Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company

Creativity and the Institution

Colin Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134616312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

This is the inside story of the Royal Shakespeare Company - a running historical critique of a major national institution and its location within British culture, as related by a writer who is uniquely placed to tell the tale. It describes what happened to a radical theatrical vision and explores British society's inability to sustain that vision. Spanning four decades and four artistic directors, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company is a multi-layered chronicle that traces the company's history, offers investigation into its working methods, its repertoire, its people and its politics, and considers what the future holds for this bastion of high culture now in crisis. Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company is compelling reading for anyone who wishes to explore behind the scenes and consider the changing role of theatre in modern cultural life. It offers a timely analysis of the fight for creative expression within any artistic or cultural organisation, and a vital document of our times.

Part One

A Short History

of Four Decades

One

All in a State of Finding

When the Royal Shakespeare Company was founded in 1961, it was not conjured out of the sky. The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon already enjoyed a national and international presence, with its own eighty years of history, culture, values and internal arrangements. The RSC was both bolstered and burdened by this history, which it made anew under the impetus of innovations borrowed from elsewhere in Britain and abroad. In examining the background to the formation and first years of the new company, it is clear the old Stratford model no longer served. A fresh model was required to release resourcefulness and the imagination. But how to achieve this dream? The context in which the seemingly impossible occurred, a context that was social, economic, theatrical and personal, shaped not only the immediate dispensation but also the nature of the institution for the decades to come.

Stratford-Upon-Avon

At the time of the RSC’s birth, Stratford was a craft market town of some 17,000 people, geographically and politically the heart of conservative middle England.¹ Nonetheless, it was the repository of much theatrical knowledge of, and expertise in, Shakespearean production yet its theatre was also drenched in the ‘bardolatry’ of the town, a brand of reverential remembrance given rein by the absence of a national theatre. The location of its theatre on the banks of a swan-rich river and the town’s Tudor beam image supported the illusion there of an eternal shrine to Stratford’s most famous son. However, this tradition of a particularly English rural idyll, which bears scant connection to the world of Shakespeare’s plays, was, like many seemingly perpetual English traditions, an invention of the nineteenth century. In fact it took until 1769 – 150 years after Shakespeare’s death – for Stratford to host a celebration to him, but even then no play of his was presented, and it was not until Shakespeare’s house was bought for the nation nearly 100 years later, in 1847, that calls were made for the creation of a permanent monument to him in the shape of a theatre. During the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1864, a festival sponsored and organised by Edward Fordham Flower, the town’s mayor and founder of the brewery that bears the family name, did include performances of Shakespeare’s plays. This festival began the long association between that family and the commemoration of Shakespeare, a tradition of Victorian philanthropy that laid the seeds for the commercial festival theatre operation that was both inherited and supplanted by the RSC.

Flower’s son Charles offered a site and some money towards building a theatre dedicated to Shakespeare and launched a national public subscription to raise the remainder. The response was so derisory that he was forced virtually to fund the project himself. The neo-Gothic theatre that opened in 1879 was unpopular, and commentators were concerned to promote the nation’s capital as the only location fit for such a place of pilgrimage. Critics made unfavourable comparisons between the prospects of a self-financed theatre in Stratford and those of Bayreuth, likewise small and removed from its capital but which enjoyed royal patronage for its temple to Wagner. This bias was the product of typical London-centred snobbery rather than a justifiable wariness of the curious quasi-religious approach that links a birthplace with the spirit of its celebrated offspring. The Stratford theatre survived the sneers, and in the shape of Frank Benson’s touring company, noted almost as much for its cricketing prowess as its acting abilities, it earned itself a national profile. By way of recognition, in 1925 the theatre was granted a royal charter. However, following a fire, another public subscription to build a new theatre for the nation barely managed to raise half the sum required; the rest came from America. After the Second World War, Stratford took the crown for Shakespearean production from the Old Vic, thanks largely to a string of performances there by Old Vic alumni, and Stratford thus consolidated an international as well as a national reputation. Yet, despite a handful of iconoclastic productions, the Stratford festival seasons soon revealed their own artistic limitations. As the new decade of the 1960s approached, it became clear to the chair of the theatre’s governors that radical change was required.

