by Peter Hall
Felicity Kendal dazzled in play after play for me as well as in The Camomile Lawn. And Alan Howard as Lear, Vladimir in Waiting for Godot and in the two Oedipus plays showed himself to be the master actor – many facetted and deeply human. In the wings, I see waiting many more to whom I owe so much. But I must stop, or the list will be endless.
I must mention The Final Passage, the television two-parter by Caryll Philips which I did for Channel 4. It was perhaps my happiest time with a camera. Two good scripts, a good cast and some weeks in St Lucia were all blessings. But the crown was my collaboration with Christopher, my eldest son. He produced with tact, clarity and efficiency. Can you work with your own son? Well, I could. Should you work with your own son? Yes, if possible. No film can be made without a guarantee for extra funds from completion guarantors. They provide insurance against disaster so that the film can be finished whatever happens. The policies are granted by tough men who make tough decisions. The money and the risk is enormous. They asked me if I wouldn’t try to override my son out of seniority and paternity if there was a dispute over spending: I pointed out to them that I would surely want my son’s credentials as a producer to be immaculate. They were, I thought, on to a good thing. So it proved – though I think the substantial sum that we saved on the budget was more the result of Christopher’s efficiency than of my self-denials.
There have been four operas: Così fan tutte and The Magic Flute in Los Angeles; Figaro with Simon Rattle and the Age of the Enlightenment Orchestra at the old Glyndebourne. There was also Simon Boccanegra at the new Glyndebourne in 1998. I returned to the new house, the quarrel made up, happy to be back among friends and happiest of all that the new opera house is such a success. I miss the old one because I miss its ghosts. But the new house acoustically is one of the triumphs of modern music. George Christie has made something that will endure. Ours has not been a century adept at building theatres. The geometric purity and straight lines of modernism have not helped make human spaces for audiences. Theatre design is about curves, not straight lines. Audiences gather around a storyteller: they do not confront him in ranks. John Bury and I gave much time to collaborating with Joe Chamberlain (the architect) to design the Barbican Theatre auditorium. To me, it is a modern theatre that embraces its audience and I have now had the pleasure of working there, doing a production of Julius Caesar. The Pit is less amenable, simply because it remains a claustrophobic rehearsal room. But it works – just. And that is where we created The Gift of the Gorgon. What doesn’t work is the Barbican itself, which is already feeling like an out-of-date airport. Weird attempts by past directors to stipple its rough concrete with pastel colours, or triumphalise its entrance with gold statues have not helped. It needs purifying so that it is wholeheartedly the design that it set out to be: defiantly Sixties. I am sure that architecturally its time will return.
If the pleasures have been intense and the personal happiness, great, the disappointments have been equally keen. I say this not in bitterness or resentment; I have had my turn of luck and of great opportunities. I have been blessed by professional good fortune at the same time as I have been cursed by personal unhappiness. It seems I can have one or the other, but not both; and in these last years, the tables have been turned.
When I left the National after twenty-five years work in the subsidised theatre, I was starting again with a new marriage and a new career. I was also in considerable financial trouble. You don’t earn money by working in the subsidised theatre, not real money. And although I had always tried to keep my foot – or at least my toe – in the commercial world, I had not amassed any savings and had no pension. Financially, I was in trouble because of my three divorces. Every split marriage means that resources are reduced by half. And then there is the eternal alimony and child maintenance, not to mention the often very high school fees. I had to earn a great deal of money in order just to keep afloat. It was not particularly onerous for me to work hard and to work continuously. And with one exception (a play that Bill Kenwright desperately needed) I did nothing that I did not want to do, and nothing purely for money.
But Nicki and I were very anxious when we were first together: the money had to continue to roll in at an even higher rate to get us out of trouble. Sacred Hunger, the Barry Unsworth book about the slave trade, was our hope. We both put a huge investment of time, passion and enthusiasm into it. We hoped and believed that it would be a huge piece of world television in eight episodes. It had already won a Booker Prize.
The production was a family affair in that my son Christopher (who had been so brilliant on The Final Passage) was to produce it, and Nicki was the principal writer. The scripts took some eighteen months of her life. The locations were selected (mainly in South Africa) and casting was begun. Then Michael Grade, who had been the enthusiastic patron of the project right from the beginning, suddenly left Channel 4. I was called to a meeting by John Willis, the acting head of the channel. He admitted that the project was a commitment and that everything was ready to go. However, it was being stopped: the channel was changing policy and was no longer doing large-scale enterprises of this kind. So that was it. Not making Sacred Hunger must have cost Channel 4 a small fortune in cancelled contracts.
It cost us profound disappointment and career disruption. I was just finishing my first magical season at the Old Vic — all in all, my happiest time in the theatre. I was supposed to go straight on to Sacred Hunger. Shortly after it was cancelled, the Mirvishes (the generous patrons and owners of the Old Vic) decided to sell it and retrench back to Canada. I had lost my theatre too.
