My Log 637 August 24 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 73 Revelation: Royal family serves second-rate Lyons food at receptions; Peter Hall’s diaries reveal a lot about the tempests of the world of theatre

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Many years ago I was enthralled by James Boswell’s London Journal which led me on to his amazing Life of Johnson, a work that established the biographer as a far greater writer than the man he was describing.

These experiences should have led me on to reading more Journals, but somehow or other, they didn’t, perhaps because Journals always seem to be so voluminous.  I do all of my book-reading in bed, so naturally I have always tended towards smaller books that are easier to hold up to the light. Okay, I know it is a foolish reason, but ‘tis mine own.

As I established in my last chronicle I have embarked on the nearly 500-page diaries of Peter Hall, the drama producer who became the most important theatre administrator of the last 50 years in the crowded minefield that is the English theatre.   I am not sure I really like the bloke who is portrayed therein, but I have to confess that this form does throw up some wonderful insights into the workings of otherwise obscure institutions.  Having hit the 200-page mark, I thought I would share with my readers some gems that Hall revealed when he dictated his diaries into a microphone at the end of every working day.

Looming over all of his work was the figure of Laurence Olivier, the most renowned actor of his time, who became the director of the first National Theatre, a long-established objective that finally came into physical existence just as Olivier was declining into old age. At first, while the new building for the long-promised theatre was being built --- it was to have three stages ---  the institution got off the ground, and began productions in the entirely inadequate premises of the Old Vic theatre, which for many years had been he centre of Shakespearean production in London. In recent years, a newcomer, the Royal Shakespeare Company, an off-shoot of the Stratford–on-Avon company, had been established by the youthful Peter Hall in the Aldwych theatre, where, in company with Peter Brook, an acknowledged genius of theatrical production, the newcomers began to set new standards for modern theatre previously unmatched in Britain.

Brook apparently had no stomach for the minutiae of the work of establishing and running a theatre; and  when, as the completion of the new building was further and further delayed into the future, Olivier began to tire of it all, it fell to Peter Hall to be anointed as the new director. It was a task he undertook with enthusiasm. Of course he soon found it was a close-to impossible job. He had to keep the Old Vic productions going, but always with a mind of establishing a company that would be able to fill the three stages of the great new theatre that awaited them. He began to get future commitments   from virtually all of the greatest directors, the finest actors, designers and so on in the country, and pretty soon the complainers emerged saying this great new National Theatre with its vast subsidies, would be the killing of British theatre as it was known.

When Hall took the job it was at a salary far below what he could earn in commercial theatre: he needed a good deal of money because he had several children by successive wives, a total of eight people dependent upon his earnings. He figured he might be able to make a go of it if he could earn 5,000 pounds a year from peripheral activities, so while planning and negotiating with the emotional characters who would comprise the meat and drink of the distant NT, he had to think of taking offered jobs to direct schlocky films, had to accept jobs as an actor for a German film,  and had to accept to direct filmed  advertisements for various products --- and all just for the money, as he keeps repeating….

There are some wonderful descriptions of the sensitivities of these theatrical people. Jonathan Miller, who first emerged as a comedian in the renowned Cambridge university show Beyond the Fringe,  was a brilliant man, already a qualified doctor, who later became a prominent director of plays and operas. At an early stage he proposed that he should direct for the NT a production  of Oscar Wilde’s glorious comedy The Importance of Being Ernest  --- with the difference that it would have an all-male cast. After much discussion this idea was nixed, but Miller took it so badly that he got into a kind of funk. Hall eventually had a meeting with him:

“I asked him why he had been behaving in a Coriolanus-like way, booking himself up outside the NT, as I’ve now discovered he has been, so that there was no possibility of employing him for the next year or so; yet going around saying he was resigning as he was fed up with not being used. There was a complete breast-beating scene. He said he always loud-mouthed against authority, was always against the father-figure, was verbally promiscuous….I asked him why he went about saying the National wasn’t using him. He apologized, asked to stay. I don’t believe he will.”

