Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  The family of old drunks see the Devil off. It turns out they love each other, and love is their salvation. As the Devil leaves the house, “the light under the Sacred Heart blinks on. The first rays of dawn are seeping into the room.”

  I am less interested in plays that mirror my own way of looking at experience than in playwrights who dumbfound me with their conviction and authenticity, so I was as much moved by The Seafarer as I was by Paul. The National Theatre has no responsibility to be fair and balanced in its approach to anything: journalism is not its business. Still, at the planning meeting every Wednesday morning, we weren’t much concerned with whether we agreed with a play. Challenged once by an arts reporter about the perceived left-wing bias of those who make theatre, I should have rejected the attempt to corral the creative arts into categories that are no longer adequate even as an indication of political belief. Instead, I said I’d be delighted to produce a right-wing play if someone would write a good one. Boring scripts poured in, all of them monomaniacal about making some point or other, none of them remotely theatrical. Plays that make points rarely are. A hundred pages that worshipped at the altar of Margaret Thatcher were no more unstageable than the hagiography of Nelson Mandela that arrived a few months later. I turned down both plays because as drama they were dead. Mrs. Thatcher’s tedious devotee chose to assume that he was the victim of political bias.

  I was always delighted to upend expectations, but for others it was an article of faith that we had an ideological agenda. To commentators on the rebarbative right, we were blasphemous, cowardly leftists who happily abused Christianity but didn’t have the guts to take on Islam. In fact, nobody was much interested taking on either, but several dramatists were fascinated by the causes and consequences of their deformed fundamentalist offspring.

  Richard Bean was the third Monsterist to have a play with a huge cast in the Olivier: England People Very Nice was his 2008 comic odyssey through four waves of immigration to London. First the French Huguenots, then the Irish, the Jews, and the Bangladeshis arrive in Bethnal Green. Each new arrival, fleeing persecution and poverty, is greeted by violent hostility over housing, jobs, religion and culture. In the pub, Ida moans about the French:

  Fucking Frogs! My grandfather didn’t die in the English Civil War so’s half of France could come over here and live off the soup.

  Ida, Laurie and Rennie, two cockneys and a Jamaican, drink in the same pub over four acts and four centuries. They’re still at it when the Irish, the Jews and the Bengalis arrive. No racial stereotype goes unmocked.

  IDA: Fucking Micks! Why—if one Mick wants to say something to another Mick—why can’t he just say it? Why do they have to get pissed, beat each other up, and then write a song about it?

  LAURIE: Because Irish is an oral culture.

  Richard was a stand-up before he started writing plays. He would go on to write One Man, Two Guvnors, which had nothing much on its agenda besides wanting to make people laugh. England People Very Nice got almost as many laughs, none of them subtle, but it was also historically informed, with a lot on its mind. The same two young actors, Michelle Terry and Sacha Dhawan, did a bravura job of being in love across the racial divide in each of its four acts, and carried much of the show’s raw optimism about the tumultuous integration of wave after wave of refugees to Britain. The French get beaten up, their grandchildren beat up the Irish, who beat up the Jews, and most of them end up outgrowing Bethnal Green and moving to Essex to live in suburban tranquillity. But in the fourth and final act, Sacha as Bangladeshi Mister Mushi and Michelle as Irish-Jewish-English Deborah, who marry during the war, live long enough to see some of their grandchildren radicalised at the local mosque. The play asks whether the centuries-old pattern of persecution followed by integration is finally under threat from militant Islamism.

  Nobody could accuse England People Very Nice of delicacy. Nobody did. It worked like a scurrilous cartoon, the action peppered with projected comic strips. Towards the end of the play, as its tone darkens, Mushi, a devout Muslim, listens in disgust to an animated caricature of a sermon lifted verbatim from the kind of garbage that Wahabi preachers spew out on the Internet.

  You Muslims living in the West, you care more about how often your bins are emptied, than how your women dress. If a farmer wants to judge a bull, he does not look at the bull, he has a look at what the cows are up to. And Allah will judge you!

