Remembering Peter Hall, 1930–2017
TLS
September 13, 2017
A “force of nature” is how The Times describes Sir Peter Hall in its obituary – Hall (who died on September 11, at the age of eighty-six) being one of the dominant figures in British theatre ever since he took a chance on producing the English premiere of a play called Waiting for Godot, at the Arts Theatre in 1955. He was in his twenties then, and it is strange to think that had he done no more than stage Samuel Beckett’s great play, to such shocking effect, he would still have an undeniable place in theatre history.
Yet there was to be more – much more. Hall went on, a few years later, to found the Royal Shakespeare Company, for which he directed David Warner in Hamlet and the ambitious reworking of history-according-to-Shakespeare, as The Wars of the Roses. The story of subsequent battles over the National Theatre, where he succeeded Sir Laurence Olivier as artistic director in 1973, is well known – his opponents included government ministers, fellow theatre-makers and, for good measure, Mary Whitehouse – as are his further directorial triumphs. Hall’s work ranged from No Man’s Land by Harold Pinter (with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson) to Amadeus by Peter Shaffer and, after leaving the NT, a notable revival of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending on Broadway, starring Vanessa Redgrave. In the TLS, Katherine Duncan-Jones found his revival of Mrs Warren’s Profession, in 2002, “flawless”. She praised his Twelfth Night, almost a decade later, as “clear, beautifully staged and intelligently thought out in every detail”. Notable among Hall’s collaborations with many leading actors is his Shakespearean work with Dame Judi Dench, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (twice) and an uneven Antony and Cleopatra (in which, Barbara Everett reported, Dench’s Egyptian queen “prowls and rasps and coos and never for an instant fails to interest”).
TLS reviewers have been less convinced by Hall’s writings about the theatre, even as they have found something of value in them, too. He was happy to lay down the law about how to speak one particular playwright’s verse, for example, in Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players; but perhaps could have said more, at least in print, about other dramatists, as both Lois Potter and Stephen Wall have noted. It may be that his most valuable publication, in the eyes of theatre aficionados and historians at least, will be the Diaries (1983) “dictated daily at dawn”, as Michael Kustow wrote, “in the thick of things” at the National Theatre. Yet could there be more to come? As Kustow also observed, Hall’s account of those heady days was edited for publication down to a sixth of its purported length. They were fascinating and hectic times for the theatre; after the ephemerality of performance, there still ought to be an audience for Peter Hall, this ebullient, fascinating and faulty figure, and this central saga in a long and busy career.