action. At a press conference held at the NT in February, I attacked the government cut-backs and set out the particular measures the National would have to take. I had to pull myself together before going into the conference because I had just finished having a terrible row on the telephone with Maria which had made me feel like a punch-drunk boxer.

  It was difficult to get through the room because it was so crammed with an enormous turnout of jou
rnalists, TV crews and waving microphones. But I grabbed a coffee table and climbed on to it. I knew there was no hope of holding an audience unless I could be seen and heard. I announced the closure of the Cottesloe which would save £500,000 over a year; a staff reduction of one hundred jobs, about a fifth of our total; and the end of touring. I then accused Gowrie and Rees-Mogg of betraying the artistic standards of the country.

  This coffee-table speech (as the newspapers named it) was given vast media coverage, nearly all of it favourable to the arts, and caused a sensation. The rest of the theatre closed ranks around me. Forty-seven artistic directors of subsidised theatres arrived at the National to discuss our common plight. A unanimous vote of no confidence in the Arts Council was passed. And there was a general recognition, at last, that the Council had divided the theatre world by indicating to the regions that they were underfunded because of the needs of the National, while indicating to the National that it was underfunded because of the needs of the regions.

  I was in politics with a vengeance, and Max Rayne and Victor Mishcon grew daily more uneasy. Clearly I had made unforgiving enemies of Gowrie and Rees-Mogg. I believe that from then on, the government’s arts establishment wanted to get me out of the National. I had always known that politics could be a dirty business and one that had to be fought with no holds barred. But it was one thing to know that. Another to experience it.

  There was, however, an interesting and helpful twist to the affair. I thought I was closing a theatre; I discovered I had committed a political act. Accused by the Right of shutting the Cottesloe when such a measure was not, or so they said, necessary, I was then rewarded by the Left. To enable the theatre to reopen, the GLC made us a special grant of £375,000. This munificence was one of their last acts before being abolished, and was largely seen as an anti-Thatcher gesture. Combined with a healthy box office and our biting economies – which included what we’d saved over the five months the Cottesloe was closed – it turned our position round. A financial year that had started with a prediction of bankruptcy, fully justified by the facts at that time, ended in April 1986 with a small profit. Our hits – Pravda, The Mysteries, Wild Honey and A Chorus of Disapproval – had increased box-office takings. Apart from that, we had won no fewer than twenty awards, as well as many allies in theatres all over the country.