Sir Peter Reginald Frederick HallCBE (22 November 1930 – 11 September 2017) was an English theatre, opera and film director. His obituary in The Times declared him "the most important figure in British theatre for half a century" and on his death, a Royal National Theatre statement declared that Hall's "influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled". In 2018, the Laurence Olivier Awards, recognising achievements in London theatre, changed the award for Best Director to the Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director.
In 1955, Hall introduced London audiences to the work of Samuel Beckett with the UK premiere of Waiting for Godot. Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company (1960–68) and went on to build an international reputation in theatre, opera, film and television. He was director of the National Theatre (1973–88) and artistic director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera (1984–1990). He formed the Peter Hall Company (1998–2011) and became founding director of the Rose Theatre Kingston in 2003. Throughout his career, he was a tenacious champion of public funding for the arts.[1][2]
Early life and career
Peter Reginald Frederick Hall was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, the only son of Grace Florence (née Pamment) and Reginald Edward Arthur Hall. His father was a stationmaster and the family lived for some time at Shelford railway station.[3][4] He won a scholarship to The Perse School in Cambridge.[5] Before taking up a further scholarship to read English at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, Hall did his National Service in Germany at the RAF Headquarters for Education in Bückeburg. Whilst studying at Cambridge he produced and acted in a number of plays, directing five in his final year and a further three for The Marlowe Society Summer Festival.[6] He served on the University Amateur Dramatic Club (ADC) committee before graduating in 1953. In the same year, Hall staged his first professional play, The Letter by W. Somerset Maugham, at The Theatre Royal Windsor. In 1954 and 1955, Hall was the director of the Oxford Playhouse where he directed several later prominent young actors including Ronnie Barker and Billie Whitelaw. Eileen Atkins and Maggie Smith were also part of the company as acting Assistants Stage Managers.[7]
Hall's many productions for the RSC included Hamlet (1965, with David Warner), The Government Inspector (1966, with Paul Scofield), the world premiere of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) and The Wars of the Roses (1963) adapted with John Barton from Shakespeare's history plays. The latter was described as "the greatest Shakespearian event in living memory which also laid down the doctrine of Shakespearian relevance to the modern world".[14] Hall left the RSC in 1968 after almost ten years as its director.
Hall was appointed director of the National Theatre (NT) in 1973 and led the organisation for fifteen years until 1988. He supervised the move from the Old Vic to the new purpose-built complex on London's South Bank "in the face of wide-spread scepticism and violent union unrest, turning a potential catastrophe into the great success story it remains today."[15] Frustrated by construction delays, Hall decided to move the company into the still-unfinished building and to open it theatre by theatre as each neared completion. Extracts from his production of Tamburlaine the Great with Albert Finney were performed out on the terraces, free to passers-by.[16]
Hall returned to the NT for the last time in 2011 with a production of Twelfth Night mounted by the company to celebrate his eightieth birthday. His daughter, Rebecca Hall, played Viola alongside Simon Callow as Sir Toby Belch in the Cottesloe Theatre.
Hall directed extensively in the United States including the world premiere of John Guare's Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (Lincoln Center, 1992), three Shakespeare plays with Center Theater Group, Los Angeles (1999 and 2001) and John Barton's nine-hour epic Tantalus (2000), an RSC co-production with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.[19]
In 2003, Hall became the founding director of The Rose Theatre – a new venue to be constructed in Kingston upon Thames whose design was inspired by the Elizabethan original. He directed a number of productions there including Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, which opened the building in 2008, and A Midsummer Night's Dream (with Judi Dench as Titania, 2010). Hall was also appointed "Director Emeritus" of The Rose Kingston.[8]
Opera
Peter Hall was also an internationally celebrated opera director. His first experience was in 1957, directing The Moon and Sixpence by John Gardner at Sadler's Wells.[20] He was able to play the piano well enough to read opera scores.[20] His first major project was Schoenberg's Moses und Aron at Covent Garden, which led on to further productions at that house.[20]
Hall worked at many of the world's leading houses as well as Royal Opera House, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Houston Grand Opera,[21]Los Angeles Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Bayreuth Festival where he, with conductor Georg Solti, directed Wagner's Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen) in 1983 to honour the centenary of the composer's death.[22] The production was played until 1986.[21] Hall staged the world premieres of Michael Tippett's The Knot Garden (1970) and New Year (1989). He had a close relationship with the Glyndebourne Festival where he was artistic director from 1984 to 1990, directing more than twenty productions including the Mozart/Da Ponte operas. His production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1981) was revived nine times, most recently 35 years after its premiere, in August 2016.[23] Hall also directed Albert Herring by Benjamin Britten, Cavalli's La Calisto, Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (all with Janet Baker); L'incoronazione di Poppea and Carmen – both with his then wife, Maria Ewing, with whom he also staged a celebrated Salome (The Royal Opera London and L.A. Opera) in 1986.[24]Opera magazine noted Hall's characteristics as (in relation to La Cenerentola at Glyndebourne) "dignity and emotional veracity", recalling that "he would always insist that 'the singers, like actors, played off each other'".[20]
Film and TV
Hall's films for cinema and TV include Akenfield (1974), a fictionalisation based on Ronald Blythe's oral history and filmed in Blythe's native Suffolk with a cast of local people. It was restored and relaunched in 2016 by the BFI. Hall's film She's Been Away was written by Stephen Poliakoff and starred Peggy Ashcroft and Geraldine James who both won awards for their performances at the Venice Film Festival. Hall also directed The Camomile Lawn and The Final Passage for Channel 4 television, as well as a number of his opera and stage productions. His only American studio movie, the 1995 erotic thriller Never Talk to Strangers, "proved to me that I have no aptitude whatever for surviving the Hollywood rat race," as Hall wrote in the updated edition of his memoir Making an Exhibition of Myself.[25] For several years during the 1970s he presented the arts programme Aquarius for London Weekend Television. In 2005 he was the subject of a two-hour documentary for The South Bank Show, Peter Hall, Fifty Years in Theatre.
