Sir Peter Hall Research Articles

What Lures and Retains the International Creative-Class Family?: A Case Study of the Family Unit Found in Vancouver's Biotechnology Sector

This article argues that the notion of successful technology transfer is highly dependent on a region's ability to attract and retain star personnel to locations where global mobility is relatively common. Such regions also must provide professional as well as family-centered opportunities for the spouses of star personnel, if a globally mobile couple is to remain "in place" for an extended amount of time. One such region is the burgeoning world-class biotechnology sector found in Vancouver, British Columbia. Drawing upon the work of Richard Florida and Sir Peter Hall, this article explores the importance of recruiting efforts that move beyond attention on creative individuals to include his/her family. Based on the results from semi-structured interviews with executives, senior scientists, and human-resource managers at Vancouver-based biotechnology firms, this study finds that the primary factors that lured and retained international creative-class families (ICCFs) (both expatriate Canadian and foreign families) included, in particular, the availability of spousal work visas and professional employment options, as well as traditional livability attributes such as "family friendly" workplace policies, good public schools, access to affordable public universities, well-kept parks, a general feeling of public safety, and accessibility to outdoor activities. The decision to remain in Vancouver was usually made by the internationally highly skilled, biotechnology professional's spouse, as opposed to a unilateral decision made by the highly skilled (and seemingly highly mobile) biotechnology professional.

Broad views of the urban past in Europe and its extensions

Readers of English can currently refer to only two works that offer synthetic overviews of the history of European cities from the period of classical antiquity into the twentieth century. We have long had the powerfully argued and highly readable book by the architectural critic, Louis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects (1961). Beginning with the earliest settlements in the Near East and continuing through the rise of the suburbs in the United States, Mumford's volume tells a dramatic story in which urbanity at its best (as exemplified by such communities as Athens and Amsterdam) gave way to a succession of assaults, whether in the form of Baroque planning, rampant industrialization, oversized ‘megalopolises’ or automobiles. Continuing in the vein of many earlier critics, Mumford saw the modern big city as a depressing departure from earlier norms of urban beauty and human solidarity, and his view of the future was bleak indeed. Nearly four decades later, Sir Peter Hall offered a similarly large-scale but otherwise very different view of the broad sweep of the urban past, in his Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (1998). He constructed his book not as a narrative but instead as clusters of case studies, in which sixteen cities appear as scenes and agents of various types of exemplary achievement. Focusing on Europe, but not restricting himself to it, Hall presented not only Athens, Florence, Paris, Vienna, London, Manchester and Berlin but also New York, San Francisco and Tokyo as ‘places that [have] ignited the sacred flame of intelligence and human imagination’ (p. 7). It is primarily for this reason that, in Hall's view, the history of great metropolises is inseparable from the history of civilization itself.

Re‐urbanizing the suburbs? The role of theatre, the arts and urban studies

We talk and write continually about cities and yet increasingly we live in urbanized spaces that have few of the characteristics of the classic city. Some of these spaces are referred to as suburbs and others as mere urban sprawl. We need, however, to be much more specific about the diverse forms of settlement we are considering and their possibilities. Could, for example, some of the towns and cities that have been suburbanized develop once again more of the characteristics of the classic city? And what would be the role of the theatre and the arts in such a development? We will be publishing an occasional series of contributions—which will include at least one major feature—on suburbs and suburbanization. We begin with a more informal approach that documents aspects of the specific case of the Royal Borough of Kingston‐upon‐Thames, to the south‐west of London, and explores the wider implications of building a new theatre there. To do so we document a discussion between the urbanist Sir Peter Hall and the theatre director Sir Peter Hall, contextualizing it with the introduction for that event and with a postscript on policy from RBK’s Principal Arts Officer.

Chinese urban history: four cheers

These four exciting books fill in what Sir Peter Hall's monumental Cities in Civilization left undone. To be sure, they do not tell the entire story of China's five (possibly six or more according to the latest archaeological findings) thousand years of uninterrupted urban experience, but together they are a flying start, especially from the perspective of one kind of elite or another.

