Balancing Acts
Page 8
The novels use string theory as a launch pad, and travel across multiple universes. The two heroes are twelve: Lyra Belacqua, from Jordan College, Oxford, in a universe where every human is accompanied from birth by an animal dæmon; and Will Coulter, from an Oxford housing estate in our own universe. By the time Will makes his first appearance at the start of the second book, we are so immersed in Lyra’s universe that ours seems more bizarre than hers, so it’s as shocking to us as it is to her that Will has no dæmon. Lyra and Will move between universes with a knife that can divide subatomic particles and create portals in space. Lyra is on the run from Mrs. Coulter, who is the glamorous mastermind behind the mass kidnap of children throughout England; the children are taken to the frozen north and violently separated from their dæmons by the “experimental theologians” of the Magisterium, a church body that has discovered a prophecy identifying Lyra as a second Eve, and wants her dead. The novels climax in a Miltonian battle between the forces of the Magisterium and the forces of Lyra’s father, Lord Asriel, a benign Satan. The Magisterium is vanquished, the Authority behind it expires, and Lyra and Will make love: a second Fall that redeems the first. When they realise it is their destiny to live in different universes, they vow to return every midsummer’s night for the rest of their lives to the Oxford Botanic Gardens. They sit on the same bench, further away from each other than the furthest star in the universe.
Which is how we started and ended: two desolate young actors sitting together on a bench under a vast tree, in different universes, unable to see each other. Beside one of them was a third actor dressed entirely in black carrying a puppet pine marten: Lyra’s dæmon, Pantalaimon. The two shows unfolded in flashback, which helped justify the casting of adults as children: the same two actors played Lyra and Will as twenty-year-olds and as twelve-year-olds. Casting turned out to be the very least of our problems.
I asked Giles Cadle, who had designed Mother Clap’s Molly House, to do the sets. I guessed that the dæmons would be puppets, though I knew nothing about puppetry. Tom Morris took me to a couple of puppet shows at Battersea Arts Centre. They didn’t seem like the right kind of thing, so I contacted the designer who had made the animals for The Lion King. Giles and I travelled to Portland, Oregon, to meet him at his workshops. Each character in Lyra’s universe has a different animal dæmon, so we described them all to him, exchanged drawings, and left him to it. Meanwhile, I encouraged Giles to go to town with the Olivier. His designs made full use of the drum revolve, a monumental piece of kit that can deliver amazing visions from deep underneath the stage. Oxford, London, Arctic mountaintops, the palace of Iofur Raknison the King of the Bears, the deserted city of Cittàgazze: Giles imagined these and many more in spectacular detail. The National’s technical and production teams squashed into his tiny Kilburn shopfront studio to look at the mind-blowing set model. I was their new boss, so nobody said to me, “Are you out of your mind?”
Both shows sold out almost as soon as booking opened. I had no idea how passionately the books were loved, but I kept quiet and allowed everyone to think how clever I was, though the Association of Christian Teachers was less impressed than the tens of thousands of advance bookers. “Philip Pullman actually sets out to undermine and attack the Christian faith. His blasphemy is shameless. This production is in poor taste,” said its chief executive, long before it actually opened. The books seek new symbols for the life of the spirit: they attack not faith, but religious fundamentalism and its pitiless doctrines.
On the first day of a ten-week rehearsal period, the puppets arrived from Oregon. We had no idea how to use them, as it hadn’t occurred to me to bring a puppet specialist onto the directorial team. Still, they looked wonderful: translucent and airy. Philip Pullman introduced himself to the company, then went off to meet his friend Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a great admirer of his books whose faith somehow survived their shameless blasphemy. The thirty actors sat down to read through Part One.
