Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  The Chorus helped: “Suppose…play with your fancies…grapple your minds…work your thoughts.” On the empty stage, the designer Tim Hatley provided, besides the Act 1 Cabinet table, a few garish reproduction Louis XV chairs for the French court, a wall that doubled as a video screen, and a couple of real jeeps. The jeeps probably gave the audience more help to play with their fancies than the Chorus intended, but they were dirt cheap, and an exciting short cut to armed conflict.

  Verbal rhetoric is Henry’s weapon of choice in his propaganda campaign. In our linguistically impoverished age, spin is more often the province of the film-maker, though video was still in its infancy as a theatrical language, and my use of it wasn’t sophisticated. The king was often on television. He broadcast his declaration of war to the nation at the end of Act 1: “We’ll chide this Dauphin at his father’s door.” In the next scene, his old drinking crony, Bardolph, watched him briefly in the pub, before switching over to the snooker. He made his threats to the townspeople of Harfleur to the cameras; in the following scene, the terrified princess of France watched it with French subtitles. As British troops entered Baghdad, the propagandists moved up a gear: George W. Bush proclaimed Mission Accomplished a few days before we opened. We made our own Mission Accomplished video, the king, like our political masters, taking care in victory to burnish his own image.

  Henry V seems constantly to probe the gap between propaganda and reality, asking whether the king is justified or wise in going to war. It asks how good a strategist he is, and how much he cares about his subjects. It asks whether his show trials and show executions are right, or worthwhile. Is he hero or war criminal? In the context of the Iraq War, the lies we’d been told to take us into it, and the self-satisfaction of its victors, Shakespeare seemed to be with us in the rehearsal room, demanding answers.

  The answers were often the direct opposite of what they’d been for Olivier in 1944. War criminal? As written, the king orders the slaughter of French prisoners before he hears of the French attack on the English boys and baggage carriers. Olivier and Ken Branagh tried to load the dice in the king’s favour by changing the order of play: Henry slaughtered the prisoners in response to the French attack on the English boys. It felt like a revenge attack, which doesn’t make it any less of a war crime, and I’m not sure the play cares. Henry V is hero and war criminal, and he isn’t the first or last to be both.

  How much does the king care about his subjects? How justified is the war? The night before Agincourt, while he’s in disguise and failing to provide much in the way of a little touch of Harry in the night, he gets into a fierce argument with his troops about whether they have a right to be in France in the first place. By the time the production opened, there can have been nobody in the audience who didn’t hear the rebuke to our own leaders in the voice of the common soldier, Michael Williams:

  But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, “We died at such a place”…I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle.

  The king’s overlong response was no more convincing than the increasingly desperate spin coming from London and Washington.

  Just before the end of the play there is one of those scenes to which the audience traditionally looks for a kind of redemptive grace. After all the slaughter, the victorious king woos and wins Katherine, princess of France. Audiences usually respond with delight to his charm and wit, and bask in the healing atmosphere of romance. Adrian is inescapably charming, but none of us were persuaded of the scene’s charm. If you see it from Katherine’s point of view, the romance goes sour. It was another scene whose meaning had completely changed. Henry can be played with wit, seductive allure, the whole works; but you can’t escape the fact that the victor is insisting not just that the daughter of the vanquished marries him, but that she tells him she loves him. “In loving me you should love the friend of France: for I love France so well, that I will not part with a village of it—I will have it all mine.” The king’s heavy humour was lost on Katherine. She accepted Henry on compulsion, as the victim of diplomatic rape.

  Henry V does not have the saving grace of self-consciousness. He is no Hamlet. But his eloquence has the power to make almost irrelevant the question of his sincerity. Gentlemen in England now a-bed, who today include almost all of us, can still be galvanised by Olivier or Adrian Lester, or by those with graver responsibilities than theirs, like Colonel Collins or Winston Churchill, who reach back to Henry V for inspiration. But by the time the production opened, there was such widespread suspicion of Tony Blair’s rhetoric, and even of his motives, that he tainted the king by association. So we maybe missed some of Henry’s characteristically Shakespearean ambiguity: although he’s ruthless and out for himself, he’s also the heroic embodiment of the kind of nation-builder that has only recently fallen from public favour. It was Adrian’s achievement in 2003 to give theatrical presence to the king’s heroism, but the audience wanted the play to discuss the kind of leader it thought Blair was, and I suppose the production encouraged them. Although Henry was brave, resolute and inspiring, nobody trusted him an inch.

  Henry V wasn’t the subtlest or best Shakespeare I directed at the National, but I never got closer to unmasking him as the new century’s sharpest political commentator.

  A few days before the first preview, I asked how big a house we could look forward to. “Really good—sixty percent,” said a member of the Marketing Department. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Really good was one hundred percent. When the first preview arrived, I was more nervous about what was going on in the auditorium than what was on the stage. I lurked behind the sound desk at the back of the stalls, watching the audience arrive, counting the house. It wasn’t quite full, but there’d been a big rush in the last forty-eight hours from the kind of audience that doesn’t bother to book in advance. They seemed new to us, and so was the buzz. Large numbers of them weren’t middle-aged. Some of them weren’t even white.

