Balancing Acts
Page 6
When we explained our problem to Chris Hogg, he shrugged and told us that in the light of the promised raise in 2004, we could assume that the board would pass a £1 million deficit budget for 2003. We could view it, he said, as a vote of confidence in our ambition. Floored, I found myself struggling with my inner Thatcher. I was viscerally terrified of running a deficit. We met him in the middle and settled for a £500,000 deficit and a spending squeeze, enjoying the irony that Chris, a renowned captain of industry, was more relaxed about it than we were.
But there still was no declaration of intent as disruptive as Mother Clap. And with six months to go, there was a gap in the schedule that cried out for one: the very first slot in the Lyttelton, to play against Henry V in the Olivier and Scenes from the Big Picture in the Cottesloe. Maybe we could do Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, I suggested: Molière could be a riot in the hands of the right director. Or Bulgakov’s Molière, that’s pretty wild. Nobody was convinced, least of all me, so I took the train to Edinburgh, to see if there was something on the Fringe that I could plunder.
The first night I was there, I went to a show I’d already seen twice in embryonic form at the Battersea Arts Centre, where Nick Starr was on the board. Back in August 2001, he’d taken me to one of BAC’s scratch nights, when its director, Tom Morris, used to introduce work in progress and ask the audience to hang around in the bar afterwards and say what they’d made of it. BAC was, and still is, the home of physical theatre, devised theatre, puppetry, immersive theatre, musical theatre: theatre that’s made by theatre makers more often than it’s made by playwrights. I didn’t know the theatre makers anything like as well as I knew the playwrights and I wasn’t that keen on the term theatre maker, though over the years I started to use it more often, probably under Tom’s influence. At BAC he was like a brainy P. T. Barnum, shouting “Roll up! Roll up!,” loud and posh, pulling in the crowds to any amount of crazy stuff, unstoppable in his enthusiasms. I lured him to the National as quickly as I could.
Before the scratch night, he told us we were about to see the first act of an opera about the talk-show host Jerry Springer. Its composer, Richard Thomas, was at the piano. Stewart Lee, a hero of the stand-up circuit, had helped write the lyrics. There was a cast of eight, all of them tremendous singers, which they needed to be as it started like Bach’s Mass in B minor, except they were singing “Jerry” instead of “Kyrie,” and they followed it with a solemn fugue:
My mom used to be—
My mom used to be—
My mom—
Used to be—
My mom—
Used to be my dad!
Used to be
My dad
Used to be my dad!
Snip Snip!
Used to be Dad!
Snip!
There followed sixty perfect minutes: a garish episode of The Jerry Springer Show set to music of astonishing operatic panache. By the time it returned to BAC in February 2002, word had got out, and it ran for three sold-out weeks. The first half was still sensational; the new second half, which saw Jerry go down to hell and host a chat show with Jesus, Satan and a handful of other biblical celebrities, was weaker, though it perked up when God appeared as Elvis.
In the bar after the show, I told Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee that I’d never had a better time in a theatre, and gave them a list of reasons why it wasn’t suitable for the National. The reasons must have been terrible, because I can’t remember any of them. I imagine I thought it was so rough and scabrous it would flourish better elsewhere; and with only a handful of singers and a piano, it felt small-scale.
In the Edinburgh Assembly Room six months later, the rudimentary staging was by Stewart Lee. There was a proper band and a chorus, so for the first time there was a big TV studio audience to sing the opening fugue. There must have been 400 people in the audience, but the show felt like it could have played to 4,000.
“Have yourselves a good time,” sang Jerry’s warm-up man early in the show, echoing the very part of my manifesto that drew me to Edinburgh in the first place. The Edinburgh crowd went wild, and so did I.
“What have I done?” I wailed at the interval. “I’m having the best time I ever had, so is the crowd, and I turned it down!” The second half was still a mess, but I couldn’t have cared less. I tracked down Richard, Stewart and his agent, who doubled as their producer, and I ate crow. We got the show, which was as lewd as a phallic parade.
There seemed at last to be a real balance of old and new, of serious and irreverent, of shows that looked outwards at the world and inwards at the soul, a repertoire that took seriously both the “National” and the “Theatre” in our title. There was at least one horrible flaw. Not one of the new plays was by a woman. The National’s record in commissioning and staging female playwrights for the first forty years of its existence was miserable. There seemed to be nothing available in 2003 that was immediately producible. That situation changed in the Cottesloe in 2004 and continued to improve. During the last two years of my tenure, there were sixteen new plays by women and fourteen by men. But it took too long.
By the start of 2003, the £10 Season was on the way to paying for itself through reduced expenditure and what we assumed would be bigger houses, but it was a massive risk, and it still needed a sponsor. We thought we had a big bank in the bag, but just before we announced the season and put the £10 tickets on sale, it withdrew. We went ahead anyway, and held our breath. Not all the donors on our Development Council saw the point of the £10 ticket. Some of them worried that well-off patrons would be able to get in for less than they could afford. Short of means-testing the audience, I didn’t know what I could do about that. The deputy chair of the Council, Susan Chinn, whose eyes seemed to sparkle with secret amusement at the vehemence of her fellow benefactors, pulled me aside after a couple of them had worked me over. She said I should meet her friend Lloyd Dorfman, the founder and chief executive of the foreign-exchange company Travelex.
