A theatrical knight passes over

Yesterday's Guardian devoted several pages to Sir Peter Hall yesterday. Obviously a good chap, both because he went to the same secondary school as I did and because he went on to partake of the wisdom of the famed F. R. Leavis.

But someone is overegging things a bit to say that Hall left the theatre infinitely richer than he found it. If memory serves, his tenure more or less coincided with the demise of the repertory theatre, in the face of the march of overwhelming numbers of television channels across our sitting rooms. Channels which do not nurture stage talent in the way the repertory of old did. Anyway, given said demise, little call for it these days.

Ironically, it also more or less coincided with what I imagine to be large growth in the output of theatrical schools of one sort or another. With the answer here perhaps being that these schools, despite their theatrical names, are really about staffing up the dance troupes of cruise ships, casinos and musicals.

PS: checking on Leavis, I came across this striking image of him from his time in the first world war ambulance service. A factlet which I confirmed by reference 1. All this being the combined work of Bing search and Google image search.

Reference 1: https://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/leavis-at-war/.