Fordham Flower had become chair in 1944, the fourth member of the family to hold the position in an unbroken line. Head of the brewery and a Sandhurst-trained ex-officer who once considered standing as a Tory parliamentary candidate, he proved to be an adept theatre supervisor and a good listener with a sound understanding of how theatre people worked. His first artistic director, Robert Atkins (1944–45), tried to introduce staggered and longer rehearsals but found this difficult as he was not in overall control of the theatre, which was run by a general manager. His radical if aloof successor, Barry Jackson, confronted this problem headon, sacking heads of departments, re-organising the workshops and backstage facilities, and refusing to employ anyone who had acted at Stratford before. Jackson wanted to create a permanent company, but he and Flower had a difficult relationship and Jackson left after only two seasons, a missed opportunity for change. His successor in 1948, Anthony Quayle, a plain-speaking military man, did have a rapport with Flower and was able to build on Jackson’s progress. He made significant changes to the theatre building, notably reducing the stage/audience distance by bringing the circle nearer. He brought in Glen Byam Shaw and – briefly – George Devine, who together were able to attract artists of the highest calibre. Quayle consolidated Stratford’s prestige by persuading Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, the most powerful London manager, to join the governing body and help him transform Stratford by means of a West End type of star system. Quayle reduced the number of new productions, brought successful ones back with cast changes, and introduced a two-company strategy, one at Stratford (under Byam Shaw) and one on tour (under him). Quayle was dissatisfied with the constraints of the festival system, and agreed with a critic who wrote in 1956 that the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre needed a common acting style and a studio school open all the year round, where novices and veterans would have time and opportunity to apply and develop the lessons of the repertoire. Without a permanent company this would be impossible, yet Quayle was anxious lest a permanent company narrowed the actors’ range by concentrating on one playwright’s work. It was also too expensive because ‘great stars, essential to a first class performance’, as he put it, would not absent themselves from the West End.²

Quayle and Flower discussed the obvious solution to Stratford’s dilemma: public money supporting a base in London. This would allow for a broader repertoire and would satisfy the needs of the stars. Neither man, however, had much time for state aid, which, they believed, would undermine Stratford’s independence. There was also little evidence that it would be forthcoming even if sought. The London idea had surfaced before, not surprisingly, given the excessive grip the capital exerted in a small country like Britain. An earlier Stratford director, William Bridges-Adams, had sought a London outlet in the 1930s but the then chair Archibald Flower had blocked the plan, which involved an association with the Old Vic. Quayle tried again. He looked at the Royal Court and the Embassy theatres as venues for a possible London outpost, and asked Devine if he would run it. Instead, Devine went his own way at the former location with the English Stage Company and thereby entered the history books as the pioneer of the playwrights’ theatre that revitalised British drama. Quayle dropped the London idea, and, keen to expand his acting career and tired of politicking, he resigned in 1956, leaving Byam Shaw in charge as a holding operation. In 1958 Byam Shaw duly proposed Peter Hall as his successor. Hall, then aged twenty-seven, had directed twice at Stratford and, as far as can be determined, was the only candidate.

