Word: sir
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Hall stirs up a stew with his tattling diaries and a new musical "If you can't have a monumental success," Peter Hall confided to his diary in 1972, "I suppose you may as well have a monumental failure." Lately Sir Peter, 53, has been getting his melancholy wish. Founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, boss for a decade of the huge National Theater, a noted director of plays, operas and films, Hall has long been the most successful and controversial impresario on the bustling British arts scene. Now he is the bestselling author of a volume of tittle...
FOES BLAST HALL: "AS BAD AS NIXON!" Publication this fall of Peter Hall's Diaries, which chronicles his first eight years at the National (1972-80), has sent Sir Peter's old enemies scurrying to put in their tuppence worth. Playwright John Osborne denounced the book as a "numbing record of banal ambition, official evasiveness and individual cupidity." Opera Critic Tom Sutcliffe of the Guardian argues that "Hall has rewritten the history of the National's early days. It's a matter of setting the record crooked...
...Indeed, Sir has become the thing he plays, a Lear-like creature wandering the blasted heath that is wartime Britain. The women of his company are very rough analogues to Lear's daughters, while Norman is certainly meant to be understood as the Fool. But Ronald Harwood's adaptation of his own play does not force these comparisons too hard. It is perfectly possible to enjoy The Dresser simply as a backstage fable, rich in the full-tilt emotional exaggeration of plays and pictures that try to catch showfolk off guard, offstage. Or as a fairly acute study...
...such posterity as the film vaults grant. On its face his is a comic turn, an impersonation of a homosexual impersonating a nanny to a grownup child. But his mincing rage for order has deeper roots; this small and isolated backstage world has offered him, until Sir started disrupting it, an asylum from the larger world he could never manage. Subtle observation and marvelously controlled invention mark Courtenay's work...
Finney is a revelation. His was almost a secondary role in the theater, largely because Sir's performances were observed and discussed by the other characters but never seen by the audience. In adapting play to film, Harwood and the always sensible Peter Yates have chosen to show Sir at work. And Finney has chosen to be as good as he can be as Lear. This redeems Sir from the bombastic egocentricity of his dressing-room self, placing a humanizing glaze on his hamminess. It also makes the ironic point that for many actors a role is the only...