The Stage News
Founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Sir Peter Hall has just received The Stage Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre. He talks to Alistair Smith about Godot, Shakespeare, the importance of ensemble and why he is taking a ‘pause’ from directing
Sir Peter Hall with The Stage's award for outstanding contribution to British theatre at the TMA's inaugural Theatre Awards UK, held at the Banqueting House in London Photo: Alistair Muir
We’ve been interrupted by his pet spaniel, Smudgie, who is barking at passers-by outside through the ground-floor window. Hall is trying, and spectacularly failing, to get the dog to sit down and be quiet.
“One word from me and he does exactly as he likes,” Hall says, resigned to this lack of control - and our conversation continues, punctuated by occasional canine yelps.
It’s hard to imagine a similar situation in the rehearsal room, where Hall has - over a career spanning more than half a century - built a reputation as an actor’s director, giving precise instructions, especially when it comes to verse-speaking, and a great trainer of young performers.
As Dan Stevens, one of many acting proteges, commented at the Theatre Awards UK when presenting Hall with The Stage Award - he has “hugely and immeasurably shaped modern British Theatre”, not least in terms of the number of top class performers he has set on their career paths.
Hall has been responsible for some of the 20th century’s greatest classical productions - both in theatre and opera - and has played a central role in both of the UK’s principal national theatre companies. Meanwhile, he has also been behind the UK premieres of two of modern theatre’s most important new works - Waiting for Godot and The Homecoming.
And yet, he is modest and self-effacing when talking about his illustrious career.
“One of the difficulties about talking about one’s own success is that it presupposes that you think you’re successful,” he starts.
After a little persuasion, he admits he has been successful “to a point… but I wouldn’t show myself as an example of what ought to be.”
Instead, he wants to focus on the idea of a company.
“I’ve always wanted to have a theatre company from my school days on and that started to happen when I was at university at Cambridge. By the time I’d finished there, I had a little band of actors. Some of them are still with us.
“I don’t think it’s possible to make theatre unless you have some real emotional connection between everybody. That connection may not be very friendly, but it’s there. I think that connection was there, way back in the 50s at the Arts Theatre, which I was given to my surprise and my delight aged 24.”
It was at the Arts that Hall directed the UK premiere of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, a manuscript of which had been sent to him in a brown envelope by theatre impresario Donald Albery.
“Godot seemed to me just a very interesting, well written, amusing script. I didn’t know the play, I didn’t know the author and there was a letter with it that said every manager in the West End had turned it down, and every actor.
“Godot has changed my life completely - to my intense surprise. I mean, I think I knew by the time we opened what we had in our hands - something absolutely original and extraordinary. But at the start of rehearsals we were thinking ‘well this is a good way to spend August. Or is it?’”
In the end, Beckett’s play took Hall into the West End and led to him working at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he would soon launch the RSC, aged only 29. He ran the company for the next eight years with help from Peter Brook and Michel Saint-Denis. Again, the idea of an ensemble of actors was central to his work.
“I often think that the reason the RSC happened was because we were quite open in our work processes. If you were a secretary at the RSC in its earliest years, you could pop into rehearsals in your coffee break.
“The moment you say ‘I’ve got six actors and I’m shutting them up and no-one can see them’, you’re really stopping some of the creative juices, which is what we live on.”
Hall is impressed by the current fortunes of both of the NT and the RSC (“They’ve both developed in quite different ways and in quite different ways to what I would have prophesied and that’s wonderful”) He still regularly visits both companies at their respective homes, and also saw the RSC’s most recent ensemble perform “at full throttle” in New York. Hall also marvels at the success the NT has had with War Horse, and its latest piece of new writing - 13 by Mike Bartlett, directed by another one of his proteges, Thea Sharrock.
The other theatre with which he is most closely associated is The Rose in Kingston, which he helped found in 2008. He has more mixed feelings when it comes to the future of this venue.
