My notes on the first preview were as blunt and as obvious as my notes on the first drafts of the play: “Too long. Too slow. Not clear. Indulgent, long, pretentious scenes in German. A girl beside me got out her phone and started texting! Cut! Cut!” I wished I’d been tougher when I’d seen run-throughs in the rehearsal room, but there was still time.
I left them to it for a couple of days and went back to see what they’d done. Still too long, still too much German, still too many extraneous scenes, still not working. Marianne and Tom had avoided the tough calls. They worried about poor Ned the soldier who had a long, wrenching scene about shell shock.
“He’ll lose most of his part if we cut it,” they said.
“I don’t care about Ned,” I said. “We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on this show and scheduled nearly a hundred performances. Do what you said you’d do!”
It was a low blow to mention money. Like almost everyone I know in the subsidised theatre, Marianne and Tom took the bottom line very seriously. And I hesitated before hitting them so hard, wanting always to balance my responsibility to the National and its audience with my respect for the creative instincts of the artists who worked for us. But the imperative behind War Horse was not the inspiration of a single artist. It was produced in answer to our collective hunger for large-scale storytelling, so the balance shifted. The next day, poor Ned was reduced to the ranks. The Germans still spoke German, but nothing like as much of it. The story was clarified. The show lost fifteen minutes. By the final scene, when Albert rode Joey back to his Devon village, even the stoniest hearts in the house had melted.
War Horse was less transformed during its previews than released. The great show was always there, hiding behind the long, slow, confusing show. Afterwards, my colleagues looked to me to turn every ailing show around during previews with a few well-chosen words and a stern look. They looked in vain, as a producer’s notes can’t turn a bad show into a good one. I sometimes turned a bad show into a mediocre show, and a debacle into a merely bad one. But my job was never as satisfying as it was when I could give a great show a final nudge.
While War Horse was running in the Olivier, I used to sneak into the back of the stalls to watch the foal Joey fly apart and dissolve into the darkness to make way for the magnificent full-grown Joey. The three puppeteers who manipulated the rickety little foal literally pulled him apart as the great, magnetic star puppet reared up into the light to replace him, and Luke Treadaway vaulted onto his back and cantered off. Basil and Adrian had given Joey eyes that were as deep and expressive as human eyes. A single twitch of his ear was worth lines of dialogue: you seemed to have direct access to his soul. His three human handlers evaporated.
What started as large-scale storytelling for a family audience became art as much as entertainment: it embraced the hardships of rural England as much as its loveliness, and the simple decency of men under fire as well as their fear. The terrible beauty of some of its imagery—the cavalry charge at Mons, the abandoned horse careering petrified through no man’s land—recalled All Quiet on the Western Front, or Britten’s War Requiem.
It still felt like a category error when, in New York in June 2011, I accepted on behalf of its producers the Tony Award for Best Play. It beat Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, one of the few undisputed masterpieces of the new century. War Horse was a superlative show, with a very effective script, but the greater part of the vision behind it was not the playwright’s. It was the apotheosis of a new and vigorous strand in the National’s repertoire that was the collaborative vision of directors, designers, puppeteers, musicians, videographers and choreographers, as well as writers. It wasn’t Best Play, and I didn’t understand why, even if it was, the producers should be lining up with the playwright to receive the prize, but I did my best to look solemn and grateful.
Awards ceremonies can only be survived on large quantities of alcohol-fuelled malevolence. They are a terrible advertisement for what we do. We are never more repellent than when dressed up and hysterical for the cameras. The best work is usually ignored, the meretricious often rewarded. You’re furious if you lose, delighted if you win, then immediately consumed by self-loathing because you’re furious that you wanted to win in the first place. Every awards ceremony tries desperately to pretend it’s the Oscars. The only time I went to the Oscars they were just as desperate as all the others, but with more superstars.
In a coffee shop on Old Compton Street, shortly after I was appointed director of the National, I asked Danny Boyle whether he fancied coming back to the theatre. He’d started at the Royal Court and I first met him at the RSC, when he was directing Tirso de Molina and I was directing Shakespeare. He said that one day he’d like to stage Frankenstein, that he and the playwright Nick Dear had an idea for it, but he had some films he wanted to direct first. I reminded him every now and then of how keen we were to have him, and after Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2009, he finally said he was ready.
Nick Dear’s big idea for Frankenstein was simple and sensational: to tell the story from the Creature’s point of view. Mary Shelley and all her adaptors see the Creature from Victor Frankenstein’s point of view. Danny and Nick described a show that started with a heartbeat and erupted into life as the Creature burst from its frame. The audience, said Danny, would see the world as if for the first time as the Creature saw it, learn to walk and speak with the Creature, follow the Creature to Geneva to confront his maker. The Modern Prometheus is Mary Shelley’s subtitle for the book; it could just as well refer to Danny’s prodigious imagination.
The script, when it arrived in 2010, was disappointing. The stage directions for the long, wordless opening sequence were fine, and I’d heard Danny’s hypnotic description of what he was going to do with them. But once they all started talking to each other, although the dialogue was less ponderous than Mary Shelley’s, it lay heavy on the page. Danny reassured me that he’d sort it all out in rehearsal. At planning meetings, my colleagues were scathing. They said the script wasn’t up to scratch, so we shouldn’t do it. “That’s as may be,” I said, “but Danny’s films are turbo-charged. He’ll solve this script’s problems. We’re doing it.”
