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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.
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