Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  Directors differ in the way they bring together actors and text. Some start with the text, some end with it. Some take the text apart around a table, find out what it means, why it’s being said, how to say it spontaneously, what surrounds it. Others create a world, maybe through improvisation; then they encourage actors to build characters within it, and finally lead them back to the text in the last few days of rehearsal. I’ve seen both approaches work, and admire colleagues at both ends of the spectrum. Although I place myself at the end that starts with the text, I’m not, like some directors, obsessed with it to the degree that I won’t let actors get on their feet to play a scene until they’ve picked it to pieces. As they start to get under its skin, I like them to inhabit it physically. I don’t like a rehearsal studio to feel like a seminar room.

  On the tiny handful of occasions at the National when a company of actors came close to mutiny, it was always because the director refused to move on to the business of doing the play: “We’ve been sitting around talking about it for weeks.” Or, just as frustrating: “Why are we improvising? Why are we playing games? When will somebody tell us where to come on, when to sit down, and how to say the lines?” Most actors buy into rehearsal games only up to a point. Secretly, they like being told what to do, if only to be able to resist it.

  The rigours of classical text continue into the twentieth century. The actors in the National’s production of Terence Rattigan’s 1939 play After the Dance, its first in London for seventy years, were thoroughly in command of dialogue as brittle as anything in The Man of Mode. But they earthed their hard-drinking throwbacks to the roaring twenties in melancholy exhaustion, and an appalled recognition of their own irrelevance in the face of the global catastrophe that is about to engulf them. James Joyce’s 1915 Exiles isn’t Finnegans Wake, but it still isn’t easy. Joyce fans flew in from all over the world in 2006, like ardent connoisseurs of avant-garde jazz. The linguistic extravagance of the Irish repertoire is maybe closer to the way the Irish still speak than Rattigan and Noël Coward are to the grunting incoherence of the English. Irish actors are rarely fazed by complex text, and have been as central to the English classical tradition as Irish playwrights like Congreve, Farquhar, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw and Beckett. The Scottish cast of Ena Lamont Stewart’s 1947 Men Should Weep, set in a Glasgow tenement, met the English audience halfway in their delivery of the Glasgow dialect. Its wild music was easier to tune into than Ben Jonson.

  Christ Almighty! A we’ve done wrong is tae be born intae poverty! Whit dae they think this kind o life dis tae a man? Whiles it turns ye intae a wild animal. Whiles ye’re a human question mark, aye askin why? Why? Why? There’s nae answer. Ye end up a bent back and a heid hanging in shame for whit ye canna help.

  Errol John found music just as potent in a Port of Spain backyard, and in the Trinidian English they speak there, in his 1957 Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. And for the Louisiana Sicilian community in The Rose Tattoo, Tennessee Williams wrote dialogue in 1950 that seems to come from the same world as Italian opera.

  The Rose Tattoo was a personal triumph for Zoë Wanamaker, and was cast and prepared by the director Steven Pimlott, who died after rehearsing it for a little more than a week in February 2007. He had been diagnosed with cancer the previous summer, and when he went into remission, it seemed an urgent necessity to stage one of the twentieth century’s most life-affirming plays.

  We started talking about the theatre at Manchester Grammar School, though it may be more accurate to say that I started listening to him, as when I arrived at the school he was already a dazzling talker. In the Dramatic Society, his Gertrude and Mother Courage were the stuff of legend. In 1968 we were both in Oh What a Lovely War! Steven was the undisputed highlight, delivering the recruiting song “I’ll Make a Man of You” with outrageous laid-back allure in an off-the-shoulder satin evening gown. There was an outing a few months later to see the recently released Richard Attenborough film. We gave it a reluctant thumbs up, though there was universal dismay at Maggie Smith’s failure to measure up to Pimlott. We both played in the school orchestra and in the local youth orchestra: Steven was a marvellous oboist, I was a dodgy flautist. When I went to Cambridge, he was my entrée into undergraduate theatre. I acted in his shows, he in mine, and I played his servant, which seemed right, in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

  His friends struggled to keep up with his enthusiasms, which acknowledged no boundaries between high art and low, and were a massive influence on my own. He could be inflamed by Mozart, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, French classical drama, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and while it wouldn’t be true to say that, like Shakespeare’s Banished Duke, he could see good in everything—he was magnificently dismissive of what he didn’t like—there was nobody more catholic in his taste, or more generous. He was completely at ease outside the English tradition. He was fluent in French and German: he met his German wife when he directed her in a French opera in Krefeld. And he was impressive in Italian and Russian. He knew and felt their cultures from within, and in his productions of continental classics, he was often more a poet than a narrator, as much a mystic as an analyst. It was how he approached the English repertoire, too, alert always to those things in heaven and earth that were undreamt of by many of his British contemporaries.

