Show Business: The Perils of Being Sir Peter

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-tattle diaries, the director of a lugubrious new musical about Actress Jean Seberg, and the star of a brouhaha that boasts enough celebrities, sex, money, backstabbing and even cultural significance to fill every London tabloid from now till Boxing Day. Screaming headlines leap to the imagination:

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."

Now listen to Jonathan Miller, who quit his job as one of the National's associate directors in 1975 and still admits to getting into "a homicidal rage" when thinking of Hall: "Working for him was like working for Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, he always has a couple of underlings around who finish his enemies off by spoiling their reputations. I've talked to all of them—Laurence Olivier, John Dexter and Michael Blakemore [three of Hall's onetime colleagues]—and there is a unanimous feeling of righteous indignation."

SIR PETER'S OPERAS EARN CATCALLS

ON TWO CONTINENTS. For Hall, it has been a rough year on the roller coaster of notoriety, after triumphs in 1982 at the National (including Harold Pinter's Other Places) and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (where Hall directed Orfeo et Eurydice). But last November he staged Verdi's Macbeth at New York City's Metropolitan Opera to a gang of mostly abusive reviews. Then this summer Hall premiered his production of The Ring of the Nibelung at Bayreuth, and things were no sunnier there. The work opened to bad reviews and an audience that sounded, as one reviewer wrote, "like hundreds of savage wolves baying for blood."

PINTER ANGRILY QUITS N.T., SCORES