Sir Peter Hall(1930–2017)

Peter Reginald Frederick Hall was born at Bury St Edmunds in west Suffolk on the twenty-second of November 1930, only son of Reginald Hall, the station-master at the Bury St Edmunds Railway Station, and Grace Pamment. He was raised in the railway station-house at Bury St Edmunds, was schooled at Saint James's Primary School and at the Perse School in Cambridge on a scholarship awarded at twelve, took the National Service from 1949 to 1951 in the Royal Air Force at the RAF Education Branch in Hamburg, and went up to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, in 1951 on the open scholarship to read English under F. R. Leavis. He took the first-class BA in 1953 in his twenty-third year, and through the Cambridge undergraduate years directed the central single body of Cambridge undergraduate theatre of his generation: the Marlowe Society production of Henry V (1952), the Marlowe Society Hamlet (1953), and the European premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1955, the production that Hall personally directed at twenty-five and that Harold Pinter would later say founded modern English-language drama.

He took the directorship of the Arts Theatre, London, in 1955, directed across the late 1950s the productions of Cymbeline at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon (1957, his first Stratford season as guest director) and at the new Royal Court Theatre under George Devine. In 1959 in his twenty-ninth year he was appointed Director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, the central institutional position of English-language Shakespearean performance. He reorganised the institution across the next year on the unprecedented model of a permanent salaried ensemble of actors (rather than the existing seasonal-contract model), opened the Aldwych Theatre as a London-base second house for the company in 1960, and on the first of April 1961 obtained the Royal Charter from the Queen renaming the institution the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He ran the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford and the Aldwych for the next seven seasons to 1968, built the modern actor-development programme on which two generations of central English-speaking classical actors trained (Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Diana Rigg, Donald Sinden, Eric Porter, the early Helen Mirren and Antony Hopkins), produced the foundational Wars of the Roses cycle of 1963 to 1964 (the seven-play history-cycle that consolidated the central modern reading of the Shakespeare history plays), and brought the writers Edward Bond, David Mercer, John Whiting, Peter Brook's Marat/Sade (1964), and the Theatre of Cruelty work onto the central English-language theatrical platform.

He stepped down from the RSC in 1968 to pursue his independent directing career across the next five years (he directed Akenfield in 1974, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera productions of Cavalli's La Calisto in 1970 and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1981, and the original 1973 stage production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic). In 1973 in his forty-third year he was appointed Director of the National Theatre in succession to Sir Laurence Olivier, took the institution through the four-year construction of the new National Theatre building at the South Bank designed by Denys Lasdun, and on the twenty-fifth of October 1976 opened the new National Theatre at the South Bank with his own production of Tamburlaine the Great. He ran the National Theatre for the next twelve years to 1988, produced the foundational productions of Pinter's Betrayal (1978), the Albert Finney Hamlet (1976), the McKellen Wild Honey (1984), Aeschylus's Oresteia in the Tony Harrison translation (1981), and Mozart's Don Giovanni (1977).

He founded the Peter Hall Company on his retirement from the National Theatre in 1988 and continued directing until 2010 (his last production was the 2010 Cymbeline at the Cottesloe Theatre at the National). He was knighted in 1977, was made a Companion of Honour in 2018 (posthumously, as he had died the previous year), and held honorary doctorates from York, Liverpool, Reading, Cambridge and Oxford. He died at the Mountview Conservatoire for Performing Arts at Wood Green on the eleventh of September 2017 in his eighty-seventh year. The Royal Shakespeare Company he founded operates today at three theatres at Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Barbican in London, with an annual audience of over a million; the National Theatre he reshaped opens approximately seventy productions per year at three theatres on the South Bank. The Hall name in modern English-language theatre carries the weight of the two foundational institutions.