by Peter Hall
But because of the genuine theatrical energy that is released by the building, I very much wanted to be part of it. I was ready to make great sacrifices to do so. And it looked at one time as if I might help it on its way. But the actors’ committee who are the advisory body of the Globe felt (I imagine rather like the Arts Council) that I had had my fair share and that for me to appear as part of another Shakespeare theatre was regressive. They were probably right.
There was a compensation however, and it was a Shake-spearean one. Gordon Davidson who runs the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles had been after me for several years to try some genuine American Shakespeare. I have always wanted to see Shakespeare done by American actors in American, but with them strictly observing the form. Every Shakespeare production I have ever seen in America has been a mixture of phoney British (dreadfully ‘classical’) and Method throw-away (incomprehensible grunts). American speech can be beautiful: their vowels are closer to Shakespeare’s own sound, richer and more assonant than the clipped sounds of modern, grey English. American actors, with their command of rhythm and music and their strong emotional tradition, couldn’t be better for the work.
And so it proved. In early 1999, I went to Los Angeles. Within two and a half weeks, I had twenty-five American actors all speaking Shakespeare the same way, observing the form and relishing the rhythm. I did two productions in repertory. One of them, Measure for Measure, was particularly successful. Perhaps this was not surprising in the America of Clinton.
So, to an extent, I have done what I set out to do during this last period of my life. Yet I can’t help feeling that it is a shadow of what I’d hoped for, not a fully achieved substance. I have always wanted to run a crack company based on Shakespeare. That could have been the Old Vic. In the winter of 1999, I was given an Olivier Award for Lifetime Achievement. The gold watch, I thought, had arrived a little early, but I was pleased. Judi Dench was to present it. At the last minute she cried off. She said that it made her too emotional to think that I couldn’t now do what I wanted to do. It also made her angry. She had better not risk a speech. Felicity Kendal stepped in at a few hours notice and said things that made my ears burn, for which I thank her. Theatre awards always remind me vividly of school prizes. They are pleasant to receive and are to be acknowledged graciously. But they can never quite be believed.
But I have work, and interesting work, for the next two years. The University of Houston has given me a Chair of Drama, so I shall be teaching there one semester a year. Los Angeles is going on with the American Shakespeare project. I am spending six months in Denver next year to develop and direct an Anglo-American project between the RSC and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It is called Tantalus – a fifteen-hour play written by John Barton about the contradictions in the Greek myths. The background is the Trojan War. It is funny, incisive, bitingly contemporary and in my view a bit of a masterpiece. Politics always needs to be treated with irony. So John’s life’s work comes to me at the end of my life. Together, we make a full circle. We have known each other and worked together for fifty years. And for a further irony, although the RSC commissioned the work, the RSC cannot now afford to do it. Hence Denver’s generosity. Tantalus is the most ambitious piece of drama I have ever engaged in, so it is wonderful to meet it now, when I feel at my peak.
There is also Verdi’s Otello at Glyndebourne and at Chicago; and a revival of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Glynde-bourne. If I am spared (and the phrase now has a more ominous meaning than it did ten years ago) there is a great deal to look forward to.
The other day, I was approached by a vast internet company. They have a formidable library of classical music and classical artists. They have films, they have reproductions or paintings from great art galleries. They have operas on video. Where, they asked, was the theatre? Why was there no theatre? ‘Because theatre is live, and you don’t have a live audience,’ I told them. They urged me to think again. Just as recording had resulted in increased audiences for live concerts and operas, they were convinced that if the five hundred classic plays of the world’s repertory were available in well shot video (like Trevor Nunn’s great Macbeth) with attendant interviews and conversations with artists, writers and actors, there would be a hugely growing audience for live theatre round the world. They said that such an operation could fund a company such as I had run at the Old Vic and out of that company could come a significant part of the work. They ended by saying that if I didn’t do it, someone else would…Perhaps they are right. Perhaps…So this old dog might well try some new tricks.
The theatre in Britain is in a mess. It is woefully under-funded and has been deprived of resources by years of government mis-management. But it mustn’t be said. The Thatcherite campaign against the arts means that artists are no longer allowed to speak out. ‘Shut up or you’ll get nothing’ is the Whitehall advice. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the arts get nothing anyway. They are then accused of whingeing, of laying too much emphasis on lack of money. And of course poor resources do not make for good art. We have to argue that some hard rethinking is needed if the theatre is to maintain its hitherto indestructible vitality. There are greater challenges than ever before, yet greater opportunities for new audiences. These include the ever-increasing popularity of videos and the ever-widening spread of television channels. We have a government unsympathetic to the performing arts. They are scared of old-fashioned standards because they smack of elitism. But elitism, properly understood, is not a crime but a perennial necessity in art. It is something to celebrate.
