George Hall lived a great life. That’s him below on his 101st birthday. He was still teaching two weeks before his final exit.
The incomparable George Hall
I’ve just been to London to attend his memorial at St. Paul’s (the actors’ church) in Covent Garden.
I knew him when he was Head of Acting at The Central School of Speech and Drama. It was a full house and my year, Stage ’83 was well represented at the service, and we reminisced very fondly.
Clockwise from top Michael Bailie, Richard Fallon. Mark Carey, Matilda Thorpe, some bloke, Harriet Thorpe. Tim Watson, blokes previously mentioned. Loads of people.
Everyone who spoke during the service was a Central acting course graduate and so the delivery was impeccable, the timing excellent, and all speakers combined a deep affection for the subject with poignant and personal recollections which were also hilarious. But then you’d expect that, wouldn’t you, from trained actors?
Apart from old friends who were fellow students, I was lucky to meet again, two people who made significant impressions on me. In particular during the course of a production of The Ruling Class. It was directed by the amazing Nickolas Grace – sidebar here: Nic was a man of the most delightful sparkling energy and mischief. With a professed loathing of any theatrical experience that was boring, he demanded inventiveness from his actors.
Nickolas Grace (in blue) with some bloke
One evening we were rehearsing in the Embassy Theatre – this was long before it was renovated to the cozy plush comfort we see now – Nic was moving around the auditorium flipping the seats up. “Do you know what this is?!” he trumpeted from somewhere in the back of the house.
The rehearsal halted.
“It’s the sound of seats flipping up!. Why are the seats flipping up? Because people are leaving. Why are they leaving? Because they are bored! Why are they bored? Because you are boring! Get some fucking ideas!!!”
It was an excellent way to confront a student too complacent in his own insecure confidence. Of course these days the HR department would be alerted and God knows how many cancel points deployed.
But back then when the world was a little saner, it was a bold and well timed shock to my system. I went home that night in a frenzy of mind, thinking “Ideas, ideas, where can I get some? What did he mean? What is an idea anyway?”
The next day I approached Nic tentatively, “Er, Nic …”
“YES?!”
“I, er, I’ve had an idea …”
“I can’t sleep with you yet, it’s too early in the production!”
Genius.
And no, if you’re curious, we never did actually sleep together. But the incident remains in my memory a treasured learning experience.
As for many of us, acting was a vocational call for me, and my teen years were ones of deep frustration. The need to somehow become an actor grew more and more insistent, exactly parallel to my complete ignorance of how to even begin.
Through some very lucky chances I managed to get a place at Central. When I arrived, all the other kids already there seemed accomplished, talented, and like something out of ‘Fame’ the movie. Now of course I know they were just as insecure as I was, but then it seemed that they could all do miraculous things like sing in tune.
And dance.
Ah … this singing thing. Long story short; when I was 9 years old a music teacher told me I was tone deaf. Not once but several times. It worked. Any astrologers reading? Chiron in the 5th.
When I told George about that teacher, his response was immediate, Well he was a ****.” Years later I wrote a version of the story of the teacher who was a **** and sold it to BBC Radio for £140, so the trauma wasn’t entirely wasted.
It’s hard to describe what happens to me when I’m asked to sing on stage.
Similarly with complicated things like moving one’s limbs in rhythm, aka dancing. Tricky stuff. And when it comes to the really esoteric disciples of, say Jazz, and especially Tap …
So there I am outside St. Paul’s with the lovely Karen Rabinowitz 43 years later after the weekly challenge of tap classes in Room D. She was a patient expert, who exuded the quiet certainty that if you keep at it, you will improve.
Some bloke (again!), Karen Rabinowitz, the newborn she brought to classes is now all grown up and mother herself.
After being initially sympathetic, George took a different tack. The Ruling Class is a satire on the British upper class, it contains several numbers. I went to George for sympathy because I was faced with something that seemed impossible, “Oh,” said George, before I could say anything, his eyebrows raised in faux surprise, “Do you have to sing in this?” Behind the words, the unspoken, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
And I had to dance too. Karen gave me some basic moves and there was a class in Room D and everyone in my year was there and I staggered through the routine…
“Here is the jazz, down on the heels, up on the toes …” and all the time the inner monologue was going … “what comes next, is it the left leg? Or the right arm? And what’s the note? Did I get it? No, obviously not. Oh fuck …” and so on.
When I got the end, all my fellow student colleagues burst into applause. I think there were even hoots and whistles. I definitely wasn’t expecting that, and even now four and a bit decades later the tears well up. The support was overwhelming, and overwhelmingly moving. But in that moment all I wanted to do was slide away, crawl into a burrow somewhere and hibernate until the pain was over.
“Shall we do it again?” said Karen quietly.
I remember being shocked. Again? But… what, again? I mean I’ve done it, haven’t I? … Er, not quite.
“Yes. Again.” said Karen quietly.
And we did it again. And again.
I’d like to tell you that I’ve just recorded my solo album, but no. Or that they call me for Broadway musicals, but no. And even though I have more than once sung and even danced on professional stages, I’m never gonna be a Sinatra threat. But these days, I don’t quit and that lesson alone is worth the price of admission.
Oh and by the way, it was The Ruling Class that got me my first agent.
As Sir Tony Robinson in his eulogy pointed out, each of us who went to Central has a George Hall story.
George had eclectic tastes in theatre ranging from Opera to Music Hall, from Circus to Shakespeare. From Ballet to Mask.
His skill as a teacher gets better and better in my memory as time goes by. I’m grateful he had the good taste to employ both Nic and Karen seen above to teach us, and he held it all together with a unique lightness of touch that was often expressed in his feedback. Examples include:
“Tony, there’s something about the way you walk as if you’re saving your heels for later.”
“Nick, there’s just something about having ‘cool’ shoulders.”
That’s Nick as Boyet in Love’s Labors Lost giving us the shoulders.
“Diana, it’s as if you know all about the XYZ of acting … but nothing about the ABC.”
That thing about the XYZ …
In an early seminar I remember George’s description of the actor Robert Newton, “His body was held together by tension, his final consonants were a matter of chance, and yet, when he came on as the Button Moulder in Act 4 of Peet Gynt, you knew that he was coming from a place that most of us have never been to.”
George was a much loved man. He had enormous influence on the profession.
THE AFTER PARTY
They say that a death is like a sunset. When someone dies you get all the great colors they had in life. I flew west returning to the US the day after the hoolie for George, and it was just the right time of day so that the sunset out the window lasted for five hours.
