Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  Richard sketched out who the alternative editor could be: she’d love horses, she’d have long wavy hair, she’d be married to a soap star, she’d be stupid, she’d be innocent of any wrongdoing. Andrew thought that would do it. We spent the rest of the conference making sure that none of Rebekah Brooks’s co-defendants would be able to identify themselves in the play.

  The trial, which had begun in October 2013, showed no sign of ending when rehearsals started on 28 April 2014. I told the cast that there were two versions of the play. In the one they had, Paige Britain, guilty as sin, becomes editor of the Free Press. In the second version, horse-loving Virginia White becomes editor, Paige Britain stays news editor, hacks and lies her way through the play, and poor, innocent Virginia is too dim to notice.

  “You’d better learn both versions,” I said to the actors. “If the jury convicts the defendants, we’ll do the first version. If it acquits them, we’ll do the second. Meanwhile, not a word.”

  If I knew anything about Rebekah Brooks, whom I had never met, it was that she was charming. We talked to many people whose paths she had crossed. They all testified to her magnetism. She could not be more fascinating than Billie Piper, who played Paige Britain. As much as any actor I’ve ever worked with, she carries with her the inexplicable electric charge that brings an audience helplessly to heel. She also has needle-sharp comic timing, so there was nothing she couldn’t get away with. Her most memorable victim was Aaron Neil as Sir Sully Kassam, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and proud standard-bearer of its diversity: Asian, gay and half-witted. He held regular press conferences to explain his force’s indiscretions:

  Unfortunately, on my watch there have been disproportionately more Afro-Caribbean men shot and killed by armed officers. I’d like to be able to say that just as many white men had been shot accidentally, but unfortunately I can’t. Working together with the communities, we will be putting that right in the coming year.

  But nobody outside the National knew the play was happening, so we hadn’t sold a single ticket, and the trial looked like it would run longer than The Mousetrap. We had a mole, of sorts: somebody knew an Old Bailey judge, and called him to ask what the word was on when the trial might end. Maybe the middle of June was the good news. The bad news was that the jury could take anything up to six weeks to consider its verdict.

  “And by the way,” said the Old Bailey judge, “don’t even think of letting anyone know what you’re up to.”

  I had to report to the National Theatre board that a play scheduled to have its first performance on 10 June might not open until August. We stood to lose several hundreds of thousands of pounds in box-office revenue. They took it on the chin.

  On the day of what should have been the first performance, Mr. Justice Saunders was summing up in the trial of Rebekah Brooks. We performed the play, now called Great Britain, to about fifty friends and family. I made a speech to them before it started: “If you tell ANYONE about this, you’ll be arrested and Mr. Justice Saunders WILL SEND YOU TO PRISON FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT.” They sat in total silence throughout the play.

  “Thanks for the speech,” said Richard Bean.

  The next day, the jury retired to consider its verdict. That night, another fifty friends and family pitched up. I toned down my speech, and they started to laugh. We stuck with the Paige Britain Guilty version because I thought it would be too confusing for the actors to keep two versions in their heads simultaneously. We played it eight times in secret to tiny invited audiences, and then it stopped to allow Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie back into the repertoire.

  On 24 June, two weeks after it was supposed to have opened, my assistant Niamh Dilworth ran into my office and yelled that the jury was about to give its verdict. Two of the defendants were guilty but Rebekah Brooks and five other defendants were acquitted on all charges.

  “That’s a much better ending!” I cried. “Rehearsals start this afternoon for the Not Guilty Version! Start selling tickets!”

  We decided to wait until the next morning to announce the play and put it on sale, so it wouldn’t have to compete with news of the verdicts. At 9 a.m. on 25 June, Lucinda Morrison, head of press, convened my last, and most enjoyable, press conference as director of the National Theatre. I told the assembled journalists that Richard Bean had written a play called Great Britain, that it would open on Monday night, that its first public performance would be its press night, and that I hoped they’d be there. I let Richard talk a little about what happened in the play before pulling the plug on him.