Tantalus (review)

John Barton's Tantalus bills itself repeatedly as "leftovers from the epic cycle." 1 Although his cycle of plays--nine in the stage performance and ten, with prologue and epilogue, in the published script--also remakes some late Euripidean plays, the spirit of the piece as a whole is far more reminiscent of what we know of cyclic epic than tragedy or even the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, which, as Aristotle's Poetics points out, are plotted in a distinctively tragic manner with a single unifying action. Sir Peter Hall and Edward Hall's performance version, which premiered in fall 2000 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and then traveled to England, is conveniently divided into hour-long segments with intermissions and meal breaks that cater to the sensibilities and attention spans of viewers accustomed to televised series like Masterpiece Theater. Any attempt to recapture the tight plotting, intensity, complexity, and tension of tragedy would inevitably fail in a performance of this scale. Instead, the viewer is drawn into a long and varied narrative replete with surprising shifts in tone, ranging from ironic to lyrical, from painful to comic; episodes drawn from obscure mythological sources or, occasionally, invented, take center stage, while episodes familiar from Homer and tragedy are deliberately deleted. Viewers can follow characters and children of characters over the series of plays and see the traits of siblings and parents emerge with variation in close relatives--an effect enhanced onstage by the fact that these relatives are often played by the same actors. Like cyclic epic, Tantalus fills in the gaps left by Homer [End Page 427] in the Trojan saga and aspires to tantalize its viewers with the possibi415lity of multiple and unstable versions of mythic truth. In addition, although the play repeatedly evokes the image of the rock of Tantalus poised to crash with finality on everyone's head, it largely espouses a cyclic and inconclusive view of history, in which events and human errors relentlessly repeat themselves without acquiring accessible meaning. "Until the great rock falls / What has happened already / Will happen again: / That is god-law, Agamemnon, / As it's man-law on earth. / Epikou Kuklou leipsana" (362). Playwright Barton and the directors fell out during the rehearsal process; the Irish playwright Colin Teevan shortened, revised, and in some critical ways transformed and trivialized Barton's original script. The stage version retains Barton's concern with the futility of war and human action but radically revises the major point of the original. Barton's script above all engages its audience in the myth-making process and the elusive truth of stories: "Who is to Blame? What is the Truth? Could it be Otherwise?" His script opens with a group of twelve "girls" (Barton's term) sleeping on barren ground. Nine (in the performance, ten) of the girls become a chorus, and the remaining ones (the script says four, though the total of twelve demands three, so there may be an error in the script here) play various female parts throughout the cycle. The group has missed the (real or mythical) boat and begins to tell one another conflicting myths about the origin of the world. The chorus, which claims to know all the traditional Greek myths, wants to know which version is true. It debates whether to drink from the nearby oracular streams of Trophonius. (One stream makes one forget the present moment; the other makes one remember even things one does not consciously know.) A poet (and tutor to Dionysus) enters with a wine bag. The skeptical chorus, which at first prefers its own stories and one truth, is lured into testing out the poet's bag of masks and engaging with multiple conflicting stories. "If you want to know the future / You must go into the past" (511). The poet and the four women don new roles and reenact story fragments for the increasingly engaged chorus. The chorus women toss stones over their shoulders in imitation of the Greek creation...

