The Perils of Being Sir Peter

By RICHARD CORLISS

Hall stirs up a stew with his tattling diaries and a new musical "If you can't have a monumental success," Peter Hall confided to his diary in 1972, "I suppose you may as well have a monumental failure." Lately Sir Peter, 53, has been getting his melancholy wish. Founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, boss for a decade of the huge National Theater, a noted director of plays, operas and films, Hall has long been the most successful and controversial impresario on the bustling British arts scene. Now he is the bestselling author of a volume of tittle-tattle diaries, the director of a lugubrious new musical about Actress Jean Seberg, and the star of a brouhaha that boasts enough celebrities, sex, money, backstabbing and even cultural significance to fill every London tabloid from now till Boxing Day. Screaming headlines leap to the imagination:

FOES BLAST HALL: "AS BAD AS NIXON!" Publication this fall of Peter Hall's Diaries, which chronicles his first eight years at the National (1972-80), has sent Sir Peter's old enemies scurrying to put in their tuppence worth. Playwright John Osborne denounced the book as a "numbing record of banal ambition, official evasiveness and individual cupidity." Opera Critic Tom Sutcliffe of the Guardian argues that "Hall has rewritten the history of the National's early days. It's a matter of setting the record crooked."

Now listen to Jonathan Miller, who quit his job as one of the National's associate directors in 1975 and still admits to getting into "a homicidal rage" when thinking of Hall: "Working for him was like working for Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, he always has a couple of underlings around who finish his enemies off by spoiling their reputations. I've talked to all of them--Laurence Olivier, John Dexter and Michael Blakemore [three of Hall's onetime colleagues]--and there is a unanimous feeling of righteous indignation."

SIR PETER'S OPERAS EARN CATCALLS

ON TWO CONTINENTS. For Hall, it has been a rough year on the roller coaster of notoriety, after triumphs in 1982 at the National (including Harold Pinter's Other Places) and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (where Hall directed Orfeo et Eurydice). But last November he staged Verdi's Macbeth at New York City's Metropolitan Opera to a gang of mostly abusive reviews. Then this summer Hall premiered his production of The Ring of the Nibelung at Bayreuth, and things were no sunnier there. The work opened to bad reviews and an audience that sounded, as one reviewer wrote, "like hundreds of savage wolves baying for blood."

PINTER ANGRILY QUITS N.T., SCORES

HALL FOR "INEFFICIENCY." Until this year, Hall's staff of associate directors had remained faithful. (Miller and Blakemore, who defected from the National in the mid-'70s, were both holdovers from the reign of Olivier, Hall's predecessor.) Then Pinter, whose plays Hall had been directing since 1962, felt abandoned when Hall left for Bayreuth just as Pinter was staging a troubled production of Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place at the National. Without alerting Hall in advance, Pinter resigned as an associate director of the theater. Last week Pinter told TIME, "The fundamental problem of the National Theater is that its artistic director spends a great deal of his time elsewhere. He and the board have failed to appoint a deputy to him, entrusted with full artistic responsibility in Peter Hall's absence. This results in a policy which is incoherent and an enterprise which has no core. This vacuum creates discontent, confusion and inefficiency. That is why I resigned in May."

HALL BURNS MOVIE STAR, SELF AT THE N.T. STAKE. In September, Hall began rehearsing Jean Seberg with a score by Marvin Hamlisch, book by Julian Barry and lyrics by Christopher Adler (all Americans). There were reports of backstage turmoil. The leading actress sprained her ankle, a leading actor broke his, and the choreographer was replaced. There were complaints that the National, with its government annuity of some $9 million, was underwriting a "Broadway tryout" (Hall may direct a New York company of Jean Seberg early in 1985).

Hall, who in his Diaries had derided Hamlisch's A Chorus Line as "reeking of double Broadway standards," now pushes the pre-opening troubles aside and defends Jean Seberg as "an exciting piece of work about the danger of starmaking in Western society." He has literally cast Seberg as a modern Joan of Arc. He has staged Seberg's involvement with the Black Panthers as a khaki chorus line brandishing rifles to a rhythm-and-blues beat. The show climaxes with Saint Jean burning at the stake for her ideals, torch courtesy of the FBI. Jean Seberg opened this month with a couple of champions and more detractors among the London critics. The most telling slur has come from Hall's alma mater, the R.S.C., whose own musical, the satirical pantomime Poppy, has begun a successful commercial run. At one point in the show, the actors encourage the audience to join in song and add a threat: "Anyone who doesn't sing along gets two tickets to Jean Seberg."

SIR PETER TELLS ALL--AND TOO MUCH MORE. A nifty bedside skim, Diaries is 500 pages of tape-recorded daily entries, bleeding with triumph and futility.

As "the pilot of the first theatrical Concorde," Hall fought with arts barons, trade unions and pretenders to his crown to see the National to its concrete home on the Thames. The psychic struggle took its toll: Hall describes himself as being "raw as burnt skin."

Does Sir Peter ever have any fun? On the Diaries' evidence, a little. Though Hall is frustrated by Olivier's "Machiavellian love of intrigue," he delights in John Gielgud's fussy modesty, Ralph Richardson's engaging bluster, Albert Finney's eagerness to tackle any role. He enjoys the artistic adventure of rehearsing: "It's really why I do this job." But there is another pleasure: confiding to the diary--and now to any Briton with -L-12.95 to spend--his colleagues' amorous intrigues (but rarely his own). In 1975 he reports that Pinter is "wildly and happily in love" with Lady Antonia Fraser while still married to Actress Vivien Merchant. In an irate letter, Pinter denounced Hall for relating "matters of the utmost privacy." As for Hall, he says regretfully: "We had a marvelous collaboration. Now there is no hope of getting him back."

BLOODY AND ABUSED, SIR PETER SOLDIERS ON. Surveying his domain from his aerie in the National, Hall finds as many defenders as snipers. Gielgud praises his "tremendous enthusiasm and energy." Playwright David Hare (Plenty) values Sir Peter's "help, experience and support." Michael Billington, drama critic of the Guardian, argues that "overall, Hall should get very high marks." Actress-Director Maria Aitken finds Sir Peter "very clever, very sexy, very stimulating."

Now Hall lowers his eyelids until he resembles Fu Manchu and says, "It's been a year of controversy, but no more or less than other years. I've had ups, downs, good years, bad ones. I've been constantly challenged, praised, abused, damned. Running the National Theater is a bit like being Nelson's Column out there with all those pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Personally, I can't tell you where I am. But I can tell you where the National is. It is extremely successful. Until I read John Goodwin's editing of Diaries I had forgotten--because one's memory of pain is short--what complete bloody hell it was opening this place: getting the money, getting it open, getting it to work. Now it really does work. And now I really am enjoying it."

Hall plans three new productions at the National: Coriolanus, Animal Farm as a musical and, possibly, another play from Peter Shaffer. (Hall staged Amadeus in both London and New York.) Meantime, he is happy to see the three auditoriums in the National complex filled to 80% of capacity. "I've always been a businessman as well as trying to be an artist. And I do love running things." With his $71,000-a-year contract at the National renewed for five years, Sir Peter seems destined to remain a lively British monument. Just like Nelson's Column. --By Richard Corliss. Reported by Mary Cronin/London

With reporting by Mary Cronin/London This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.