It was during the table reading that I first heard myself saying, “This isn’t working.” Nick Wright didn’t flinch, and quickly wrote something that did. “It’s not working” became a mantra during rehearsals. I told the actors I wanted high-definition acting. By this I meant that our priority would be vivid storytelling, and that most of them would have very little time to establish the several characters they each were playing, so they’d need to present them in primary colours. It also turned out to mean that I’d scheduled too little time to work with them in detail on their performances, so the best they often got from me was: “That isn’t working.” And before they had time to ask what would work, I’d be buried in the script with Nick Wright trying to untangle some narrative knot, or running off with the technical team to work out how to get from the streets of London to the frozen north via a rusty old ship without a ten-minute pause between each scene.
At the still centre of the storm were three young actors who had been at drama school together. Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyra, Samuel Barnett as her dæmon and Dominic Cooper as Will were all LAMDA alumni. They forced me to carve out time for them, partly because almost alone in the company they were having a ball, so it was possible to have fun with them. Everyone else was sweating under their enormous bear masks, or learning synchronised witch movements, or staring blankly at their dæmon frog, scorpion or cat and wondering how to bring it to life. Anna and Sam slowly worked out how to be the same person. They wouldn’t be hurried into clarity. What is the relationship between a girl and her dæmon? they asked. Is the dæmon her brother, her heart, her better nature, her worst fears, her soul? There was no easy answer: Philip Pullman’s dæmons have the power of myth, pregnant with meaning, beyond rational explanation. By exploring every possibility, trying everything, taking their time, Anna and Sam went beyond high definition into something suggestive of a rich inner life. The same happened between Anna and Dom: you watched them grow up together.
Mrs. Coulter was Patricia Hodge and Lord Asriel was Timothy Dalton, and their inherent authority gave them instant access to the commanding heights of Philip Pullman’s many worlds, Patricia bringing to them the cold allure of Marlene Dietrich. As experienced as they were, they were still surprised when after only three weeks I announced a run-through of Part One. After four turgid hours, while everyone else queued up for coffee, two members of the cast sat weeping in opposite corners of the rehearsal room.
“It wasn’t that bad. What’s wrong with them?” I asked Aletta Collins, the associate director.
“Massive affair, one of them has a partner at home, won’t leave the partner, everybody’s noticed except you,” said Aletta.
“Nothing to do with the show?” I asked.
“No. But they’re very unhappy,” said Aletta.
“I’ve no time to worry about that,” I said, and called the company together. “The show’s far too long, and the dæmons aren’t working. I have to move on to Part Two. Aletta can sort out the dæmons in the next room.” And as I started the long trek through the second play, Aletta worked with the dæmons.
“Where did your dæmon train?” I heard someone ask, as they disappeared down the corridor. That was the problem: none of them were trained. Together, Aletta and the actors taught themselves the rudiments of puppetry. By the time we produced War Horse, four years later, we knew better than to be so cavalier about an ancient theatrical art.
Halfway through rehearsals for Part Two, Aletta returned with the dæmons. I tried again the first scene in Part One when Lyra meets Roger the kitchen boy, and their dæmons make friends with each other, so they realise they should, too. The puppets, once beautiful but inert, were now alive, moving and thinking as extensions of the actors who manipulated them. Russell Tovey as Roger was so delighted with his dæmon that he went on playing with her long after the focus of scene had moved elsewhere. “Russell, stop being so interesting,” I snapped at him, which by then was the best most of the actors were getting from me.
When we moved i
nto the Olivier, Giles’s sets were magnificent, but I had underestimated how long it would take to get the drum revolve working again after years of neglect. The technical rehearsal kept grinding to a halt.
“Why are we waiting?” I would call from the auditorium. “How long will it take? Will someone please talk to me? This isn’t working!”
As a young director, I once or twice lost my temper, which was counterproductive and discourteous. I mellowed quickly. As the technical rehearsal staggered on, I felt myself unmellow, but as the director of the theatre I couldn’t allow myself to boil over, so when the palace of Iofur Raknison the King of the Bears got stuck in the flies for the ninth time, I ran up the centre aisle and banged open the heavy auditorium doors so I could let rip alone, in the privacy of the foyer. I felt my wrist give way, and howled louder than the entire company of witches. I already had a huge sty on my right eye. I was coming apart and we were only just past the interval of Part One.
