BOOK REVIEW / Inscrutable company man: 'Making an Exhibition of Myself' - Peter Hall: Sinclair-Stevenson, 20 pounds

IF NOT a great imaginative artist, Peter Hall is undoubtedly a master builder. No one in post-war Britain has made such a formidable contribution to the welfare of the theatre. He founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and mounted provocative new plays there in the early Sixties. He brought in Peter Brook to direct a celebrated King Lear and to explore the Theatre of Cruelty. With John Barton, he adapted four of Shakespeare's history plays. As artistic director of the National, he fought the unions and government parsimony in a long battle to complete the three auditoria.

Yet it's hard to praise the man, let alone find him. Is he merely the dray- horse of our theatre, this unctuous, scholarship-boy swot? Or is he a sleek Machiavelli with a voluptuous love of power? (He claims he's merely an imprudent enthusiast.) Is he a hyper-sensitive romantic with suicidal tendencies? Or a jovial politician?

If Peter Hall has the secret to his own complex personality, it's not revealed in this autobiography, which is puffed-up, repetitious and apparently hastily written (or dictated?). By the end one feels not that the author is hiding but that he hasn't stopped long enough, in the greedy rush against time, to explore his inner life. The narrative voice isn't sophisticated or witty, but banal and even innocent. As a title, Making an Exhibition of Myself is better suited to his Diaries, published in 1983, which were offensive, gossipy and alive.

The autobiography reads, in part, like a fence-mending operation. Demonised by many in the profession (Jonathan Miller used to call him Genghis Khan), Hall claims here an army of friends. Harold Pinter is a 'warm friend', Michael Birkett is an 'old' one, Lord Goodman 'one of the most valued', Ralph Richardson a 'firm' friend and John Guare a 'new'. I counted at least 15 such references.

Two aspects of this book are to be commended: Hall's description of his Suffolk childhood, and his exploration of his work process. I wish he had cut out the genial references to ex-wives, the lists of activity and the trite wisdom ('Living is a lonely thing', 'Sex is the great mystery, as great as death').

Born in 1930 in Bury St Edmunds, he was the only child of a railway clerk from a background of labourers. 'Blood and offal and horse manure . . . were part of my everyday life', he writes, and he captured that world in his film of Ronald Blythe's Akenfield. His kindly father, who became a stationmaster, was a union man and a Labour Party supporter, a vegetable gardener who 'would have kept chickens on the moon'; his mother was clever and volatile. The couple coddled their precocious child, made him 'feel special' and told him that learning was 'the one certain way to betterment'.

When the family moved near Cambridge, he attended BBC symphony concerts and opera from the Sadler's Wells, and saw Gielgud's Hamlet and Wolfit's Volpone and Lear. From the Perse School, he won an Exhibition in English to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and booked the Amateur Dramatic Club Theatre for a date two years ahead. As a director he learnt to wear 'a different mask to satisfy the needs of many different people' and to recognise 'that special time in every rehearsal period when the group becomes collectively inspired'.

In his mid-twenties, at the Arts Theatre Club, he directed the first English-speaking production of Waiting for Godot. Soon after, he was installed at Stratford, directing Charles Laughton in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Olivier in Coriolanus, while also forming a policy for a second company and an ensemble group along the lines of the great European theatres.

By 1963, in the midst of the break-up of his marriage to the actress Leslie Caron, he started work on The Wars of the Roses. Two weeks into rehearsal he broke down, 'like a child who doesn't want to take the exam because he fears he will fail'. It wasn't the first, or the last, such collapse. On this occasion he went back to work. 'Dr Theatre,' he reports pompously, 'is very potent.'

Hall ran the RSC till 1968, and then helped run Covent Garden. In 1971 he was approached by Lord Goodman as a successor to the ailing Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre. The theatre's associates were shocked at the imposition of a 'usurper', but Hall was the right man for the job, especially in the light of Olivier's irresponsible failure to appoint a successor. (He had toyed with the idea of Joan Plowright, Richard Attenborough and, in one of his skittish moods, Richard Burton.)

Hall claims that his style at the National was more democratic than Olivier's: 'It was certainly more open.' Such views were contested by the old guard, and later by those who welcomed the take-over of Richard Eyre. In his defence, Hall fought valiantly against the Thatcher policy of dismantling the performing arts, directed first- class productions of the Oresteia and Shakespeare's late plays, and opened the National to foreign companies. (He points out that no state organisation exists in this country to promote foreign art.) He also found time to direct 40 operas around the world, to make a few forgettable feature films, and to marry four times.

With his five productions about to commandeer the West End (Separate Tables, Lysistrata, She Stoops to Conquer, Feydeau's Le Dindon, and a musical about Piaf), does Hall hold a full house or two of a kind? Either way, I hope he abandons the tape recorder and further volumes of autobiography, and allows himself that extra half-hour of sleep in the morning.

(Photograph omitted)