The first thing you notice about Rebecca Hall — on stage, as in person — is
her sheer loftiness. There may be taller women, but she is serenely,
aristocratically vertical. In her own words, she is “a giant” — disablingly
so, given the half-pint proportions of so many actors. In the cauldron of
performance, she has had to compromise. “I’ve got really good at dropping my
hip and drooping my shoulders, and making myself look small,” she says. No
amount of folding herself into creases will stop her from towering over
Simon Russell Beale, opposite whom she is now playing at the Old Vic in two
great classical roles. But there is another side effect of being 5ft 10in —
and not blonde — in her line of work. Or so she reckons. You get typecast as
a brainbox. “I’m often cast as clever people. It doesn’t mean I necessarily
am.”
Her saying so doesn’t necessarily mean she isn’t. Anyone who saw her in The
Camomile Lawn will have known she was one of life’s cerebral head girls.
When Peter Hall cast the only child of his third marriage in the television
adaptation of Mary Wesley’s novel, she was only 10. But even at that age,
she was already playing the only character who talked any sense. And so it
continued into her early twenties. Before anyone else could employ her, she
was working with her father, who did little to dissuade audiences that his
daughter was a genius when he cast her as those emancipated Shavian heroines
— in Mrs Warren’s Profession, and Man and Superman — who can rationalise the
hind legs off a donkey. Then he sent her round the world as Rosalind,
perhaps the cleverest character in Shakespeare. Even when she escaped from
his benign clutches to play an undergrad in the film Starter for 10, her
amused Cambridge chums judged it a work of documentary realism. Her
character, who is effortlessly above all the hysteria of University
Challenge, was “precocious and irritating, and that was exactly what I was
like”.
So, Rebecca Hall is in the — for an attractive young actress — surely unique
position of wanting to play down her IQ. She wants to be taken less
seriously. It’s why she was thrilled to flutter her eyelids as David Frost’s
pointless but alluring floozie in Frost/Nixon. “That was valuable to me.
Nobody had ever cast me to swan around in the background in dresses. I
thought, ‘Why not?’ Nice to be able to prove to the world that I can also
look pretty, as well as using my brain. It’s usually the other way round.”
But it was her performance in Vicky Cristina Barcelona that decisively
reinvented her. Penelope Cruz may have clasped the Oscar; Hall was the
revelation. Of course, it helped that it was Woody Allen’s first
semi-presentable effort in a long old time. It must also have helped that
Allen cast her after one of his implausibly brief interviews — “Can you do
an American accent?” “Yes” — without troubling to delve any deeper.
Whatever: for the first time ever, Hall was asked to play someone
tongue-tied and diffident. As a teenager, she had dreams of playing a
reincarnation of her yakky, sophisticated namesake from Annie Hall. And yet
here she was playing the ghost of Mariel Hemingway’s airy ingénue in
Manhattan.
Having overcome her fears that Allen’s recent record is, as she puts it, “a
bit dodge”, she remembers the sensation of reading the script. “I suppose I
did do a little moment” — she mimes a gag reflex — “when you see the
dot-dot-dots on the page and go, ‘Oh, okay, this is familiar.’ ” Not in a
good way, then? “A bit double. In the way that you go, ‘Oh, great, I can be
one of those people.’ But part of your brain is going, ‘Oh, Christ, I don’t
want to be someone that’s doing that.’ ” She overcame her doubt by page 16.
The result was instant. A career that, for most of her twenties, had been
characterised as promising was catalysed into something heftier. Hall is now
27. However intelligent people have her down as, her next move has not been
seen as remotely clever by the Hollywood agents appointed to run her film
career. Vicky might have been seen as a springboard to bigger parts in
brasher movies, more like her suicidal wife in The Prestige, only around for
longer. Instead, Hall chose to jump off one juggernaut and onto another
heading in the other direction: a theatrical stint lasting a couple of
months shy of a year. “It took them quite a long time to deal with that. A
month into rehearsal, there was a lot of, ‘I know you’re doing this, but can
you just read this script? It’s shooting in...’ ‘No! I’m doing a play.’”
Two, in fact. Hall is part of the inaugural cast of the Bridge Project. Sam
Mendes’s return to theatre is an epic odyssey spanning three years and six
plays. The first season’s double bill kicked off at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music and fetches up in Epidaurus, but for now it has bedded down at
London’s Old Vic. Hall is part of a transatlantic cast tilting at The Cherry
Orchard, in a new version by Tom Stoppard, and The Winter’s Tale. No need to
ask why she signed up to work not only with Mendes but also with Russell
Beale, Sinéad Cusack and Ethan Hawke. But what particularly about her two
roles lured her? Both explore the lucklessness of love. Hermione is falsely
accused by Leontes of adultery in a showpiece trial scene and condemned to
death. Varya is one of Chekhov’s terminal spinsters, who dutifully runs the
bankrupt household while waiting for Lopakhin, the filthy-rich son of a
serf, to propose.
