The Shakespeare Code

A Tribute from Trixie the Cat

Brothers and Sisters of the Shakespeare Code….

Everyone seems to be dying……

……well Thesps at least…..

After a long battle with dementia, Sir Peter Hall, CBE, has passed on…..

He started the RSC and oversaw the National Theatre’s move from the elegant Old Vic…..

…..under the charismatic Laurence Olivier…..

…..to the squat, concrete bunker on the South Bank….

Hall is of particular interest to the Shakespeare Code because our Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter…..

…..as a very young man…..

…..worked as his assistant on six productions at the National Theatre at Glyndebourne…

(1) Bedroom Farce….with Michael Gough and Joan Hickson….

(2) Volpone – with Paul Scofield and Hugh Paddick (the Jules of Jules and Sandy fame).

Also in the show were Ben Kingsley (not then a knight) Sir John Gielgud (very much then a knight) and the late, handsome, Ian Charleson – who starred in Chariots of Fire….

(3) Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne with Thomas Allen who played his first Don under Stewart’s direction….

(4) The Country Wife – with Albert Finney as Horner….

(5) The Cherry Orchard – with Sir Ralph Richardson as Firs, Dorothy Tutin as Madame Ranevsky and Derek Thompson as Yasha…..

 – now the highest paid actor on  television….

….and  (6) Cosi fan Tutte with Maria Ewing who later became Hall’s third wife….

When Stewart later applied for the Post of Artistic Director at the Northcott Theatre…..

….it was what Peter wrote about him in his reference than ensured he got the job….

…..a position he held for five years.

During this time, Peter Hall published his diaries……

…..and Stewart was asked to review them for the Listener….

…..the prestigious BBC magazine, for whom he often wrote….

You Cat has been rummaging round the office files….

…and here is what she found…..

Unhappy Hall

by Stewart Trotter

The Listener.

29 September 1983

Sir Peter Hall’s diaries – like the man himself on a good day – are totally disarming.

Not that he actually bothered to write them. They were dictated – either late at night or early in the morning – into a machine then pieced together, selectively, by the National theatre’s Press Officer, John Goodwin.

So inevitably they are biased. Hall seems to win every argument, opponent ts bacvk away like naughty school-boys – and he comes across, at times. Like a retrospective Old Moore’s Almanac: ‘But I’ll do it [Wagner’s Ring] one day I know’. But something of the truth remains – too much processed, but with oh! So much pain that even if you do not exactly want to throw your arms around Hall, at least you want to tell him that he has achieved something, that he is worth it.

Hall, like many theatre directors, fears oblivion. A bit of him wants to be a writer – but what really motivates these diaries is a desire to catalogue his fight to open the National Theatre. What comes across as the villain is not Lord Olivier, not the strikers, not the building, but the entire concept of the National theatre itself as realised after the war. How is it that the British fought a huge evil, yet were so contaminated by the need to construct monoliths – to smash up organic life?

 

Anyone in the theatre will tell you that the whole building works for the moment when a play opens; technicians, wardrobe, workshops and actors all slave away for the opening of a play – then collapse until the cycle starts again. But here we have not one but three theatres, opening all the time with the company spread between them. A medieval warrior can pass a Twenties flapper in the corridor, and the Green Room is like an airport lounge with everyone waiting tom take off to a different part of a fantasy world.

Hall took this over instead of Olivier and these diaries still do not make it clear who, if anyone, stabbed whom in the back.

 

But Olivier, to say the least, was a hard act to follow……

The public had seem him at work, but hardly knows what a director of plays does, let alone a director who runs a theatre. These diaries record idiot schemes by Sir Peter to make himself well known – fronting Aquarius and advertising wallpaper. Of course he wanted to make money as well – and large sections of the population will feel little sympathy for his need to make an extra £12,000 a year. But a theatre board, having employed an exceptional person, surely has an obligation to look after his needs.

It might be argued that Hall was not up to the job, that his almost suicidal lack of confidence excluded him from wielding exceptional power. But his very ordinariness, his bourgeois aspirations, his refusal to blow up mark him out as exactly the right man to weather strikes, press abuse and misunderstanding.

But at what cost? His health failed, he nearly went blind in one eye and he worked with no joy. Max Rayne, the Chairman of the Board…….

….abuses him more than he praises him and, crudely, does not let him get on with his job. Hall, needing authority figures, gives him the time of day.

Perhaps a maniac should have been appointed to run the National – single-minded, obsessive and arrogant. But how could a man like that hold together a team of top directors, all equally meglomaniacal? Hall shows a childlike delight in the achievement of his peers with a corresponding denigration of his own talent.

The final sense one gets from these diaries is the destruction of Hall’s self-respect. But they are only one sixth of all the material available to Goodwin. And it is possible that too pathetic emerges. Much has probably been censored to stop lawsuits from flying all over the place.

It seems to me that a lot of the life has been squeezed out of Hall and the full diaries – available, probably, long after everyone involved is dead will tell a very different, wilder, more life-embracing story.

I for example appear on page 383 as a lunatic who has destroyed Hall’s conception of Cosi fan tutte for the Glyndebourne tour. What he doesn’t mention is that I assisted him, very closely, on five earlier productions and we had great fun. I genuinely believe that I have had more laughs with Peter than anyone I know…..

…….that he is a great, ordinary man who, when happy, can transform the world.

© Stewart Trotter.

Thanks for letting me post this, Stewart.

Your Cat is hunting down a further review of the Diaries that Stewart later wrote for the Western Morning News….

And I’m trying to persuade him….

(1) To review Michael Blakemore’s Stage Blood…

(2) Do an interview about his time with Peter with Your Cat!

‘Bye now,