In the meantime, we have escalating costs of production against income. And our income is limited because the seating capacity of theatre auditoriums cannot be increased. The vital actor/audience contact would be lost if they were any bigger. Without a healthy theatre, there is less health likely in television, film, or the arts in general – I would even say less health in the body politic itself. Theatre remains any society’s sharpest way to hold a live debate with itself. So I still passionately believe that it matters.
We complacently think that the British have the best theatre in the world. Indeed we still congratulate ourselves on the power of British arts. But are they so wonderful? Well, yes – particularly in the face of our national neglect. We are a society that is still largely tolerant – a society, what is more, that takes pride in being sceptical, refusing to be awed by reputation or impressed by success. We also have a healthy suspicion of politicians. But alone among European countries, we use the word ‘intellectual’ as a term of abuse. And – though we are extraordinarily good at creating it – we remain by-and-large profoundly indifferent to our arts and our artists. We are particularly indifferent to our theatre.
It is difficult to explain our apathy. Why don’t we care for, and then exploit, one of our greatest resources? Our most important export is our language – rich, flexible and capable of infinite nuance. It is also capable of sending our values, our dreams and our history all round the world: of being a potent influence. This is modern colonisation; a hundred years of Hollywood have established America in world trade. Hollywood and Coca-Cola is the expectation of the world. Britain could do the same.
The greatest artist of all time is British: Shakespeare. He and his fellow dramatists created the richest theatrical culture in history. Yet thirty years after his death, the theatres were torn down, the actors sacked and the dramatists sent into exile. The Puritans (the obverse side of our eccentric national creativity) had triumphed. They seem to me to be triumphing now again in the person of New Labour.
Creation followed by self-righteous destruction seems to be the central need of British life. As the Second World War ended, we blessed the arts (for the first time in our history) with subsidy. The result was an explosion of talent which was historically without precedent. In the last fifty years, we have produced over twenty dramatists of world stature – more than any other country. We had long been thought of as the land without music; but
our orchestras, our singers, and above all our composers (from Britten to Birtwistle) have become the envy of the world. It has been an equally extraordinary period for dance and for the visual arts.
So what do we do, faced with this golden age? We demolish the arts, or at least diminish them. The application of Thatcherite market forces have year on year reduced the resources available to the arts. Crisis management has therefore become normal management. Every arts organisation continues to be in trouble.
New Labour had a golden opportunity to revitalise our culture. For a relatively small sum of money, in national terms, the quality of our lives and our international standing could have been utterly transformed. Nothing would have such a major effect on this and subsequent generations for so low a cost. But support has remained grudging and patchy. We live in towns where there is now insufficient money for libraries to be opened every day of the week. Their video stores are open twenty-four hours a day. And the arts remain in crisis.
Art and market forces never mix. Art is necessarily innovative, unexpected and frequently (particularly at its inception) unpopular. Van Gogh never sold a picture. It is rare for originality to be initially commercial. Mozart’s Vienna found his music too ‘modern’; it took a century for him to be understood. Waiting for Godot was booed at its first night in 1955. Now it tops the list of the century’s important plays.
To make safe and consistent money out of art at the moment of its creation, it must be dumbed down to the common denominator. It must be safe and expected. It must reassure us about today, not disturb us about tomorrow. Money can only be made by providing the expected stuff for the expected public. It is the principle of McDonalds taken away from catering and applied to creativity. There is of course a place for this, but we shouldn’t confuse it with the real thing. It is rarely art.
We now run the risk of killing originality and desensitising art. If art is not initially understood, it is now thought by New Labour to be elitist. It might just be revolutionary – leading us to the future. It might just assert standards. If art doesn’t challenge, provoke, or illuminate, it is not fulfilling its function. On television, what is sold as infinite choice (over one hundred channels on digital television) is in fact infinitely the same. Too often, what is sold in the theatre as entertaining is bland and is exactly what we were expecting.
If things go on as they are the next generation will have less need of the arts: the taste will have gone. In the interests of economy, school visits to theatres and concerts have been radically reduced. There is less and less music in schools. Wherever we look, there is the same stupidity. As the Millennium approaches, we will finish building the best opera house in the world, Covent Garden. It is clear that there is insufficient money to run it. For some curious reason, we think we can run an international opera house for a fraction of what it costs any other country. At the same time, we are building a Dome without quite knowing what to put in to it. We are desperately building the cathedral without having found the god. It is a potent image of our age.
Radio (the cradle of many dramatists, Pinter and Stoppard among them) now has no plays longer than three-quarters of an hour on its main wavelength. Audience research has told the BBC that no one will listen longer. Everywhere broadcasters and producers think about their audience’s comfort rather than their provocation. So the point of art and certainly the point of theatre is in danger of being lost.
The cry goes up that we must all strive in the theatre for a much more ‘popular’ audience: it has been fashionable and loud for half a century. But I now believe that the theatre’s strength is exactly because it is elitist, because it is often not populist. It performs to a public that on the whole is informed and sophisticated. What the finest theatre does today, television and film will still do tomorrow. ‘Elitism’ may be a dirty word, but I think the theatre should be proud of it.
