John Hall (English playwright)


John Clifford Hall was an English playwright who wrote over thirty plays for theatre, television and radio.

Biography

Hall was educated at Queens College, Oxford, where he studied under C. S. Lewis. Study for his MA was interrupted by service in the Royal Naval Reserve. For this he studied Japanese and worked in Intelligence at Bletchley Park.
His first produced play, World Behind Your Back, was in collaboration with actor William Eedle, at the Mercury Theatre in London in 1952.
Albert Finney starred in one of his most successful plays, The Lizard on the Rock, at Birmingham Repertory Theatre of which Michael Billington wrote: 'Above all, I remember him in The Lizard on the Rock by John Hall, which required him to be shot at point-blank range in the stomach: as he suddenly crumpled, uttering cat-like cries, the critic Kenneth Tynan in The Observer described it as "the best fall since Feuillère", who was then queen of the French stage'.
The Lizard on the Rock was well-received. It is a story based around '...an industrialist – a Senator – who is prospecting for water...' '...in the Western Australian desert... the central character outwardly a man of success and power, but faced with the collapse of his achievements...' and the realisation that 'Life cannot depend upon "the blandishments of power; the blind man groping among the useless treasure.'"
Sir John Gielgud was quoted as saying that the play contained 'a great deal of power and originality'. and the playwright Christopher Fry wrote: 'Mr Hall's mind is his own; what he has to say is his own...' The review in The Stage for the Birmingham production of the play read: 'an interesting journey through a variety of tense scenes, each peopled with characters that might in turn be the focal point of the play themselves... Mr. Hall... gives them an aura pregnant with possibilities.' The International Theatre Annual described the blank verse in The Lizard on the Rock as 'Eliotesque'.
Hall wrote his play Exit, Joe, Running influenced by 'the marked contrasts of life at Oxford... and Keele ... The leading character – within a few months of leaving academia – writes a paper titled "39 Reasons Why University Is No Good"'.
Hall considered the most important playwrights of the 1960s were '...Harold Pinter, Christopher Fry, Robert Bolt, John Arden, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Peter Schaeffer and Charles Wood'. He was influenced by Fry during the resurrection of verse drama, and by Anton Chekhov. One of his own favourite plays was Everly, which never got beyond a rehearsed reading. Wrang-Gaites, written for his sons to enjoy, was originally performed by the York Theatre Royal Activists in 1973 and was later set to music at Chichester University. Of Wrang-Gaites, playwright Christopher Fry wrote: 'It is as though the traditional Mummer's Play of St George and the Dragon had spread and ramified and leapt into the twentieth century.'

Works

Stage plays

Television plays

Radio plays

  • 1982    Chrissie  –  Radio 4
  • 1983    Jackie  –  Radio 4, Saturday Night theatre
  • 1985    The Gaudy  –  Radio 3
  • 1985    In the Venn Country  –  Radio 4
  • 1986    Breakfast at Mother Brown's  –  Radio 4          
  • 1987    The Bridge  –  Radio 4
  • 1988    The Little House  –  Radio 3
  • 1989    The Wedding of Jackie  –  Radio 4