Top director Peter Hall puts focus on future work - at 79

The influence of director Peter Hall in the world of theatre is impossible to estimate – the word enormous barely begins to do it justice.

Peter Hall established the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1961 to bring the work of England’s greatest playwright to a wider audience. Later, from 1973-88, he served as second ever director of the National Theatre in London, following in the footsteps of the legendary Laurence Olivier. He has served as Artistic Director of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival and the Peter Hall Company, which he also founded.

He recently directed a cast that included Judi Dench at Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in London’s Rose Theatre in February. Judi Dench first played Titania for Peter Hall with the RSC in 1962.At the age of 79, Peter is currently drawing up rehearsal plans for his next shows, Sheridan’s The Rivals in Bath’s Theatre Royal in September, starring Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles (To the Manor Born) and a production of Twelfth Night in the National in November. The Twelfth Night production – which will feature his daughter, the supremely talented Rebecca Hall, as Viola – is to mark his 80th birthday.

Here in Galway, people will get a chance to hear Peter Hall discuss his life and work when he joins The Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington in conversation on July 24 in the Town Hall Theatre.

“I had such a very brief visit the last time, I felt I had to come back,” he says from his London home about his return trip to Galway.

Peter Hall attended the closing night of last year’s Arts Festival to see The Merchant of Venice, directed by his son Edward, who runs his own all-male Shakespeare company, Propeller Theatre.

“He’s the real deal,” says his father, praise indeed from a man who was knighted in 1977 for his services to the arts and who holds honorary doctorates from several universities including Bath, York and Cambridge, for the same reason.

It was at Cambridge University that Peter Hall first began acting and directing, having developed a love of theatre in childhood.

He was born in Suffolk where his father was the station master Bury St Edmonds’ small station which “had four trains a day and a goods train at lunchtime”. Had the Halls stayed there, Peter might never have become involved in theatre, but they moved close to Cambridge, which was, he recalls, an extraordinary place around the time of World War II.

Because of the war and the bombing of London, many theatre and opera companies premiered their work in Stratford before touring, something that left a lasting impression on him. Even before that, he saw John Gielgud play Hamlet, which he still remembers.

Peter graduated from Cambridge in 1953, the year he made his professional directing debut, before going on to run London’s Arts Theatre during the time when Waiting for Godot received its English-language premiere there.

He took up a job with The Shakespeare Memorial Company in Stratford in 1959. By 1961 he had established an ensemble company that was officially named the Royal Shakespeare Company, with bases in London and Stratford.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.