Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  Stephen Beresford gave up a successful acting career to write his first play, The Last of the Haussmans, in 2012, so he knows what an actor needs to build a character and land a line. Julie Walters played Judy, a refugee from the 1960s, who has totally messed up her daughter and son, not least by dragging them with her to India when they were children to live in an ashram. Now they join her at her dilapidated house on the south Devon coast.

  JUDY: It’s all second homes here now. Fucking fascist pigs. They don’t want me to drive down the value of their exclusive little boltholes…This is property. Do you see? It’s the greatest agent of control ever devised by any government anywhere. Get people to care about their property and you don’t even have to police the state. They do it for you. Residents’ association? They’re worse than the Stasi.

  Most of this could have been delivered without irony thirty years earlier, when it still seemed possible that the theatre could be a call to arms, and that audiences would leave enraged enough to bring down an unjust system. The system stayed put. Now the call to arms is much fainter: understanding who we are, and where we live, is a full-time job. The tainted legacy of the 1960s generation was one of the play’s subjects, Judy’s children apparently wrecked by her fabulous self-indulgence, although the play didn’t settle for easy mockery either of the nightmare mother or of her values.

  Simon Stephens’s Harper Regan in 2008 sent Lesley Sharp in the title role on an odyssey to Stockport, where she arrives too late to tell her father she loved him. She has a series of bruising encounters with lonely men and a desperate confrontation with her mother. Harper’s anger burns as fiercely as anything in Tena Štivičić’s or Stephen Beresford’s plays, but:

  Harper can’t speak with rage…

  Harper puts her fist to her mouth…

  Harper looks at her. She can’t speak. She’s shaking.

  Simon makes theatrical poetry out of the emotional reticence of the north of England. Like his frequent director Marianne Elliott, he grew up in Stockport. I grew up only a few miles away, in the relative comfort of Didsbury, a middle-class Manchester suburb, but the stoicism and emotional reticence of Simon’s protagonists didn’t seem strange to me. Simon was a teacher before he started writing plays full-time: he knows the lives he writes about.

  Many artists make art about lives they once lived, but it is hard to avoid how little of their art reaches the worlds they were once part of. At the National, much of our subject matter came from exactly that part of our society that feels most alienated from those who come to watch it. And if there was a non-metropolitan bias to our new playwriting, it was because most of the playwrights were themselves rooted in the world outside the metropolis, and their sympathy for it coursed through their work. In 2006 David Eldridge put the whole of Romford Market on the Olivier stage in Market Boy, a riotous spectacular about his own sentimental education selling stilettos as a market monkey in the mid-1980s among Mrs. Thatcher’s own people.

  Give them what they want. And they’ll give you what you want. We were put on this earth to chase women, and women were put here to buy shoes.

  Our four most commercially successful plays—The History Boys, War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and One Man, Two Guvnors—all gave London a wide berth.

  On its stages, the theatre is profoundly engaged with as much of the wider community as its writers and actors know from personal experience, or can reach through acts of creative empathy. But there’s a constant struggle to extend the audience beyond the couple in Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now? to the kids in Nadia Fall’s Home. Even Lucinda’s couple would be a stretch, to be honest: too tired, and who’s going to babysit? They used to go to the theatre before the kids arrived, and they may come back once the kids are old enough to look after themselves, but at least they’ll feel they belong when they do.

  No playwright insists more eloquently that the arts should not be the exclusive property of a privileged elite than Lee Hall, so when The Pitmen Painters opened at Live Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 2008, I hurried up to see it. “We’re bringing this in,” I told the planning meeting on the following Wednesday morning, not even waiting to discuss it with them.

