YOU LYING S***!
National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner turned War Horse into a hit and made James Corden a star — but, as he found, you’re no one in luvvie land until Pinter’s screamed ...
BALANCING ACTS: BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE by Nicholas Hytner (Jonathan Cape £20)
RUNNING the national theatre — that hideous concrete slab on the South Bank, which would have been thought gloomy even in the Soviet union (‘It’s like a women’s prison,’ said Maggie Smith) — is akin to being the absolute monarch of a city-state.
Sir nicholas hytner, who took over from Sir trevor nunn in 2003, and was in charge of the 300-seat Cottesloe, 900-seat Lyttelton and 1,500-seat Olivier theatres for the next 12 years, began his day checking box office receipts, fending off the Press, rubber-stamping set designs and analysing budgets.
he had to arbitrate in disputes between directors and playwrights, attend rehearsals, reprimand slackers, examine leaflets prepared by the marketing department and have lunch with potential donors.
there’d be auditions to watch: ‘their lives are an endless parade of rejection,’ he says of the hopeful actors.
‘Directors sit safely in judgment, though very few of us are wiser or more expert than the actors we judge.’
Finally there are the technical rehearsals to oversee — the Olivier’s drumrevolve, which can ‘deliver amazing visions from deep underneath the stage’, is always temperamental.
‘Why are we waiting? how long will it take? Will someone please talk to me? this isn’t working,’ hytner finds himself bleating.
he takes out his frustrations by banging on the heavy auditorium doors with his fists — with the result that he often locks himself out when his key-card then fails to function.
At LeASt, occasionally, there is light relief: briefings from Security and watching any misdemeanours caught on CCtV are part of his artistic director duties.
‘Security found a famous actor up to no good with an autograph hunter in the underground car park.’ I’d give a lot to know who that may have been.
hytner’s job involved mounting entertainments and selling tickets — balancing the books — in a country where an innate Puritanism and antiintellectual stance mean the Government is never totally happy about subsidising and supporting the arts. the arts boost tourism, hytner says. Communities are drawn together. Drama in particular is ‘an unparalleled educational tool’ — yet drama and music teachers are ‘a vanishing species in state schools’.
We are lucky, therefore, that people with hytner’s intelligence, enlightenment and defiance operate on behalf of dressing up, showing off, treading the boards, despite official opposition.
though this is not a personal memoir — nothing is divulged about hytner’s personal life or background — we do learn that he became a stage director at Cambridge because he could neither write nor act.
Once hytner had graduated from the university, he directed ‘everything from the Christmas pantomime to elizabethan tragedy in repertory theatres in exeter, Leeds and Manchester’.
hytner only glancingly refers to the blockbusting Miss Saigon, where he arranged for the landing of a helicopter on the stage at Drury Lane. But that production must have earned him millions very early on.
As a director, he says, ‘you start with a vision and you deliver a compromise’ — yet during his reign, the national produced more than a hundred new plays, including important works by David hare, though nothing by harold Pinter, who in 2005 attacked hytner in a restaurant because he’d declined to
revive a pinter play at the national. ‘You’re a ******* liar... You’re a liar and a **** and now I’ve ******* told you.’
hytner is philosophical: ‘You can’t call yourself director of the national theatre until harold pinter calls you a s***.’
there were lavish musicals and restoration romps: ‘Whatever it was that brought the house down when richard Briers wobbled unsteadily on to the stage cannot be taught.’
War horse has now been seen by seven million people worldwide, but the play — which came about because somebody said his mum had liked listening to Michael Morpurgo on Desert Island Discs — almost didn’t make it to the stage.
It took some patient experimenting to create the famous equine effects: ‘If the enemies of arts subsidy had seen two actors walking in a circle with cardboard boxes on their heads pretending to be horses at the taxpayer’s expense, they would have had a field day,’ says hytner.
the script also took a long time to get right, but after three months of puppetry training and seven weeks’ rehearsal, the play finally opened in October 2007. even then, War horse looked as if it might be a turkey. After some brutal editing, insisted upon by hytner, the shape and dynamism were finally found.
‘the great show was always there,’ he claims. ‘A single twitch of Joey’s ear was worth lines of dialogue.’
All it needed to create a classic, hytner says modestly, was ‘a few well-chosen words and a stern look’ from the boss.
HYTNER is also a firstclass Shakespearean. he turned henry v into an allegory of Blair and Iraq, complete with a dodgy dossier that ‘explained england’s right to take military action . . . Although henry was brave, resolute and inspiring, nobody trusted him an inch’.
his closest creative partnership, though, has been with Alan Bennett, beginning 25 years ago when Bennett adapted the Wind In the Willows as ‘a subversive psychodrama about the repressed lusts of edwardian bachelors’.
Subsequently there has been the Lady In the van with Maggie Smith, the Madness Of george III with nigel hawthorne, and the history Boys, which inaugurated the inexorable rise and rise of James corden, who struck hytner as ‘ either super- confident or super-nervous’.
everyone adored the history Boys, which was a corrective to ‘the government’s obsession with school league tables’. here, education was brilliant fun — a revolutionary concept in the 21st century. the production ran for years, toured, transferred to Broadway, and became a film with the original cast.
I loved frances de la tour as the senior mistress: ‘ history is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men... history is women following behind with the bucket.’
As hytner says, this is as good as Oscar Wilde. the opening night at the Lyttelton was ‘ the most euphoric night I will ever spend at the national’.
It was almost matched by the moment when a member of the audience approached hytner in the foyer and showered him with praise: ‘ there are no queues for the women’s toilets at the interval. You are doing a brilliant job.’