The sale of the Old Vic was perhaps the biggest disappointment of my professional life.
To some extent, you expect the film world to be undependable and illogical. It is usually just plain daft. Commitments mean little, giving your word means nothing and contracts are not usually worth the paper that they are written on. Theatre is nothing like so volatile or dishonourable. So I wasn’t expecting the sale. But the Mirvishes were entirely within their rights to sell and they had been very generous to me. It was simply a ghastly surprise.
At the Old Vic, for that golden year, I ran a repertory trying to avoid all the worst excesses of the National and the RSC. There was a permanent design aesthetic so that we could rehearse on the stage and change from one play to another between matinée and evening performances. Lear did not have to perform twice in one day. We also spent very little money on changing from play to play because the stage, masked by a dark blue box (that could become many different colours under different lights) had frank, handsome planking. It was self-confessedly a stage on which we placed key elements and props. By this honesty, the stage was given back to the actors. They could work there again for most of their rehearsals.
We played a repertory of Waste, The Seagull, King Lear, Waiting for Godot and Caryll Churchill’s Cloud Nine. But on Sundays and Mondays (we kept open seven days a week, thus making the building live every day) we played new plays with a separate company for a run of four or five weekends. This attracted a young audience. I had a company of favourite actors in the repertory – Felicity Kendal, Michael Pennington, Alan Dobie, Alan Howard, Ben Kingsley, Gregg Hicks, Dennis Quilley, Anna Carteret, Victoria Hamilton. I have never been happier. It was what I had wanted from the RSC and the National, but because they were national institutions, they had to grow too big. Only by becoming more productive could they be funded and maintain proper working conditions. Size appeared to be the only way to justify the subsidy.
It was a bitter blow to me when the Old Vic was sold. A year later, I had the chance to return to it. So it was an even worse blow when my application to the Arts Council, for a guarantee against loss (not a subsidy) of half a million pounds in order to carry on with the project a year later, was refused. Well, of course it wasn’t strictly refused: that would be far too clear a response and one that could be argued with; it was filed under pending. I was told that the Arts Council had not yet decided its priorities. A
nd it was whispered to me that it might be felt that there was enough serious theatre in London. Translated, I was very well aware that the Arts Council was saying, ‘You have had your turn. Go away, we don’t need you any more.’
I have continued to work from time to time at the National and at the RSC. But with the twin burdens of alimony and school fees it has to be said that I cannot easily afford to work at either of the theatres that I helped to create. With seventy approaching and my private pension paying at least something, it may be easier. What I would like, of course, is some regular work in a Shakespeare studio attached to either of these organisations. But neither have the money, nor the inclination.
So I am bent on growing old gracefully. There are plays and operas that I would like to do again. It is a joy to spend months inside a masterpiece; but it is also a corresponding sadness to say goodbye to it and realise that you probably will not meet it in work again. I had ten years of the Da Ponte/Mozart operas at Glyndebourne. Yet I would love to do them once more. I would love to try to do The Ring again. I spent three years learning it; it seems a waste not to struggle again with this marvellous monster. I would like to do Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron again. Philosophically the argument between what is true, and how you sell what is true, where the selling often becomes more important than what is sold, seems to me even more apposite in our PR-manipulated age.
There have been other minor disappointments. The chance came to make a Hollywood film — Never Talk to Strangers with Rebecca de Mornay and Antonio Banderas. The experience proved to me that I have no aptitude whatever for surviving the Hollywood rat-race. The film was a moderately original thriller with an interesting script, which Nicki and I rewrote. It was about a multiple personality disorder. When I completed my cut and the dub of the sound and dialogue, I thought it was rather original. Anyway, it was a stylish piece of work.
The moguls, though, did not agree with me. So in time-honoured fashion, they took the film away from me (which was their contractual right), re-edited it, put new music on it and changed it (apparently) in many fundamentals. They then asked me if I would like to see it, and were hurt and surprised when I said I didn’t want to because it was no longer my film. Contractually though, the film was entitled to keep my name on it. In the face of dreadful notices, I had to keep quiet. I still haven’t seen it.
In Hollywood, you only get muscle from success. On the other hand you are only likely to get success if you are left alone. Committees rarely make art. It is a peculiarly vicious circle.
Producers come in all shapes and sizes. But on the whole, I neither like nor respect them. There is a level of incompetence among producers that could not be tolerated among actors, directors, designers or writers. Nothing would ever get done. Most producers would like to be something else – rich, or a writer, a director, or even a performer. What all of them should be, and what most of them are not, is good managers. They may deserve credit for a brilliant idea, and they may even raise the money for it. But the art of producing is to pick the talent, and support it so that it gives of its best. Interfering with it is never the answer. Encouragement, discipline, efficient management and the provision of the right resources at the right time are the necessary virtues.