  The Pitmen Painters tells a true story. In 1934, the Woodhorn Colliery miners in Ashington, Northumberland, want to take evening classes in economics, but can’t find a tutor, so instead settle for lessons in art appreciation. Their tutor soon realises that showing them slides of old masters is getting them nowhere, so he lets them paint. Their fame spreads, but they continue to work down the mines. What transforms them is the actual making of art, not its mere presence. One of the miners describes what it was like to paint his first canvas:

  And when I stopped to look at what I’d done, suddenly I realised it was light—it was morning—time for work—I thought it’d been an hour or something—I’d been on the whole night. And I was shaking—literally shaking—’cos for the first time in me life I’d really achieved something.

  In Max Roberts’s staging, you saw their paintings, which spoke for themselves about the enrichment of ordinary lives through art. They found transcendence in the mundane reality of the pithead and the pub, in their whippets and ponies, in a pint of beer and a game of draughts.

  Lee Hall’s movie Billy Elliot traced the transformation through dance of a young boy from a mining village. Billy gets lucky because he stumbles on a ballet class. The pitmen painters get lucky because they can’t find anyone to teach them economics. The play ends in 1947, with the post-war promise of art and education for everyone. “They’re not ganna leave yer Shakespeare and yer Goethe just for the upper classes now,” says one of the pitmen. Successive governments have betrayed them. Lee Hall, who comes from the same world as Billy Elliot and the Ashington Group, got lucky like them, found a local youth theatre, and went to Cambridge. Because he’s a successful playwright and screenwriter, I suppose he’s now part of the reviled metropolitan elite, but he has repeatedly made art out of his anger, on behalf of his own community, at the broken promise of universal access to the arts.

  Lee’s play suggests a way through the constant frustration that too many of our fellow citizens leave school without the introduction they deserve to the cultural riches that their taxes help pay for. Every cultural institution in the country is committed to helping schools not just to appreciate art, but like the pitmen painters, to take part in it. At the National, I inherited the Connections programme, which started in 1995 in direct response to what schools told us they wanted. Every year, ten short plays are commissioned from established writers like Howard Brenton, Moira Buffini, Lucinda Coxon and Lee Hall, to mention only a few of those who have been the subjects of this chapter. Up to five hundred school and youth theatre groups throughout the country choose one of the ten. Every group performs its production at festivals in over forty partner theatres. In 2016, 10,000 young people took part: a mammoth Ashington Group, rolling up their sleeves, getting their hands dirty. A handful of groups travel to London to perform at a week-long festival at the National itself. Watching even the least memorable of them, you can see how confident they become, how deeply they share their writers’ commitment to the huge range of subject matter they’ve chosen to address. Like the Ashington Group, the kids return to their communities. But for once, the playwrights’ involvement in the wider community has been returned by the community’s involvement in the plays. When they perform at the National, the kids and their supporters in the audience may be more boisterous than the average crowd for a Chekhov matinee, but you can’t help noticing that in all essentials, their engagement with the event is the same: empathetic, immersed in the lives of others, passionate, inclusive, liberal. You want the same for everyone. To our incalculable cost, a malfunctioning polity has left half of us behind not just materially, but in the provision of art and arts education.

  James Graham was twenty-eight, not much older than the Connections kids, when in 2010 I saw his play The Whisky Taster at the Bush
Theatre. I asked him what he might write for the National. He launched into an impassioned monologue. “I’d been increasingly obsessed with the hung parliament of 1974–9,” he later wrote, “long before the general election of 2010 gave me a handy modern comparison.” The 2010 general election delivered a hung parliament and a formal coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. But the hung parliament of the mid-1970s? Seriously? I couldn’t imagine why we’d want a play, thirty years later, about the stuttering economy, the strikes, the parliamentary machinations behind the short-lived pact between the Labour government and the Liberals. My memory of it was in grim monochrome, but James, who wasn’t even born when it happened, pitched it to me in saturated colour.

  “OK,” I said, “when can we have it?”