I believe in minority art. I believe in uniqueness. I believe in creativity which is beyond my understanding, until an artist leads me to appreciate it. I believe that theatre is precious and that it is a privilege to spend your life in it.
I have managed to work with all six of my children and since they are all in or around the same profession as me, it has been a rewarding experience. First, there was Christopher, proving himself to be an excellent producer; then I directed Jennifer many years ago as Miranda in The Tempest. She was rapidly becoming a fine actress, but she gave it up and became an even finer mother. She now writes. Edward is a very good director. His first night of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with the RSC was I think the most frightening night of my professional life. But he brought it off and I was left reflecting that a parent’s pride in his children can be absolute, there need be no false modesty. Edward has gone on to do a fine series of Shakespeare plays at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury with his own company. Armed with a digital video camera, he also went off to Kenya and made a one-hour documentary film for Channel 4. The immediacy of the new video age is something that obsesses him, because it is now possible for a director to shoot his own material and to make his own film. The next generation is going to have a great deal of freedom.
In 1999, Edward did Twelfth Night in Newbury and phoned me in Los Angeles. He was very excited. He said that every critic had loved the production and he thought that for the first time he had really done it — not least because for the first time not a single critic had mentioned that he was my son. We celebrated.
Lucy is the designer of the family. She designs clothes for ordinary life, and sets and costumes for the theatre and opera. She also has two wonderful little sons. For years, she wouldn’t work with me. But not very long ago, when I did Hamlet, she agreed to design it. She was, she said, now ready for me. And she was. It was a stimulating experience.
Rebecca has continued to develop the acting talent she showed in The Camomile Lawn. She has a university career in prospect as she finishes her last year at school as an unexpected and original Head Girl. She took my advice and didn’t continue a professional career as a child. Childhood is too important and enjoyable to waste, and so is education.
Emma is now seven and has an appetite for life that leaves me gasping. I have had, because of my peculiar life, forty-three years of little children. In that, I have certainly been lucky.
I am perfectly sure that you get more like yourself the older you grow. So who am I? And am I nearer knowing myself? Not really. I have always been prone to black depressions. But they have been much less frequent since the coming of Nicki. I have always been histrionically inclined, with a tendency to have sudden rows or write rude letters. (This is acceptable, if you tear them up.) But I like to disguise that turbulence behind a mask of calmness.
I believe in telling the whole truth and I try to follow that precept. Eighty per cent of the time it works. It even gives you a negotiating advantage, because nobody believes that you are telling the truth. The other twenty per cent of the time it causes rows and ructions because people don’t want to contemplate honesty. Many of my attempts at integrity are read as arrogance.
Why have I worked so hard? For adulation? For success? Not at all. I still remain shy and embarrassed in public. Perhaps that is why I have made myself direct – talking in public, working in public all day long is a great challenge to shyness. It won’t cure you, but it makes you come to terms with it. Perhaps this is also why I allow myself to be a public figure. I don’t like it, but it is good for me to endure it.
I have made money, but it has all gone in divorces. I have lived comfortably and I enter my old age with a pension and a house and nothing more. I am aware that this is more than many can say in this unfair world. But I have no other assets.
I know that I am a better director now than I have ever been. And that is a further sadness, because I don’t have a theatre or a company. But at the very least, I have a few more years, I hope, of living in great masterpieces.
I am now old enough to see that nothing much changes as far as politics of the ar
ts are concerned. Every political party encourages the arts in opposition, and nearly ignores them in government. The biggest disappointment to me has been the Blair government. They are very good at representing themselves and have told the country how much they have done for the arts. But what they haven’t said is that it is about half what is needed to repair the depravations of twenty years of Thatcher and Major. We are a daft country. We have creativity which can lead the world, and we do next to nothing either to encourage it or nurture it or educate it. I don’t believe that will ever change. The British, for all their originality, are basically philistines. And the politicians respond eagerly to their middle-brow tastes. It is of course a catastrophic mistake and we lose much by it. But it would take real vision from a real leader to correct this. Nothing would so transform the country or the prowess of future generations.
In the meantime, Emma doesn’t like me going away. ‘Where are you?’ she asked indignantly on the telephone the other day. ‘And when are you coming home?’ ‘I am in Houston,’ I replied. ‘I am just going to teach.’ ‘What are you teaching?’ she asked. ‘Shakespeare, I suppose?’ I agreed: that was my task. But she was not mollified. She wanted me to come home. ‘Don’t they know about Shakespeare?’ she said.
List of Productions
For obvious reasons I could write about only some of the plays, operas and films I have directed. Just in case any reader might be interested to fill the gaps, here is a full list of my productions up to 1999. The years given are of the first performance. Revivals and tours are omitted.
P.H.
PLAYS AND OPERAS
1953 The Letter (professional debut)
Somerset Maugham Theatre Royal, Windsor
1954 Blood Wedding (London debut)
Lorca Arts, London
