Views from the stalls

I have been re-reading, with even deeper admiration, Sir Peter Hall’s diaries about the founding of the National Theatre in the 1970s. I have been told, more than once, that I should not have enjoyed them - that Hall was a vain villain, that he was totally self-centred, evasive, and that he got things wrong.

Yet I cannot see it that way. He remains a man who, perhaps knew too much, whose abilities were too wide, and who paid more attention to directing plays than being an administrator. His enemies, Michael Blakemore and Jonathan Miller among them, have made that perfectly plain.

Yet in their kindle edition the diaries are riveting, wonderfully written, illuminating and also greatly touching - the story of a fascinating, complex man of the theatre, obsessive and, on his own admission, paranoid, in the throes of dealing with rivals, writers, actors, backstage wranglers, aggressive unions.

Sometimes, his hopes and desires bit the dust.  Was he over-ambitious? It often looked like it. But not only was he a voracious reader and stage director, he made films (the inspired                Akenfield about his native Suffolk more than a century ago), acted in them, ran a high profile television programme (Aquarius, featuring lengthy, absorbing interviews with Dame Janet Baker and others), spent whole nights devouring play-scripts, was constantly tempted into opera production, where he was much at home - including his original, unmutilated Cosi fan tutte for Glyndebourne, perfectly observed and enacted until an assistant got his hands on it and spoiled it when it went on tour.  

His knowledge of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinter profoundly pervade the diaries, along with delectable walk-on appearances by Ralph Richardson and John
Gielgud. The book, though very long, remains unputdownable.

His Suffolk boyhood - he was the son of a kindly station master - provides the backcloth. But in the end the bomb dropped.    Entering his eighties, and long retired from the National Theatre, he suddenly disappeared from public view.  He had gone out one evening to see a Chekhov play and started shouting insults at the star actress from his seat in the audience - an unforgettable scene of embarrassment for those who witnessed it.

After what can only be called a full life, including four marriages, dementia had attacked him.  He promptly offered himself to Charterhouse, a one-time monastery, now a sort of monastic care home in London where he could live in privacy. He is now in his mid eighties.

Seize your chance and, whatever you thought of his diaries the first time you read them, read them again.
13 September 2016