Hall, Sir Peter Reginald Frederick

Hall, Sir Peter Reginald Frederick (1930– ), English theatre manager and director. He directed his first professional production in 1953 at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. A year later he was in London, at the Arts Theatre, where among other new plays he directed Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1955) and Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors (1956). He was responsible for an excellent Love's Labour's Lost (also 1956) at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, where he later directed Cymbeline (1957), Twelfth Night (1958), A Midsummer Night's Dream with Charles Laughton, and Coriolanus with Olivier (both 1959). In 1960 he became Managing Director of the newly formed RSC, where his productions included Anouilh's Becket (1961), The Wars of the Roses (based on Henry VI and Richard III, 1963), and Pinter's The Homecoming (1965; NY, 1967). He resigned in 1968, though he remained Co-Director and continued to direct plays for the company, notably Albee's A Delicate Balance (1969) and Pinter's Old Times (London and NY, 1971). From 1973 to 1988 he was Director of the National Theatre, himself directing Hamlet (1975) and Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great (1976), the opening productions at the Lyttelton and Olivier theatres respectively. He also directed such outstanding productions as Pinter's No Man's Land (1975; NY, 1977); Shaffer's Amadeus (1979; NY, 1980); a masked, all-male version of Aeschylus' Oresteia (1981); and Antony and Cleopatra (1987). His work in the commercial theatre included Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Orpheus Descending (1988), and The Merchant of Venice (1989); the last two, the first productions of his own company, were seen in New York in 1989. He is also a major director of opera.