Managing these high-tempo stars was far from easy. In preparing a production of an Ibsen play, Hall had managed to cast Wendy Hiller, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, three of Britain’s greatest theatre stars, along with a lesser-known player Alan Webb, who became violently ill, as was Wendy Hiller, who nevertheless appeared for rehearsal against doctor’s orders, wheezing, coughing and voiceless. He began to think of opening without the two sick players. "Ralph is an instinctive tennis player, ” Hall commented. “If he finds himself playing a scene with an actor who doesn’t interest him, he chunters through as quickly as possible. Alan forces him to play good tennis.”  And then:

“There was a ridiculous moment today at rehearsal when Peggy and Ralph sat side by side on the sofa. Peggy said it was much too high for her to work on, Ralph said it was just right. I soothed things over by saying we should practise with some lumps of foam rubber and get a compromise height. Ralph, as he left, his motorbike helmet securely on his head, winked and whispered to me: ‘Don’t touch that bloody sofa.’ ”

A few days later:

“Dreadful dream. My mother and father and I were looking at coffins and selecting my father’s for he had agreed to die that afternoon. Mother was in a frightful temper because…she found it extremely inconvenient of father to decide to die on this particular afternoon. Father was, as usual, cheerful about the whole proceeding and accepting it with a good grace.

“Considerable feeling of distress today as if I have been through some long physical disaster. I begin to think what is the point of working at this pressure and putting up with all the shit about the National  Theatre. I have only 2 ½ years of my contract to run so I shall be getting rhe new building open for somebody else to use. Is it worth it?’ ”

Part of the job put Hall in touch with the highest in the land:

“To Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Reception for the media…Newspaper editors, television controllers, journalists and commentators. Heath looking like a tanned waxwork; Macmillan a revered side show, an undoubted star; a few actors (Guinness, Ustinov, Finney), and all the chaps like me…

“It was two and a half hours of tramping round the great reception rooms eating bits of Lyons pate, drinking oversweet warm white wine…. and that atmosphere of jocular ruthlessness which characterizes the Establishment on its nights out. Wonderful paintings, of course, and I was shown the bullet that killed Nelson.

“As we were presented, the Queen asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Duke asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Prince of Wales asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn't know. At least they knew I was running the National Theatre….

“Home by 2 am with very aching feet. Who’d be a courtier?”

Now we know why they are among the richest families in Britain.

Serving second-rate Lyons products with warm white wine! I know about Lyons  and their food from my three months working in their factory as a labourer in 1952, never dreaming that the food was going out to the highest in the land.

And always the worry about money:

“All my personal accounts are overdrawn. And Kimble (his accountant) is now telling me I must earn between 10,000 and 15,000 pounds a year more…. (Three weeks later): “A dreadful hour with Kimble. There is no hope for my future peace of mind unless  I can cut down the cost of my family overheads. Something will have to go. But I can’t think what….My impulse at the moment is to take to my heels and run --- from every responsibility and every family tie. Is this the fine gesture of the revolutionary saving his creative self? Or is it (and I think it is) the ostrich wanting to place his head in the sand? The truth is that work in the subsidized theatre can never earn me the kind of money I need to keep everyone in comfort. I knew this when I went to the National.”

I couldn’t help asking myself why, as the working class boy he proclaimed himself to be at the beginning of these diaries, he had to keep his children in such expensive private schools. But I guess he knew the British class system better than I…..