We cancelled the first preview in time to let most of the audience know not to come, but it was still a terrible humiliation not to be able to give them a show. On the afternoon of what should have been the second preview, we invited everyone who worked front of house to watch the dress rehearsal. The drum revolve seized up after three minutes. Three hours later, after several more unscheduled seizures, we hadn’t reached the interval. Nick Starr and Mark Dakin pulled me aside and said we’d have to cancel another show, though there was no time to stop the audience turning up to see it. “What about the children?” I wailed, but they were more interested in the safety of the actors, so I admitted defeat. Philip Pullman gamely offered to sit in the foyer and sign books for the disappointed children.
The next night I took to the stage before the show, my wrist swollen and my right eye livid, and warned the audience that the show they were about to see might stop at any moment. “I’m very sorry,” I whimpered. It sometimes moved at an elephantine pace, but it didn’t stop, and the thirty actors finally started to declare independence from the tyranny of the gargantuan production. At the second performance their confidence soared. But the following morning, in a piece of scheduling from a hell of my own making, we had to put Part One aside to start the technical rehearsal for Part Two. I arrived early with the production team, and watched the stage crew strike all the scenery from the night before. I started to laugh hysterically. If anyone had given me the option, I’d have cancelled the whole run.
We only just survived. Part Two opened after another lost preview, and not before Anna had threatened to lead the whole cast out on strike because Patrick Godfrey, the oldest actor on stage, got stuck behind a moving tree and was almost flattened.
Meanwhile, every time there was a break, the young actor playing Brother Jasper came quietly to the front of the stage to run through his long, sinister address to the Magisterium. He was straight out of RADA, and there was nothing I hadn’t thrown at him: he was a stolen child, a gyptian, an armoured bear, a dæmon goose, a witch in a long black wig and silk skirt. Brother Jasper was his big moment, and I’d hardly had time to notice how good he was. “This kid is mesmerising,” I whispered to Aletta, who already knew. Not long afterwards he told me that he’d been asked by Trevor Nunn to play Hamlet at the Old Vic. Trevor’s not lost his touch, I thought, and Ben Whishaw won’t be playing any more bears.
When we finally performed both plays together, it started to feel that it had been worth the agony. The audience, half of them children or teenagers, were completely swept up in the narrative. They marvelled as the drum revolve belched up Giles’s mind-boggling visions, and took to their hearts the intrepid company of actors, who were never better than when I gave them the room to be quiet. “The moon is high. But the clouds are still. Two children are making love in an unknown world,” said the witch Serafina Pekkala, in a shaft of golden light, as Anna and Dom played out the old story of the Fall of Man, though this time the story was not about Sin, but about Love. When they parted to spend the rest of their lives in different universes, there wasn’t a heart in the house left whole.
“To see large school parties in the audience of the Pullman plays at the National Theatre is vastly encouraging,” said Rowan Williams to the BBC. During a platform discussion before one of the performances, he and Philip found a lot of common ground.
“We might as well end by reminding ourselves Jesus was one of the greatest storytellers there’s ever been. Whether or not he was the Son of God, he was a great storyteller,” said Philip.
“Eight out of ten,” said the archbishop.
We brought His Dark Materials back the following year, by which time we all knew what we were doing, and I blushed at the memory of the impatient autocrat who had directed it in 2003. The new cast suffered none of the war wounds of the heroic originals. The staging was smoother. We all decided to forget how close we came to disaster.
Writing the introduction to my first annual report as director of the National, I reflected on the reasons why public funding of the performing arts was vital to their survival. At the very least, I wrote, subsidy ensures the stability that arts institutions need to “outlive the vanities and inadequacies of individual artists.” The scars of the second cancelled preview were still showing. But I was able otherwise to report ninety-two percent capacity over the year, and in place of the budgeted £500,000 deficit, a £500,000 surplus. The annual reports of subsidised arts institutions generally find a way to flaunt their enormous statistics, and ours grew ever more tumescent as the years passed. But I’m not sure that I ever presided again over a period of such consistent creative success.
