“I know I have to start with Shakespeare,” I said to Nick Starr. “But not Hamlet.”
The first three directors of the National all opened their accounts with Hamlet, and I never doubted that Granville Barker was right to put Shakespeare at the top of the agenda, but I wanted to start with the play that seemed most likely to speak as if it was written yesterday. In 2002, this was Henry V. British troops were involved in military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. At the time, I thought this was justifiable, so I didn’t have a doctrinaire anti-war agenda, but I thought I could explore through Shakespeare what it felt like for the country to be at war. I had no idea, obviously, that Henry V would open within weeks of the invasion of Iraq, although by the autumn of 2002, five months before the Iraq War, I described it, in the Times Literary Supplement, as “a play about a charismatic young English leader who commits his troops to a dangerous foreign invasion for which he has to struggle to find justification in international law.”
“And there’s another reason for kicking off with Henry V,” I said to Nick, “and that’s ticket prices.”
As ticket prices had risen during the 1980s and early ’90s to compensate for a drastic reduction in government funding, a huge potential audience, including those most likely to respond to Granville Barker’s ambitious repertoire, could no longer afford the arts. We thought we would find the audience to support the work we wanted to do if we could charge them less to see it; but reduced box-office receipts would spell financial disaster. The reason this didn’t seem like an open-and-shut case for despair was that, except for the musicals, the box office was already feeble. The Winter’s Tale had been barely half full. In fact, unless a musical was playing, the Olivier Theatre never seemed to be much more than half full. So we had to ask ourselves whether we’d be selling the other half of the house if the tickets cost half as much. What if we sold one hundred percent of the house at half price and meanwhile spent less on staging the shows? Wouldn’t we end up doing better?
And while I wondered how to produce an ambitious repertoire cheaply enough in the Olivier to justify huge cuts in ticket prices, here was Shakespeare’s Chorus talking about staging Agincourt at the Globe:
Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
Over the years, designers had filled the Olivier with some impressive vasty fields. Act 4 of The Winter’s Tale was a rural music festival, revellers pitching their tents in a big grassy meadow. The Chorus suggested a different design strategy:
On your imaginary forces work.
A battle cry for the whole theatrical enterprise: use your imagination!
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies…
Suppose. Suspend your disbelief. How much would it bother you if we emptied the stage of scenery, and in exchange charged what it cost to see a movie—say, £10? You may even prefer it: stripped back, the Olivier stage is a beautiful and harmonious space, where you may find it very satisfying to
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
So how many shows could we do like this? Could we do a whole season of them? If I did Henry V on a rock-bottom budget, I might be able to persuade the directors and designers of the other plays to do the same; and in exchange we’d deliver them full, enthusiastic houses who’d be up for whatever we wanted to give them, because they’d be able to afford it.
I couldn’t shake my conviction that the National needed to be the big, public alternative to the studio theatres. Its response so far to the success of the superb classical work at the Almeida and Donmar theatres had been to produce superb small-scale classical work of its own in the 300-seat Cottesloe, which only added to the growing reluctance of actors and directors to rise to the Olivier and the Lyttelton. So I issued a self-denying ordinance in the Cottesloe: no more famous classics—new and experimental work only. I stuck to this for twelve years, making only occasional exceptions for plays from the far reaches of the repertoire and Twelfth Night, directed by Peter Hall to celebrate his eightieth birthday. I rejected productions that could have been wonderful; but withholding the easy option forced directors and actors to develop their stamina for the main stage.
The avalanche of new plays in black boxes all over London made it easier to imagine that we could fill the Cottesloe with them. I asked to read everything that was sitting neglected on the Literary Department shelves. Two plays stood out. The first, Scenes from the Big Picture by Owen McCafferty, a sweeping survey of contemporary Belfast, was made up of a succession of scenes too intimate for the Olivier: it needed twenty-one actors in a small theatre, the kind of play only the National could afford to do. And it might have been written as part of the project to investigate the nation that I’d promised in my letter to Chris Hogg. So might Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen, set in a cafe in Hackney’s Murder Mile, another corner of the nation under-represented by its National Theatre. Soon after I was appointed, Martin McDonagh, whose play The Cripple of Inishmaan I had directed in the Cottesloe in 1996, sent me The Pillowman. Maybe it had less to say about the state of the nation than some of the other new plays, but few of them pushed so hard at the expressive boundaries of the theatre.
