Sir Peter Hall: his 10 greatest theatrical productions

Sir Peter Hall, the eminent theatre director and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has died at the age of 86, leaving behind an enormous legacy of work that crossed theatre, opera and film. In celebration of his life, Telegraph theatre critic Dominic Cavendish has assembled 10 of his very best productions.

1. Waiting for Godot (Arts Theatre, 1955)

The UK premiere that made Hall’s name at the age of 24 (and launched Beckett as a major playwright). The script came his way after it was rejected by numerous directors and most of the acting profession.

“I still wake up wondering what would have become of my life if I had turned it down,” he wrote ahead of a 50th anniversary revival. “It changed everything” – not just for him, but for British theatre. Although many were baffled, the critic Kenneth Tynan gave it a crucial adulation: “It is validly new, and hence I declare myself, as the Spanish would say, godotista”. 

2. The Wars of the Roses (RSC Stratford and Aldwych London, 1963-64)

A hugely ambitious pulling together (using controversial abridgements and even pastiche Shakespeare) of the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III into a three-play cycle in 1963, bolstered by the Henriad (Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V) the following year; an unprecedented feat of theatrical inquiry. The production – which required intensive rehearsals and mass collaboration, with input from the dramaturg and director John Barton – was regarded as the crowning achievement of the RSC under Hall in the Sixties.

3. Hamlet (RSC Stratford and Aldwych London, 1965)

At the age of 24, David Warner was the most youthful Hamlet critics could recall - and he became idolised by the young audiences who flocked to see the show; with his trailing scarf and gangly, fragile physique, he embodied a Sixties generation disillusioned with their elders and the establishment.

“He feels each line back to freshness, lives each scene as if for the first time,” declared one critic; and he was so admired that there weren’t only queues around the block, he had to be smuggled out of the theatre.

4. The Homecoming (RSC Aldwych, 1965)

Pinter had sent Hall The Birthday Party but he was neither able to direct that nor the next play The Caretaker. With the 1962 one-act piece The Collection then The Homecoming their formidable creative partnership began in earnest, spanning 11 premieres. “I was as rigorous with the actors over Pinter’s punctuation as I was with them over Shakespeare’s line endings,” Hall observed in his autobiography.

In the first performances in Cardiff, there were walk-outs, some indignant at the way the anti-heroine Ruth (Pinter’s then wife Vivien Merchant) abandons her family to set herself up as the woman of her father-in-law (Max)’s north London household, paying her way as a high-class hooker. But the play ran for 18 months in the West End, then conquered New York, winning Hall a Tony as best director. 

5. No Man’s Land (National Theatre, 1975)

Another Pinter triumph, even if again its enigma left some baffled and bemused, and a premiere production still regarded as the benchmark. Hall recalled a remarkably smooth process from first sight to stage: “I read it, gave it instantly to John [Gielgud] and Ralph [Richardson], and within a few days they had accepted. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had.” It proved a popular success transferring to the West End, then Broadway, before returning for a run at the National in 1977.

6. The Oresteia (The National, 1981)

The Yorkshire poet and playwright Tony Harrison promised that his rendering of Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy would be “as monumental as Wagner and as northern as Yorkshire pudding” – and when the production finally opened, eight years after being conceived, that boast was realised. The decision to employ only male actors was controversial, and not every critic was persuaded by the use of full mask, with the performers – including Greg Hicks as Orestes, and Pip Donahy as Clytemnestra – also directing words and gestures out to the audience.

But many of those who saw it were awed. For Simon Callow it was “perhaps Hall’s single most adventurous and completely realised production for the NT and one of the key productions of the post-war period”. David Hare ranked it among “the very greatest theatre experiences of his life”. It was the first English language production to play at the ancient amphitheatre at Epidaurus.

7. Antony and Cleopatra (National Theatre, 1987)

“I’ve never enjoyed anything more in my whole life, and I wish it wasn’t over” said Hall just prior to the opening night. Dench had had doubts about her casting (“I said, “I hope you know what you are doing setting out to direct Cleopatra with a menopausal dwarf”). Hopkins had major wobbles in the run-up and claimed only to have found his way into the part some 80 performances in, having had a stinking cold and hoarse throat (“scarred, bruised, raucous, drunken, but a great spirit”) but the critics were kinder, most of them, at first sight.

The Telegraph acclaimed Dench as a complete triumph (“exuberant, imperious, witty, both frightening and moving”) and the Guardian’s Michael Billington declared “It is not only the most intelligently-spoken Shakespeare I have heard in years but it also contains two performances from Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins that, in their comprehensive humanity, rank with [Peggy] Ashcroft and [Michael] Redgrave at Stratford many moons ago [1953].” It was a sell-out success.

8. Orpheus Descending (Haymarket Theatre, 1988)

Hall inaugurated his producing company after leaving the National by continuing his relationship with the work of Tennessee Williams (he had UK-premiered both Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the late 50s). Vanessa Redgrave played Lady Torrance in this 1957 rarity, the daughter of a Sicilian immigrant murdered by the KKK and married to a dying bigot.

In an admiring notice – repeated when it transferred to New York – the critic Frank Rich, renowned as the “Butcher of Broadway”, hailed “Redgrave – for taking “complete, perhaps eternal possession of the role” – and Hall, for eschewing any attempt at realism and staging “the play in a hallucinatory set that floats against a spooky, cloud-streaked azure sky”.

9. The Merchant of Venice (Phoenix Theatre, 1989)

Although the critics were slightly underwhelmed by Dustin Hoffman’s Shakespearean debut aged 51 – for Michael Billington in the Guardian he was “a modest, low-key, small-scale Shylock”, while the Evening Standard complained that his performance was “never fierce enough to make Shylock an interesting monster nor despised enough to make him an oppressed victim”, this was still a hot ticket. Hoffman was complimentary: “I never felt he had a preconception of what he wanted me to feel, and that’s one of the nicest gifts an actor can get”- although the pair fell out when Hall refused permission for the final performances to be filmed.

10. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Rose Theatre, Kingston, 2010)

In 1962, Judi Dench played Titania to Ian Richardson’s Oberon and Ian Holm’s Puck at Stratford; almost 40 years on, she returned to the role as Hall came full circle to one of his early glories (that production was filmed in 1968 in a black-and-white version that saw Dench wearing next to nothing but green paint and ivy leaves, with a scantily clad Diana Rigg as Helena and Helen Mirren Hermia).

“I thought it must be a joke when I first heard that Dame Judi Dench was to star as Titania”, Charles Spencer declared in his Telegraph review. But, he went on, “This is one of the most lucid and beautifully spoken productions of the Dream I have ever seen, with a lovely autumnal glow about it as the great director and the great actress reunite”.

Dench assuming the role of the Fairy Queen in the initial guise of the “virgin queen” Elizabeth I knew every word after all those years; “It was a really happy, good company,” she noted in her autobiography – and it ranks as one of Hall’s finest swansong productions.