Acting
Hall began acting as a student at Cambridge University, where Dadie Rylands taught him to speak Shakespearean verse.[8] He was also influenced in his understanding of Shakespeare by the literary critic and teacher F. R. Leavis.[26] He subsequently acted in three German films in the 1970s: Der Fußgänger (The Pedestrian, directed by Maximilian Schell, 1973),[27]Als Mutter streikte (When Mother Went on Strike, 1974)[28] and Der letzte Schrei (The Last Word, 1974).[29]
Books
His books on theatre include The Necessary Theatre (Nick Hern, 1999), Exposed by the Mask (Oberon, 2000) and Shakespeare's Advice to the Players (Oberon, 2003). The Peter Hall Diaries – the Story of a Dramatic Battle, edited by John Goodwin (Hamish Hamilton) were first published in 1983 and documented his struggle to establish the National Theatre on the South Bank. His autobiography, Making an Exhibition of Myself (Sinclair-Stevenson), was published in 1993.[30]
Hall was married four times. He had six children and nine grandchildren. His first wife was French actress Leslie Caron, with whom he had a son, Christopher (b. 1957), and a daughter, Jennifer (b. 1958). With his second wife, Jacqueline Taylor, he had a son, Edward (b. 1966), and a daughter, Lucy (b. 1969). Hall married American opera singer Maria Ewing in 1982 with whom he had one daughter, Rebecca (b. 1982). He was finally married to Nicki Frei; the couple had one daughter, Emma (b. 1992).[8]
Hall worked with all his children:[32] for the National Theatre, Jennifer played Miranda in The Tempest (1988); Rebecca, aged nine, played young Sophie in the Channel 4 adaptation of The Camomile Lawn, for The Peter Hall Company she played Vivie in Mrs Warren's Profession (2002), Rosalind in As You Like It (2003), Maria in Gallileo's Daughter (2004) and, for the NT, Viola in Twelfth Night (2011); Emma, aged two, played Joseph in Jacob (2004, TV Movie); for the Peter Hall Company, Lucy designed Hamlet (1994), Cuckoos (2003) and Whose Life is it Anyway? (2005); Christopher produced the Channel 4 television drama The Final Passage (1996); Edward co-directed the stage epic Tantalus (2000).
Hall was diagnosed with dementia in 2011 and retired from public life.[33]
Hall was described by Guardian contributor Mark Lawson as a "committed atheist, from as early as his 20s", leading "to a punishing work rate in his hurry to get everything done".[9]
His obituary in The Times declared him "the most important figure in British theatre for half a century"[36] and a Royal National Theatre statement declared that Hall's "influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled".[37]
Many luminaries of British theatre paid tribute to Hall. Nicholas Hytner said: "Without him there would have been no Royal Shakespeare Company."[38]Trevor Nunn said: "Not only a thrilling director, he was the great impresario of the age."[38]Richard Eyre called Hall the "godfather" of British theatre: "Peter created the template of the modern director – part-magus, part-impresario, part-politician, part celebrity."[39] Impresario Cameron Mackintosh said: "It's thanks to Peter Hall that people like Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Sam Mendes transformed musical theatre around the world."[40] Theatre critic Michael Coveney said that he believed Hall's production of The Wars of the Roses "recast the [Shakespeare] history plays and put them at the centre of our culture".[41]
Peter Brook said: "Peter was a man for all seasons – he could play any part that was needed". Elaine Paige said: "Peter Hall had absolute authority and, as a heavyweight of the theatre, real presence." Griff Rhys Jones said: "Peter was an absolute smoothie, the most charming and diplomatic man" and Samuel West said "Peter was an extraordinarily energetic, imaginative director – if you left him in the corner of a room he'd direct a play – but he was also a great campaigner. He never stopped arguing for the role of subsidised art in a civilised society and its ability to change people's lives."[42]
^Fay, Stephen (1995). Power Play: The Life and Times of Peter Hall. London: Hodder and Stoughton. p. 25.
^Current Biography Yearbook (volume 23). H. W. Wilson. 1963. p. 179.
^Hall, Peter (1993). Making an Exhibition of Myself: the autobiography of Peter Hall. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. p. 36.
^Addenbroke, David (1974). The Royal Shakespeare Company. London: William Kimber & Co. p. 27.
^ ab"Sir Peter Hall". The Daily Telegraph. London. 12 September 2017. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 12 September 2017. (subscription required)
^Wardle, Irving (6 January 1991). "Profile of Peter Hall". The Independent on Sunday.
^Spencer, Charles (31 October 2005). "A Titan who Transformed Theatre". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
^Rosenthal, Daniel (2013). The National Theatre Story. London: Oberon Books. p. 251.
^Peter Hall (24 August 2005). "Godot almighty". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 May 2018.
Pearson, Richard (1990). A Band of Arrogant and United Heroes. London: Adelphi Press. ISBN1-85654-005-7.
Simon, Trowbridge (2010). The Company: A Biographical Dictionary of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Oxford: Editions Albert Creed. ISBN978-0-9559830-2-3.
Fay, Stephen (1996). Power Play: the Life and Times of Peter Hall. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN0340666331.
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