Lloyd turned out to be a fervent lover of the theatre. He and his wife, Sarah, had been quietly sponsoring the performing arts for years, and he was ready now to swing Travelex behind a major sponsorship. I was already in rehearsal for Henry V, the first £10 show, when in early March, Travelex told us that they were in for £300,000 a year. A week later, coalition forces invaded Iraq, and almost immediately, Travelex suspended all new spending. I couldn’t blame them: their business was foreign exchange and the world had stopped travelling. I buried myself in rehearsals. As I staged the siege of Harfleur, British troops entered Baghdad. A couple of days later, after working on the battle of Agincourt, I called Lloyd. “The war’s ended,” I said. “I thought it might be worth checking in.” It was. By the end of the first £10 Season, Travelex had virtual copyright on the £10 note. Their sponsorship was widely imitated, nationally and internationally. A substantial provision of cheap tickets became standard in all London theatres. Travelex stuck with us throughout my directorship and into the next, a record-breaking long-term relationship.
With rehearsals under way and the budget balanced, I felt confident enough to tell the government what it was paying for, and why it was worth paying for it. I wrote in the Observer that it would be churlish not to acknowledge the Labour government’s impressive injection of cash into the performing arts, but that it was time to ask again what we were here for. I wanted to reframe the debate about investment in the arts, to move on from its supposed instrumental benefits and to find a better way of talking about it.
We didn’t get the hang of it during the lean years. We tried talking the Thatcher government’s own language: it made economic sense to invest in the arts because it was an enormous invisible earner, pulling in the tourists, regenerating inner cities, earning back a fortune in VAT, the lot.
Now we’ve learnt to speak the language of access, diversity and inclusion. We share the aspirations of the New Labour arts agenda. We all of us want to play to as wide a public as we can find. But there is a real dange
r in a relentless and exclusive focus on the nature of our audience. Performing artists, once under attack for apparently not paying their way, are now in the dock for attracting the wrong kind of people.
There’s evidently a thing called the young audience and everybody accepts that it’s a good thing. And there’s also a white, middle-class, middle-aged audience and it’s a very, very bad thing indeed. Until recently, the National Theatre’s audience was getting worse reviews than some of its shows. Then somebody noticed some kids in the house with studs through their noses, and the reviews looked up.
I might have said that one of the audience’s worst reviews had come from me, but I left that out, and drew attention instead to how difficult it was to attract new audiences because arts education in state schools was so low on the list of their priorities.
It seems absurd to invest so heavily in the arts and so little in introducing kids to the lifetime’s pleasure and fulfilment that is available to them. We are disenfranchising a vast swathe of our future audience, and it isn’t fair on them. They won’t all like everything they’re introduced to, and that’s fine. I was introduced at school to all sorts of things I hated, football for a start. It’s not compulsory to like classical music, theatre, or dance, but unless their mysteries are uncovered, you don’t stand a chance of deciding for yourself. Our schools deserve to have returned to them the wherewithal to give their kids space to discover their souls.
Twelve years later, drama and music teachers were a vanishing species in state schools. In 2015, the Education Secretary advised teenagers against studying the arts and humanities, “which will hold them back for the rest of their lives.” But in 2003, I didn’t feel like I was swimming against the tide when I moved into a major key and sang about art’s intrinsic value, building to my standard feel-good climax.
The best reason for the state to help pay for art is because a vibrant society thrives on self-examination. Simply, it’s more exciting and fulfilling to live in a society actively engaged in wondering what’s beautiful and what’s truthful. The healthy state builds not just monuments, but the resources for its citizens to discover for themselves values that transcend the marketplace, and to have a really good time.
3
A Really Good Time
2003
Giving the audience a good time must have been high on Shakespeare’s agenda when he wrote Henry V. At least three other Henry V plays ran in London during the 1590s. Shakespeare borrowed a lot from the only one to survive, The Famous Victories of Henry V: Containing the Honourable Battle of Agincourt. He must have known what the public wanted from the Henry V franchise: to cheer the English, jeer at the French, and bask in the glow of “this star of England.”
Henry V has often been used to take the temperature of the nation when it has been at war, but its belligerent patriotism coexists with its insistence on the bloody consequences of armed conflict, and I have never seen a jingoistic stage production of it. Still, the Olivier film hovered over all of them: the play has never been more necessary than it was in 1944, when it summoned the country to arms. Olivier had to do considerable violence to the text to bend it to his pugnacious ends, cutting everything that tarnished the king, but in the context of the imminent Allied invasion of France, who can doubt his urgency, or his honesty? Responding to current events, he employed Shakespeare as a scriptwriter. During 2002 it became evident that I had to do the same. On 16 March 2003, the day before we went into rehearsal, George W. Bush and Tony Blair announced that they would bypass the UN Security Council and go to war with Saddam Hussein. The invasion started three days later. It would have been perverse not to play Henry V as a contemporary text.
