Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  “Who to, Mr. Pitt?” said Nigel.

  Blind panic.

  “The daughter of the Duchess of Huddersfield, Your Majesty,” said Julian, rewriting history and inventing an entirely new branch of the aristocracy.

  Nigel moved in for the kill.

  “What’s she like, Mr. Pitt, what, what?”

  After a stricken pause, the king moved smoothly back to the warrant he was signing, leaving Mr. Pitt in a flop sweat, a departure from history, as the real Pitt only fell apart when he was drunk.

  A live show happens for the audience gathered on the night, on one night only. It never happens the same way twice. At all other performances of The Madness of George III, Mr. Pitt was a confirmed bachelor. So when you go to the theatre, you are among the uniquely advantaged few. The trickiest balancing act of all is to reconcile that exclusivity with the thirst to share it as widely as possible. When I applied to run the National, I fretted about the retreat into tiny black-box studios, but compared to James Corden’s YouTube millions, the difference between fifty people in a room above a pub and 1,150 in the Olivier seems negligible.

  It was always worthwhile to run a show that people wanted to see for long enough for them to see it, even if no two houses see exactly the same show. But here was another conundrum. We wanted the National to be full, but that often meant closing a show before we’d exhausted its appeal. The only way of knowing we’d exhausted it would have been to keep it running until it started to fail at the box office, but we didn’t want to play to half-empty houses. The traditional solution was to make partnerships with commercial producers and send successful shows into the West End. This allowed more people to see the show, but the commercial producer, who shouldered the financial risk of remounting it, also took the lion’s share of the profits.

  I assumed, when we started, that there was a rule that publicly funded theatres weren’t allowed to risk their own capital. Nick Starr soon discovered we were required only to make “best use” of our resources. In 2006 we had in The History Boys a major hit that, despite more than three hundred performances in the Lyttelton, had nowhere near satisfied the public hunger for tickets. We didn’t see why we should allow a commercial producer to earn large profits by bearing the almost negligible risk of presenting it in the West End. We spent hours in each other’s offices, winding ourselves up into enjoyable furies about the money we didn’t want to give away. The difference between us was that Nick had the financial acumen to present a case to a wary National Theatre board that the best use of our resources was to invest them in a West End transfer of The History Boys.

  After a long national tour, The History Boys opened in the West End in December 2006 for a three-month run. It was packed, quickly earned back what we’d invested in it, and made us a handsome profit. At the end of its run, we closed it. We told ourselves that our remit was to find the widest possible audience for our work, so we toured it to twenty-seven different regional venues, before bringing it back to the West End for another limited run. Touring is expensive, and made us no money. Only after the tour ended did we ask ourselves why we’d been so determined to take it off in the West End. We could have run it indefinitely, made lots more money for the National, and put together another company to tour it to the rest of the country.

  The widest possible audience was sometimes not very wide at all: an experimental multimedia production of fragments from a difficult novel by Dostoevsky was never going to appeal to the War Horse crowd. But we believed in both, and looked for the audience that would share our belief. When the widest possible audience could be numbered in millions, it was a pleasure as well as a responsibility to sell tickets to them.

  War Horse started with workshops at the Studio, just as Katie Mitchell’s Dostoevsky started at the Studio, and in the same spirit of investigation. To an outsider, Tom Morris’s workshop with the two actors who put cardboard boxes on their heads would probably have looked more experimental than Katie’s. Even if we’d ditched War Horse at the last moment, the two years of exploratory work wouldn’t have been wasted. Everybody involved would have extended themselves as artists and taken what they’d learned into their creative futures. The scale of its success took us by surprise, but this time we knew what to do with it. After a second run at the National, we put it into the West End and left it there. War Horse ran at the New London Theatre for seven years, toured the UK for two years, ran in New York, Toronto, Berlin, Amsterdam, Beijing, Cape Town, and toured the U.S., Canada and Australia. It played to over 7 million people, and by the time it closed in London, its global success had returned more than £30 million to the National Theatre. Later we did the same with One Man, Two Guvnors and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

  In 2003, public funding accounted for forty percent of a total income of £37 million. By 2015, turnover was £117 million, of which fifteen percent came from the public purse. Our commercial profits were enough to compensate for large cuts in public funding, and invest besides in the redevelopment of our building, and the production of new work for young audiences. The desire to widen the audience for our work found one outlet in the numbers we could attract to our productions in the commercial sector; and another in what we could do with what we earned to attract new audiences at low prices to the National itself.

