A Family Affair

Shakespeare’s plays, culminating with The Tempest, are master classes in the shifting undercurrents between parent and child, a theme from which the late Sir Peter Hall took continuous inspiration. The father of six children from four marriages, and arguably Britain’s greatest theater director, Hall chose this powerful play to be his first for the National Theatre, in 1974 (he’d been appointed director a year earlier), and revisited it 15 years later, casting the actress Jenny Hall—his daughter from his marriage to French actress Leslie Caron—in the role of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. READ ON