Meanwhile, I pursued some of the big beasts who already had relationships with the National, pretending to them that I had a right to be where Olivier and Peter Hall had been before me. There was an early stroke of luck: Michael Frayn, the most versatile of great playwrights, as funny (Noises Off) as he is intellectually stimulating (Copenhagen), delivered a new play out of the blue. Democracy told the true story of the Stasi spy who worked as personal assistant to the West German chancellor Willy Brandt in the early 1970s. Michael is the kind of playwright who delivers a watertight final draft: there was nothing to say about his play except yes. It came with his regular director, Michael Blakemore, who was one of Olivier’s associates at the Old Vic, and one of the great masters of the craft: someone else who wouldn’t need notes.
No playwright had done more than David Hare to anatomise the nation on the National’s stages. He now wanted to work with the director Max Stafford-Clark: they were both part of the pioneering company Joint Stock in the 1970s. Max gave David a book by Ian Jack about the Hatfield rail disaster of 2000, and they proposed a co-production, with Max’s company Out of Joint, of a play based on interviews and research, in collaboration with a group of actors: the old Joint Stock method. Talking to David and Max, I felt like a frivolous interloper from the wonderful world of show business, but I was growing into my skin, and starting to realise that nobody cared much about where I’d come from: they were interested in the director of the National and the patronage he brought with him.
Many prominent playwrights had nothing cooking. Alan Bennett never says what he’s up to, and is always downbeat about writing another play. He told me that he’d try, but didn’t sound convinced. Tom Stoppard promised something one day. Harold Pinter proposed a revival of his most recent play, Celebration, which he’d written for the Almeida in 2000. I wondered whether he didn’t think that, at thirty minutes, it was rather short. Harold suggested it could be done, as it had been at the Almeida, in a double bill with one of his early one-act plays. I didn’t dare ask him why the National should want a reheat of an Almeida show, so I prevaricated, and told him it was an interesting idea. Peter Hall could have said no to his face: I wasn’t yet up to it.
Several playwrights accepted a commission for the Olivier and Lyttelton theatres, but none of them would have anything ready for 2003. A major plank of my platform—the promise to lure the new generation of playwrights into the big theatres—was looking shaky. I was apprehensive about an invitation from a group of eight young playwrights called the Monsterists: I assumed from their title that they’d asked me along to rough me up. They said their objective was to encourage theatres to
produce monster new plays, which I told them was my objective too. Why should Shakespeare be allowed twenty actors, they asked, and living playwrights think themselves lucky to have six? No reason at all, I said. Write the plays! If they’re good, we’ll do them. They doubted I’d put the National’s money where my mouth was, but they let me go without doing me any harm. Although none of them made it into the 2003 line-up, four saw their plays produced in the Olivier by the time I’d finished: Richard Bean, Moira Buffini, David Eldridge and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. At least two of the others had plays in the Cottesloe. Job done, the Monsterists have now disbanded.
There were no new plays for the big theatres, but by the middle of 2002, we had committed to a big idea to win back the audience that could no longer afford us, and to lure in the audience that had never given us a chance. We’d offer them tickets that cost no more than they’d pay to get into a West End cinema: a £10 Season in the Olivier with four shows, two-thirds of the seats at £10, the rest at £25. Nick Starr estimated that at a hundred percent (nearly always theoretical), we’d make as much money as we’d take from sixty-five percent at normal prices, which was where the National’s budget was traditionally pitched. The shortfall between a hundred percent and what we might expect to take, maybe eighty percent, would be covered by reduced production costs, and sponsorship. So we needed a sponsor.
