Every society chooses how much it values art. It can look to its government to sustain its artists and to make their work affordable. It can look to the market to identify the art that most people want to buy, and to the goodwill of its rich to support the rest. It can trust to a balance between the patronage of the public, the state and the wealthy. But for centuries, powerful patrons of the arts have wanted something back: prestige, the company of the artist, sex with the dancers, a marble tomb. When I started in 2003, what the Labour government wanted back was greater access to the arts. The Secretary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell, loved the theatre, and wanted as many people as possible to find out about it. After 2010, diversity and inclusion were lower on the agenda. In 2013, Jeremy Hunt’s replacement, Maria Miller, candidly asked artists for help in making the economic case to the Treasury for “arts investment.” Nick and I made it in a sober, boring piece in the Daily Telegraph. The Tories were also keen on international pre-eminence, so we gave them evidence for that, too.
Arts journalists frequently grumbled that we never learned to make the arguments for public funding, but their complaints were unfounded. Successive Labour governments responded to us with handsome increases in funding. We convinced George Osborne to spare us the worst of the cuts, and in 2015, he announced the first rise in arts spending since the big-spending days of New Labour. Everything we said was true: investment in the arts amounts to 0.1 percent of public spending but delivers four times that in gross domestic product; publicly funded art is the bedrock of a creative economy that in 2016 was worth £84 billion and is growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy; British creativity is admired across the world and is a source of disproportionate “soft power”; the arts boost tourism; they draw communities together; they are an unparalleled educational tool. There are legions of articulate arts leaders who make the arguments daily to public funding bodies, corporate sponsors and philanthropic trusts.
But none of these are the reasons why I came into the theatre, and they aren’t why George Osborne comes to see it, or why the Elizabethan audience thronged to the South Bank, or why Queen Elizabeth brought the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to court. Nor are they the reasons why the Germans spend three times as much each year on the arts as the coalition government spent in total over its five-year term. The most eloquent argument is the one that can only be made by the art itself. Inspired, moved, outraged, cast down, cheered up, entertained or infatuated by a good performance, the audience cares nothing for GDP.
The theatre has never been more popular, in rooms above pubs, in abandoned factories, in ornate West End theatres, in concrete culture palaces. Maybe the most significant consequence of the digital revolution is not that it has opened the door to widespread digital distribution of live performance, but that it has led to a resurgence of the real thing. The instant availability of everything you want at the click of a mouse turns out not to include the thing you want most: human contact. You want to be there when it happens, for one night only.
A failed washboard player beats himself up for being an idiot; a woman falls in love with her stepson; a man could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he has bad dreams. You reach out across the void and touch lives you seem to have led. Or you live vanished lives, strange lives, the lives of others. You are part of a community that, by an act of collective empathy and imagination, rejects the low dishonesty of the age, and insists that no one exists alone.
Every Friday at 10 a.m. there’s a company meeting in the canteen. It lasts about fifteen minutes and it’s usually standing room only: actors, stage crew, painters, lighting, finance, IT, anyone who wants to turn up. We’re given the low-down on last week’s box office. We hear about the death-defying acts that will play outside on Theatre Square during the summer: acrobatic identical twins from Poland, artistic hairdressers from Barcelona, the Whalley Range All Stars’ Pig. The canteen manager tells us that she’s had enough of whoever’s nicking the stainless-steel cutlery so she’s going over to plastic. I announce additions to the programme and the latest casting.
It was at a Friday company meeting in the spring of 2013 that I announced I’d step down as director in March 2015. After ten years, I said, it’s time to let someone else think about what the National should be doing. Theatres need regular reinvention; their directors must make way for new generations. It’s someone else’s turn to decide what it means to give the audience a good time.
But this Friday in November, not much more than a year before I’m due to leave, is the day before the fiftieth-birthday show, and I’m already feeling wistful about my departure. I tell the company how the show’s going, though most of them are involved in it, so they know already. Then I riff about the mighty actors from the National’s past who have joined us, and what it means to be the National Theatre. I ask myself what I’ll do with all my stories when I don’t have a weekly captive audience. I think that maybe I’ll have to write a book.
At the end of the company meeting, instead of going back to the press office, Lucinda Morrison walks upstairs with me. She’s just had a call from one of the Sunday papers. They have information that the rabbit roulade served in the Terrace restaurant uses meat from rabbits kept in shocking conditions on a Spanish farm. This is news to our kitchens, but they immediately remove the roulade from the menu. This doesn’t stop the Sunday paper running the story, with a big photograph of happy diners on the terrace of the National Theatre next to a bigger one of sad white rabbits with brown ears and pink eyes.
It’s unnaturally quiet in my office, but the silence is broken by the saxophonist who plays “Moon River” to the passers-by on the South Bank. No longer content merely to play badly, he now walks a rickety tightrope at the same time, so not a single note comes out in the right order.
