Theatre’s grand old man is still out to shock

01/05/2008 

WHEN George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion premiered in 1914, it caused outrage.

Patricia Campbell, the actress playing Eliza Doolittle, the flower-girl hot-housed to become a society flower, exclaimed “Not bloody likely”. The word “bloody” had never been said before on the stage.

Shaw asked the actress to take it out but she refused — and the play’s first run became a succes de scandale. As Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and former director of the National Theatre, prepares to revive the comedy at the Old Vic — naughty word in place — he is convinced the play retains the same shock factor today.

“Just you wait. You should see people’s reactions,” he says with relish. And you have to concede that the man who oversaw the first English production of Samuel Beckett’s impossibly bleak Waiting For Godot and who was verbally attacked by Margaret Thatcher knows a thing or two about shock value.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

After a sell-out season in Bath, Hall is bringing the production to London for the first time in many years.

He insists that Shaw’s play “is one of the 10 greatest comedies in the English language which has suffered from the musical My Fair Lady because you are always expecting a tune in your head. While the musical is a sentimental romance, the play is tough.

Shaw hits people hard.” One critic claimed the controversial expletive has “never been funnier”, also saying of the play that “it is like seeing in a new light an old member of the family that you had taken for granted”.

The idea of social engineering makes for just as uncomfortable watching today, says Hall, but his production wasn’t one that grabbed London’s theatre producers.

WEST END BATTLE

“All the critics said this play is destined for London and then there wasn’t a theatre available. What’s happening now is that the people who own the theatres are also putting money into productions, so they favour their own productions. The market force of theatre is changing.”

When Kevin Spacey, artistic director at the Old Vic, heard there was no interest in bringing Hall’s production to the West End, he travelled to Bath to book it. But Sir Peter says that unless you have a Judi Dench-size name in lights above your show, it has become a battle to get into the West End.

“I used to get asked what play I would like to do,” Hall reminisces. “Now I am asked who can I get.” It should be added that on this score, he doesn’t fare too badly, having attracted Braveheart actress Catherine McCormack, Mike Leigh favourite Alison Steadman and acclaimed stage and TV actress Niamh Cusack to his sixth season with his company at the Theatre Royal Bath.

In addition, his efforts reviving the Rose Theatre in Kingston are now coming to fruition.

ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

However, to a director whose productions once regularly made the front pages and whose international reputation is legendary, the changes to the theatre world are galling. He insists that British theatre is in a healthy state — but is rueful about the glitzy musicals and their television spinoffs which dominate the West End.

A month after Spacey publicly railed against the BBC’s I’d Do Anything talent show, Hall says: “Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh have conned the BBC into giving them the greatest advertising campaign that the theatre has ever witnessed.

It seems odd that Phantom Of The Opera can run for 22 years. One would have thought nobody would be interested.” Echoing his spat with Thatcher when he was at the National Theatre and sitting on the Arts Council (he relishes repeating back to me word-perfect: “

‘Why do we have to keep giving money to that awful man Peter Hall?’”), there’s not much love lost between Hall and New Labour. He has been irritated with the lack of direction on the arts: “There’s no sense that the situation will change under Brown.”

How about the Tories? “They won’t be any better.” So what’s his solution? “Give the arts money. It’s simple.”

REALLY LOVELY

He may sound old-fashioned, cantankerous at times, but no one can accuse Hall of being remote. He is regularly to be seen at the opening nights of London’s most significant arts events: Daniel Baremboim at the Royal Festival Hall, The Minotaur at Covent Garden, or the productions of his increasingly successful son, Edward.

Hall says it’s “really lovely” to have children in the business, and he’s looking forward to his daughter, Rebecca, who now has a thriving film career — starring in Starter For Ten and The Prestige — returning to the stage.

At 77, his greatest fear is that time will run out before he’s completed all his theatrical projects. As he is standing waiting for his photograph to be taken, he contemplates the inscription on a nearby gravestone. “Died aged 61. Hmm.”

I wonder whether he is now turning to Shaw as part of a project to fit in all the great British dramatists while there is still time. Having tirelessly promoted Shakespeare and Beckett, does he now feel a duty to Shaw?

“No one has a duty to do anything. Never make that mistake. Do what you’re passionate about. You never know how people are going to find a piece of theatre.”

And with a knowing glint in his eye, he adds: “When I got a play called Waiting For Godot sent through to me from a man called Samuel Beckett, I could not have predicted the effect it would have.”

By Johanna Thomas-Corr

Pygmalion is at the Old Vic from 7 May until 2 August. Box office: 0870 060 6628. Visit: www.oldvictheatre.com`