So in the autumn of 2001, a month after the attack on the World Trade Center, I was back in New York to begin rehearsals for what would be my third Broadway musical, though the first not to open in London. I thought I had a perfect right to be there: I was by now the grandly titled director designate of the National Theatre, and I thought American musical theatre was one of the things I could do.
Sweet Smell of Success is genuinely a replay of Faust. Mephistopheles is J. J. Hunsecker, a newspaper columnist who offers the world—in fact his column, but it amounts to the same thing—to a press agent Faust: Sidney Falco. Sidney needs publicity for his clients. J.J. wants Sidney to destroy his sister’s jazz-singer boyfriend. The bargain promises Sidney infinite power in the world of 1950s New York cafe society. It ends in Sidney’s ruin.
John Lithgow played J.J. with fabulous menace and terrifying charm; Brian d’Arcy James was a driven, desperate and vocally bewitching Sidney. On the opening night, the audience stood and cheered. The party was at the Waldorf Astoria. We arrived in high spirits. Twenty minutes in, I fought my way through the crowd to the bar, to find another glass of champagne. When I turned back round, the crowd had fled into the night. Someone had arrived with the morning papers. Nowadays, they check the reviews on their smartphones while they’re standing and cheering, and if the show’s a flop they give the party a miss. But I got to experience at first hand an essential part of Broadway folklore before it was made obsolete by technology. I made a defiant exit with the cast from the deserted ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, to get hammered somewhere less cavernous. The show closed a couple of months later.
Twelve years at the National have made me sanguine about accounting for creative failure, and for the failure to engage an audience. They don’t always go together. Maybe Sweet Smell failed at the Broadway box office for the same reason the movie failed at the box office. It is cynical, bleak, hard-edged: the New York it celebrates, and you can’t do much else if you put New York on the New York commercial stage, is a “dirty town.” I’d love to go back to the Stork Club of the 1950s and hear jazz while the air crackled with malice and violence, but six months after 9/11, the audience didn’t. Perhaps it was always a bad idea to base a musical on a great movie that failed commercially but later acquired cult status. But I still think that Marvin, John Guare and the lyricist Craig Carnelia wrote something powerful and gripping, so maybe I was the one who screwed up. Maybe, in the end, like Jack Buchanan, I lack the visceral feel for the intoxicating cocktail of dialogue, song and dance that comes with growing up in the American theatre.
John Guare and John Lithgow both came to work at the National. John Guare wrote His Girl Friday for my first season in 2003. John Lithgow, whose performance in Sweet Smell was so dark with danger, came at last in 2012 to play the title role in Arthur Wing Pinero’s Victorian comedy, The Magistrate. It is supposed to be an iron rule of comedy that it must be acted seriously, but the rule only works if the actors doing the serious acting have funny bones. John has played J. J. Hunsecker and King Lear. His face, which can congeal into immobility and ooze tyranny, turns rubbery with panic when he plays farce.
I last saw Marvin in London a few months before he died, far too young, in 2012. I forget which world leaders he’d come to play for. The Broadway failure of Sweet Smell had hit him hard: he never wrote another musical. But he’d just seen a student production of it in New York, and he’d loved it. It sounded better than mine. The show is bound to resurface, and now that the barbarians have stormed the gates of American democracy, its cynicism about celebrity and power will be harder to dismiss. The CD is terrific: I recommend it to young directors, preferably American, looking to make a splash.