  This House arrived within months. James isn’t a writer who hangs around. He spoke to MPs from all sides of the House of Commons and decided that the real drama was in the Whips’ Office. His unlikely chief protagonists were the Labour deputy chief whip, Walter Harrison, and the Conservative deputy chief whip, Jack Weatherill. He built around them an enormous play about the business of politics: exactly the kind of play I promised the Monsterists I wanted for the bigger theatres. I fretted that its appeal might not extend to those who weren’t around at the time, and chickened out of scheduling it in the Olivier. I told James it would be better to produce it in the Cottesloe, where there’d be less pressure to sell tickets, and where his whispered corridor conspiracies wouldn’t need banging to the back of the house. He looked a little crestfallen, but hurried away to write another draft of the play in response to the notes we’d given him.

  First in the queue when This House opened in 2012 were the politicians, most of them at best intermittent patrons of the performing arts. But who doesn’t love seeing themselves on stage? And to their astonishment, here was a play that, far from putting them in the pillory for their failures, relished the grubby realities of their vocation. The Cottesloe run sold out within days, and This House moved smoothly into the Olivier, where it continued to sell out to the extent that a West End transfer was frustrated only by the preference of the owners of the single available theatre for a new musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The one person who seemed not to be surprised by the scale of its success was the playwright himself.

  James had hung his pitch on the similarities between the Lib-Lab pact and the coalition government of 2010, which turned out to be beside the point. Behind its delight at the surreal wheeling and dealing of the two Whips’ Offices was an awestruck belief in parliamentary process that recalled Michael Frayn’s Democracy. Beyond that was an enormous sense of loss. Its politicians were from another age: they seemed to have real lives, rooted in real communities. Walter Harrison was an electrician and union official before he entered Parliament, Jack Weatherill an apprentice tailor before he took over the family firm. Both fought in the Second World War. Parliament is poorer for the current dominance of consultants, researchers and newspaper columnists: those whose only career has been politics. The play mourned the disappearance of political tribes that had lives outside politics, and for political enmity that was based on something more than individual vanity.

  This House built to an act of simple human decency. As the vote of confidence that was to bring down the Callaghan government loomed, the Labour MP Alfred Broughton was on his deathbed and unable to vote. Jack Weatherill offered Walter Harrison his own abstention to compensate for the government’s missing vote, a move that would have enraged his leader and ended his career. Harrison was so moved that he refused Weatherill’s offer, and the government fell by a single vote. James Graham did more than reveal a friendship that reached across the party divide. He used it to insist that there are values—principle, decency, honesty—that transcend personal gain. This House finally made it to the West End in 2016, a few months after the country fell victim, in the EU referendum campaign and its aftermath, to the frivolous rivalries of a self-serving political elite for whom principle, decency and honesty were negotiable commodities.

  “A big, scabrous, state-of-the-nation satire. Working title: Hacked,” said Richard Bean. “What do you think?”

  Among my replies were: “Of course, yes please. When can we have it? And by the time you’ve written it, they’ll be done with the trial of Rebekah Brooks, won’t they?”

  Richard’s friend and fellow dramatist Clive Coleman is also a journalist: he was covering the continuing legal proceedings around phone hacking at News International. Clive thought the hacking scandal showed how badly we had been kidding ourselves that integrity ran through our institutions—Parliament, the police, our fearless free press—like a stick of rock. In fact, we’d always known about the control the Murdoch press exercised over the political class. Now we knew about how close News International was to the Metropolitan Police: there was something increasingly ridiculous about the Met’s red-faced outrage at anyone who dared question its refusal to act on the mountain of evidence against News International. The arrest in 2011 of Rebekah Brooks, its chief executive, at last promised to reveal how far the Murdoch press had sewn up politics, law enforcement and the country.

  With substantial contributions from Clive, Richard wrapped up the play long before the legal system wrapped up the case. “Right,” says Wilson, the editor of the Free Press to the assembled journos,

  we haven’t had a decent scum story recently. Who are the scum!? The scum are Scousers, obviously—gyppos; the unemployed; druggies; MEPs; feminists; northerners; criminals; prisoners; teenage mums; asylum-seekers; illegal immigrants; legal immigrants; squatters; kiddie-fiddlers; cyclists; trade unionists; the IRA; and career women who rely on childcare. (Beat.) Any one of those is a scum story, any two of those is a double-scum story and a guaranteed hard-on.