The John Fowles Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the principal rare books and manuscripts library of The University of Texas at Austin, is noted for its collections of British, American, and French literary materials, with major Additional strengths of photography, music, film, and theater arts. The Ransom Center's acquisition of the John Fowles Papers, the majority of which were obtained from the author in 1991, serves to enhance the Center's twentieth-century British literary holdings. The Fowles collection documents the author's activities as a novelist, translator of French plays, screenplay writer, essayist, local historian, and museum curator from about 1926 to 1992, though most of the materials date between 1953 and 1991. This collection offers extensive material for critical, bibliographical, and textual study of the works of John Fowles, but as yet contains relatively little in terms of more personal information such as personal correspondence and financial or legal records. The papers, now catalogued, occupy 54 boxes (approximately 24 linear feet) and are available for use by scholars. A 52-page archival inventory (produced using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh computer) describes the collection and is available on the Internet at the UT-Austin World Wide Web Home Page or from the Office of the Research Librarian at the Ransom Center in paper or diskette form. The papers are arranged in the following five series: I. Works, 1953-1991 (35 boxes); II. Adaptations of Fowles's Works, 1968-1987 (5 boxes); III. Works about Fowles, 1963-1991 (10 boxes); IV. Personal Papers, 1926-1990 (2 boxes); V. Miscellaneous, 1965-1992 (2 boxes). The majority of the collection consists of manuscripts in the Works series, including The Magus, The Aristos, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggott. Additional manuscripts represent poems, plans, several translations from the French (Cinderella, Don Juan, Lorenzaccio, The Lottery of Love, Martine, and Ourika) various nonfiction works (such as Shipwreck, Islands, Land, The Tree, and The Enigma of Stonehenge), contributions to books by others, and book reviews, as well as curtorial and local history writings. The collection also contains a number of unpublished essays, novels, plays, poems, short stories, and screenplays. Materials relating to the works include notes, clippings, multiple handwritten and typewritten drafts, printer's copies, galleys, and page proofs, many heavily revised. Of special note among the manuscripts of Fowles's major published works are an early urdraft of The Magos, a file of work notes for The Magus which includes clippings embodying Fowles's vision of the character Alison, and a notebook for Daniel Martin. While this collection does not contain all known manuscripts of The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman (The University of Tulsa holds a collection of these manuscripts), it does include an unpublished group of poems called Sequence Four (written as an exercise during the writing of The Collector), as well as the final typescript for The French Lieutenant's Woman. During the writing and publishing of his works, Fowles kept related correspondence, clippings, contracts, and other items in the folders along with his manuscripts, and this original order has been maintained. The correspondence is usually from agents, editors, co-authors, and commissioners of works among others, and serves to elucidate the evolution of Fowles's works. Major correspondents include Julian Bach, Anthony Sheil, Tom Maschler (Jonathan Cape Limited), Ray A. Roberts (Little, Brown, and Company), Fay Godwin, and Michael Bogdanov, John Russell Brown, Peter Gill, and Sir Peter Hall (all of The National Theatre). Fowles's original file folders, also preserved in the collection, frequently include title information, dates, identifications of draft progression, or other notes. Brief descriptive notes, with information Fowles apparently jotted down as he was preparing his papers for shipment to the Ransom Center, provide valuable commentary on the works. …

Four Bars of ‘Agit’. Incidental Music for Victorian and Edwardian Melodrama. Edited by David Mayer and Matthew Scott, with a preface by Sir Peter Hall. London: Samuel French, 1983. Pp. 80. £5.25.

Four Bars of ‘Agit’. Incidental Music for Victorian and Edwardian Melodrama. Edited by David Mayer and Matthew Scott, with a preface by Sir Peter Hall. London: Samuel French, 1983. Pp. 80. £5.25. - Volume 9 Issue 2