  Henry V quickly filled up; it finished on ninety-six percent, and not long after, we appointed a head of marketing, Chris Harper, who persuaded the entire organisation that one hundred percent was the new normal. More than thirty percent of the Travelex audience had never come to the National before. For a tenner, they were up for anything: they seemed to sit forward in their seats, inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt. Many regulars wrote to me to say that the new prices would allow them to come more often, another welcome boost to the box office. A few were less comfortable, maybe feeling the theatre was slipping from their exclusive grasp. Some indignantly pointed out that Adrian Lester was black, and Henry V wasn’t. Lucy Prebble, the office assistant, put their letters gingerly in my in-tray, and decided it was time to give up her day job, which was a good call. She had what she called a dirty secret: her new play, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in November 2003.

  Each of the £10 shows had a budget for sets, costumes and props of £60,000, much less than half of a normal Olivier show. The head of production, Mark Dakin, was responsible for delivering the shows physically onto the stage. He and the designers ran with the brief with such panache that few people seemed to notice that we’d spent so little. And in return for our frugality, we got the new £10 audience, packed to the rafters.

  His Girl Friday followed Henry V. Alex Jennings was right: he was very good as Walter Burns, and Zoë Wanamaker was very good too as Hildy. John Guare made a theatrical fusion of the Howard Hawks film and The Front Page. John’s voice is one of the most idiosyncratic in the American theatre and he blows into any room on a hurricane of enthusiasm and curiosity, usually singing hits from the great American songbook, whose most obscure corners he knows as well as he knows the canon of American drama. The American director, Jack O’Brien, knows them too, and knew enough about the British theatre to ask Bob Crowley to be his designer. Bob’s costumes, which
cost next to nothing, looked a million dollars. Margaret Tyzack, a legend of the London stage, played a fierce old lady in a fur coat that took up a large chunk of the costume budget. A couple of weeks into rehearsals I asked her how it was going. “I love Jack O’Brien,” she said. “No nonsense. He tells you where to stand, when to move, where the laughs are. It’s such a relief. I haven’t worked with a director like him for decades.” She seemed so happy that I thought I wouldn’t remind her how recently she’d worked with me. His Girl Friday played to ninety-seven percent.

  There was never any doubt that Edmond would do the business once Kenneth Branagh said he’d play the title role. Ken gave a performance that seemed to shrink the Olivier into the tiny prison cell that is the last of the play’s twenty-three short scenes, almost all of them duologues for Edmond and one other actor. Some leading actors are in exclusive communion with their public, their occupation of the space so complete that the rest of the company doesn’t get a look-in. Ken is the opposite. In all his short scenes, he lifted the other actors. Sometimes, he appeared only to be listening, turning the spotlight on his interlocutor. Edmond played to ninety-eight percent, and brought us within a few seats of the theoretical one hundred.

  The final £10 show brought down the box-office average: Tales from the Vienna Woods played only to seventy-five percent. Richard Jones was unhappy at the National. His bracing theatrical aesthetic, remote from the psychological realism of the British mainstream, split the £10 audience. But although we’d been spoiled by months of nearly full houses, the seventy-five percent houses for Tales from the Vienna Woods seemed to be the ultimate vindication of the Travelex ticket. At normal prices, it would have struggled to fill a quarter of the house.

  Many of my usual correspondents must have stayed away from Jerry Springer—The Opera: they left space for more than half of its audience to visit the National for the first time. Those who paid careful attention might have caught a whiff of moral seriousness in the second half, when Jerry, who has been shot in a studio brawl, goes to hell and is forced to acknowledge the devastation his show visits on the lives of its wretched guests. “I don’t solve problems, I just televise them,” he whines; and for a moment the show seems to be asking whether television has any responsibility for the real people it devours in the name of entertainment.

  But on the whole, the show was a carefree extravaganza, an amoral marriage of trash television and high art. Richard Thomas heard opera in the inflated passions of daytime TV, and he had an outlandish gift for matching them to the right music.

  “I’ve been seeing your best friend!” sang Steve, an enormous Puccini tenor, to his coloratura wife, Peaches.

  “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking, fucking fuck!” she replied, climbing the chromatic scale.

  “Dirty whore! Dirty whore! Filthy, dirty, manky, skanky slut whore!” sang the chorus in gorgeous close harmony to Peaches’s best friend, Zandra, who responded with a poignant solo, as if by Benjamin Britten: “I remember when we was young, we had some laughs, we had some fun, we lived on dreams, we was full of hope, until I got addicted to crack and dope! Crack and dope!”

  In the 1580s, the theatres took refuge on the south bank of the Thames, after the outraged city fathers expelled them because they gave vent to forces that the authorities, spiritual and temporal, preferred to suppress. In 2003, Jerry Springer—The Opera was rude, disreputable and exhilarating in a way that would once have had its creators thrown into jail, but now the authorities helped pay for the theatre that staged it.