Danny had other big ideas besides the switch in point of view. He wanted the actors who played Frankenstein and the Creature to rotate in their roles. This made conceptual sense: the creator and the created are two sides of the same coin. Beyond that, Danny knew how much extra excitement he could generate by alternating two great actors. And there may have been an ulterior motive. The Creature was the part actors would be fighting for. By offering both parts to both actors, he guaranteed that every night the Doctor would be as strong as the Monster. He already knew he wanted one of them to be Jonny Lee Miller, Sick Boy in Trainspotting, and just as powerful on stage as on screen. He started circling around Benedict Cumberbatch, who was at the National in Rattigan’s After the Dance. Danny could see from the Rattigan how good Benedict would be as the educated Frankenstein, but didn’t know him well enough to be confident that he had enough of the animal to be the Creature. Benedict was at a point in his career when he could do anything and was being offered everything, but he wanted to work with Danny and he wanted to play both parts in Frankenstein. He asked to audition for Danny.
I very rarely sat in on other directors’ auditions, but Danny wanted me to watch Benedict with him in case he needed a second opinion. I told him I was certain that Benedict could do anything he was asked to do, but I was happy to watch. Danny described the opening sequence to Benedict: the birth of a fully grown adult who learns first to see, then walk, then talk in a fierce fast-forward of infancy.
“So it would be great if you could do that for us now,” he said.
“Absolutely no problem,” said Benedict.
He lay on the floor of the rehearsal studio and shut his eyes. A few seconds later he opened them. They grew large in amazement, as he saw the world for the first time. He started slowly to twitch his
limbs. Slowly and painfully, he tried to hoist himself to his feet. His legs buckled from under him: his limbs were like jelly. He collapsed painfully, and grunted in shock. He repeated the noise he’d just made, and realised he had a voice. He tried to stand again, grunting, mewling, bouncing off the walls. Locked in a room with him, it was impossible not to share his birth-pangs. I started to sweat, hoping it would end soon, but Benedict had only just started, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Danny beaming with delight. On and on went Benedict: the Creature’s agonies weren’t going to stop until somebody pulled the plug. After about twenty-five minutes Danny finally thanked Benedict very much, so Benedict thanked Danny very much, and returned to his dressing room to get ready for Rattigan.
“He’ll be great,” said Danny.
When the audience walked into the Olivier for Frankenstein, a corpse was already strapped to a vast circular frame that revolved slowly around a stage hung with hundreds of flickering light bulbs. A great bell, cast in bronze, tolled above the auditorium. Through an unsettling soundscape by Underworld, a heart started to beat, louder and louder, until in a terrifying flash of brilliant white light, the corpse moved. Naked and bloodstained, abandoned by their creator, Benedict and Jonny led the audience through the dawn of their own consciousness, and stumbled through an early industrial world of pounding machinery, swirling fog and violent humanity. They escaped to the verdant countryside, cleansed by the rain and warmed by the sun: from dark satanic mills to green and pleasant land. They learned to eat, laugh, weep and talk. At the first preview in February 2011, I sat among an audience that had been drawn by Danny, Benedict and Jonny. Most of them seemed new not just to the National but to the theatre, and they were thrilled. So was I, at Danny’s control of the stage, and at the effortless modernity of his journey into the Romantic past. But half an hour in, it started to feel like the first preview of War Horse: too long, too slow, too much talk. When Benedict and Jonny faced off in the Swiss mountains, whichever way around they were cast, their savage charisma was enough to rivet the audience to the show’s urgent concerns about scientific responsibility, love and loneliness, parents and children. But I felt the show slacken its grip whenever they weren’t together on stage.
Danny could not have been more grateful for my notes: cut, speed up, tighten transitions, more underscore, less talk. “That’s very interesting,” he said. “I see exactly what you mean. Thank you. I’ll think about what you’ve said carefully.” But he’d seen off mighty Hollywood moguls, and he was more than a match for me. I gave him the same notes after every preview, and he warmly agreed with everything I said. Then he did what he wanted to do, and no more. By the time the show had its two opening nights, one for each rotation of the cast, I’d stopped watching its thrilling highs and could only see what I thought were its lows.
But nobody had come to see Best Play: they’d come to see Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein. The script gave Danny what he needed, and he had a respect for Nick Dear’s dialogue born of his training at the Royal Court. He has an iron grip on an audience. Adrenaline-fuelled highs rush through his movies, but he gives you time to come down from one before he drives you through another. The highs in Frankenstein were many and frequent; but he wanted the audience to listen to its arguments, too, so he slowed its pulse as much as he quickened it.