  Tennessee Williams was right up his street: he responded viscerally to Williams’s emotional rawness, his poetic extravagance, his sympathy with those clinging on by their fingernails. We assumed he would be able to see it through, though we agreed that if anything happened, I’d be his backup. So we worked together for the first time in nearly thirty years, but I never properly told him how much I owed him.

  I would have liked to see Steven take on the European repertoire at the National. He was keen to direct The Misanthrope. As it was, I drew a total blank on Molière, and from the great canon of French classical theatre managed one Racine and one Marivaux, which was not enough. In my defence, the French repertoire is notoriously hard to translate, though outside the English-speaking theatre, translation is often synonymous with adaptation and liberation, so difficult old texts can be pulled wherever a director wants them to go.

  British audiences don’t expect a facsimile of the original production, but they won’t go with a director beyond the point where they lose sight of the playwright. They want a production to tell them what kind of play they’ve come to see, which still leaves a director with a vast amount of room for manoeuvre, but they usually smell a rat if the play is nothing more than a vehicle for the director’s imagination. They prefer the director’s imagination to reveal the play, rather than the other way around.

  This leaves too much room in the British theatre for the kind of production that does no more than apply a coat of gloss to a play and leave it to fend for itself. I’d far rather see a director go out on a limb than to draw an intellectual blank. And you can count on an audience to know enough about Hedda Gabler to take on the chin an argumentative production. But if you’re inviting them to a play they’re unlikely to have seen before, like Ibsen’s monster epic Emperor and Galilean, which had never been staged in English before Jonathan Kent’s production in 2011, they want access to Ibsen more than to its director.

  Before biting the bullet, we read through the whole thing in turgid Victorian blank verse over a long day at the NT Studio: in A.D. 361, the Holy Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate tried to abolish Christianity as the religion of state and restore worship of the ancient gods. In the middle of the afternoon, with hours still to go, a soldier had to warn the emperor about the enemy’s vanguard.

  “The elephants are in the van!” shouted the soldier.

  “I still want to do it,” cried Jonathan, after the hysteria had died down. His riotous enthusiasm sustained the Almeida when he ran it, and is now a gift to the many theatres who queue up to work with him. His staging of Emperor and Galilean embraced the modernity of what Ibsen had to say about fundamentalism and totalitarianism, and at
the same time gave its audience as lucid an account as possible of a play that it had never seen and would never see again.

  Howard Davies was the director all actors wanted most to work with, and he made a series of productions of Russian classics that were wholly original not because he came at them from an unexpected angle but because moment by moment they were invested with complex, unpredictable truth. He worked with the Australian dramatist Andrew Upton, whose versions acknowledged the impossibility of creating an English mirror-image of the Russian originals, so he found independent life in them, based on but not bound by literal translations. When Gorky wrote Philistines in 1902, “naturalism was an experimental, even radical form of theatre,” wrote Andrew. He and Howard restored naturalism to its radical roots.

  Bulgakov’s The White Guard is set in Kiev during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. The city is occupied by the Germans, under attack from Ukrainian nationalists, and preparing for the imminent arrival of the Bolsheviks. At the centre of a play that swings from high farce to grotesque horror then tragic elegy is an irresistible family of tsarists. Stalin couldn’t get enough of them: he returned to see The White Guard over and over at the Moscow Art Theatre.

  “The story’s so good,” said Howard at a planning meeting in 2010, before he went into rehearsal. “Youngish group, one woman, living like students in an apartment. They look after a young schoolboy relative. They argue about war, politics, get drunk, chase the girl to no effect. Then set off to put the world to rights. War turns out to be vile and shocking—farcical, absurd, cruel and pointless. Metaphor for life. The woman’s brother dies a heroic death, his younger brother goes mad with distress. The schoolboy has his heart broken. They all meet up again in the apartment, older, wiser, damaged. It’s Christmas. They try to celebrate but fall silent as the bells ring out. And because there’s no lead character, everyone will identify with whomever they want to, or have a point of entry through whichever experience chimes most truly or painfully. What’s not to like?”

  He took for granted that one of his jobs was to communicate the play’s politics and historical context to an audience unfamiliar with them. His productions crackled with intellectual energy. But the way he described the play—not in terms of his concept, but of its humanity—was unpretentious and straightforward, a foundation for the wild and contradictory passions he and his actors unlocked in it. His death in 2016 robbed the British theatre of a large part of its conscience.

  Deborah Warner is one of only a small handful of British directors since Peter Brook whose reputation means much outside the English-speaking world. Most of us are written off as hopeless reactionaries, though our playwrights are admired. There may be a connection between the primacy of British playwrights and the determination of British directors to put the plays rather than themselves centre stage, but if there is, it gets us no credit in the citadels of the European avant-garde. Deborah’s production of Brecht’s Mother Courage had in Fiona Shaw an artist whose thrilling command of a mighty part matched the vast following she brings with her to the theatre. She’s always a hot ticket, though neither she nor Deborah could persuade me to love Beckett’s Happy Days, despite their vivid work on it. I recognise its greatness, but it suffocates me: I’m less resilient than Winnie, its protagonist, who stays cheerful even when buried up to her neck. As director of the National, I suppressed my misgivings about Beckett. A bishop who had doubts about the existence of God would have been less fearful of exposure as a heretic.