  Jerry Springer and the £10 Season promised a new kind of National Theatre to a new audience. I worried in the Observer at the beginning of the year about judging “the success of an artistic enterprise by its ability to pull in an Officially Approved Crowd.” We discovered in 2003 that the crowd follows the show, so a wide-ranging programme brings in a wide-ranging crowd. Who cares if they don’t all come at the same time? For the audience that shunned Jerry Springer we had Three Sisters and Mourning Becomes Electra, substantial, serious productions of the kind of play that the National has always served well. On the page, Mourning Becomes Electra feels overripe, a kind of high-class soap opera, but Howard Davies faced down its melodramatic excesses partly by taking them entirely seriously, partly by sniffing out every opportunity the play gives its actors for self-lacerating irony. Helen Mirren, its red-hot centre, knew when to allow laughter as an escape valve. At four and a half hours, even though heavily cut, Mourning Becomes Electra feels in retrospect like the blueprint for the massive cycles of violence and recrimination that started to dominate long-form television a few years later, a step only from Breaking Bad.

  Although an avalanche of trouble was about to be triggered in the Olivier, there was no less of an appetite for new plays in the Cottesloe than there was for £10 classics. In Elmina’s Kitchen, Kwame Kwei-Armah wanted to ask questions about what was happening to his own children’s generation. Elmina’s Kitchen is a “one notch above tacky” West Indian takeaway run by an ex-boxer, Deli, whose son, Ashley, has started to deal drugs. “I wanna do big tings with my life.” The dialogue swings from north London to full-on Jamaican patois. “Oh God, dem catch me again, I could kill a bloodclaat man tonight.”

  Deli was Paterson Joseph, a classical actor of massive presence, who brought tragic weight to a play that was fierce, funny and terrifying. But he was as aware as everyone else that it would be pointless to put a new community onto the National’s stage and then betray it by softening its contours to make it accessible for a National Theatre audience, to whom much of the dialogue wouldn’t be immediately comprehensible. White people, like me, would get it more easily in the company of people who got every word of it. And it was in any event way past time for the people who got every word of it to find out about their National Theatre.

  There’s an audience that will come to anything at the National, voracious for whatever it throws at them. But there’s also an audience that expects everything to conform to its expectations of what the National Theatre should be. We had to develop a way of communicating in code when we described a play to them in the rep leaflet. “Experimental” was a useful turn-off. “Foul-mouthed” became less of an issue as the years passed. But most of the people who saw Elmina’s Kitchen were those who hung out at joints like Elmina’s Kitchen, which were the focus of much of our marketing. It didn’t hurt that Kwame, who was then also an actor, had just come off a long stint on Casualty, and was a celebrity contestant in Comic Relief Does Fame Academy. Whatever packs them in.

  The first preview audience for Michael Frayn’s Democracy spotted him in the auditorium, and stood and applauded him at the end, a few of them shouting “Author! Author!” which I thought only happened in the movies. They looked a little sheepish about making an exhibition of themselves, but they knew their man, and had come with high expectations. Democracy grew in part, as Michael wrote in its postscript, from “an achievement at which I never cease to marvel or to be moved,” that from the utter desolation of 1945, the citizens of West Germany “constructed one of the most prosperous, stable and decent states in Europe.” In Michael Blakemore’s production, the workings of the West German political system were as intoxicating as musical comedy.

  After the first run-through of The Pillowman I told Martin McDonagh that it was the best play he’d ever written. “No, it’s the best play anyone has ever written,” he said. It was a joke, but as with all Martin’s jokes, you could only just tell. He’s an urbane and seductive collaborator, nothing like you’d expect from the cruelty of his humour. The Pillowman is sustained by a genuinely tragic vision of blighted lives that are, in a gathering storm of theatrical invention, redeemed by art. It’s full of stories. One of them, mentioned only in passing, is called “The Shakespeare Room”: “Old Shakespeare with the little black pygmy lady in a box, gives her a stab with a stick every time he wants a new play wrote.” In the full version of the story, which Martin told me years earlier, the pygmy, who writes
all Shakespeare’s plays because he couldn’t have written them all by himself, is fed up with writing to order. She writes the play she wants to write in her own blood on the walls of the box where Shakespeare keeps her locked up. It’s the best play ever written, better by far than any of the ones she gives to Shakespeare when he stabs her with a stick. I can’t remember how, but at the end of the story the pygmy dies, and the box with the world’s best play goes up in flames, so nobody ever gets to read it. Maybe Shakespeare’s relationship with the pygmy in the box is Martin’s relationship with his own imagination. Somewhere, smeared in blood on the inside, is the best play ever written. I hope he keeps trying to write it.

  The Pillowman ended up on Broadway, and has since been produced by theatre companies all over the world. Three more of the first six Cottesloe productions went on to play to much bigger audiences: Elmina’s Kitchen in the West End, Democracy in the Lyttelton and later in the West End, and David Hare’s The Permanent Way in the Lyttelton. Most of the new stuff got onto the main stage after all.

  In the autumn, we came close to nemesis. As big as it was, it was still an act of reckless folly to try to cram His Dark Materials onto the Olivier stage. The three novels come in at 1,300 pages. Milton’s Paradise Lost is their inspiration, and Philip Pullman outdoes Milton in the wild fantasy of his imagination. Squeezing his trilogy into two three-hour plays was like pouring a petrol station into a pint pot.