Frankenstein was one of our hottest tickets, and it turned out to be, at least in part, a dry run for Danny’s next show. Eighteen months later, in August 2012, with the same two designers, Mark Tildesley and Suttirat Larlarb, he created the London Olympic Opening Ceremony for a worldwide audience of 900 million. It had images of awe-inspiring industrial might and verdant rural tranquillity. It had music by Underworld. It had the biggest harmonically tuned bell in the world, cast in bronze. It had heart-pumping highs and laid-back lows. It celebrated the past and looked with confidence to the future. It made the rest of the world like Britain and for a brief, shining moment it made Britain like itself. It was even more exciting than Frankenstein.
You can’t second-guess what the public will best like. Popular success is always the consequence of creative conviction. Creative conviction can’t guarantee popularity, but the pursuit of popularity for its own sake stifles creativity. So you do what you believe in, and if you’re running a huge theatre like the National, you also do what the artists around you believe in. When Simon Stephens brought us his adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he, like the adaptors of War Horse and Frankenstein, had completely changed its point of view. Mark Haddon’s novel is narrated by its protagonist, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, and its genius is in its appeal to the reader to see the world through the eyes of “a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties.” Christopher’s parents exist only as he sees them. Simon’s play looked at all three of them, and embodied by actors, they all existed independently of each other. For the book’s countless admirers, one of the play’s many new perspectives was in its acknowledgement of how difficult Christopher was to live with. It asked us to identify with his parents’ mistakes, the collapse of their marriage, his mother’s disappearance, his father’s violence and dishonesty.
The playwright and novelist met when both had short residencies at the NT Studio. The invitation to adapt Curious Incident came from Mark. Simon wrote it without a commission and showed it to Marianne Elliott, who showed it to me, and it felt like the work of a playwright working to his own vision rather than a producer’s. Simon’s long working relationship with Marianne gave him the confidence to ask her to find a theatrical correlative for Christopher’s way of seeing the world. Neither novel nor play ascribe Christopher’s difficulties to Asperger’s syndrome, as neither novelist nor playwright claim to have expert knowledge about the autism spectrum. But both are drawn to the outsider, to surprising ways of looking at human experience. Together, Marianne and her designers made an entirely new world from Christopher’s obsessions.
The theatrical virtuosity of Curious Incident was matched by its unsentimental honesty. It never ducked how nightmarish it can be to be Christopher, or to live with him; nor how difficult it must be to love someone who doesn’t know how to be loved. But it asked the audience to love him nevertheless, not just because he’s brilliant, but because he’s impossible. What a piece of work is man, says the show, particularly this difficult, contradictory young man who has no interest whatsoever in his fellow men. It’s an unlikely premise for a blockbuster hit (two years on Broadway and more than four in the West End), but no less unlikely than the adventures of a puppet horse or eight A-level history students.
What the sillier sort of people really like is comedy, and I’m with them on that, though many of my associates were wary of it. Whenever we looked together at the rep chart, and the programme for the year ahead looked unrelentingly serious, it would be to me that they turned. I grumbled, though in fact little made me happier than sitting in an audience that I’d helped render helpless with laughter. I relish working with the writers and actors I know to be funny, though most of them, if asked exactly how to be funny, shrug: you’re either funny or you’re not.
Harish Patel is one of Bollywood’s leading comic stars, and a veteran of the Mumbai theatre. He’d never appeared on the London stage before Rafta, Rafta…, Ayub Khan Din’s gorgeous celebration of close-knit Indian family life in a terraced house in Bolton. Ayub is an ex-actor, so he knows how to write funny parts from the inside, but Harish had the audience laughing before he’d spoken a line. Because he’s tubby? Because he has huge eyes which he knows how to roll into the back of his head? Because, like so many tubby actors, he’s absurdly light on his feet? He played opposite Meera Syal, another actor who is inherently funny. Maybe there were territorial negotiations before they settled on the comic give-and-take that brought happy crowds to the Lyttelton, but nobody taught them to be funny. They just were.
Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw, two great tragedians, are also natural-born comics, though before 2010 neither of th
em had been in a play quite as preposterous as the Victorian comedy London Assurance by Dion Boucicault, one of the great chancers of the British theatre. He was born in Dublin, and London Assurance was his first big hit. “It will not bear analysis as a literary production,” he wrote in 1841, in his preface to the published edition of the play. “I completed this work in thirty days…I am aware that it possesses all the many faults, incongruities and excrescences of a hastily written performance.”
Sir Harcourt Courtly is fifty-seven, admits to thirty-nine, and makes a reluctant trip to the country to bolster his bank balance by marrying Grace Harkaway, an heiress less than half as old as he claims to be. There he falls in love with Grace’s neighbour, Lady Gay Spanker, a devotee of the hunt: “I look upon foxes to be the most blessed dispensation of divine providence.” Alas for Sir Harcourt, Lady Gay is already married, and Grace falls in love with his own son, Charles, who has fled to the country to escape his creditors. Thirty days wasn’t enough for Boucicault to bring much finesse to his plotting.
“Isn’t your name Charles Courtly?” says Sir Harcourt when he runs into his son.
“Not to my knowledge,” says Charles.
“Cool, is that my son?” Sir Harcourt asks his supercilious valet.
“No, sir,” says Cool, “it is not Mr. Charles, but is very like him.”
Simon, one of the foremost scholars of the British stage, is never more convincing than when playing a feather-brain.
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