And we needed the actors and directors who could make the classical repertoire feel like it was new. At the Old Vic, Laurence Olivier formed a permanent company of actors. It was possible in 1963 to identify and hang on to a National Theatre Company, among them Olivier himself, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Billie Whitelaw, Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon, carrying a spear. When the company moved from the Old Vic to the South Bank in 1976, there were three theatres to fill and the maintenance of a permanent acting company became impossible. Trevor Nunn tried to restore it in 1999: an exceptional ensemble of thirty-eight actors appeared in six plays. But the world had changed. There are too many opportunities outside the theatre, and after a year, the thirty-eight seized them, and went their own ways. I didn’t regret the change: I wanted to create a repertoire too diverse in style and subject matter for a single acting company. Many of those who appeared during the first year came back later, including Roger Allam, Simon Russell Beale, Alex Jennings, Paterson Joseph, Adrian Lester, Helen Mirren, Margaret Tyzack and Zoë Wanamaker. There was a recognisable core to the company, but there was nothing permanent about it. There were too many actors I wanted to include.
A repertoire of twenty plays can’t be dreamed up alone, so I solicited suggestions from anyone who understood that it was my habit to dismiss something out of hand before hailing it a stroke of genius ten minutes later. For the Olivier £10 Season, I needed shows that were robust enough to thrive on an appeal to the audience’s imagination, without expensive visuals: a four-play manifesto. I had Shakespeare, so now I wanted a foreign classic, a modern classic (in the absence of a new play) and an undemanding summer treat, which Granville Barker would have thought unnecessary, but what the hell, I’d promised in my letter of application to give the audience a really good time. Alex Jennings suggested that restoring His Girl Friday to the stage could make for a good time. The 1940 movie was based on Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page, with the reporter Hildy Johnson, who in the play is a man, re-sexed for Rosalind Russell. “Why would we want to stage the movie when we can do the play, which is a masterpiece? It’s a ridiculous idea,” I said to Alex. “Because it’s just as funny, much sexier, and why shouldn’t Hildy Johnson be a woman?” said Alex. “And I’d be very good as Walter Burns.” “Genius,” I said, ten minutes later.
Over coffee in Soho, the director Richard Jones suggested Tales from the Vienna Woods, a fascinating panorama of pre-Nazi Vienna by Ödön von Horváth. “Who’ll come? Where’s the audience for pre-war Vienna?” I thought. Then I remembered the £10 ticket, and the new audience that would be able to afford it. “Terrific idea,” I said.
Howard Davies floated Waiting for Godot, the Olivier stage empty of everything except a tree and two tramps. He reread the play and thought better of it, to my secret relief: I dreaded having to sit through endless performances of it. Habit, as one of the tramps says, is a great deadener, and over the years I’ve become immune to their drollery. Deborah Warner, a Beckett devotee, later suggested Godot again, with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench as Vladimir and Estragon. I’d have sat through that as many times as it took for Godot to turn up, but it was a waste of time taking it to the Beckett estate, who are famously intransigent about casting.
Then Mark Ravenhill reminded me of David Mamet’s Edmond, a short, violent fable set in New York. “It’s a studio play, isn’t it?” I said, though I’d never read it. When I did, I thought that although its twenty-three short scenes were all small in scale, it was driven by a kind of mania, which in the right hands could fill the Olivier. Kenneth Branagh thought so too, and Zoë Wanamaker was on for the Rosalind Russell part in His Girl Friday. So in the Olivier we had a wide-ranging repertoire; we had leading actors; and we had a £10 ticket, though we still didn’t have the money for it.