  “You can’t censor the playwright,” said the omniscient show-business reporter Baz Bamigboye, who alone among the hacks had already got wind of the play.

  “I get censored all the time,” said Richard.

  The entire run sold out within a few days, and when it finally opened, stupid, horse-loving Virginia White got one of the biggest laughs of the night when the cops arrived to arrest her and the rest of the staff of the Free Press, and she cried in panic, “What have we done?!” But maybe there was a faint air of disappointment that our foul-mouthed, scabrous satire didn’t aim higher. Maybe it could never match the rabbit we pulled from the hat in announcing so quickly that we had a play about a trial that had put the whole establishment in the dock. Maybe the play could never quite rise to how keenly the public wanted the Murdoch press dismembered limb from limb, the Met pinned to a wall, the politicians reduced to rubble, and a sick society anatomised.

  But Great Britain landed its punches, and like all the best satire, it knew what was decent and what wasn’t, and it had a great time slinging mud at its many indecent targets. We announced that as soon as it closed at the National, it would move to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the West End. It seemed like a no-brainer.

  After her trial, Rebekah Brooks went to the U.S. to lie low. A year later she came back as CEO of News International, a development that was beyond even Richard Bean’s satirical imagination.

  “Phone hacking?” says Paige to the audience. “Give me a break, it’s riding a bike without lights. None of you give a damn about us hacking a bunch of trouser-dropping, publicity-seeking celebrities, or royals. For Christ’s sake, isn’t that what you pay them for?”

  Bullseye. By the time Great Britain transferred, nobody gave much of a damn about any of it anymore. The West End audience laughed, but they’d already moved on. They knew that the exposure at the Old Bailey of the corruption and criminality at the heart of the new establishment had barely dented its ascendancy. Great Britain, a very funny, very topical play, was ancient history by the end of the year.

  Committed to producing up to twenty shows every year, at least half of them new, we were bound to make mistakes at the Wednesday meeting. Sometimes we misjudged a play, and saw in it more than it turned out to offer. Sometimes we didn’t do a good play proper justice. A poor evening of classical theatre is usually blamed on the director, justifiably. A poor new play is invariably blamed on the playwright. Omertà prevents me from naming the guilty directors of some fine plays that barely survived their ministrations. A couple of times, it was me.

  But when it worked, I was never happier than in rehearsal with a living playwright. John Hodge’s Collaborators in 2011 was the first play from the screenwriter of films like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, so it was no surprise that it gripped like a vice. John had been commissioned to write a screenplay based on Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin and had been astonished to discover in a footnote that the great playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov had once accepted a commission to write a hagiographic bio-play about young Stalin for the Moscow Art Theatre. John tried to persuade his producers that making a film about Bulgakov’s play about Stalin would be an interesting way of making a film about Stalin. They weren’t convinced, so he wrote a play instead, a lethal comic masterpiece about tyranny and the compromises art is forced to make with it. John knew about compromise: he’d worked in Hollywood.

  “How do I know I can tr
ust you?” Bulgakov asks the NKVD man who comes to commission the Stalin play.

  “Sir, I think you’ve spent too long in the world of show business,” says the NKVD man, affronted. “Here in the Secret Police, a man’s word is his bond.”

  The brilliant central conceit has Stalin offer to write the play while Bulgakov runs the Soviet Union, until before he knows what he’s doing, he’s organising the Great Terror. John’s portrait of Stalin—charming, seductive, impenetrable, terrifying—was meat and drink to Simon Russell Beale. He won the prizes, but knew that the play’s real burden was carried by Alex Jennings as Bulgakov, whose desperate struggle to hang on to his integrity achieved tragic profundity. Collaborators peers into a vortex of fear, and invites the audience to laugh in nervous relief from the safety of the auditorium. This, it says, is what tyrants look like: a salutary corrective to the hysterical fearmongering in twenty-first-century politics that sees tyranny in the imperfect bureaucracies that were built to keep despots at bay.