Most producers, particularly the modern breed on Broadway or in Hollywood, confuse arbitrary decrees with efficient management. In the early stages of a production, if a facility is required that costs some thousands of pounds, the producer is inclined (in order to prove to everyone that this is a tight organisation that doesn’t waste money) to veto the facility entirely. He will be deaf to pleas that it is absolutely necessary and spend the next few weeks wasting a great deal of time, energy and money trying to find an alternative solution. At the eleventh hour, he will inevitably have to agree to the original idea. It will now cost considerably more because it is so late. This scenario, or variations of it, has happened to me innumerable times all over the world in theatre, opera and film.
I have directed over two hundred productions. And I must have tried to produce well over five hundred for other people. Producing is the more difficult craft because every situation is unique and by definition unrepeatable. Efficient management can be learnt, but how to get the best out of creative people is entirely a matter of one-to-one relationships.
The great producers I have known could probably not have done anything else, nor would they have wished to try. Binkie Beaumont, the emperor of post-war West End theatre, towers above them all. He was enthusiastic and canny. He loved power, but he had a pride in doing things well and that included spending money well. He was not lavish, but he provided what was necessary. And he loved the product. Tony Quayle and Glen Byam Shaw at Stratford-upon-Avon in the Fifties had learnt something of his style. Bob Whitehead and Roger Stephens on Broadway were great figures of a similar mould. They were men of their word. I always felt they cared more for what was on the stage than for asserting their own egos.
Moran Caplat is the best opera producer I have ever been involved with. And Glen Wilhide (who did Camomile Lawn) the best TV and film producer. Producing is always about a choice of priorities. And the director/producer relationship is crucial if the decisions made are to be creative.
For some seven years and fourteen productions, from Lysistrata to a four-hour Hamlet, taking in Filumena and An Ideal Husband on the way, Bill Kenwright was my producer. I find it very difficult to write about him. I owe him a great deal. And he was generous, supportive and kind. If you are one of his, part of his set-up, he will do anything for you. He was unbelievably generous to me, but his price is control and in his eyes that price is expressed by unswerving loyalty of a peculiar kind. This, unfortunately, can disintegrate into blindly having to do what he requires to be done. And after our unlikely, but very enjoyable, love affair – two working-class boys from the wrong side of the tracks, united in trying to do exceptional work – we quarrelled over his concept of loyalty. The revival of Amadeus was a co-production and even by the last week of rehearsal the share had not been agreed between Bill and the other producers. Bill, choosing his words very carefully, said that if he was me, he might think it appropriate to withdraw from the production until the thing was settled on terms that were acceptable to him, Kenwright. He was careful not to ask me to take this action, careful not to insist that I followed his advice. I pointed out that in the last week of rehearsal it was impossible that I could walk out on Peter Shaffer, David Suchet, Michael Sheen and a cast of actors, many of whom I had worked with for thirty-five years. Bill said that in that case that would be the end of his involvement with The Peter Hall Company. And so it was. I still believe that friendship cannot mean possession.
So as I write, I have lost the Vic, lost my company, and lost the possibility of continuing the work I want to do in the way I want to do it. Professionally, it is no longer all roses. Now most of my work is in America – and that means miserable separations from my family. Will it change? It is hard now to see how it can.
Some years ago, I had hoped to be involved with Sam Wanamaker’s Globe. I am a trustee of the enterprise because of my vast admiration for Sam’s tenacity. He wanted me there. I am not really for antique reproductions of anything, and I don’t basically believe in a great deal of the Globe. I am sure that it is too big – that the inside measurements have been mistakenly turned into the outside ones. I am equally sure, because of the experience of the excavation of the foundations of the earlier theatre, the Rose, that the stage of the Globe is mistakenly formulated. The pillars are in the wrong place. The Globe was built by actors who had successfully run the Rose. Actors do not change what works. Nor, more to the point, do they build theatres which ensure that they can’t be seen when they make their entrance. There is also something inherently absurd about carefully reconstructing a theatre where the sight-lines are warped by modern safety requirements, the aisles are too big and the audience capacity is woefully inaccurate because modern human beings are about thirty per cent larger than Eli
zabethans. Even daylight is now simulated by artificial light; so authentic the Globe isn’t. I think we needed a Globe – in daylight and in intimacy — so that we can understand the nature of Shakespeare’s stage. But I would have built a modern building, not smothered it with approximate Elizabethan decorations. Nonetheless, the place, because it has a carnival atmosphere, an open-air energy and an extraordinary direct contact between actor and audience, works and works triumphantly. It could revitalise Shakespeare in our country, providing it now studies and masters the techniques of Shakespearean verse and Shakespearean staging. Otherwise, it will remain a tourist attraction – a pastiche jollity rather like the Player’s Theatre version of the Victorian music hall. And William Shakespeare does indeed meet the Player’s Theatre when the Globe audience is encouraged in self-conscious audience participation. To boo and hiss the French is not the reaction expected by Shakespeare’s Henry V. It is a play that consistently preaches magnanimity in victory.