A life in the theatre sometimes feels like it’s on a loop. I asked a young New York choreographer to make the dances in Sweet Smell. Christopher Wheeldon was from Somerset and trained at the Royal Ballet School before dancing with New York City Ballet. He made his first steps as a teenage choreographer for a Royal Ballet workshop at the Riverside Studios in west London. In the audience was Kenneth MacMillan, who pulled him aside afterwards and told him he should take every chance that came his way to practise his craft. Chris’s sinuous work on Sweet Smell became a mere footnote to a career on the cutting edge of classical dance, which I have followed as a fan and as a friend. Ten years later, he told me he wanted to make a three-act Shakespeare ballet for the Royal Ballet: they hadn’t done a new one since the MacMillan Romeo and Juliet. I suggested The Winter’s Tale. I thought that dance might be the ideal medium for its magical synthesis of loss and rebirth, its marriages of flesh and spirit, jealous fury and unbridled glee; and I sent him a synopsis of the play that imagined a completely different response to it than mine in 2001. In 2014, I took a group of actors, including Alex Jennings, Debbie Findlay and Julian Wadham—Leontes, Paulina and Polixenes at the National—to a Royal Ballet rehearsal studio. They read the play to the dancers who were working, with Bob Crowley as their designer, on Chris’s ballet. It was different in every respect to my production of the play, which I could remember with renewed affection thanks to its brief revival in the ballet rehearsal studio. Chris’s beautiful ballet will be revived much more often.
A few years after Sweet Smell of Success, I’m watching Family Guy on TV with Steve Ochoa, the brown-eyed Texan from the Carousel clambake. Brian the dog and Stewie the baby have joined the army, and they’re out running with their platoon. One of the many virtues of Family Guy is that its writers are show queens, so the platoon chants:
West Side Story, Anything Goes,
Two of my favourite Broadway shows.
Miss Saigon and Cabaret,
Overrated I should say.
I couldn’t be more excited. Brian, Stewie and the platoon are singing about my show. Steve points out that they don’t think it’s as good as West Side Story. His first Broadway show was Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, an anthology of musical numbers created by the American musical’s greatest director. Steve was a Shark in scenes from West Side Story, directed by Jerome Robbins himself, who later promoted him to a Jet, so he agrees with the platoon. I tell him that they are nevertheless making a very important point. It is through musicals that the theatre finds a perfect balance between high art and low, and reaches the wider public: the public that watches shows like Family Guy.
But then I remember that much though I love musicals, fascinated though I am by the vast passions they release and the euphoria they breed, they squeeze a director dry. I know they are as disproportionately draining of a theatre’s energy as they are exhilarating. At the National, I was wary of programming too many of them. And in the wake of the rediscovery of the great Broadway classics by Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn, there was no shortage in London of theatres or producers eager to stage old musicals, so I was happy to leave them to it, and focus on new ones. I produced six new musicals, three of them imported from New York. The two that caused most of a stir owed least to Broadway. Neither Jerry Springer—The Opera nor London Road jumped on the bandwagon of American musical comedy, which I continue to love, and continue to think can do just fine without the good offices of Jack Buchanan.
That left open the question of how to break through to the audience that kept Miss Saigon going for ten years in the West End, so I was reassured when, a couple of years after he joined the army on Family Guy, Brian the dog wrote a play and Alan Bennett came to see it. The animated Alan was voiced by the real Alan. There are more ways to the wider public’s heart than through favourite Broadway shows, and more ways to entertain them than with song and dance.
11
What They Best Like
ENTERTAINMENT
In his short play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, George Bernard Shaw imagined a midsummer night’s rendezvous between Elizabeth I and Shakespear, as he insisted on spelling him, always on the lookout for an opportunity to get up posterity’s nose. Shakespear “craves a boon” of the queen: the endowment of a National Theatre, “for the better instruction
and gracing of Your Majesty’s subjects.”
“Are there not theatres enow on the Bankside?” asks the queen.
Shakespear tells the queen that these theatres are by no means enow, because they only exist “to give the sillier sort of people what they best like.”
A century after Shaw made his high-minded case for the National Theatre, it seemed to me that the occasional provision of what the public best like was part of the deal, a fair exchange for the annual boon of several millions of pounds from the public purse. And besides, I liked giving it to them, though knew that what they best like is rarely what they liked last time they came to the theatre. They want to see what they haven’t seen before: they want to be surprised to find themselves liking what artists want to give them.