  John Hodge was part of a flood of playwrights new to the National in the last years of my directorship, when plays by women finally outnumbered plays by men. Lucy Prebble, who answered the phones for me and Nick Starr in 2003, came back at last as a playwright in 2012 with The Effect, an exceptionally moving play that asked the big existential questions: what is love, what makes us human, are we more than a set of physical responses to chemical stimuli? Like Hamlet, it asked what a man is, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed.

  Rona Munro’s vast James Plays, a trilogy about the Scottish kings James I, James II and James III, also had Shakespearean ambition and were as much about the present as the past. Commissioned and co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, they opened at the Edinburgh Festival just before the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, and were playing in the Olivier on the night the result was announced. They were funny, violent, informative, sexy, and staged with swashbuckling élan by Laurie Sansom. At the climax of James III: The True Mirror, Queen Margaret, the Danish wife of James III, rounds on the Scottish Parliament:

  You know the problem with you lot? You’ve got fuck all except attitude. You scream and shout about how you want things done and how things ought to be done and when the chance comes look at you! What are you frightened of?

  Ten years after making heavy weather of the two Henry IV plays in the same theatre, I couldn’t help thinking how much more fun I was having with Munro on Scotland than Shakespeare on England.

  A temporary theatre rose next to the river in 2013: a bright red shed, designed by Steve Tompkins, whose mastery as a theatre architect at the start of the twenty-first century recalls Frank Matcham’s at the start of the twentieth. It was home to plays that looked forward to a new National Theatre by Tanya Ronder, the TEAM, debbie tucker green, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Polly Stenham, Nick Payne and Carrie Cracknell. My last first night, four days before I left the National, was Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living, a dizzying comedy about a family Christmas, the rules we write for ourselves, and the mechanisms we use for coping with them. It was her second play for the National. The first, Edgar and Annabel, was a weirdly funny Orwellian satire. I thought that there’s probably nothing this writer can’t do, and she’ll still be writing plays for the National when it reaches its centenary.

  The day I left the National, seventy playwrights were under commission. More than thirty of them have since delivered plays, and many of those have already been produced. At the planning meeting, we strove to balance the work of young playwrights with plays from giants of the British theatre, like Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett. There was never a shortage of the former. Most Wednesdays, I gloomily reported that I’d heard nothing from the giants.

  Since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1967, Tom Stoppard had written a play for every decade of the National’s existence. I kept asking him for another, but he only writes when he has something to say. I had to wait until my time was almost up before he sent me The Hard Problem, which had the uncompromising seriousness and grave beauty of one of Beethoven’s Late Quartets. But it was full of jokes, and was about people young enough to be the grandchildren of the audience who saw the first production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tom is a magician, and has something of Prospero about him, but there was nothing valedictory about his play.

  The hard problem is consciousness. Hilary, a young psychology student, is in bed with her young tutor, which in Tom’s universe is a set-up for a scene that’s sexy, funny, sad and passionately thoughtful.

  HILARY: Explain consciousness.

  Impatiently, Spike takes her finger and holds it to the flame of the candle for a moment before she snatches it away with a little gasp.

  SPIKE: Flame—finger—brain; brain—finger—ouch. Consciousness.

  HILARY: Brilliant. Now do sorrow. (Spike groans.) You think you’ve done pain. If you wired me up you could track the signal, zip-zip. If you put my brain on a scanner you could locate the activity. Ping! Pain! Now do sorrow. How do I feel sorrow?

  SPIKE: Do you feel sorrow?

  HILARY: Yes.

  SPIKE: I’m making you sad?

  HILARY: Not everything is about you, Spike.