  “I know it won’t be perfect, and I know it isn’t really theatre, but I keep thinking about how much I’d have loved to see Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in my local cinema when I was a Manchester teenager.”

  Every Friday morning, I met with Nick Starr and Lisa Burger. “You’ve been talking about cinema for long enough,” said Lisa one day, as we were looking at the 2009 budget. “I’ve found the money for it. Let’s just do it.” Lisa, subtle as finance director and super-subtle as chief operating officer, used to listen to my streams of consciousness, tell me what I wanted, and then make it happen.

  The Royal Opera House had for years broadcast opera and ballet on television, but televised theatre has always been problematic. Opera works on television because its only point of reference is opera: you don’t expect opera singers to give performances scaled down for the cameras. But when you watch actors on TV, your unconscious points of reference are television and film. You expect them to reveal themselves subtly to the camera, so when they reach out and include the house, you wonder why they’re shouting. Somewhere in the background, you hear the theatre audience laugh, and you feel left out, so you switch over.

  But I remembered that my 1998 production of Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center Theater in New York had been broadcast live on PBS television. On the night, the actors, all of them experienced in television, tried at first to play inwardly for the cameras. But they quickly realised that if they didn’t communicate to the audience in the theatre, the show evaporated; so imperceptibly they opened it out to include them.

  I watched it on TV, expecting to hate it. But it worked, partly because it was shot with skill and sophistication, but mainly because it was live across America. Its liveness, the fact that wherever you were, you were watching the same event at the same time as the audience in the theatre, made it less like television drama and more like an outside broadcast. You knew it wasn’t the real thing, but as you couldn’t be there at the big match, you were glad the cameras were there to capture it for you. It didn’t matter that the actors were a bit sweaty and a bit shouty, because, like footballers, they were sweating and shouting live, in the moment.

  I was still bothered by the mismatch between the small screen and the stage, and I missed being part of an audience. But I was excited when the Royal Opera House started to relay big-screen opera and ballet to huge crowds in Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square. Then, in 2006, the Metropolitan Opera started broadcasting live opera to cinemas across the world. And public demand pointed in the same direction as technology: although we sold 750,000 tickets every year at the National Theatre itself, there were many thousands more who wanted to see us.

  The entire ope
ration was masterminded by David Sabel, a young American who trained in mime at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. He discovered that there was a glut of red-nosed clowns plying their trade on the boulevards, so he found work as a pastry chef. Tiring of that, he crossed the Channel and did a business degree. Live satellite relays of theatre to cinemas were no more of a challenge to him than a perfect millefeuille.

  We were ready to go by the middle of 2009, and had coincidentally already scheduled to open Racine’s Phèdre in June, with Helen Mirren in the title role. Eighteen months after she’d won the Oscar for her performance in The Queen, there was no actor more likely to attract audiences to see theatre in cinemas. Always a pioneer, she was immediately enthusiastic, and completely unconcerned about how much she was risking her reputation by performing live on the big screen in an untried experiment. Helen was a more obvious first port of call than Racine. It would be hard to think of a less cinematic form of theatre than French neoclassical tragedy. Strictly bound by the unities of time, place and action, Phèdre unfolds on one set, has no jokes, ruthlessly excludes everything except the central agony of the woman who falls passionately in love with her chaste stepson Hippolytus, and drags him, her husband and herself to ruin. It had one advantage: if Racine worked live on screen, there’d be nothing in the repertoire that wouldn’t.