  Satire is in the eye of the beholder. To the Daily Mail, the National was still “HQ of the multiculturalism-is-compulsory brigade.” For the Guardian, it was just as much an article of faith that the National Theatre should never deviate from the liberal consensus. Even a tonal deviation was enough to incite accusations of apostasy, and a history of immigration from the raucous viewpoint of the white working class was way beyond the pale. “Seven people from diverse backgrounds” were sent to the Olivier to record their dismay. Their diversity didn’t extend to their way of looking at the world: they were all regular Guardian contributors.

  England People Very Nice ridiculed racism and celebrated immigration, but acknowledged that it can be traumatic both for the newcomers and for the communities on the sharp end. Richard Bean’s voice is simultaneously humane, mordant, hilarious, offensive, angry, and tolerant of any amount of deviation from polite conformity. His plays are torrents of theatrical energy. Despite my sympathy for the Guardian’s doctrinal pieties, I preferred to run a theatre that felt confident enough of itself to be able to poke them with a sharp stick.

  And confident enough, occasionally, to forget about nuance, ambivalence and balance, and to stick the boot in. Polemic usually sits more comfortably in an 800-word column than in the theatre, but my admiration for the choreographer and director Lloyd Newson and his company DV8 Physical Theatre was unqualified, so when his focus turned to freedom of speech, censorship, homophobia and religious fundamentalism, I was happy to follow.

  The National co-produced four of Lloyd’s shows. All of them were vivid demonstrations of what first drew me to his work in the 1980s, when he started to break the barriers between dance, theatre and film to explore difficult subject matter. Lloyd is a living rebuke to the idea that great theatre is built on compromise. His ferocious visions reach the stage undiluted. He’s fierce even about when his shows go up—as advertised, to the second—and what happens to latecomers—not admitted.

  “Maybe we can go up five minutes late to allow stragglers time to get to their seats,” I suggested as we discussed the terms of our first co-production.

  “It’s the audience’s job to be there on time,” insisted Lloyd, who, though funny and good-natured, isn’t someone you mess with.

  With considerable misgivings I told the front-of-house team what the rules were. One night Madonna, who is a fan of Lloyd’s work, showed up ten minutes late. The awed house management descended on her and did their steely best to bar the door. But they were no match for the Queen of Pop, who faced them down, and walked into the auditorium to watch the rest of the show.

  By the time Lloyd arrived with To Be Straight With You in 2007, the front-of-house team had found ways of sneaking latecomers into the back of the circle without him knowing about it. The show was unclassifiable: based on eighty-five verbatim interviews, and communicated through an extraordinary synthesis of dance, text and video, it was driven by personal fury at religious intolerance of homosexuality. It had all forms of fundamentalism in its sights, nothing more disturbing than the testimony of a skipping fifteen-year-old from Hull who, after telling his parents that he was gay, was cornered by his family in a back alley and stabbed. The joyous whirl of the boy’s skipping rope gradually transcended the horror of his tale, until it climaxed in his escape to London and the ecstatic embrace of his new gay friends.

  Lloyd was sufficiently unsettled by what he discovered about radical Islam that he returned to it in 2011 for his next show, Can We Talk About This? He collected material from those who had found, to their cost, that there were things they couldn
’t say. He revisited the stories, among many others, of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, and the demonisation in 1984 of the headmaster Ray Honeyford for writing an article in a right-wing periodical hostile to prevailing dogmas about multiculturalism and its effect on education. “This is Islamophobic shit!” shouted an enraged patron halfway through. He was a plant, but he spoke for a large portion of the unnerved liberal audience.

  Militant fundamentalism found a different context in Dara, set in Mughal India and adapted by Tanya Ronder in 2014 from the original by Pakistani playwright Shahid Nadeem. It was no less uncomfortable than Lloyd Newson’s shows, but its chief concern was the ecumenical Islam promoted by its hero, and shared by the thousands of predominantly young Muslims who came to see it.