  Tom returned to a theme that has preoccupied him throughout his career: the search for “some form of overall moral intelligence, otherwise we’re just marking our own homework.” Just as you thought you had the measure of The Hard Problem, it ambushed you with pain. When Hilary was a schoolgirl, she gave up a baby for adoption.

  I missed her like half of me from the first day, and the worst thing was there was literally nothing I could give her, do for her, she’d just gone, and then I thought up something I could do, just to, just to be good, so that in return someone, God, I suppose, would look after her.

  “Do you believe in God?” says her old school friend, Julia, after a pause.

  “I have to,” says Hilary. And then, as if to recommend Him to a puzzled audience of sceptics:

  But I’ll tell you what, though. Everyone should say a prayer every day, anyway, for who you love, just because it puts them in your diary.

  “All directors want to warm my plays up and I want to cool them down,” said Tom one day, about something I’d done that he thought sentimental. “We usually end up somewhere in between.” I imagine that all his directors are as dumbfounded as I was by the layers of feeling that gradually emerge during rehearsal. When the Cottesloe Theatre reopened as the Dorfman in 2015, The Hard Problem was its first new play, and the last play I directed as director of the National. Forty-eight years after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern opened at the Old Vic, Tom shared the repertoire with Sam Holcroft, who is no older now than he was then.

  I was lucky to get a play from Tom. Shortly before Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in 2005, I was having dinner with the designer Bob Crowley in a restaurant not unlike the one he lampooned in Celebration; three years earlier I’d chickened out of saying that I couldn’t share his enthusiasm for reviving a thirty-minute play that had only recently been produced at the Almeida. We saw Harold having dinner in the opposite corner. Bob waved to him: they’d worked together often. Maybe I should have been on my guard when Harold’s wife, Antonia Fraser, made a hasty exit about twenty minutes later, but suddenly Harold was bearing down on me.

  “You’re a fucking liar,” he shouted. The entire restaurant went silent. “You’re a fucking liar, and you’re a fucking shit.” I had no idea what to say, so I said nothing.

  “You told me you would revive Celebration at the National Theatre,” said Harold, quieter now, but with Pinteresque menace. “You told me you’d put it in a double bill with The Room. You’re a liar and a shit.”

  “I’m really sorry if I gave you that impression, Harold,” I said meekly. “That wasn’t my intention. I’m genuinely sorry.”

  “Don’t fucking apologise to me,” roared Harold, “I’m not interested in your fucking apology. You’re a shit and a liar, and now I’ve fu
cking told you.” And he left the restaurant.

  Bob waited for all the other tables to stop looking at us. “Rite of passage,” he said. “You can’t call yourself director of the National Theatre until Harold Pinter has called you a shit.”

  Two years later, in 2007, I sent word to Harold that we’d like to do a new production of one of his early plays, The Hothouse. He couldn’t have been more charming or enthusiastic. He was delighted we were doing it, delighted with the director Ian Rickson, delighted with the cast. A few days before its first preview, Ian told me that one of the cast was having unaccountable difficulties in learning it. Ian was worried he wouldn’t make it. I’d worked with the actor, knew him to be reliable, and assured Ian that it would all be fine by the time he got in front of an audience.

  At the first preview, the poor actor fell to pieces. During the first half he must have taken forty prompts. It was one of the most difficult nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre. At the interval, I met Harold and his party in a small room off the Lyttelton foyer. Nobody said a word until one of Harold’s friends broke the ice.

  “The actor playing Lush is very good,” said Harold’s friend, diverting attention from the actor who had fallen apart.

  “What do you mean Lush is good?” said Harold, shaking with rage. “What about the play? Is the play no fucking good? What do you think of the fucking play?”

  Harold’s friend told him the play was a masterpiece, and the rest of the interval passed without incident. Nobody mentioned the actor who kept drying. During the second half, he dried even more.

  After the show, I’d arranged to meet Harold and Ian Rickson for dinner. Harold lowered himself into his seat. There was a long, dreadful silence.