  On 25 June, Phèdre went out live to seventy-two cinemas in the UK, and live or delayed by a few hours to 120 cinemas in the rest of the world. If Helen was nervous, she didn’t show it. Margaret Tyzack, who played Oenone, Phèdre’s old nurse, remembered doing live TV in the 1950s and ’60s, so it was no big deal to her.

  I watched it in the BFI cinema, next door to the National. I had kept from everybody a residual fear that it would look like a bad movie. But you almost forgot you were in a cinema. You knew you were watching a play, so you expected theatre performances: you wanted the actors to reach out to you as if you were in the middle of the stalls. I was probably the only person who noticed that in the heat of her passion for Hippolytus, Helen skipped a key line of Ted Hughes’s free-verse translation: “I am in love.” It didn’t matter: she was saying it with every fibre of her body, so nobody missed it. But I was secretly thrilled by how graphically her tiny lapse exposed the precipitous danger of the whole event.

  Seventeen thousand people watched Phèdre in UK cinemas. After its international and encore screenings, 63,000 people had seen it, more than doubling its audience in the Lyttelton. During the party after the broadcast, David Sabel circulated the excited emails and tweets that arrived from all over the country; later they arrived from as far afield as Reykjavík and San Francisco. As the cost of the equipment necessary to receive and project our broadcasts fell, the number of cinemas that took them rose, and soon included small local arts centres and village halls from Cornwall to the Shetland Islands. When we screened Frankenstein two years after Phèdre, more than 600,000 people saw it on 1,500 screens.

  NT Live will never replace the thing itself, nor does it discourage audiences from going to their local theatre: if anything, the cinema experience acts as a spur. It was driven, like our commercial operations in the West End, by the contradictory ambition to make theatre for the privileged few on the night, and to spread that privilege as widely as possible: the impossible balancing act.

  Two weeks after screening in cinemas across the world, Phèdre played twice at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus. Helen and the rest of the cast ramped it up a little, but essentially they gave the same performance to the 28,000 people who saw in the flesh as they gave to the cameras. At the second performance, I watched from the very back of the vast, semicircular auditorium. The acoustics at Epidaurus are miraculous, so it was perfectly audible, though I couldn’t see much of what was going on in Helen’s eyes. At the BFI cinema, of course, I missed nothing.

  But at Epidaurus, when Helen cried “I am in love,” Venus reached out from Olympus across the Peloponnese and held the entire audience in her lethal embrace. Twice only.

  “Are you Nicholas Hytner?” Every so often, I was recognised front of house, or out and about in London, by enthusiastic theatregoers. “We just wanted to say how much we love the National Theatre.”

  “It’s very kind of you.” I would look forward to them telling me how moved they’d been by Othello or Curious Incident.

  “Well, we love it. There are no queues for the women’s toilets at the interval. You’re doing a brilliant job.”

  Or: “The Terrace restaurant is such good value. Exceptional meatballs.”

  Or: “The cheap tickets—amazing! And the legroom in the Olivier Theatre—incredible!”

  Or, a particular favourite: “There’s nowhere like the National. Superb underground car park.”

  “And apart from all that, Mrs. Lincoln,” I never quite said, “HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE SHOW?”

  But packing them in makes you responsible for what happens to them before and after the show, so I learned to be as happy to hear about interval activity in the women’s toilets as I was to hear about the play.

  When Denys Lasdun designed the National Theatre, the site was a dead end: a wharf separated it from the rest of the South Bank. He did not foresee that it would quickly look as if the theatre had turned its back on the river. At the end of the twentieth century, London rediscovered the Thames; you could finally walk almost uninterrupted along the South Bank from Vauxhall Bridge to Tower Bridge. But where the National should have been showing its best face to the world, Lasdun had put the goods entrance and rubbish bins; 17 million people walked past them every year. I moaned about them endlessly.

  By 2010, we knew we needed to spend about £10 million on keeping the existing plant up to scratch. Better, said Nick and Lisa, to raise £70 million for a scheme that promised a massive overhaul of the building than £10 million for rewiring and new generators. John Rodgers, the phlegmatic head of development, which is what arts institutions call fundraising, took it on the chin.

