Theatrical tales

An entry to recommend a rollocking good theatrical read.  I have just finished Sir Peter Hall's diaries from the time when he was director of the National Theatre, struggling to move it from the Old Vic into the new South Bank building. I found them unputdownable. His almost daily entries from 1972 until 1980 tell the  compelling story of him taking over as director of the National Theatre from Laurence Olivier (fraught as it was with politics and intrigue), his unrelenting efforts to get the new building finished, his frustration with the power of the unions once established on the South Bank and wrangles over public funding with the Arts Council and the Governments of the day.  This was the backdrop against which he built the theatre company (from the relatively small concern that played from the Old Vic), established a repertoire and planned for the future..... not to mention directed some memorable plays.  The entries, dictated early each morning for the previous day, are often frazzled and distraught with the politics and pressures of the job...... but remain delightfully gossipy and candid as well.  His pen portraits of many theatrical greats (Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, Ashcroft, Pinter, Beckett, Ayckbourn and so many more) are a treat although I wonder how many of them he fell out with after publication.

The diaries transported me back to the 1970s - Wilson resigning (I remember the Evening Standard headline on my way home from school), Callaghan and endless, endless strikes, Thatcher, a politicised Arts Council. I also recalled with excitement the opening of the National Theatre on the South Bank and going to some of the early plays including seeing Albert Finney in Tamburlaine the Great which opened the Olivier and Amadeus (Simon Callow as Mozart and Paul Scofield as Salieri). Love it or hate it, Lasdun's National Theatre building is now so much part of the landscape that it is easy to forget the impact it had when it opened - all that public space and foyer music was a novelty.

What this book provides is an insight into the characters and incidents at key moments in the National Theatre's history. It also is a revelation in its description of the creative process of giving life to a play. It was a delight to follow No Man's Land from Pinter's enigmatic text to success on the stage (with Richardson and Gielgud) and then to New York and the development of Amadeus from an idea to a script to research in Vienna to a read through in the rehearsal room to a huge hit. Loved it!