Still, I knew they couldn’t get enough of His Dark Materials, so contemporary literature for young people felt like fertile territory. I heard about Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy on a BBC Radio 4 book programme in 2004. It starts in Gloucester in 1742, where desperate mothers give their illegitimate babies to the “Coram man” Otis Gardiner, who instead of taking them to the Coram Hospital for Foundling Children, kills them and pockets the fee. He buries their tiny corpses not far from Gloucester Cathedral, where the choir sings Handel. Although the novel had won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, it had nothing like the profile of His Dark Materials, but I reckoned we had uncovered a hunger for ambitious family shows, and could risk a relatively unknown title. While we geared up for the second run of the Philip Pullman, I asked Tom Morris to oversee the development of Coram Boy at the Studio. It opened in the Olivier in November 2005, directed and co-designed by Melly Still and adapted by Helen Edmundson. We scheduled it for around fifty performances and put it in rep in the Olivier with a sure-fire hit, Once in a Lifetime, Kaufman and Hart’s great comedy about 1920s Hollywood. The sure-fire truth about sure-fire hits is that they never are. Once in a Lifetime felt like it had been scheduled for no better reason than to be a hit, and limped through nearly twice as many scheduled performances as Coram Boy, which immediately seized the public’s imagination because it had seized the imaginations of the team that made it.
Melly started her career as a designer. With a fraction of the budget of His Dark Materials, she conjured a macabre, Hogarthian England and told an exciting story with propulsive energy, sweeping up in its wake eighteenth-century folk songs, sea shanties and church anthems. Some parents were disturbed by the gruesome honesty of her storytelling, but their children relished the frisson of horror at the discovery of the skeletons of Otis’s little victims. They knew that a steady gaze into the darkness is a precondition for a journey from dark to light, from wickedness to salvation.
Coram Boy had to come back for a second, much longer run in 2006. It started to feel as if we’d invented a genre. Like a movie studio, we could look for material, buy it, and commission playwrights to work for us, rather than waiting on their unpredictable inspirations. Long before Coram Boy opened, Tom Morris was looking for its successors. He stayed behind after a Wednesday planning meeting and said, “I think I may have found something. My mum was listening to Michael Morpurgo on Desert Island Discs the other day, and liked him so much that she went out and bought some of his books.”
“Does the horse speak?”
“No, the horse doesn’t speak.”
“You said the book is written in the first person, as if by the horse. Do you promise he won’t be Mr. Ed?”
“I promise,” said Tom.
Tom’s mum had told him about Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, like Coram Boy a winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award.
“It’s short,” said Tom. “You’ll read it very quickly. It’s about a horse called Joey who belongs to a Devon farm boy called Albert. Joey is requisitioned in August 1914 and goes to the Western Front. The entire First World War is seen from the horse’s point of view. He’s captured by the Germans, he witnesses unimaginable horror, gets snared by barbed wire and hideously injured in no man’s land. Meanwhile, Albert joins up and spends the war looking for him. They’re miraculously reunited in Calais on Armistice Day.”
“But if it’s about the horse and the horse doesn’t speak, how is there a show in it?”
“Have I ever told you about Handspring?”
Tom had brought the work of Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, founders of the South African Handspring Puppet Company, to Battersea Arts Centre when he was its director. He showed me a video of their latest show, Tall Horse, about a giraffe presented as a gift by the viceroy of Egypt to the king of France in 1827. The Handspring giraffe was a living, breathing creature, visibly manipulated by his puppeteers and superbly charismatic: a real leading actor.
“Can we bring Basil and Adrian to the Studio and see whether there’s anything in it?” asked Tom.
In January 2005 I went down the road to the Studio to see what Tom, Basil and Adrian had discovered. Sam Barnett, Posner in The History Boys, put a halter on another actor and led him round in circles.
“Good boy,” said Sam.