  Lloyd Dorfman, whose company Travelex continued to sponsor hundreds of thousands of cheap tickets, was one of the first to step forward. He gave us £10 million, which immediately gave the scheme credibility with other major donors, and the renovated Cottesloe Theatre became the Dorfman Theatre. The naming of arts buildings for the philanthropists who back them has long and inspiring precedent: Tate, Courtauld, Carnegie, Whitworth, Guggenheim. The family of Lord Cottesloe, a political grandee and first chairman of the South Bank Theatre board, was sympathetic to the renaming.

  Development increases in importance as public funding diminishes. Directors of American theatres, who receive almost nothing in government funding, spend nearly as much of their time courting donors as they spend on what happens on their stages. Their French and German counterparts spend no time on it at all, as public subsidy accounts for as much as ninety-five percent of their income. In the absence of American tax incentives, and the pervasive American culture of charitable giving, it will never be possible for our cultural organisations to raise as much as their American counterparts. Nor would it be desirable: the cushion of public subsidy encourages both creative innovation and the strong ethos of public service that lies behind our determination always to widen our audience.

  But the arts are over-dependent on a small number of committed philanthropists. Apart from Lloyd Dorfman, the chief donors to NT Future—Guy and Charlotte Weston, Stewart Grimshaw of the Monument Trust, Dame Vivien Duffield—were supporting the National before I became its director. Their successors have yet to emerge. Fortunes have been made on Wall Street and in the City of London during the last twenty years, but the super-rich of London do not feel the social pressure that opens wallets on Wall Street for an entire spectrum of charitable and cultural causes.

  Still, between 2003 and 2015, John Rodgers and his department increased annual fundraising from £3.7 million to £8.3 million, and raised £50 million towards the redevelopment of the building. Another £7.5 million came from War Horse. We built a new education centre, new
workshops, new dressing rooms, and opened the building to face the river. Where rats once feasted from the overflowing rubbish bins, there is now a cafe and bar. The National looks at last like it wants you to come in and have a good time; and as the annual income from the bar is several hundreds of thousands of pounds, the provision of a good time to as many people as want to share it has once more turned out to be to the theatre’s commercial advantage.

  A few days after the formation of the coalition government in 2010, the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, invited a group of artists and producers to meet him at the Roundhouse in north London. He promised “a golden age for the arts,” based on a huge increase in charitable giving, which he vowed to facilitate. He then presided over a thirty percent cut to the Arts Council’s budget, did nothing to encourage philanthropy, got chummy with Rupert Murdoch, and moved on in 2012 to work his magic on the NHS. Thereafter, the arts were cut less aggressively than other spending departments, though outside London, theatres were hit hard by cuts to local authority funding. I much preferred Jeremy Hunt’s successors as Secretary of State: none of them pretended that they could do much for us, or that they knew as much as Ed Vaizey, the excellent Minister of State for Culture until 2016.

  Meanwhile, Joey the War Horse became a poster boy for what we learned to call the creative industries, eventually travelling with the prime minister to China for a special appearance at a state banquet. He was more comfortable in the company of the queen. She saw him first on a rare visit to the West End, and he was swiftly invited to Windsor, where she made a great fuss of him, and was expert in her assessment of his equine verisimilitude. When she came on an official visit to the National to mark our fiftieth birthday, she greeted him like an old friend.

  The most significant devotee of the arts was the man who did the cutting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, came regularly to the theatre, and was a connoisseur of opera, ballet and the visual arts. Few of the artists whose work he enjoyed can have had much time for his economic policies, but they were spared the worst of them: a different Chancellor might have done more damage. He invented, in the theatre tax credit, a way of giving back to us some of what he’d taken away. The tax credit is more useful to big-spending theatres than it is to companies who are strapped for cash, but it’s impossible to avoid the awkward reality that the arts were not hit as hard as, for instance, welfare.