Finally, for those who have admired Laurence Olivier as actor and producer over the years, Hall offers up an intriguing picture: occasionally fussy, reluctant to give up, always popping up unexpectedly even after he had retired, anxious always to have his say. His last 20 years were marked by severe illnesses, and Hall gives us a graphic description of their effect on him (this was written in 1975):

“To Roebuck House to see Larry. He is alert, humorous with a mind dancing from subject to subject much as in the old days. But the scale of him seems to have been pressed, reduced; the strong physical presence seems to have gone….He has surmounted cancer, surmounted phlebitis and this recent muscular virus should have been the death of him, but he has surmounted that, too. He told me that every muscle in his body was affected. He couldn’t keep his eyelids open. He couldn’t swallow, so he had to be fed intravenously. Only one muscle continued to operate properly ---the muscle in his right thumb. This he used gently to press the bell for the nurse.  He has had to learn to walk again, to write again, and ---- most importantly --- to train his voice again. It is still high, still a parody of its former self, but it is improvin…. He said he didn't like going into town very much as crossing the road was  diffucult. He could move at an even pace, but if he needed to take two quick steps to avoid a car his knees might give way…. He said he has to cease being a NT asssociate director this autumn, that anyway was when his contract was up….I said he must…somehow take part in the opening of his theatre. He answered that he knew there would be disappointment if he didn’t act in the new theatre, but he would sooner that than have people disappointed if he did. I urged him to accept the presidency of the National. He said he would think about it.”

It is a measure of the great actor’s determination that he not only overcame all these physical problems, but was still acting fourteen years later in the year of his death, 1989, at the age of 82.       

My Log 636 August 21 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth decade: 72 A book recalls the slow process of my cultural education: Peter Hall’s Diaries

I was 17 when in 1945 I quit after four years of high school, and got a job on the lowest rung of journalism. Looking back, I was ill-prepared for life, had a rather limited breadth of knowledge about the world and how it works, and a very narrow range of interests.  Of course, I knew an immense amount about cricket and its history. And I was accustomed to having on my bedroom wall photos of All Black Rugby teams since 1905, and knew the names of every player. But I can hardly describe such knowledge as an adequate foundation on which to embark on a working life.

In addition I had been brought up in complete ignorance of sex and its essential place in modern life; and I don’t believe that at the time I had ever heard of such concepts as homosexuality, nymphomania,  or any other of the many specialties into which such knowledge is  divided. In other words I had been brought up in such a way as to make it almost impossible for me to embark on rewarding relationships, especially with the opposite sex.

In one thing I was extremely lucky. I found the profession of journalism ridiculously easy, so, once I got into a writing position, which happened after six months, I was able to leap  ahead at double quick pace, and after two and a half years I was regarded as a trained journalist of senior rank (as defined in the union agreement), a position that should have taken me seven years.

At the age of 22 --- far too young --- I married, and my wife and I headed off to have a look around the world. First to northern Queensland, where we experienced for the first time the discomforts of a really tropical climate, with its multiplicity of wild and dangerous animals, later to India, where the dreadful condition of life of a majority of the world’s people was brought home to us, and finally to Englsnd, where --- to get on to the subject of this Chronicle, at last ---  for the first time in my life I became a customer of what is generally regarded as the high culture of modern society, in this case, the incomparable British theatre.

I have already described, I am sure, probably in an earlier Chronicle, how we were able to be present at performances by the world’s greatest actors, simply by laying out the magnificent sum of one shilling and sixpence for a seat in The Gods, the far upper reaches  of a modern theatre for drama. I have to confess my introduction to high drama did not come particularly easily for me. I had been bored out of my skull in high school by Shakespeare, had never understood a word of it, and in our frequent trips to the Old Vic theatre, the London seat for Shakespeare productions in the 1950s,  I was for quite a while far less than enthralled. Fortunately, at other theatres, great actors playing more naturalistic theatre were much easier to understand.  I remember one occasion --- I think it was in Caesar and Cleopatra --- a play by Bernard Shaw written in 1898, when, as Caesar, Laurence Olivier, in a position well back from the audience, and with his back to us, whispered the answer to a question which, even to those of us up in The Gods, was perfectly audible, a demonstration of voice control that completely astounded me.  Another great pair who were playing a series of Shaw plays were John Clements and his wife Kay Hammond. The play that I enjoyed most I think was The Doctor’s Dilemma, written in  1906, a very amusing story about a dying genius, a thoroughly detestable, self-centred person whose genius nevertheless commanded maximum efforts to save him. Unfortunately, he was handed on from one medical specialist to another: each of them had his own specific cherished solution to every illness. One I remember was the doctor who claimed he was suffering from a nuciform sac, whatever that was, and insisted on treating him, unsuccessfully for that.  Shaw’s prescience with this play has always impressed me. Years later, in Montreal, my wife appeared to fall seriously ill, fell into the hands of a man described as the greatest heart doctor in the city, who scared her half to death by equipping her with an arm band that would enable anyone to see at a glance what was wrong with her should she collapse in the street, as he seemed to think inevitable. She remained in this half-stricken condition until a younger member of the profession, who happened to be the son of one of our friends, asked the eminent doctor if he could examine her. When he did so he discovered there was nothing wrong with her heart: she was simply suffering from post-menopausal hormone imbalance. I have since heard of a number of people who have suffered from the obsessions so amusingly illustrated by Shaw in his play undermining the medical profession and its pretensions so long ago.