  I am Muslim, but my humanness is shared with anyone and everyone. If we choose to love one special person, does it mean that they are the only person worth loving? “To you, your religion, to me, mine.” “There is no obligation in religion”—straight from the Quran. We cannot force our religion upon others.

  Dara was written from a Pakistani point of view about the Indian subcontinent. More often, we saw the rest of the world from our own perspective, and the double-edged sword of Western intervention was the inevitable focus of many of our playwrights. Matt Charman, a young writer with a priceless nose for a story, wrote the 2009 play The Observer, in which there arrives in an unnamed West African country an idealistic international election observer, the embodiment of liberal intrusion. In 2010’s Blood and Gifts by J. T. Rogers, a CIA station chief goes to Pakistan in 1981 to fund a Pashtun rebel group in their resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Moira Buffini’s vast Welcome to Thebes (also 2010) reworked Greek myth to imagine a shattered African nation, newly emerged from civil war, that seeks the aid not of the West but of its wealthy neighbour. The wealthier nation’s eagerness to impose democracy across the border is entirely motivated by profit: its president can only see Thebes as a “vast economic development zone.”

  I failed to find or develop African plays about Africa, though Bill T. Jones brought from New York his musical biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. Most of the Olivier Theatre audience in 2010 for Fela! seemed to be Nigerian: Fela Kuti’s music brought them almost instantly to their feet. It took the white minority a little longer to follow suit. They swayed politely while the Nigerians partied.

  Contemporary voices from the rest of Europe were also under-represented. I sometimes read translations of plays that had caused a sensation in their original language and found myself totally foxed. Often, that was the point: many European theatres are so heavily subsidised that their writers need only engage a tiny elite, so it can be left up to the director and the audience to crack the code. I thought I couldn’t ask the National’s audience to crack something I couldn’t crack myself.

  But two plays stood out. Our Class by Tadeusz Słobodzianek was an act of political defiance in his native Poland. In 1941, 1,600 Jews were massacred in the town of Jedwabne. Many Poles, including the resurgent right-wing nationalists who govern them, are deeply resistant to recent investigations that blame their slaughter not on the occupying Nazis but on the local community. Our Class tells the stories of ten members of the same school class, from 1925 to the present: anti-Semitism is a constant. Tadeusz, a great bear of a man, felt impoverished by the absence of the tenth of his fellow Poles who were Jewish. He thought their culture, wiped out during the war, was part of his heritage, and had been extinguished before he was born.

  3 Winters by Tena Štivičić, a Croatian playwright who wrote in her own idiomatic English, was set in the same house in Zagreb in 1945, 1990 and 2011. The violent tide of history washes through the Kos family almost as fiercely as it does through Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Jedwabne. Four generations adapt from the remains of monarchy through fascism, communism, civil war and ultimately to the implacable demands of free-market capitalism. Like so many of the best plays, 3 Winters was about a family, and in particular its women, who fight and fall in love as the world seethes on their doorstep.

  At the Wednesday-morning meeting, I was usually more agitated than my associates by the size of a playwright’s canvas, always looking for shows that would fill the two larger theatres. But the crying need to know each other is rarely better satisfied than in seeing ourselves in other families, tearing ourselves apart. Trying to balance plays that look inward with plays that look outward at the world, I looked often to plays with a tight focus but large ambitions. One family can immerse an audience in the wider Balkan tragedy. A small Cottesloe play about a north London Jewish family might say as much about the Middle East as a big Olivier epic.

  When I took Mike Leigh to lunch in 2002 and asked him whether he’d make a play for the National, he said that nobody from the National had bought him lunch before, so yes, he’d make us a play. A grilled Dover sole? That’s all it took? Lunch and total secrecy: he’d create it over four months of improvisation with seven or eight actors. Everybody knows how Mike works, so this wasn’t a problem.