  During the play, Paige Britain, the news editor of the Free Press, ingratiates herself with its Irish proprietor, Paschal O’Leary, hacks the phone of famous cricketer Jasper Donald, has sex with the prime minister, hacks the queen’s phone, takes Wilson’s job as editor, hacks the phones of missing twelve-year-old twins and sets up their father for their murder. She’s arrested, charged with conspiracy to intercept communications, convicted, sentenced to two years, and on her release, given her own chat show on O’Leary’s American TV channel where her guests include Madonna, Vladimir Putin and the Pope.

  Meanwhile, the trial of Rebekah Brooks and her co-defendants had been postponed, and didn’t start until 28 October 2013, more than a year after Richard first proposed the play. We knew we couldn’t schedule it until the trial was over, as even this, a satirical caricature of the case, would contravene the laws covering contempt of court. These would be mystifying to an American dramatist brought up on the First Amendment, but British law puts the assumption of innocence ahead of the protection of free speech, and forbids the publication of any material that could prejudice a trial. We suspected that it would take no more than a public announcement of our intention to produce the play to land us in hot water. So we postponed it for six months, left an unidentified gap in the programme, and within the National we referred to it only as the new Richard Bean. When it finally opens, we thought, maybe only a few months after the verdicts come in, it will at the very least amaze by its topicality.

  As rehearsals approached, the trial dragged on. We consulted Andrew Caldecott QC, an expert in contempt of court. He confirmed that it would put us on the wrong side of the law to announce, let alone perform, the play while the trial continued. He reassured us that the contempt laws didn’t extend to rehearsals: if we kept them secret we’d be OK. Richard Bean wondered whether he’d found the play funny. He advised us that it was very funny, but that of course we wouldn’t be able to perform it if Rebekah Brooks was acquitted. This stopped us in our tracks. We have to perform it, I told him, as there’s a huge gap in the schedule for it. He said we’d lay ourselves open to a massive libel claim.

  “But the play doesn’t in any way suggest that Paige Britain is in fact
Rebekah Brooks,” I said, “or that Paschal O’Leary is Rupert Murdoch, or that any of the sleazy journos in the play are direct representations of the allegedly sleazy journos at the News of the World. Nobody is saying that anyone hacked the queen’s phone or had sex with the prime minister! We have no opinion about the guilt of any of the defendants—we’re happy to leave that to the jury. It’s satire!”

  Andrew Caldecott confirmed that satire can be a defence in law, but his advice was not to risk it.

  Walking back to the National from Andrew’s chambers in the Temple, I said to Nick Starr that we were screwed. I couldn’t seriously ask the National Theatre Board to support the production of a play that might never reach the stage. Maybe it was time to start thinking of an alternative.

  We returned to Andrew’s chambers a few days later to comb through the play for potentially actionable material. As the list got longer, my heart sank. In the draft we were discussing, Paige Britain is news editor of the Free Press, is promoted to editor and is the brains behind phone hacking on an industrial scale. Rebekah Brooks was a feature writer on the News of the World, was promoted to editor and her defence was that she knew nothing whatsoever about phone hacking. The problem was not that the play suggested there was industrial-scale phone hacking, or that there was an unhealthy relationship between sections of the press, sections of the Metropolitan Police, and sections of the political establishment. None of that was in dispute. The problem was who the play seemed to identify as guilty of breaking the law.

  “So is Rebekah Brooks’s defence,” I asked, “that she was too stupid or too incompetent to know what was going on at her own paper?”

  More or less, we all agreed.

  “So what if instead of Paschal O’Leary promoting Paige Britain to editor, he promotes someone else who’s too dim to know what’s going on? If Paige Britain doesn’t make it to editor, she can’t be identified as Rebekah Brooks, can she? We’d have another editor, an innocent editor, and no suggestion that the editor has broken the law.”