A Prolific Director – in More Ways Than One

Sir Peter Hall recently unveiled England’s newest theater, modeled on Shakespeare’s Rose, the Elizabethan stage where the bard learned his craft. Mr. Hall presented “As You Like It,” with his daughter Rebecca as Rosalind, in the as-yet-unfinished shell of the building at Kingston upon Thames – the same production he will bring to BAM’s Harvey Theater next week.This man never stops. This season in London he is also directing Nicholas Lyndhurst in “The Dresser” and Kim Cattrall in “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” Taking a rare day off, England’s most prolific director sat in a quiet corner of his club, the Garrick, seemingly as excited as the day a copy of Samuel Becket’s “Waiting for Godot” landed on his desk at the Arts Theatre.“I was 24, putting on a new play every five weeks and got £7 a week, plus luncheon vouchers. The play arrived on my desk. I read it, and thought, ‘Very original, four men and a tree.'”“We did it – and it completely changed my life.”“One of the many things that Godot immediately brought me was a phone call. A voice said: ‘Hellooah. Aahm Tennessee Williams.’ I first thought, as a young director, ‘Pull the other one.'”“But it was him. He said that he had been, the previous night, to see the play, which he loved, and would I like to have a drink. He said, ‘Would you like to have my plays to direct in London?'”“I did ‘Camino Real,’ ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ and we became great friends.”“The sad thing was that in his last years, he would come into my office at the National about once a year, bearing a play, which I felt I couldn’t do. It is a terrible thing when you have to turn down genius.”Mr. Hall, the director of both the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company, helped Sir Laurence Olivier through stage fright.“I directed Olivier when I was 28. He was actually very easy, but very demanding. I’ve never been so tired in all my life, as he really used you.”He had to instruct the other theater knights, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, in the art of playing Harold Pinter. The thing was, they didn’t believe in pauses.“When we rehearsed, suddenly there would be a silence, and Ralph would say, ‘Is that you, Johnnie?’ And John would say: ‘No, it’s you.'”“And I’d say: ‘It’s neither of you. It’s a pause. For Harold, the pauses are equally as important, and you’d better find out why it’s there.'”Mr. Hall’s marriage to Leslie Caron, the first of his four wives, ended at “a crossroads” in his career.“When I was 27, I was offered in the same month the directorship of the Shakespeare Memorial Company at Stratford, and a trainee director’s contract at MGM. It really was a fork in the road. I went to Stratford.”“Leslie was reluctantly based in Hollywood. She had an MGM contract. She was a great big Hollywood star. But it would have murdered me. I wouldn’t have lasted there. I love making films. I don’t love the trappings of films.”John Osborne called him Dr. Fu Manchu, Michael Blakemore referred to him as Gengis Khan, and Glenda Jackson called him a dictator.Lady Thatcher famously inquired: “How long do we have to keep giving money to that awful man Peter Hall?”Mr. Hall said: “I think she suspected I was a left-wing intellectual dabbling in the arts instead of doing a proper job.”He chuckled, recalling a dinner with the Tory leader after her only visit during his 15-year stint at the National, to see “Amadeus.” “She turned to me and said, ‘Sir Peter, I think it’s disgraceful that the National Theatre should do a play which indicates that Mozart uttered four-letter words.'”“I said, ‘But he did, Prime Minister.’ ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Of course, he couldn’t have done.'”“I told her that in fact his letters were full of dirty jokes, bad language, and what you might regard as an infantile sense of humor.”“She said, ‘It cannot be true. He wrote such beautiful music, such elegant minuets.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.’ She said, ‘I don’t think you heard what I said.'”“It just shows you. You shouldn’t do dirty plays.”Now, 50 years on, the Rose has entered his life, thanks to the radio DJ David Jacobs. “I feel like the little boy being shown the pot of honey,” he said.Mr. Jacobs, a friend since their days on the BBC’s “Any Questions” (“before it became political”) asked him to be an honorary vice-president of the theater, created for £5 million by the local authority, with another £6 million needed to finish it off.“At first I thought, ‘Oh God, not another modern theatre. Do we really need another stage in Greater London?’ Then I opened the brochure, and thought: ‘They can’t have done this. What a brilliant idea.'”“I became completely smitten, as have an awful lot of my colleagues: Peter Brook, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn.”The Rose was unearthed in 1989 by archaeologists during a dig on the South Bank. “Original timbers were found, preserved in London mud, so you could see the shape of the stage, like a lozenge.“When an actor stands there, he can see every member of the audience, with nobody behind him, and is in contact with a space that holds a thousand, but is unbelievably intimate.”A Good Year for England’s Theatrical DynastyPeter Hall and two of his children, Rebecca and Edward, will all be plying their craft in New York this season.Rebecca Hall first played her Rosalind in Bath last Spring – and the almost unanimous opinion of the London critics is that this was a Rosalind for the ages.“Tall, gawky and with a strong vein of melancholy underlining her wit, she delivers Shakespeare’s language with a thrillingly fresh and at times almost improvisatory quality,” wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph. “Watching her, you are in no doubt that you are watching a great actress in the making.”“As You Like It” at BAM Harvey Theater January 18-30 (651 Fulton Street, between Ashland and Rockwell Place, 718-636-4100).Edward Hall drew raves from the city’s critics for his productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at BAM last summer. plays. “Edward Hall’s triumphant new production abounds in wonders,” wrote Jeremy McCarter in the Sun. “The show gives New York a gem it has lacked for too long: a Shakespearean production with fullness, with the reach and flash the text demands.”His “Rose Rage” – a version of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” plays – played the Duke to equal plaudits. “His productions are richly theatrical, never employing a CD or a stagehand where an actor would do,” Mr. McCarter wrote. “There’s a real sense of esprit de corps that comes through in every scene.”The spring he will take on the work of one his father’s old friends when he directs Natasha Richardson in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.”“A Streetcar Named Desire” will be in previews March 26 (Studio 54, 254 W. 54th Street, 212-719-1300).

A Prolific Director – in More Ways Than One

A Prolific Director – in More Ways Than One

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