This is the best modern theatre I know

10 April 2012

Here is a theatrical anomaly. While our West End playhouses crumble, and smaller venues quail before the current 20 per cent cut in Arts Council funding, a brand-spanking-new theatre is opening in Kingston-upon-Thames.

The 900-seat £11 million Rose, modelled on the Elizabethan original where Shakespeare played, has been 23 years in the birthing. Next Wednesday, after four years as the project's directorial figurehead, Sir Peter Hall will open the Rose's first season with his production for English Touring Theatre of Uncle Vanya - his first stab at Chekhov's play since his undergraduate days at Cambridge 56 years ago.

You might expect Hall, 77, to be triumphant. The founder of the RSC and a former director of the National Theatre and Glyndebourne now has his first permanent home since the Peter Hall Company was evicted from the Old Vic in 1998 and he embarked on a starry but itinerant freelance career.

The Rose is slap bang in the middle of the suburbanites who made up 62 per cent of his core audience at the National and 20 minutes from central London for urban culture vultures keen to see this unique space or just to find out what Hall, the old fox, is up to now. His powerbase is surely strengthened by his position as chancellor of Kingston University, which, along with the local council, has paid for the new theatre. Yet Hall, still a physical ringer for Orson Welles, is lugubrious. Tired, even.

"We are opening the Rose with high expectation and great pride, and great thanks to the local authority and the university," he says. But what he really needs is benefactors. The Rose receives no core funding and needs £600,000 to get through its first year: Hall's grander plans, for a postgraduate theatre course at the university that would work with and feed into two small resident companies performing in repertory at the theatre - and doing two plays a day from Thursday to Sunday - are on hold.

"I don't know what will happen," Hall continues. "All I know is that it's the most beautiful modern theatre I know. It works, and it's there. And somebody else will probably find the money and make it work." He is happy to direct there, or to helm the educational programme should it come off. But he concedes that the daytoday admin and funding wrangles involved in running a theatre no longer appeal to him - he has not been directly involved in fundraising, instead playing the role of "figurehead". "Such energy as I have got, I hope, will be devoted to putting plays on and passing whatever knowledge I have on to other people," he says.

It seems most of Hall's enthusiasm was focused on getting the Rose open. He didn't initially want to get involved in the theatre at all when his old friend broadcaster David Jacobs sent him a brochure for the shell of a theatre building, which Jacobs and other local residents had insisted was included as a planning gain in a 1980s development of riverside apartments.

"I thought, oh no, I mustn't put my name to it because I'll then do nothing for it," says Hall. "Then I opened the brochure, saw the floor plan and just went 'wow'. When the original Rose was excavated 10 or 12 years ago I stood on its stage and felt where the audience had been, and they were all in my eyeline. I went to see the new building in its scaffolding state and it seemed to me to answer so many problems that we have in terms of the actor-audience relationship."

The new Rose seats, as Hall puts it, "almost 1,000 people in extraordinary intimacy" in three horseshoe-shaped tiers of seats around a pit where groundlings can sit on cushions for £5 a pop. The projecting stage emulates the lozenge shape that theatre historians now believe the Rose's original owner, Philip Henslowe, arrived at, rather than the thrust stage traditionally imagined.

"A thrust stage is like a diving board," observes Hall. "It gives you a great entrance but when you get to the end of it you've either got to jump off or, rather embarrassingly, turn round and go back." The new Rose has no wings, no fly tower for scenery, just an open passageway at the back with a balcony above. Simply put, there's nowhere for actors to hide.

"It is a theatre dedicated to the word, to our language, to English, which I think is important in this age of mumbles," Hall says. "And it lends itself to repertory. There's no problem changing sets between shows because you simply can't have a big set on that stage. Yet it is the most versatile space. Put down lino and some old furniture and you could do The Birthday Party. Put in a tree and you can do Godot."

As if to point this up, Hall's first season, post-Vanya, includes Warren Mitchell in the old-fashioned drama Visiting Mr Green, Alan Plater's exuberant Blonde Bombshells of 1943 and David Harrower's expressionist play about sex abuse, Blackbird. The skeletal stage - and its balcony - will also play host to Northern Broadsides' stripped-down Romeo and Juliet and Tara Arts' acrobatic production of The Tempest. After that, it's anybody's guess.

"I have taken half the profession to see this theatre and nobody has said anything other than 'When can I do something here?'," says Hall, adding drily, "but they do require payment. Trevor Nunn, for one, is very keen to direct something here. Maybe he could bring money with him."

Hall says he never expected funding because the Rose "didn't fit into any sort of plan" but he is aghast, if not exactly surprised about the recent Arts Council cuts. For him, it's like his years at the National in the 1980s all over again, when he believes the Thatcherite onslaught on the arts wiped out an entire generation of theatregoers.

"Until now [Labour] did the bare minimum necessary to maintain the status quo," he says. "This is the first time they have set out to destroy. They have decimated the arts, one of the things we are really good at, wrecked the small people who are developing the next generation. It's depressing to have had a succession of governments of both stripes who are only friendly to the arts when they are in opposition. I wish one of the major parties would grow up about culture, not be embarrassed by it. But there are no votes in art so they don't rate it."

The local Labour and Conservative parties in Kingston, he notes, opposed the Rose. It was the Lib-Dems in charge of the council who nursed it to completion. Would a Lib-Dem government give Hall cause for hope? "No," he intones gloomily.

Growing up as the working-class son of a Bury St Edmunds railway clerk, Hall was inspired to become a director aged 14 by family trips to the West End but had no idea of "how to do it or whether anyone would let me do it" until he went to Cambridge. There he staged five productions a year and almost failed his degree.

Within two weeks of graduating in 1955 he was at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, directing Somerset Maugham's The Letter. A year later he was running the Arts Theatre, where he premiered an unknown work, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In the interim, not that much has changed. He still directs around five works a year and, apart from his diversification into opera, his ethos has remained remarkably consistent.

His actress daughter Rebecca once said there was nothing in his life apart from family and work, and he has managed to combine the two by working with at least four of his six children by his four wives: Rebecca, indeed, starred as Rosalind in the As You Like It he staged in the uncompleted Rose in 2004 - a demonstration of the theatre's potential that Hall thinks swung the balance in favour of its completion.

"It's hard for me to put it into words," Hall says, "but all I've ever wanted to do was theatre based on the word - theatre based on Shakespeare - and I've always had a strong feeling that you have to be tuned into new work, new writing, if you want to make the classics live. I hope I've got better and developed in the past 50-odd years but what I do hasn't really altered. I love my work and I hope I can go on until I drop."

And even if he is ambivalent about the Rose's future, he is energised about its present, particularly the opening production. "I'm absolutely adoring doing Vanya," he says. "I've got a wonderful cast [it includes Nicholas le Prevost, Neil Pearson and Ronald Pickup] who aren't afraid of making fools of themselves, which is a big part of Chekhov's drama. It's funny, cruel, hurtful, painful, but very, very human. Wonderful writer." For the first time in our interview, he seems genuinely enthused.

Uncle Vanya is at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, from 16 January (0871 230 1552; www.rosetheatrekingston.org).

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