  “I’ve been thinking it may be time for me to make something about what we have in common,” said Mike, “but don’t tell anyone.” His eyes sparkled with merry acknowledgement of our Manchester Jewish roots. Although Jewish subject matter is a staple of the New York theatre, the London Jewish audience has always seemed less eager to see itself on stage, a function perhaps of the anxiety of European immigrant communities not to draw attention to themselves. But I reckoned we would cope with seeing ourselves in a new Mike Leigh play. It was announced in 2005, to great excitement, as Mike hadn’t made a play for twelve years. The announcement made a big song and dance out of giving nothing away about it, not even its title. Nothing was more than enough to sell out its first booking period.

  Under normal circumstances, Mike would have called some of his regular collaborators, and met some new ones, and together they would have improvised their way towards a play. But to improvise a play about an observant Jewish family, Mike needed eight actors whose shared experience included growing up in a Jewish family; which meant that Toby Whale and his colleagues in the Casting Department had to call all the London agents and ask them which of their clients were Jewish. The Jewish agents could reel off the list without pausing to think. The reply of the non-Jewish majority was usually, “I’ve no idea, darling. How would I know?”

  Most people still don’t. But to find actors for the Mike Leigh play, the agents had to call their clients and ask if they were Jewish. Mike brought eight of them together, and four months later he had a play. I was allowed in to see its final run-through.

  “Here’s my Jewish play,” wrote Mike in the introduction to Two Thousand Years when he eventually published it: his plays, though generated through improvisation, are scripted by him before they reach the theatre. “All my films and plays have in one way or another dealt with identity. Who are you? What are you? Who is the real you, and who the persona defined by other people’s expectations and preconceptions?”

  Dave, the grandfather, says, “You’re born Jewish. You are as you are.”

  Tammy, the granddaughter, says, “It’s not the whole of me—I feel Jewish, and I don’t feel Jewish.”

  I wasn’t the only Jew to identify with a family that feels Jewish, doesn’t feel Jewish, eats bacon, agonises over Israeli action in Gaza, and reacts in bewilderment to Josh the son’s sudden embrace of ultra-Orthodoxy. But non-Jews were equally moved by Mike’s passionate response to much wider questions about Israel and Palestine, religion and social progress.

  After the first preview, I was hovering outside the Cottesloe to get a sniff of how it had gone down with its first audience, when a young reporter with a notebook buttonholed me. “Did you see the show?” he asked.

  I said warily that I did.

  “I’m from the Guardian,” said the reporter, “what did you think?”

  I said it was one of the most brilliant things I’d
ever seen in my life, that I was Jewish and I could testify to its incredible insight into Jewish identity, but that you didn’t have to be Jewish to be knocked out by it.

  “Thanks very much,” said the reporter, “could I quote you, and what’s your name?”

  I plucked a name out of the air. “Nigel Shapps, I’m forty-two,” I said, knocking a few years off my real age, not because I’m Jewish, but because I’m vain.

  The following day the Guardian ran a story about Mike Leigh’s return to the theatre. Nigel Shapps was quoted with exemplary accuracy, though his age wasn’t mentioned, which was a pity. Mike was even more impressed by Nigel than he had been by the Dover sole. Two Thousand Years moved to the Lyttelton to accommodate the demand for tickets, and Mike came back six years later with Grief, a devastating play that burrowed under the skin of a 1950s suburban family. Lesley Manville’s performance as a war widow so traumatised by grief that she destroys her own daughter was incomparably moving.

  Plays about families gave us many of our most involving evenings. At the centre of Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now? in 2008 was Kitty, a woman who has it all: a great job running a charity, a husband, two perfect children, a gay best friend. It caused more winces of recognition than anything we ever produced: at Kitty’s permanent exhaustion, at the scramble to pack the children off to school, at the solipsism of the friends whose marriage is falling apart, at the mountainous self-regard of her worthy husband as he changes career from lawyer to teacher so he can feel better about himself, at her mother’s black belt in pushing her daughter’s buttons.