Peter Hall

A teenager in the war (he was born in 1930), Hall was representative of a new upwardly mobile breed of ebullient ‘scholarship boy’ determined to make the most of whatever opportunities the post-war settlement offered. He reached his majority at the time of nationalisation and the introduction of the welfare state, and by background and inclination voted Labour but was not of the radical left.³ Apart from a moment when he was briefly engaged to a woman he had met in the RAF, he had only one resolve: to be a theatre director. The power position in the theatre lay with this relatively new role of director, which had unseated that of the actor-manager. Hall was influenced by the example of Edward Gordon Craig, who believed in the director as superman and who had become an icon for Hall through his book On the Art of the Theatre. The survival of the major pre-war reps such as Birmingham, Liverpool and the Old Vic, and the establishment after the war of the Bristol Old Vic, meant that it was not entirely fanciful to crave the notion of a career as a director, let alone for someone who had not also first been an actor (as had major pioneers of the modern theatre like Stanislavsky or Reinhardt, and in the UK, Granville-Barker). The directorial success of non-acting university graduates, such as Hugh Hunt and Peter Brook, made the dream plausible if not obvious for students like Hall.

Although the theatre was still widely regarded as a risqué profession, the curious admixture at his university, Cambridge, of the ‘puritan’ F.R. Leavis and the ‘cavalier’ George Rylands conferred upon him not only an intellectual and ethical justification of such a choice but also a sense of missionary intent. Leavis despised as effete both the theatre and the Rylands Bloomsbury set, yet his notions of textual scrutiny and the moral gravitas of art provided powerful analytical tools and the urgency of an evangelical spirit: good art was not only good for society but essential to its well-being. Rylands, a link to the influential Renaissance revivalist William Poel as well as to Granville-Barker, offered the sensual satisfaction of practising the art with a rigour equal to that of Leavis but with glamour as well. There was the additional allure of Rylands’ connections at the highest level of the theatrical profession. The hot-house Cambridge environment in which Hall found himself was famously the seedbed of many who became leading theatrical figures, such as Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn. As founder of the RSC and later artistic director of the National Theatre, Hall himself was to become the exemplar of the modern artistic director, a defining figure in the shaping of modern British theatre.

Negotiating the student drama jungle was superb training for weathering the vicissitudes of the commercial theatre, and during his twenty student productions, Hall displayed qualities and formed a persona that were to become familiar to those who worked with him at the RSC. He was ambitious (he decided as a fifteen-year-old to run Stratford), could pretend convincingly, easily went over budget, took well-calculated risks and had a huge appetite for work. He enjoyed self-promotion, being in charge and the politics of the theatre. He showed a flair for organisation, was single-minded and usually obtained what he desired with disarming charm. After Cambridge, he moved quickly off the treadmill of the regional reps through the short-lived Elizabethan Theatre Company to running things: the Oxford Playhouse, the Arts Theatre, London, where he made a considerable name for himself directing the English-language première of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and his own company, International Playwrights Theatre. His reputation was bolstered by having three productions in the West End at the age of twenty-five, including British premières of two plays by Tennessee Williams, Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Hall was energetic, articulate, pragmatic, successful and becoming increasingly well connected at the apex of the profession. He was the coming man.

It was the Beckett production that triggered the invitation to direct at Stratford, which Hall had longed for. His debut was not auspicious but he was invited back the following year. He was already a celebrity without being an enfant terrible in the Peter Brook mould. The press reported his love of fast cars and his marriage in 1956 to French film star Leslie Caron, which impressed the Stratford governors. Hall says she begged him not to take the RSC job but he was never going to let personal relationships stand in the way, and the marriage did not survive very long after he took up the post. He officially became director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre on 1 January 1960, aged twenty-nine, a potent symbol of the new decade, which his youth, liberal views and vigour epitomised.

Hall was seen in the 1950s as uncharacteristically young for such a responsibility, though Hugh Hunt before the war had run the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, aged only twenty-three. The Stratford governors’ anxieties concerning Hall’s age were mollified by the appointment at the same time of a new general manager, Patrick Donnell, whom Byam Shaw thought an admirable link between the old and new regimes. Although the governors endorsed Hall’s selection, the post was in the gift of Fordham Flower; there were no advertisements or formal interviews. Hall and Flower, the Labour meritocrat and the philanthropic Tory businessman, went on to form what became an unlikely yet remarkable partnership, one of the most important in post-war British theatre. The relationship between chair of governors and chief executive, who at the RSC was the artistic director, is always crucial to the health of a theatre. Too much interference by the chair inhibits the creativity of the institution; too little threatens its capacity to endure. Hall and Flower agreed on the separation of the governors from the artistic management of the company, a division that was followed within the company between the administrative and artistic wings. Future alliances between chair and chief executive officer were similarly vital to the stability of the ever-threatened RSC – there were only three more chairs to the end of the century and three more artistic directors – although it was not until the pairing of Geoffrey Cass and Adrian Noble in the 1990s that a similarly close relationship became central to the direction of the institution itself.

