In 1980 Peter Hall, Director of Britain’s National Theatre, received a letter from a colleague: If I interpret you correctly, you want what I want: to get on with the business of directing and not to be administering a theatre so that other people can do the plays we ought to be doing; quite apart from a desire to keep certain colonials out of the corridors of power. The writer was John Dexter; the upstart colonial, Michael Blakemore. In Stage Blood: Five Tempest­uous Years in the Early Life of the National Theatre, Blakemore’s second volume of memoirs, Hall and Dexter…