“The Rose has been a great source of pride and a source of misery too,” he says. “We have still had no support from the arts council and it looks like it will go on like that because they don’t think the theatre is necessary in the south west of London - they think there is enough already, that’s the reason given. We’ve done some good things at Kingston, considering the dreadful conditions we’ve had to play in.
“It’s gone from one crisis to another just to keep alive, to keep its head above water. I hope that we’ve got another year if people continue to support us, but it’s very difficult to plan when you don’t know if you’ve got any money.”
Meanwhile, Hall has continued to direct his eponymous company in Bath and scored a huge hit in the summer with a production of Henry IV Parts I and II, which received some of the best notices Hall thinks he has ever received.
Sadly, plans for a tour and West End transfer had to be scrapped because enough money couldn’t be raised. It is a chastening theme to our conversation - Hall thinks that UK theatre is artistically in rude health, but worries where future financial support will come from.
“Artistically, the theatre is very healthy, but it’s also very threatened - particularly up and down the country. Outside of London it’s a bad scene,” he says.
“It’s terribly dangerous. In ten years, we could have lost our theatre apart from two palaces on the South Bank. I’m really alarmist about this. Unfortunately, we’ve been yelling for money for so many years, that people think we do it like walking - automatically - but this is the real thing.
“We’re in a situation now that it’s not enough to do a play, you’ve got to do a play with extra funding got from some source god knows where - it’s terrible. I think the arts council justify themselves by saying ‘we’ve trimmed things for the future’, well ‘Ho, ho’ is what I say.”
He is more optimistic about the state of audiences (“in pretty good shape”) and young performers, who he thinks are “much more hard working, more technically interested and they are - God save them - less keen on their billing - more modest” than previous generations.
Hall does, though, have concerns over the future of verse-speaking and the classical canon. He describes Shakespeare as like “training for athletes” and worries that not enough young actors are getting a good grounding in it.
“One of the reasons the RSC started as a company was because Michel Saint-Denis was making studio work that stretched people into all sorts of shapes they didn’t know they had. That’s still going on, but the classical world is not attended to in the same way as it used to be. It’s not there enough - people say ‘Why should I do Shakespeare? I’ve got to do Kellogg’s Cornflakes.’ And it’s true - it’s a truth. In order for the drama schools to actually function they need to earn money to pay for their studios and that’s absolutely proper and right.
“There are about 50 or 60 actors in this country who can really stand up on stage and speak Shakespeare. There are 100 who would like to have a try. I think one can encourage a young actor into Shakespeare in two days, if he’s the right actor. Some small percentage just can’t deal with it.”
He continues: “You can always tell an actor who has done Shakespeare. If you can do Shakespeare, you can manage Pinter, you can have a little nod at Osborne, there’s nothing you can’t do. You have a new set of muscles.”
As for his own plans, Hall is currently taking a “pause” from directing to write a book. He won’t be staging another season at the Theatre Royal in Bath next summer, but stresses that he is not retiring.
“I wanted to stop. I haven’t stopped ever. 81 is a fine old age and I’m not as… I’m not as fast as I used to be,” he pauses for a second, “But fast enough, though. I’m not retired. People keep saying to me you’ve stopped directing, but it’s just a pause.”
He still enjoys his work in the rehearsal room “more than anything, I love it” and has plans for future productions after his break from the stage - he continues to keep a book in which he writes down shows he hasn’t yet directed or would like to revisit.
He has hopes to revive his recent productions of Henry IV and, he adds: “I’d like to have another try at Lear - but everyone wants another try at Lear. There are some Shakespeares I haven’t done - I haven’t done Pericles, which I’d like to do, Timon of Athens.”
Clearly, it’s quite a long list, but there is at least one play that he has crossed off the roster.
“I don’t particularly want to do Merry Wives of Windsor,” he adds with some finality.
At the end of our interview, I ask him if there’s anything else he’d like to add. He pauses and thinks for a while, before saying: “I wish there was in existence a company of 15 or 20 actors that were eager to operate the classics, to find out how to do them.”
And we’re back full circle to Hall’s idea of company
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