Then both actors put cardboard boxes on their heads and tied tails of shredded newspapers around their waists. They did some more circles.
“We’re onto something,” said Tom.
If the enemies of arts subsidy had seen two actors walking in a circle with cardboard boxes on their heads pretending to be horses at the taxpayers’ expense, they would have had a field day. But Tom, Basil, Adrian and the actors all seemed excited and convinced, so I was too.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s develop it some more.”
Basil and Adrian went back to Cape Town and started work on Joey. Tom commissioned an adaptation from the playwright Nick Stafford that put a puppet horse centre stage. Joey couldn’t speak, so he needed to share the limelight with someone who could: Albert, the boy who owned him. Joey’s story was intercut with the story of Albert’s family in pre-war Devon, Albert’s comrades in the army, Albert’s search for Joey. I asked Marianne Elliott if she’d like to direct it. After a second workshop she said to me that she needed a collaborator: “Why don’t I co-direct War Horse with Tom?”
As it became clearer how big an undertaking War Horse would be, I started to interfere a little more and say yes a little less. When we commissioned an original play, our role as producer was to nudge it into being as good a version as possible of the play the playwright wanted to write. We were as responsible to the playwright as the playwright was to us. When we took material to a writer for adaptation, we worked more like a film studio: the director and producer take the lead, and the writer provides a play to support their needs. War Horse needed a text that left space for Marianne, Tom, Basil and Adrian to transfer much of the narrative and emotional burden away from what actors said onto the way puppets moved. It had to work more like a libretto for an opera or the book for a musical, which are pared back to make space for music to do the dramatic heavy lifting; or like a screenplay that leaves the camera space to tell the story. In the event, it took hundreds of performances in London and New York for War Horse to find its final shape, but between its second and third workshops, draft after draft landed on my desk.
“I’m not sure it’s clear enough, or tense enough, or the stakes are high enough,” I said to Tom, quite often. Clear storytelling and high stakes are always at the top of a producer’s agenda. One problem with War Horse seemed to be that throughout the first forty minutes of the show, Joey and Albert are inseparable, but after he’s requisitioned, they never appear on stage together again until the closing minutes of the show. The audience has to follow two entirely different storylines. They needed something to reassure them that both stories are travelling in the same direction, like a signpost: Story This Way. Tom relayed the note to Nick Stafford and came back with a line for Albert:
I promise you, Joey, that we will be together again. We will be reunited. I promise you. You understand that? I, Albert Narracott, do solemnly swear that we shall be together again.
To
m’s delight with the line was in direct proportion to its lack of subtlety. It’s the kind of speech you might hear in a big-budget action movie, and for the same reason: the audience has no time to decode oblique or poetic dialogue when the principal means of communication is beyond words.
For the third War Horse workshop in June 2006, Basil and Adrian arrived with Joey. He was gauze stretched over bent cane with leather ears and tail. Three puppeteers, two inside him and one outside at his head, manipulated him. As they breathed, so did he. The play still needed work, but I was completely sold on the horse and gave Tom and Marianne the go-ahead.
“So it’s horse-based programming?” said Tom.
“It’s an outstanding horse,” I said.
War Horse had its first preview on 9 October 2007 after three months of training for the puppeteers and seven weeks’ rehearsal for the rest of the company. Tom and Marianne brought to it not just visual and musical bravura, but a seriousness of approach that treated puppetry as a mature theatrical art, and drew truthful performances from a huge cast. Joey and an even more impressive horse called Topthorn could not have carried the show without Luke Treadaway as Albert. Luke made the foal Joey his friend with a delicacy and tenderness that belied the scale of what was happening around them. His fevered search for his horse over the long years in the trenches was as harrowing as the images of suffering summoned by emaciated horses hauling immense field guns. But the show left the audience cold. Among those who thought it was doomed were Nick Starr and Michael Morpurgo.
Balancing Acts Page 26