The Plan

Hall impressed Flower with his practical arguments. Hall had lectured on business finance and management in the RAF (by the necessity of accident, as it was not his chief subject), and early in his career had appreciated the importance of the economics and administration of theatre. His time in national service in Germany had introduced him to the concept of public subsidy and his reading, particularly books such as Norman Marshall’s The Other Theatre, supported the concept persuasively. His hero Craig in 1910 had asked for a five-year subsidy for a standing company of 100, two theatres, and a school for theatre workers. It was an early blueprint for the RSC. Hall argued to Flower that for Stratford to prosper as anything other than a provincial heritage theatre, it had to be transformed into a publicly funded, permanent or semipermanent company performing classical and contemporary work, built around a core of artists, with a base in London as well as in Stratford. There were signs that British theatre was beginning to reconnect to its society, having previously failed, in Hall’s words, ‘to take into account the fact that we have had a World War . . . and that everything in the world has changed – values, ways of living, ideals, hopes and fears’.⁴ Theatre was staking its claim as a cultural force of significance and a new Stratford–London company could add its considerable voice to this clamour.

Specifically, his aim was to emulate the great art theatre ensembles but without their institutional drawbacks. Hall understood and sympathised with the British caution concerning bureaucratic intervention in the arts and was not seeking the introduction of cultural commissars or artistic jobs for life. On a trip to the Soviet Union in 1958 with the Stratford company, during which time he had the decisive conversation with Flower regarding the future Stratford operation, he saw much that was wrong with the Soviet theatre system. Soon afterwards he met Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow and head of the Berliner Ensemble, who stunned him with her criticism of its spoilt, lazy actors. Hall did not want to replicate a civil service theatre, which he believed quickly became artistically sclerotic, and gave rise to what he characterised as an ‘official’ Puck syndrome whereby an actor takes a role by right of seniority, not aptness. He recognised that subsidy could make theatre complacent, yet, without it, the experiment could not happen or be sustained. He sought to balance the best of both systems: the collective discovery over time of the subsidised ensemble without its rigidities and the fleetness of the commercial system without its waste.

Flower was familiar with all the elements of Hall’s plans to revitalise Stratford except one, and it was critical. The new company had to win public subsidy, and to achieve this it had to gamble everything. The Treasury could not be persuaded to grant Stratford a substantial subvention unless it merited an award on both artistic and economic grounds. The measure of the former would require the company to operate at a level and breadth of activity expected of a major ensemble. The measure of the latter would require Stratford’s reserves to have disappeared. Hall’s idea was to achieve the former through the latter and vice versa. In other words, Stratford would have to become bankrupt in order to receive state aid, but it would go bankrupt by supporting the vastly expanded work of the new company.

There was a further imperative. Hall and Flower were aware that the putative National Theatre, a shadow that had hung over Stratford since the 1949 National Theatre Act had promised its creation, now really looked like coming into existence. If the challenge presented by a national theatre were not met, Stratford faced a substantial reduction in its appeal, both to audiences and to artists. The climate concerning state aid would change once the NT was launched, and a Stratford–London company could mount a strong argument for similar treatment if it were so ambitious that it could not be ignored. Hall’s was a high-risk, ‘all or nothing’ strategy, but he convinced Flower that it was necessary and practicable.⁵ Hall’s own personality – a curiou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One A Short History of Four Decades
• Part Two Staying Alive
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index