I have other vivid memories from my theatre-going in those early days of my education. Sam Wanamaker, a harsh-voiced but riveting American actor, teamed with Michael Redgrave in a Clifford Odets play about a drunken shell of an actor who was offered by the American producer a chance for one more attempt at rehabilitating his reputation. With Googie Withers playing the hard-done-by wife, this play was so compulsive that I returned to it at least twice. Wanamaker, a refugee from the oppressive political system that was imposed on much culture in the United States in the 1950s, later adopted as his personal project a scheme to rebuild on the South Bank of the Thames, in almost the exact place of the original Globe theatre in which Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, an exact replica of the original theatre --- a project triumphantly brought to a conclusion, so that it is possible to see the plays in the same conditions as Londoner originally saw them in the seventeenth century  --- truly a gift from abroad that Londoners must  cherish.

Do not worry, dear reader, I did eventually get on to Shakespeare, and I can remember the exact occasion: it was in Edinburgh, where Claire Boom and Alan Badel combined to play Romeo and Juliet and at last their speaking of the lines was so luminous and clear that I was able to follow what they were saying  and become throroughly engrossed in the story.  Alan Badel was a magical actor, a man with a voice that was itself like a musical instrument, and although Bloom was not his equal, she was so lovely to look at as a young girl to make up for any other inadequacies.

I have at last arrived at why I decided to write this. Today, passing my favourite bookshop, The Word on Milton street, I chanced upon a huge volume of 500 pages called Peter Hall’s Diaries, for the customary out-front price of 50 cents. When I returned to London in 1960 to represent The Montreal Star Peter Hall, who had been a wunderkind in the British theatre since his first production at the age of 23, had founded a new company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Aldwych theatre in central London, with the object of introducing the best of the great bard plus the best of international theatre. Working with the even more brilliant talents of Peter Brook, this company attracted me, as a persistent theatregoer by this time, to many unforgettable productions. I will never forget the  feeling in the audience at the conclusion of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Representative, about the alleged indifference  of the Pope to the fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe.  When one entered the theatre one was confronted not with a stage curtain, but with two vast rolling metal doors, the doors to a gas oven. Every scene played by the Pope was played inside this oven, and when the play was over so intense had it been that the audience sat, without applause, in stunned silence for at least three minutes, before they could even stir themselves to leave the theatre.  That was not Hall’s work, but it represented the sort of challenging theatre he and Peter Brook placed, month after month,  before the London audience.

I notice since I started to write this that Hall died last September at the age of 86, and was generally agreed to have dominated the British theatre in its last 50 years.

The Diaries are not the sort of book I would normally read, but I started in on it this afternoon, and am already deeply interested in the rivalries and tensions revealed during the 1970s, when Hall’s Shakespeare Company was merged with the new National Theatre that had been directed by Laurence Olivier for its first years before it had its own new theatrical home.