Shakespeare in Stratford and London, 1981

It is pleasing to curl one's fancy around the symmetry that London and Stratford-upon-Avon are as important today as centers for theatregoing as they were in Shakespeare's time. The steady flow of eminent and not-so-eminent itinerant companies through Shakespeare's home town in the midand late-sixteenth century ensured that the populace, then as now, was well entertained and that any keen citizen had ample opportunity to try and join the profession. It is true that nowadays transference is reversed, with major productions having conception and birth in Stratford before moving in willowy young maturity to London. But the symmetry is there, and a sense that the country's metropolitan heart depends mightily on the arterial flow from the environs. It is fervently to be hoped that this pattern will survive, though it must be strongly tempting for the management to relegate the awkward, old, curmudgeonly inconvenient Memorial building at Stratford now that the spanking new London Barbican center for the Royal Shakespeare Company is opened. The Aldwych Theatre (known till recently as the RSC's London home) will doubtless go. Money problems may well be added to the lures of newness, so that Trevor Nunn and company may soon confront Sir Peter Hall at the National, with headquarters in London-Stratford left slowly to museum their way into secondary status. This would be a sadness and probably an error with several dimensions-not least because it would only add one more cultural facet to a divisiveness between center and periphery, between capital and provinces-a divisiveness that is already dangerous and sapping-but perhaps most because, at Stratford, the RSC has created at its Other Place's small auditorium a theatre of exciting potency and achievement. Stratford's main house still has to come to terms with the presence of this small theatre, but it is out of the tension between the two (the Warehouse in London is a pale imitation) that the Company is likely to revitalize itself. Monolith Barbican (Trevor Nunn) facing stony National (Peter Hall) will create no tensions, only a kind of clobbering, unproductive medieval warfare-perhaps scenarioed by John Barton. In any case, so far as Shakespeare is concerned, the National has never begun to rival the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is no real contest. In Stratford, because of The Other Place, the RSC is now in creative challenge with itself-and that is good. But there is a world elsewhere, in theatre as in reality, and the specific relationships of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company have to be seen against a context of some doubt, confusion, and not a little anger. All theatres lack money-many of them, though not all, partly because they tend to spend it loosely, with childlike incontinence. One has to see, but few do-including Great Britain's clumsily indeterminate Arts Council (indeterminate in the sense that it seems to base some of its funding less on policy than on sentiment, apprehension, hazy ideology, or benevolent unconviction)-the poor financial state of British theatre in ternis both of the economic situation and of its own natural, ineradicable profligacy. Theatres are incapable of real economy-though they play at it-because their world is one of illusion and self-delusion. The credit titles for staff at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National would be terrifying to many a canny businessman. They are feasible only if you remember that theatre survives solely by being larger, in every sense, than life. In the long run small theatres suffer more than larger ones because they have less to be profligate about and fewer opportunities to indulge in endearing but incredible shadow-play with reality. The Royal Shakespeare Company (or any large organization) can always cock a snook at public relations and, for example, charge theatre critics for their second tickets at first nights (traditionally a free privilege). The smaller theatres may not dare to do it-at least they haven't. How many pence the Royal Shakespeare Company has saved by its fiddling and farcical gesture one cannot say. Enough to pay for yet another (and again temporary) alteration to the main house stage for the

Visual Metaphors, Theatres and Courts

There was, earlier this winter, a great deal of ribald talk about a scene in the National Theatre’s production of Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain. There is likely to be more talk of the same sort now that the Secretary of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association is proceeding with her suit against Mr Michael Bogdanov for procuring the commission of an act of gross indecency between Mr Peter Sproule and Mr Greg Hills on 19th December last. And all this talk will doubtless be excited by public interest in Mr Timothy Sainsbury’s Indecency Displays Bill and the Government’s promise to assist the progress of that Bill through Parliament. We are, it seems, again about to debate the meaning of ‘indecency’.Though Sir Peter Hall has not followed the distasteful example of another theatre director, I would yet like to suggest that The Romans and indecency should be considered with the Old Vic production of Macbeth in mind.I had secured my ticket for that Macbeth some weeks before the production opened, so I was not required to join the line of those who had been excited by the critical notices which quickly made Mr Brian Forbes’ production and Mr Peter O’Toole’s performance notorious. The opportunities for happiness, or even a little pleasure, are not so common in my life that I would easily forego a performance of any of Shakespeare’s plays, and among them, Macbeth has especial claims. Once, when quite a small boy, I surprised the greatest Macbeth of my time rehearsing to himself across the lawn: ‘Learning me lines, dear laddie’, Godfrey Tearle admitted with a flourish.