Hooray for Hallifax
There was a bit of a do for the elegant, tall and stringy Michael Hallifax at the National Theatre today. Hallifax was the man who backed up the aspirations of our modern theatre’s great geniuses, Laurence Olivier, George Devine and Peter Hall. He was the exemplary stage manager, the ideal Prospero, the perfect Peter Quince.
Dame Joan, Lady Olivier, was there, elegantly ferried around by her son Richard, along with such crucial NT alumni as Edward Petherbridge – who delivered a brilliant celebratory ode of his own devising – Bill Gaskill, Michael Pennington, David Bradley, Gawn Grainger, and Peter Hall
The latter brilliantly pointed out that whenever Hallifax moved on to the next great theatrical enterprise, he left no ill feeling, or even sadness, behind him: it was a mystery how Hallifax had gone from the West End of Binkie Beaumont to the Royal Court, the new RSC of Peter Hall, the infant National of Olivier, the RSC again, then the NT with Hall; he just turned up. He knew where the action was and made it happen.
Pennington said he was one of the great quiet men of our theatre. Gaskill pointed out the delicious irony of Hallifax, as company manager, walking onto the Court stage at the start of the Osborne revolution, to “crave your indulgence.”
And Richard Mangan, stage manager and historian, suggested that Ernest Hemingway would have to redefine his notion of style as “grace under pressure” if he’d seen Hallifax dealing with a crisis on tour.
The crowd of celebrants included a magnificently blazered and red-eyed Jeremy Kemp, the quietly adorable Gemma Jones, NT stalwarts from Simon Relph, John Goodwin and Peter Stevens – members, along with Hallifax, of what I always called Peter Halls’s “gang of eight” in 1976 – Julian Glover and Charles Kay, Tim West and Prunella Scales, whom I always think of as Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray with attitude (and a sense of humour) and such great designers, whose dreams Hallifax helped happen, such as Bill Dudley, Ralph Koltai and John Gunter.
It was an incredible occasion and a moving testimony to the grace and power of the post-War British theatre. I also caught up with my former (deputy) editor on the Financial Times, David Palmer, whose delightful wife is a first cousin of Hallifax’s widow, Elizabeth. It was Elizabeth who said to me that she loved Michael but never really knew him.
This struck me as extraordinary…nearly as extraordinary as David Palmer’s injunction to me in 1981, as he welcomed be aboard the FT staff, that they wanted me to be the new Ken Tynan, but I “wasn’t quite there yet.” I’m still trying. But at least, like the inimitable Ken, I had the pleasure of knowing Michael Hallifax.