I can tell I am going to read on: already the sharp dislike of Hall for Kenneth Tynan, the acerbic critic who was the dramaturge for the National Theatre during Olivier’s reign, has added a bit of spice. When the question of Hall’s taking over from Olivier as director of the theatre was raised, Hall made it clear that if Tynan were to stay, as he was manoeuvring to do, Hall would not take the job. Although he accuses Tynan of creating problems for his takeover, when the two eventually met, someone had tipped the wink to Tynan who accepted it without further debate. He was out, and Hall was in.

Hall had four wives, the first of whom was the French actress and dancer Leslie Caron. From each of them he had children, six in all, and one of them, Rebecca, is one of my favorite actresses presently working. A mistress of seduction, even though she is only moderately good-looking: she seems to have inherited from her father an instinct for the drama that was on show in Woody Allen’s beautiful film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she plays the plain English girl who is pursued by Javier Bardem, as a typical Latin lover. To my mind she ran away with the picture, even against such strong performers as Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, and Bardem.

My Log 635 August 20 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 71 I am once again held in thrall by the bell-like clarity of the prose of Bertrand Russell; I remember with approval his after-90 political activism

 I have begun to read a book that I think I have had in my library for some years without reading it, and have, not unexpectedly, been completely gripped by it. The book is called Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell, published in 1927 (incidentally, the year before my birth), when this great man, one of the seminal intellectuals of my time on Earth, was 53, and had already published 26 books on, it seemed, almost every subject under the sun.

I have always considered Russell to have been one of the greatest writers ever of the English language, for the bell-like clarity of his prose. But I have an even more personal connection with him, for I will never forget the day in October of 1962, when I stood in Trafalgar square clutching the hand of my two-and-a-half year old son, wondering, like everyone else in the huge crowd, whether in the coming week we would be incinerated by a nuclear bomb, as this ancient philosopher, 91 years of age, as thin as a rake, was carefully handled up on to the plinth to make a speech denouncing the suicidal stand-off between Kennedy and Khruschev. These two men were madmen, he proclaimed in his high-pitched, squeaky voice. I had to rub my eyes to actually believe that I was listening to this intellectual giant who had many years before transformed the field of mathematics, and had since gone on to emerge from the stuffy halls of academia to urge on his fellow citizens policies that he said would lead human society into new realms of happiness and co-operation. So little was he confined to the halls of academe that as early as 1920, only three years after the Soviet revolution, he went to Russia with a group of intellectuals, travelled extensively, had a one-hour interview with Lenin, and returned with a generally unfavorable view of their determination to follow the Western path of industrialization, in contrast to his travelling companions, who returned with as much more favorable atttitude towards what was underway. Then he went to China for a year, returned wth as much more favorable attitude, realized they were in many ways superior to the /western model, and wrote extensively about it, insisting that they had retained human characteristics in their society that the Western model was in process of killing. His idea was that both Russia and China were what he called "artist" countries, in that they had preserved more traditional values, rather than allowing their cultures to be sublimated to money, as had happened in the Western world.   

Of course after the Great War, none of the policies towards an ideal world had come about, and certainly we are further from them than ever nowadays. In other words, though he had high hopes for human societies of the future, his trust in the commonsense of humans has been betrayed. But surely no one could fault his many years of dedication to the ideals of pacifism during the destructive wars through which he lived. I have always remembered one fact from his superb autobiography, published in three volumes during the 1960s. where he described during the Second World War having to borrow the money for his bus fare to get him to a lecture he was scheduled to give at the City College of New York. Later, that appointment was annulled by a court judgment that found him morally unfit to teach because of his opinions on sexual morality. I thought: what a remarkable  comment on human society that such a man had become so strapped for money as to not even have the bus fare.  Whatever else might be said of him, he could never be accused of enriching himself unduly: at his death in 1970 he was declared to have an estate of 69,000 pounds.   

In recent years he had not let his advanced age bring his agitations for peace to a halt; he was at first active in the mass-movement Campaign for  Nuclear  Disarmament. But when it showed signs of faltering before the implacable opposition of the State, he had formed a smaller movement, the Committee of 100, which entered into non-violent civil disobedience.  I remember being present as an observer in Whitehall on the occasion on which he sat down before the War Department, from which position he was gingerly lifted by police officers who deposited him into the paddy wagon, and thus to jail. 