  In one zone of the repertoire, the audience would go wherever the director wanted to take them. The out-and-out strangeness of the Greek tragedies is part of their continuing grip on the public imagination. Another part is the staggering immediacy of their 2,500-year-old passions. Even in London, the audience for the Greek plays expects radical solutions to their alien theology, their vanished cultural milieu, their remote theatrical conventions. Nobody comes to the theatre expecting to know what it was like to watch Sophocles in Athens in 450 B.C. They expect directors and actors to make major negotiations with the ancient world on their behalf, to find contemporary correlatives to the outlandish theatrical universe of the originals. Actors often do their best work with the Greeks, their imaginations released by terror.

  No director responded with more intensity or authority to them than Katie Mitchell in her productions of two plays by Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis and Women of Troy. She rejected the public, demonstrative element in the plays that made the Olivier their natural home: both filled the entire width of the Lyttelton proscenium arch. For Iphigenia, there was an immense requisitioned mansion, swarming with the marooned Greek army; in Women of Troy, the captured Trojan women waited for their brutal dispersal in a warehouse with huge iron doors. None of the action was shared with the audience. We were invited to peer as appalled observers as if through a transparent fourth wall. Katie’s actors, disciples as much as colleagues, never played to the audience: their immersion in their hermetically sealed world was total. She led them beyond the frontiers of naturalism. It is assumed that the masked Chorus sang and danced its part in ancient Athens; Katie filled the plays with eerie bursts of song and dance. The Women of Troy danced jazz standards as if to ward off their inevitable end. There was a chorus of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” to give religious legitimacy to the sacrifice of Iphigenia. We were spared none of the pitiless barbarity of war, its moral anarchy, the desperation and dignity of the women who are caught up in it: everything that makes Euripides speak across the millennia.

  Katie took her shows for small children—The Cat in the Hat, Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel—as seriously as she took Greek tragedy. Busloads of five-year-olds were ferried into the rehearsal room to watch run-throughs, interrogated about what they thought of them, their notes rigorously incorporated into the shows. She uses the stage to reflect the sheer strangeness of human experience, but I grew to dread her first previews.

  “What do you think, boss?” she always asked.

  Though disarmed by being called boss—she was alone in that—the reply more and more often was: “I can’t see and I can’t hear.” I had nothing but admiration for a sensibility that is far outside the British mainstream. I recognised the integrity of her absolute insistence on allowing the audience access to the experience rather than making them part of it, of directing her actors to play only for each other and never for the house, on lighting her hyperreal spaces strictly in accordance with real onstage light sources regardless of whether they revealed the action to the audience. But audibility and visibility are negotiable only up to a point. I found it increasingly difficult to defend her shows, and she did nothing at the National during my last two years. She works with consistent success in Germany, where audiences are readier to go wherever the director takes them, and happier to accept the director’s method of travel.

  9

  The Age and Body of the Time

  MORE SHAKESPEARE

  In a world consumed by greed, Timon of Athens, plutocrat and philanthropist, is a man whose estimation of his own worth is entirely financial. After he runs out of money, he faces a catastrophic credit crunch. Those he thought to be his friends—a bunch of unscrupulous bankers, politicians and their disgusting hangers-on in the arts world—desert him. He turns on them, and flees to a wasteland outside the city. There, digging for food, he finds gold. He spends the rest of the play spewing invective against the parasites who are now queuing up to befriend him again, his misanthropy eventually consuming him. He leaves the stage to die of self-disgust.

  Timon of Athens is often rediscovered in the wake of a financial crisis, but in 2012, as Greece imploded under the weight of its debts, I resisted the temptation to build a production entirely around the title. The play has nothing to say about Athens. Its original targets were the aristocratic big-shots and Scottish bankers who were the new game in town after the accession of James I, but it would have taken a theatrical imagination less opportunistic than mine not to reco
gnise in it a satirical image of fat-cat twenty-first-century London. And in the poet and painter who crawl around Timon, touching him for his money, desperate for his patronage, slagging him off as soon as his back is turned, I saw a hideous reflection of my own circle.

  The first scene in the 2012 production in the Olivier is a reception at a grand art gallery endowed by Timon. It observes to the letter many of the First Folio’s unusually detailed stage directions—“Enter Lord Timon, addressing himself courteously to every suitor”—as they devour champagne and canapés in front of El Greco’s Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple. The irony of the setting would be overwrought if it wasn’t the sober truth. The El Greco is in the National Gallery, where I have drunk champagne in front of masterpieces of religious art that mocked the company they looked down on. “I like your work,” says Timon to the painter as she tries to interest him in her probably dreadful portfolio. “And you shall find I like it.” Music to her ears.