ABSTRACT
With its customary timing, the National Theatre (NT) moved from the Old Vic to its new building on the South Bank eleven months after its last deadline on 23 April 1975, a symbolic date, Shakespeare's birthday, and about six years after Peter Stein had declared that big state theatres were a thing of the past. Peter Hall decided to move in prematurely because he was convinced that otherwise the place would never be finished. Hall wanted to assemble the best acting talents in the country for his company. He hoped that the NT would become a shop window for British theatre, a laudible aim, but this was no comfort for managements who might find that their best professionals were being lured to the South Bank. It cheered few of them to know their taxes paid for the subsidies to undermine their work. By 1980, Hall had become the most powerful British impresario since the heyday of Beaumont.
