Meirion Bowen writes: Peter Hall played a key role in rescuing the reputation as an opera composer of Sir Michael Tippett, dismissed and mocked in the 1950s as bafflingly over-complex and bizarrely eccentric. Hall’s direction of The Knot Garden in 1970 benefited above all from his experience as a director of Shakespearean drama, for this work was to a large extent a retelling of The Tempest. The Covent Garden production of this opera used miles of rope with imaginative lighting and film (by Tim O’Brien), contriving magical stage pictures for the constant metamorphoses in the action. Hall was in his element here, directing the game-playing of the seven characters.
Hall was to have directed Tippett’s next opera, The Ice Break, but had to withdraw after he accepted an invitation to run the National Theatre. He was also due to direct the Houston premiere of Tippett’s last opera, New Year, but arrived late for rehearsals, because of his involvement in an award-winning Tennessee Williams production in New York. He nevertheless gave the production a modern ambience. Its cartoon-style subtitles and jokey irreverences (“New Year’s Eve - y’all have a nice night”) were received rather snootily in Texas, but went down better when the production reached Glyndebourne (though some English critics were offended). Hall and Tippett hit it off as a theatrical partnership.
Walter Hall writes: I remember Peter Hall’s first professional production well, because I was in it. I joined the Elizabethan Theatre Company when I left drama school at the end of 1953, and he joined the company too, coming straight from Cambridge. His first production was Twelfth Night and I played Sebastian.
His style then was based on firm decisions which he had already made. But, much later, in 1990, when he directed The Wild Duck, he was open to suggestions, no matter who made them. Gentlemanly in fact. He had a music stand before him with the script on it, obviously making sure that the cast was keeping to its exact wording. At every rehearsal he smoked a rather strong cigar, casting a haze. Surprisingly he did not look at us. We actors were, of course, disturbed by this. Once the production was on, he lost interest in it and just took up another of the many he had waiting for him. During the run he didn’t return to us to “take out the improvements”, as a lot of directors do. Nevertheless it was a privilege to work with his remarkable talent.
Brian Baxter writes: Peter Hall’s cinema and television legacy was modest compared with that for the theatre, but it’s worth recalling some 20 directorial credits between A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959) and The Final Passage (1996), plus three acting roles, most notably in his friend Maximillian Schell’s memorable The Pedestrian (1973), alongside such luminaries as Peggy Ashcroft, Elisabeth Bergner and Lil Dagover.
Inevitably, many films were derived from his theatre productions, notably Pinter’s The Homecoming. He also filmed a lively version of Benjamin Britten’s opera Albert Herring after its Glyndebourne opening and a less successful version of La Traviata. Another successful film was of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, made in the US in collaboration with the writer. He also found time to work specifically for television (The Camomile Lawn, 1992) and directed several original screenplays including a heist movie, Perfect Friday (1970), a psychological thriller, Never Talk to Strangers (1995) and Three Into Two Won’t Go (1969), starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. He fell out with the American production company which re-edited the last of these, after the shoot.
His most original venture was a labour of love based on Ronald Blythe’s classic book Akenfield, a logistically difficult work filmed over a long period in Suffolk using local people. The film had a fascinating release history: it was first screened to an audience in Suffolk and the event was the subject of a BBC television programme. Later in the year it opened the 1974 London film festival and in January 1975 it opened commercially at the Paris Pullman in Chelsea, with a simultaneous screening on London Weekend Television. My partner, Soren Fischer, who was the film’s publicist, took Peter to the cinema to introduce the film but he was far keener to watch the television transmission, which he did in company with friends at our flat. The widely seen TV screening affected its cinema release and the film went into limbo until its BFI video release in 2016.
Gerry Harrison writes: The film for which Peter Hall had the strongest commitment, Akenfield, was certainly the most modest, shot on super 16mm and with an amateur cast and a film crew that worked for nothing over weekends. Both Equity and the ACTT took an interest in these breaches of the rules.
I was Peter’s assistant director in the early days when we were finding locations and casting. It was arranged that I would meet him at Woodbridge station on Saturday mornings. I had thought that he was travelling there by train, but I noticed him parking his Rolls-Royce in the station car park. He then got into my Renault 4. While I drove him to the rendezvous, he enthused about his Suffolk childhood while his accent slipped into a rural Suffolk vernacular. I was amused at this, until he stepped out of my car and told those meeting us in this accent that I had given him a lift from London.
We obviously got on, because he offered me a job at the National Theatre, which was then at the Old Vic. I remember trudging around the wet concrete and shuttered foundations of the new building in borrowed wellies and munching cheese sandwiches as he described his dreams for the future.
