Michael Billington describes “a certain sadness” in Peter Hall’s later years (‘He left British theatre infinitely richer than he found it’, 13 September). But there was nothing sad about his Indian summer at Kingston. Sir Peter revelled in his role as chancellor of Kingston University, of which he was immensely proud. He loved the ceremonies, but more than anything he relished the chance to spread some of the privileges of his own Cambridge education through his uniquely creative rapport with his vice-chancellor, Peter Scott. And at Kingston’s Rose Theatre he helped shape his ideal of a teaching theatre, where actors and academics would work side by side.
For Hall, the Rose was Prospero’s island, where the music he learned from George Rylands could be fused with the rigour taught by FR Leavis. Crucially, this “wide and universal theatre” was not the Globe, with those pillars he famously deplored. When he blessed the house with As You Like It in 2004, reviewers were dismayed that his chilling vision was not the comedy they liked. But Hall insisted Shakespeare’s forest was a place of terror; and his 2010 A Midsummer Night’s Dream took critics aback by its starkness, and the fierceness with which Judi Dench’s Titania decried climate change in the mask of an aged Queen Elizabeth. So, there was no sad falling off in Peter Hall’s Kingston swansong. But equally, he did not go gently into his good night.
Richard Wilson
Sir Peter Hall professor of Shakespeare studies, Kingston University
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