t's a funny old job," says Sir Peter Hall of directing. "But it's the best in the theatre, and I wouldn't do anything else for all the world." As if to prove the point, he will spend his 80th birthday, which falls on 22 November, starting rehearsals for his new National Theatre production of Twelfth Night, in which his daughter Rebecca plays Viola. The following night sees the London opening of his production of The Rivals. It somehow seems symbolic of a director who has found much of his joy and fulfilment in life through work.
Attitudes to Peter Hall depend, I suspect, on one's age. To the young, he probably embodies a text-driven orthodoxy that ought to be dismantled. But to anyone with a sense of the past, he is the director who did more than anyone to shape postwar British theatre. His 1955 production of Waiting for Godot not only introduced us to Beckett, but planted for ever the image of its central characters as tramps (they were clowns in the original Paris production). In 1960, he created, out of a summer festival at Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company. And in 1976 he led the National Theatre company into its new South Bank home, occupying the still-unfinished building like a determined squatter. At 80, Hall may seem to represent the establishment, but much of his life has consisted of a radical campaign for subsidised theatre and championship of living writers.
Talking to him today, I find him mellower than of old, when he was famous for engaging in noisy public arguments with the government and the Arts Council. And, since much of our conversation focuses on how his attitudes to directing have changed, I wonder what he has discovered in doing Twelfth Night for the fourth time.
"I've been startled," he says, "by the homosexual streak in the play, because it's so evident and glaring. Antonio cracks up emotionally because of the depth of his passion for Sebastian, and Orsino's obsession with the disguised Viola suggests he is wrestling with his sexuality. If I didn't bring all this out in 1958, it's because times were very different: I'd just come from directing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which was officially banned by the Lord Chamberlain precisely because of its homosexual content. But I'm also retaining things from past productions. It never occurred to me not to do the play again in period costume: it would be like doing Godot without the tree. There's a wonderful eroticism and elegance about the reign of Charles I that is right for this play."
'My first Godot was far too fussy'
But how has Hall's directorial style evolved? "Working on Beckett and Pinter changed my approach," he says. "My first Godot, with its wisps of Bartók floating through the air, was far too fussy: over the years I've learned how to strip the play to the bone. Working with Pinter and the designer, John Bury, also had a huge effect on me. Harold was absolutely possessive about his work so that, if a designer gave him two chairs, he'd say, 'I only want one chair.' But John's rigour matched Harold's, so that even the apple on a table in The Homecoming had to be in synch with the tone and texture of the set. In the end, I applied what I'd learned from Beckett and Pinter to the classics."
Hall's style has visibly changed. But how about his method? What does he know at 80 that he didn't at 20? "Many things. One is to delegate. When I started, for instance, the director was expected to light his own shows. As a result, I remember spending 48 hours continuously in the Phoenix theatre in 1957 lighting Camino Real with occasional half-hour naps, which was just crazy. In the last five years, I've made another radical change: I now ask the actors to learn the part before we start rehearsals. Some argue that, if you do that, the actor won't develop. Absolute bunk. What it gives you, in effect, is an extra two weeks' rehearsal."
Hall admits that the learning process may be harder for old actors than for young ones. When he worked with Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud on Pinter's No Man's Land, he recalls there were moments when rehearsals ground to a halt and there'd be a dreadful hiatus. "Ralph would say, 'Is that your line next, Johnny?' and John would say, 'No, Ralph, it can't be me, it must be you.' I'd have to say to them, 'Actually, it's neither of you. It's a silence.' In the end I gave them two weeks off rehearsal to drill the words and silences into them so they were absolutes and they did it triumphantly."
There is no question that it was Hall's single-minded and even ruthless pursuit of his vision that brought the RSC into being in 1960 and enabled it to survive. Today, he looks back it at with the fondness of a parent.
Falling out with Pinter
"I was lucky," he says, "to have an idea of what the RSC could be; and I take pleasure in the fact that 50 years later, it's still there. But I made one cardinal mistake: I left it far too early in 1968. I say that in no spirit of criticism of Trevor Nunn who succeeded me. I left because I was terribly tired and was becoming creatively restless. But I should have stayed, for my own sake rather than anyone else's, to discover how to steer a company going through its difficult periods. Inevitably, I also feel nostalgia for the old building. I personally find, though it's no time to be saying it, the thrust stage difficult for complicated words." He's referring to the redesigned Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, which is about to open. "You come on down that vast diving board of a stage and address the person you're speaking to with your back to half the audience. So the moves tend to be based on whose turn it is to have a fit of text. I don't say that in any spirit of destructiveness and I wish the new theatre well. But I've deliberately kept away while it's been under construction. I had three-and-a-half years of hard hats at the National, and that was enough."
With scores of productions of plays and operas under his belt as well as a clutch of films for cinema and TV, Hall is not someone who views the past either with misty romanticism or grumpy-old-man regrets. He dwells constantly on his good fortune rather than his disappointments, though he owns up to a few when I press him. He admits that he'd love to have worked more on the Barbican stage, which he cooked up with John Bury. He also talks, a touch wanly, of the fallings out he had with his close friends, John Barton and Harold Pinter. Both these ruptures, he admits, were foolish but happily didn't last long. "I suppose, my greatest regret," he adds, "is that we seem to be fighting the subsidy battle all over again. The current government has no idea of the capacity of the arts industry to remake the world and earn a good deal of money in the interim. When you meet politicians, as I occasionally do, they're frightfully understanding, but they don't seem to grasp the spiritual, social and economic case for the arts."
Hall, however, lives too much in the present to be bitter or resentful. He rejoices in his enduringly happy marriage to his fourth wife, Nicki. Their daughter, Emma, now in her first term at Cambridge, is also about to follow in the family footsteps by making her undergraduate acting debut. And Hall, tireless as ever, is making plans for the future. His big project for next year is a production of the two parts of Henry IV, if he can find the right Falstaff. "Work," according to the title of a film Hall once directed, "Is a Four Letter Word." And it is work that has sustained Peter Hall throughout a long and productive career that has helped to reshape British theatre. As we part in the autumnal sunshine, he says, "I regret it's nearly over. But you do what you want and try to do it as best you can. All said, I've been extremely lucky."
Seven decades in theatre
Sir Peter Hall's career highlights
1930: Born in Bury St Edmunds, son of a country station master.
1955: Takes over the running of the Arts theatre, London and directs Waiting for Godot.
1960: Creates what is to become the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon, operating in both Warwickshire and London.
1968: Leaves the RSC to pursue a freelance career.
1973: Appointed director of the National theatre in succession to Laurence Olivier. In office for 15 years.
1977: Knighted for services to the theatre.
1984: Becomes artistic director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Stays until 1990.
1988: Forms the Peter Hall Company. Opening production: Orpheus Descending, with Vanessa Redgrave.
2003: Begins a series of summer residencies at the Theatre Royal, Bath. Several productions, including Pygmalion, transfer to London.
2003: Appointed founding director of the Rose Theatre, Kingston.
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