Sir Nicholas Hytner on Alan Bennett’s new play
Nicholas Hytner – formerly the Midas-touch director of the NT – tells Dominic Cavendish how quality is all that counts at his new theatre
This morning heralds something of a watershed moment in the early life of the Bridge Theatre, the lavish £12.5 million playhouse nestling beside the Thames at Tower Bridge. It is the new creative home of Nicholas Hytner, the director who famously displayed the Midas touch when it came to running the National Theatre, presiding over a golden era from 2003 to 2015 and tripling its annual income.
At 10am, tickets for Allelujah! – the latest play by Alan Bennett – go on sale to the public, and short of the current winter freeze bringing the internet to a standstill, it’s a racing certainty that there will be a box-office stampede.
This is Bennett’s 10th collaboration with Hytner, and together they achieved one of the NT’S biggest hits,
The History Boys (2004). If you thought that Bennett had been muttering that he had no more plays in him, you should never have been taken in.
“Oh, he’ll always talk like there isn’t another play in him,” Hytner reveals, “but when we did the last one [2012’s
People] it really p----d him off when anybody assumed it was in any way valedictory – so I knew he would try again.”
Last summer, Bennett cycled over to his Manchester-born Primrose Hill neighbour and posted his latest opus through the letterbox. Set in an ailing hospital on the edge of the Pennines threatened with closure, it’s about the experience of old age as it affects patients on a geriatric ward and those close to them, Hytner explains, “but this isn’t a valedictory play at all”. Possessing a “freewheeling theatricality”, like The History Boys it will have song, dance and a roaming energy, “except it’s the over-eighties doing the song and dance, rather than 18-year-olds”.
If there were any lingering doubts that the 900-seat Bridge would find favour with theatregoers, and prove commercially viable, they will surely be quashed by the arrival of Allelujah!, which begins previews in July. It has become increasingly clear that this pioneer among unsubsidised players in London – which Hytner set up with Nick Starr, his former NT executive director – is very much in business.
Owing to its ingenious venturecapitalist funded model, the Bridge doesn’t have to chase investment or strive for profits for each show, as in the West End, while Hytner’s mission statement is bullishly simple: “to put on great shows from as diverse an array of voices as possible - and sell as many tickets as possible.”
“There will be no quotas of any kind,” he says. “There’s no audit, there’s no one out front ever saying: ‘Where do you come from?’ We’re not in that game. We’re going to be doing mainly new plays, but that has nothing to do with virtue. I can’t stand ‘new writing’, as if it has some special status. We don’t want to virtue signal – we are in showbusiness.”
His distaste for quotas is apparent in his views on gender balance: he has received criticism for the way male playwrights have dominated the Bridge’s line-up so far, but he is not about to apologise for that.
“The work we do will tend towards being fair and diverse, but I’m not going to get involved in any maths.
“If a brilliant play arrived that was 100 per cent male, sure as hell I’d do it. But would we want to do only plays about men? That would be stupid – because it would be out of touch, boring and uncommercial.”
A mixture of commercial nous and of-the-moment shrewdness can be seen in the Bridge’s current take on Julius Caesar, its second production following Richard Bean’s slightly underwhelming farce, Young Marx.
“It’s a huge hit,” Hytner says, grinning. “By God, it has been a risk, but the question ‘Will they come?’ has been answered.” Shakespeare plus some star names (he has got Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey in the mix) might look like the height of safe programming, but the production has entailed a big leap in the dark – taking an immersive approach (a first for Hytner) by putting standing members of the audience in the thick of the action.
“It took me about three to four previews to be sure it would work for both halves of the audience,” he explains, fearing that the “groundlings”, effectively cast on the spot in the collective role of the fickle Roman mob, might impede matters. But their presence – going with the festive flow at the start, whooping up David Calder’s Caesar, then getting caught in the crossfire when the evening descends into civil war – has exceeded all expectations and added fresh layers of meaning.
“During those previews, I realised we can persuade people to do whatever we want them to do – in alarming ways that reinforce what
‘The work we do will tend towards being fair and diverse but I’m not going to get involved in any maths’
the play talks about. At the scene of Caesar’s assassination, for example, we get them to hit the floor and they do so almost immediately.”
Interestingly, while Julius Caesar has been widely heralded as the play for now, because of its apparent parallels with Trump, Hytner has found a far more interesting, less glib target for his version.
“I wanted this to be about an outof-touch liberal elite,” he says. “Top of the conspirators’ agenda should be making their case to the people, but it struck me that they are preservers of the status quo. Both the play and the production lay blame at the feet of those who are too arrogant to be bothered to make a good case to the population at large.
“What happens is their fault as much as it is the fault of those who make a dishonest case, but at least realise the need to communicate.”
Hytner was a communicator par excellence at the National, helping to lead the cultural debate during the Blair/brown and Coalition years, often going on to the airwaves and into print to argue the case for the value of funding and the need for arts in our national life. Now 61, he seems to relish taking more of a back seat.
He keeps in touch with Rufus Norris, his successor at the National, and they liaise to ensure they don’t tread on each other’s toes with a clashing revival. Norris is doing well, he avers. “Everything I see, I love, and whenever I go, it’s packed. He has had some that haven’t gone so well, but then so did I.”
But while Hytner mostly looks back at his time at the National with affection, recently he has had cause to be haunted by it, he says, following the allegations last autumn about Kevin Spacey’s behaviour while running the Old Vic.
“It was really dismaying. Nick Starr and I sat down and asked ourselves very seriously: did we allow anything that we’re now ashamed of to happen at the National? We don’t think we did. I’ve since asked, is anything coming out of the woodwork? I’ve been told no. That’s the best I can do.”
Throughout the interview, sitting on Hytner’s ipad is an image of the concrete shell of the Bridge site as it was in the spring of 2015, populated by visitors in hard hats – an empty space at the heart of a deluxe development. It’s been an incredibly fast journey into the unknown. Already there are plans for a sister theatre, location as yet undeclared. Is he happy and proud of what he has achieved so far?
He winces a little at the cliché. “Is it as extraordinary as someone holding their newborn child in their arms? No, I can’t say it could match that. But is it satisfying? God, yes!”
Julius Caesar runs until April 15; NT Live broadcast in cinemas March 22; Allelujah! runs from July 11 to Sept 28; public booking opens today at 10am. Tickets: 0333 320 0051; bridgetheatre.co.uk