“Hermione is enormously flattering to my ego,” Hall explains. “For quite a
long time, I thought, ‘Did he really say Hermione?’ But it attracted me to
play a grown-up. I haven’t really done that.” The way Hall
describes her — “the wife that everyone wants at their social event: witty,
intelligent, devoted, sexy but not so that it’s wrong” — Hermione is a sort
of Shakespearian Michelle Obama: not an easy role to pull off. As for Varya,
Hall has been eyeing her up for years. “Yes, she’s austere and
commanding, but to me she is someone playing a role. There are elements that
contradict the stereotype. There is something joyous there, too.” Just as
her height is an advantage for Hermione, stuck up on the plinth as a statue
for the troubling final scene, so it is for Varya. “She stands bolt upright.
She’s trying to hold in an awful lot. If she slouched, she’d probably turn
into a puddle.” When she does finally collapse, upon coming to the
Chekhovian understanding that her life will consist of disappointment unto
death, the effect is shattering.
You can perhaps see why Hall is not often asked to be truly feral and sensual.
The dark, pebbly eyes and alto chest voice suggest a confidence and wisdom,
and maybe even a sort of bluestocking invulnerability. When you next see her
on film, she’ll be playing Emily Wotton, a suffragette, in Dorian Gray
(don’t look up her character in the book: she’s not there). The closest she
has come so far to losing all control is as Jean Rhys’s pyromaniac heroine
in the BBC’s Wide Sargasso Sea. When she does let go, she knows the gift is
not an inheritance from her father. Thanks to her surname, and Sir Peter’s
eagerness to bring her on, it’s often overlooked that Hall was, in fact,
brought up as a single child from the age of five by her American mother,
the soprano Maria Ewing. She spent years in the wings of opera houses. She
remembers the Los Angeles costume department making her replica costumes
from Tosca for her dolls. A salient memory is of Ewing’s Salome, nakedly
dancing the seven veils. “She’s the big, big influence, really. A lot of my
memories of getting excited about performing are watching my mum clinging to
the severed head of John the Baptist. I feel like I was watching it for a
massive chunk of my childhood. She is one of the greatest performers that
I’ve ever witnessed, and she’s my mum.”
And yet Hall was always going to act, not sing. She already knew that when she
went up to Cambridge. She was officially there to read English, but with
quiet premeditation she pulled the plug after two years. “I just felt I did
it all in two years and then I got a bit itchy. I wasn’t very good at
getting to the lectures and getting my essays in on time. It wasn’t nearly
as free and easy as my dad described it, and I got into an awful lot of
trouble. I had seen friends of mine disappear into the library in the third
year. I didn’t want my memory to end up being that. Also, I didn’t really
want the degree.” Once her father had overcome his devastation, he offered
her a West End lead as Mrs Warren’s disapproving daughter. But she dithered.
“I was very aware that if I was somebody else looking at me, I would want to
think I was crap. I had visions of doing interviews with my dad, and
thinking how hideous all of that was.” She felt vindicated in her decision
on the first preview, even more so after her performance won her the Ian
Charleson award in 2003.
Not that it smoothed her path to further stage work. “I couldn’t for love nor
money get a theatre audition at that time. It was much easier to get
auditions for film and TV — always, up until now.” Her theory is that the
long shadow cast by her lineage might have put off directors from copycat
casting. “Young directors set out to be the next Peter Hall, they don’t want
to be like Peter Hall. So if they cast his daughter, then they’re
associating with him when maybe they want to keep a distance.”
In the end, after the remarkable start he had given her, it became clear to
Hall that she needed to seek alternative employment. Like a good girl, she
agonised. “I’m very aware being the daughter of a director that actors moan
about rejection,” she says, “but the truth is, directors get rejected just
as much as actors do. And that hurts, too. There was a point where I had to
go and say, ‘No, I’ve got to do something else.’ That’s where the
father-daughter stuff comes in. It’s difficult to turn your dad down.” Thus,
Mendes is only her third stage director. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that
she has put all those Hollywood scripts on hold to play grown-ups with a
director who has been known as the next Peter Hall for 20 years now. It may
even be an act of steely oedipal severance.
The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard are in repertory at the Old Vic,
SE1, until August 15