Adrian Lester was Henry. I’d admired him since he played Rosalind in a mind-bending, all-male production of As You Like It by Declan Donnellan in 1991. He looks, sounds and moves like a war leader, but brings subtle refinement and intellectual precision to everything he does. The play begins with a council meeting. The king needs rock-solid legal justification for the invasion of France. He’s in icy control, cueing the Archbishop of Canterbury to give him the answer to the question that matters: “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” The archbishop obliges him, at tortuous length, with an analysis of the ancient Salic law governing succession to the French throne:
There is no bar
To make against your highness’ claim to France
But this, which they produce from Pharamond,
“In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant,”
“No woman shall succeed in Salic land.”
Which Salic land the French unjustly gloss
To be the realm of France.
There’s nearly a hundred lines of this stuff, and the king is as gratified as Tony Blair must have been when the attorney general delivered to him the notorious justification in international law for the invasion of Iraq. The serpentine archbishop handed copies of an elaborately produced dossier around the Cabinet table, and referred to it repeatedly as he explained England’s right to take military action. The audience, force-fed by news media on UN resolutions and dodgy dossiers, caught on instantly.
Plays, particularly Shakespeare’s plays, change all the time. When Olivier made his film, who was interested in the justification of the cause? The cause spoke for itself, so Olivier cut the archbishop to the bone, and mocked what was left, though he was at his imperious best a few minutes later, when he sent the French ambassador packing after the delivery of the dauphin’s insulting gift of tennis balls. Jacques Chirac, the anti-war French president, gave Adrian Lester an unexpected bonus when, days before we opened, he sent half a case of inferior claret to Tony Blair for his birthday.
A large portion of the play turned out to be about presentation, the king spinning first the build-up to the war, then the initially perilous progress of the campaign, then its aftermath. I kept insisting that the play wasn’t about the Iraq War, that Agincourt was a parallel reality, not the thing itself. Tony Blair was not in power through hereditary succession, and the then archbishop, Rowan Williams, was not a member of the War Cabinet: it would be hard to imagine a prelate less likely to speak untruth to power. But as we worked on the play, we gained a vivid impression that Shakespeare was writing for us, now. We lost its corollary: the indisputable truth that Shakespeare was writing for his own audience, then. A serious loss, but not a permanent one: there’s always next time.
This time, there was no avoiding what the play had become. On only the fourth day of rehearsal, the papers were full of an address given on the border of Iraq by Colonel Tim Collins of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, to the men he was leading into battle:
We are going to liberate Iraq, not to conquer…There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world…If there are casualties of war, then remember that when they got up this morning and got dressed, they did not plan to die this day…You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest order, for your deeds will follow you through history.
In the safety of the rehearsal room, we worked on another rhetorical tour de force:
he which hath no stomach for this fight,
Let him depart, his passport shall be made…
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a tiptoe when this day is named…
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.
Whether or not Colonel Collins had Shakespeare in mind, Adrian had Colonel Collins in mind when he crouched on top of a jeep to give the St. Crispin’s Day address.
Colonel Collins’s speech was recorded in shorthand by Sarah Oliver, a British journalist. At the start of rehearsals, Penny Downie, who played the Chorus, ran with the idea that she too could report on the action as if embedded with Henry’s
troops, but we soon realised that the Chorus, who introduces each of the play’s five acts, speaks in retrospect, as a chronicler of the action and not as a participant. And we weren’t the first to notice that the action she promises often fails to materialise. It’s as if we’re given first the approved, spin-doctored version of history, and then the messy reality. Before Agincourt, we’re told to look forward to “a little touch of Harry in the night.” It’s not, as it turns out, an inspirational touch. Nobody “plucks comfort from his looks.” He skulks around the camp in disguise, and gets right up his soldiers’ noses.
Penny started the play committed to the official version of the invasion of France. Act by act, she became more and more aware of the limitations of her vision, because the action she introduced was at odds with her description of it. In a play that’s so concerned with presentation, she struggled to impose her narrative on the truth. At the end, foreseeing the disaster of the War of the Roses, you felt she’d lost faith in her whole story.
Penny was a welcome presence in the rehearsal room. She wasn’t the first woman to play the Chorus—Charles Kean cast his wife in 1859—but I’d always seen it done by a man. Penny brought the testosterone count down, marginally: there were only three other women in a cast of twenty-five, one of the hazards of staging a war play. The army trained every day: soon enough, some of them were squaring up to each other, an inevitable consequence of imagining themselves at war. It made it easier for me to accept that the days of hanging out with the actors after rehearsals were over. For the next twelve years, as they left for the pub, I went back through the pass door to the office.
The pumped-up cast did not erase my unease about staging a military campaign. How many of us involved now in making or watching theatre or film has personal, or even second-hand, experience of battle? For centuries, drama about war has been made by and for those who have lived through it. Shakespeare must have spoken to hundreds of soldiers, even if he wasn’t himself involved in military action, as he might have been during the 1580s. Olivier was a member of the Fleet Air Arm. We who know nothing, who are required to use our imaginations, are much better advised to find suggestive metaphors for combat than to pretend we can involve an audience in full-scale reproduction.