PART TWO
New Things
4
Ourselves and Each Other
NEW PLAYS
It’s Wednesday morning at 9:30, and around twenty people squeeze into my office for the weekly planning meeting: the associate directors, Nick Starr and Lisa Burger, casting, technical, literary, learning, music, marketing. We all stare at the rep chart, and we fling ideas at each other to the sound of bottles rattling into the recycling truck on the riverfront below. The associate directors pick their moment to insinuate their pet projects into the conversation, and manoeuvre them into slots that fit neatly into their own diaries.
“The Seagull would work well in L2,” says Katie Mitchell. She wants the second Lyttelton slot.
“Chekhov would work better in L4,” I say, looking across the chart from the Lyttelton to the Olivier, where Howard Davies is directing Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo in O2. I’m worrying about the balance of the rep: if The Seagull plays at the same time as another twentieth-century classic, they may cannibalise each other’s audience. But the dates for L4 don’t work for Katie, and Howard can’t move from his Olivier slot, and we want both shows, so they stay where they are.
“Around sixty performances for each of them?” I ask. Marketing aren’t keen on selling sixty Seagulls at full price in the Lyttelton, and I know they’re right, but the next show into the Lyttelton can’t open sooner because its director’s dates are as fixed as Katie’s. Sixty Galileos won’t be a problem in the Travelex £10 season, but Howard always tries to negotiate his performance numbers down as he prefers full houses to long runs. The exact numbers can be settled later, so I drop it.
Mark Dakin points out that on the current chart both shows open in the same week. He doesn’t want to overload his colleagues in the Production and Technical Departments, who have to deliver them to the stage, so we separate their openings by ten days. I ask Katie whether she has any casting ideas for The Seagull, but she keeps her cards close to her chest, though she says she’s talked to Juliet Stevenson, which makes me more cheerful about sixty performances as there are bound to be lots of people who want to see her play Arkadina.
“It’s time we did a Restoration comedy,” I say. “Anybody interested?” They study the rep chart and say nothing, so I sigh and say I’ll take one for the team, though secretly I’m pleased to have the Restoration to myself. I pontificate about Restorati
on comedies I’ve seen and read, but they’re still buried in the rep chart, so I move the meeting on from old stuff to new stuff, and everyone perks up.
“Where’s the play about climate change?” someone asks. “Who’s going to write that? Where’s the immigration play? Why is nobody writing about the NHS? Where’s the Middle East play? The play about what’s happening in China?”
We try to wind playwrights up to share our sense of urgency, but most of the time, we commission them simply because we admire them and want to work with them. They pitch ideas to us, and we encourage them to write the play that sounds most interesting to us. Sometimes we say we want their next play whatever it is. Sometimes, we bring material to them and ask them to adapt it.
We’re looking for the plays that answer what Tennessee Williams called “the crying, almost screaming need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better.” We want plays that turn their gaze inward, and plays that look outward at the world; plays that speak to particular communities, and plays that transcend particularity; plays that build on the literary tradition of the English-speaking theatre, and shows that subvert it.
We hear what’s going on at the National Theatre Studio, ten minutes’ walk from the National, next to the Old Vic. It’s where young playwrights are given residencies, and ideas are allowed time and space to develop. The director of the Studio has a large degree of autonomy: she brings in the artists she thinks can use the Studio’s resources most productively, and she lets me know when I should see work in progress. In turn, I send over to the Studio shows that I think would benefit from unpressured workshop time before they go into rehearsal. I ask how Emma Rice is getting on. Emma has a legion of fans for the popular theatre she makes with her company Kneehigh in abandoned tin mines and deserted factories, and she wants to make a stage adaptation of Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death. Her Studio workshop is going well, and we’re keen to see what she might do in the Olivier, so we’re back to the rep chart looking at vacant slots.