Why I’m still as busy as ever in the theatre at 77
With two openings this week, Trevor Nunn, at 77, is as busy as ever. That’s better than sitting alone, he tells Dominic Cavendish
For a man who turned 77 at the beginning of this year, Sir Trevor Nunn has been ridiculously busy. In the past two-and-half years he has, among other things, directed three Shakespeare plays – concluding his long-stated goal of directing all 37 – mounted a new musical about the librettist of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and revived a neglected drama by Terence Rattigan.
That Rattigan – Love in Idleness – transfers to the West End this week, a day after Nunn’s new production of the much-loved Peter Shaffer comedy Lettice and Lovage, starring Felicity Kendal and Maureen Lipman, opens at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
Retirement is obviously not one of the words in Sir Trev’s (extensive) vocabulary. “My mentor and idol Peter Hall kept going with a huge rush of productions during his final productive years. I have no plans to stop,” he says. (Hall was forced to retire when diagnosed with dementia in 2011.)
But, it turns out, there is a sad reason for Nunn’s freneticism: the unexpected death of his most recent partner at the end of 2014.
“Sadly, the brilliant lady involved was diagnosed with cancer, and died,” he says. “I thought life had wonderfully restarted [after a 2011 divorce from Imogen Stubbs], but it was not to be.”
That lady was Cheryl Hersch,
18 years his junior and an occasional actress who appeared in the 1983 Bond film Octopussy. After her death, which Nunn has not spoken about publicly before, the director threw himself into work with renewed zeal, determined not to succumb. “I felt very acutely that I should be working as many days of the year as possible because sitting alone and getting depressed can be very debilitating,” he explains.
One of our foremost Shakespeare interpreters, Nunn staged The War of the Roses – an adaptation of Henry VI Parts One to Three and Richard III – at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in 2015. The musical about The Magic Flute, by Stephen Schwartz, the composer of Wicked, premiered in Vienna last year.
But it was his painstaking restoration of Rattigan’s drama, a triumph at the Menier Chocolate Factory in April and now transferring to the Apollo Theatre, that spoke most directly and cathartically to the situation he found himself in.
Originally a hit in 1944, Love in Idleness centres on a vivacious widow whose affair with Sir John Fletcher, a wealthy member of the War Cabinet, is disapproved of by her son, an evacuee just returned from Canada.
“In the play, one of the ingredients is a young man trying to come to terms with the death of his father, which has taken him by surprise – he had no idea his father was that ill, so that really stirred memories for me,” Nunn says. “And how the wife in question survives and what she then goes on to next, yes, I connect with that too. It speaks to me hugely.”
At this, his eyes shed their slight mist of melancholy and light up, rejuvenated, as he expounds more on the play. His fingers dance about as if conducting an unseen orchestra.
Part of Nunn’s ingenious contribution – dramaturgical as much as directorial – is to have grafted the Rattigan play, admired by Winston Churchill, with an earlier more serious, sidelined version called Less Than Kind, giving greater intellectual weight to the socialist leanings of the son, Michael. “Rattigan was a man of Left-wing views, and when he was young was even toying with becoming a card-carrying Communist. So there is quite a bit of autobiography in the young hero, confronting this industrialist [Sir John]. What’s ironic is that the papers in the last few days have had the word ‘nationalise’ in the headlines and young Michael is passionate about the need to nationalise industry and the railways.”
A lifelong Labour voter, Nunn made no secret 20 years ago of his support for New Labour and makes no secret now of his despair. “I have had several conversations over the past few years with David Miliband,” he says, in a mournful soliloquy. “Had he become leader, which everyone expected [in 2010], he would now be our prime minister, we wouldn’t be leaving Europe and we would have an inclusive government of the centre-left.”
Does he think Miliband Major might return to British politics? “I keep telling him he has got to,” says Nunn. But when I press him on Jeremy Corbyn, he is less forthcoming: “We’re getting into deep water.”
He clams up a couple of times, arms suddenly folding, but he is prepared to deliver a brisk self-defence against complaints about his all-white casting of The Wars of the Roses. (The actors’ union Equity said it locked “minorities out of the cultural picture.”)
“I regret the hoo-ha but I decided that on this particular occasion this was an exception and that an audience could be seriously baffled if we took any other route. Others didn’t agree.”
He also takes a pot-shot at the current state of the RSC, which he ran from 1968 to 1983, presiding over some of its mega-hits, Les Misérables and Nicholas Nickleby included. “It’s a shame the company has moved back to Stratford and diminished itself – the Barbican could have become as splendid an address for the RSC as it is for visiting companies.”
As for Lettice and Lovage, which sees Felicity Kendal follow in the hallowed footsteps of Maggie Smith as Lettice Douffet, an eccentric countryhouse tour-guide whose fictional embellishments become ever more elaborate, Nunn says he did it in Shaffer’s honour.
“I was very upset when I heard of Peter’s death [in June 2016]. I knew he was frail, I didn’t know to that
extent. Lettice and Lovage has a strong autobiographical element [expressed in the contrasting personalities of its principal characters] – there was the passionate outgoing Peter and the serious, cautious ‘I can’t do it’ Peter.”
Has Nunn ever succumbed to crippling doubt? “Of course,” he says, “a voice in the back of the head says all the time: ‘Are you any good at this, are you doing the right job here?’ That moment of doubt is constantly present. But I’ve never been brought so low that I feel I should now give up on this.”
Even death holds no sting for the man who helped create the concept of the Heaviside Layer as the celestial destination for feline reincarnation in the musical Cats. Does he believe in an after-life? He shakes his head.
“I do love the idea that we are all composed of atoms, though, that the universe is atoms and our atoms continue to have an existence. You have to accept,” he adds, with a sanguine smile, “that we are writing on the sand – the tide comes in and it’s gone.”
Love in Idleness opens at the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue (0330 333 4809) from Thurs and runs until July 1; Lettice and Lovage opens at the Menier Chocolate Factory (020 7378 1713) from tomorrow and runs until July 8