We had auspicious plans for the Lyttelton. Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers was written for the National in 1972 and had a leading role for Simon Russell Beale. Katie Mitchell, a director whose work I admired partly because it was so unlike my own, was eager to do Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the only indisputably great play of the season. Henry V was lurid hack work in comparison: a sequel to three better plays, unsubtle and emotionally shallow, though I came to respect it far more than I thought I would. Howard Davies suggested Eugene O’Neill’s epic Mourning Becomes Electra, a huge play for which the Lyttelton might have been designed. Actors fight to work with Howard; it was no surprise that he persuaded Helen Mirren to be in the O’Neill, though that made her participation in the season no less of a big deal.
So far, the repertoire might have come from the Granville Barker playbook. Shakespeare (tick); revive whatever else is vital in English classical drama (not yet, but it was on the cards for 2004); prevent recent plays of great merit from falling into oblivion (Jumpers, Edmond, tick); produce new plays (entire Cottesloe repertoire, tick); produce translations of foreign works both ancient and modern (Three Sisters, Tales from the Vienna Woods, tick; Katie Mitchell already talking about Euripides). It felt like a serious, considered response to my brief: a substantial balancing act. But pulled as always in the opposite direction, I worried at the same time that it was all too worthy. An evil spirit whispered in my ear: boooring.
I thought I had one ace up my sleeve. Back in 1990, when I was one of Richard Eyre’s associate directors, I’d volunteered to direct a big family show in the Olivier. I suggested The Wind in the Willows; Richard set me up with Alan Bennett. The family audience couldn’t get enough of it, and although Granville Barker had nothing to say about children, no contemporary National Theatre can afford to ignore them. But I saw no reason why we should bother anymore with the kind of stories our grandparents loved: there was a stirring corpus of contemporary literature for young readers.
Jack Bradley, who had found Mother Clap on the Literary Department’s shelves, asked me whether I’d read Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. I hadn’t, but I knew enough about it to know that it sounded unstageable, which was a plus. “Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall,” it began, and as I read it I already fancied putting a dæmon on stage, even before I knew what it was. Later, Lyra makes friends with an armoured polar bear, and who wouldn’t want to see one of them? Later still: “her harsh voice was drowned by a million whispers, as every ghost who could hear cried out in joy and hope; but all the harpies screamed and beat their wings until the ghosts fell silent again.” I thought, like the tap dancer in A Chorus Line, “I can do that.” Two children from parallel universes stand on the brink of hell, face down spectres and cliffghasts, watch the death of an unimaginably old man who may be God, and fall in love. “Get the rights,
” I said to Jack. Philip Pullman had been an English teacher, and knew enough about making plays to be relieved that we weren’t asking him to write ours, though he offered his help if we wanted it. I asked Nicholas Wright to make the adaptation; as it took shape through a series of workshops, Philip’s ideas were always less reverent about the original than anyone else’s. Part of Nick Wright’s mandate was to give us a script that called for the exploitation of the Olivier’s stage machinery, a miracle of 1970s engineering. It had fallen into disuse, though was lovingly maintained by the National’s Engineering Department who toiled underground like the Nibelungs over their gold, waiting for it once more to see the light of day. I scheduled His Dark Materials to follow the £10 Season, partly as an antidote to its austerity. It demanded a staging of extravagant theatricality. “How will we afford it?” I asked. “We need to find £1.5 million to balance the year’s budget,” said Lisa Burger, the finance director.
Trevor Nunn became director of the National a few months after the Labour victory in the 1997 general election. After twenty years of dwindling funding, Nick Starr knew exactly when to strike, and wrote to the Arts Council reminding them of a request made in 2000 by Trevor Nunn and Genista McIntosh for an extra £1 million to cover the cost of maintaining the building, which was granted, and an extra £1.5 million for the repertoire, which was not. By 2002, when the National’s grant was £13.5 million, the government had started pushing money the Arts Council’s way, and Nick was fluent in Official Artspeak. He promised that a re-energised programme and the £10 ticket would together tackle “the pressing need for artistic and audience regeneration.” This hit the target at the Arts Council, who committed to giving us the raise from 2004, and was a resolute partner throughout the next twelve years. But we were still short of £1.5 million for our first season.
Balancing Acts Page 5