The book I have started to read is full of remarkable descriptions of society, and I have already been stopped short by ideas that have made me examine my own opinions. On an essay on The State, for example, he broadly approves of the internal powers exercised by the State, but inveighs heartily against the primitivism of the State’s external power, and against the conditioning that prepares citizens to go to war against foreign countries whenever told to by the State. Personally I have for many years defended the existence of strong government because I realize that it is the only authority that can equalize  income and wealth, which, I suppose is the primary reason that strong government is opposed by the oligarchs who now control our societies.   Russell also sees that as a virtue, along with  compulsory education, and other essential services.

His  opinion of the intense dangers of government are illustrated by indirection in a strange article called The World As It Could Be Made, which he wrote in 1918, presumably under the influence of the Great War, which showed that all his hopes for a bright peaceful future for human society had been exploded by the greatest war ever fought to that time.  This article is simply a dream of a human society organized according to the principles of anarchism, as espoused by Kropotkin, mixed with Guild syndicalism, which is still defined as “a movement that advocates direct action by the working class to abolish the capitalist order, including the State, and to establish in its place a social order based on workers organized in production units.”

In other words, capitalism, the economic system that turns one man against another, one class against another, one country against another, would be abolished and replaced by a free system of worker control of industry. All this would only be possible if man’s preconceptions could be entirely transformed through an education system that would be entirely free, compulsory to the age of 16, followed thereafter at the desire of the pupil, and which would have been free of all persuasion directed to produce aggressive people ready to go to war at the drop of a hat.  

This prescription for a utopian society provided that women’s work in the home should be paid, since “this will secure the complete economic independence of wives, which is difficult to achieve in any other way, since mothers of young children ought not to be expected to work outside the home.”

He adds: “Government and law will still exist in our community, but both will be reduced to a minimum. There will still be acts which will be forbidden --- for example, murder. But very nearly the whole of that part of the criminal law which deals with property will have become obsolete, and many of the motives which now produce murders  will be no longer operative.” Economic fear and most economic hope in such a society “will be alike removed out of life. No one will be haunted by the dread of poverty or driven into ruthlessness by the hope of wealth.”

Nor does he shrink from rewriting the rules about marriage. “One of the most horrible things about commercialism is the way in which it poisons the relations between men and women.” He says that the effect of economic conditions on marriage seem to him even worse than prostitution, since there is not infrequently in marriage ”a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain standard of material comfort.”  Thus, very often a marriage differs from prostitution only in that it is harder to escape from. ”Economic causes make marriage a matter of bargain and contract, in which affection is quite secondary, and the introduction of the law requires that each submit to some loss of his or her liberty, for the pleasure of curtailing the liberty of the other. When he wrote this he had already been married once, and eventually he had four marriages: each lasted many years, and when he felt he no longer loved his wife he had no hesitation in telling her so and moving on.

He allows himself to wonder whether a League of Nations might be created after the war, and one can only sympathize with the man when he was confronted by the rise of Nazism. Although it is not mentioned in this book, published  in 1927, he at first apparently opposed rearmament, but he changed his mind as Hitler swept across Europe.

In the light of man’s subsequent descent into the unimaginable slaughter of World War II, his article reads more like a sophomoric dream of Utopia, than the work of one of the great minds of our time.  But the man wrote 60 books, thousands of articles, and countless pamphlets, and gave advice on every aspect of human life, so I guess the odd miss can be excused. With the war ended, he lost no time in using his undoubted authority to harass and harangue the world’s statesmen with advice to come together instead of falling apart. He does pose in his article a desideratum-world which would be as far as one can imagine from the current world situation in which the so-called world’s greatest democracy  appears to have fallen under the control of hugely wealthy industrial-military entrepreneurs, and  has greater military force than the rest of the world combined, with the apparent intention  to ensure the obedience of all nations to its will.