On my desk is the rep chart. There’s a thick line under March 2015, which is when my time’s up. There are one or two gaps in the schedule, but none of them can accommodate the very good new play that arrived yesterday, whose fate now rests with my successor. Lyn Haill comes in with the programme for tomorrow’s show, packed with memories of the last fifty years. Lyn, who has edited our programmes for as long as anyone can remember, worked for Olivier at the Old Vic. She points me to something Sir Laurence said, which she’s printed in big bold letters:
The National Theatre can never be what the public wants if it isn’t allowed sometimes to be what the public doesn’t want.
Niamh tells me that they’re ready to continue the technical rehearsal in the Olivier. I spend the rest of the day finessing transitions from scene to scene, from Antony and Cleopatra to Angels in America, from Mourning Becomes Electra to Jerry Springer—The Opera. In the evening, there’s a public dress rehearsal. Some of the biggest laughs go to Penelope Wilton and Nicholas Le Prevost, who perform a scene from Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce. They’re in bed with a plateful of pilchards on toast, and they’re as precise about the consumption of the pilchards as Baryshnikov would be about a multiple pirouette. But they also seem totally spontaneous: one more perfect balancing act.
Before the performance the following night, I go backstage. There are five floors of dressing rooms facing each other around a central light well. “It’s like a women’s prison,” says Maggie Smith when I knock on her door. Actors are leaning out of the windows, shouting encouragement and obscenities to each other. Plumes of illicit cigarette smoke curl from Michael Gambon’s window. Frances de la Tour also has a cigarette. She’s never come across a rule she doesn’t want to break, so she’s smoking for the revolution.
I go from room to room to thank everyone and wish them good luck, and I’m in with Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale when the stage manager calls beginners to the stage. Softly at first, the room starts to shake. I look across the light well, and see that in every dressing room, actors are banging with their palms against the windows. It’s what happens at the beginners’ call on every opening night, and it carries
with it the terror of prisoners on death row, hammering at their cell doors in tribute to the condemned on his way to execution. But tonight, it’s as if the starting gates have opened on the Derby, and a hundred thoroughbreds are thundering towards the finish.
I stand with Alex and Simon and everywhere I look are the actors who have marked my life at the National, in a frenzy of drumming. So I start drumming with them.
And I think: I’m going to miss this.
Prologue
At my leaving party in the new scenic workshops, I owned up to breaking the pass door at the back of the Olivier stalls on the fiftieth birthday, because I was locked out of the backstage celebrations. During the whole of my last day as director, I was locked out of the workshops, because they wanted them to be a surprise. When I arrived for the party, I was immediately surrounded by hundreds of old friends and colleagues, so had no time to admire the battered furniture, faded costumes and props: mementos of all my shows, beautifully hung like a vast gallery installation. They’d made life-sized cut-outs of Nicholas Hytner, so that people could have their photos taken with him. Some people had their photos taken with the real thing, but eventually I joined the pack having their photos taken with the cut-outs, and had mine taken with Nicholas Hytner too. He’s probably still around, stacked against a wall somewhere.
Lisa Burger, Alex Jennings and Frances de la Tour made speeches: Alex talked about our twenty-five-year friendship, Frankie said that she was my wife. I drank too much, danced a little, and stole a joke from Alan Bennett for my own speech: how proud we can all be, I said, of the contribution we have made together to show-business history, by playing a small part in the inexorable rise of James Corden.
“What’s past is prologue,” says Antonio in The Tempest, often quoted as an inspirational maxim, though in fact he’s trying to persuade Sebastian to turn his back on the past and murder his brother. The National’s past is always prologue, if not to murder then at least to new directions. Eighteen months before I left, the board, chaired by John Makinson, appointed my successor, Rufus Norris. He has a stirring vision for the National, and the respect and devotion of the artists who will realise it for him. Some of them came to my leaving party straight from rehearsals for his first show as director. Lisa is now executive director, Nick Starr’s old job. I love going back and seeing what they’re up to. No longer responsible for what’s on stage, I’m free to have a really good time.
Not long before I told the board that I thought my time was up, Nick suggested that we went on working together after we both left. He had an idea that we could raise the money to buy or build our own theatre. I was immediately up for it, and we started to think about where we wanted to be.
We are both immune to the allure of the West End, where the theatres will always be constrained by their architectural heritage. They are perfect for the kind of shows that they were originally built for, most of them around a hundred years ago, and many of them are beautiful and atmospheric. But my heart beats faster at the National, at the Manchester Royal Exchange or in a disused warehouse than it does on Shaftesbury Avenue. I prefer theatres that can be knocked around to suit the show to theatres that force me to knock the show around to fit the space. And London has changed. Audiences will go wherever you invite them if the invitation is worthwhile.
We knew that whatever we did had to work as a business. There’d be no public funding: we’ve had our turn. We’d try to make bold, popular theatre. We’d commission ambitious plays that could run long enough to pay for themselves, and build an environment for them that would be exciting, flexible and welcoming, with plenty of legroom, and lots of women’s toilets.
I went out and talked to playwrights, while Nick went out and talked to property developers. And then, as we always have, we went to each other’s meetings. One of Nick’s new friends told him about a development nearing completion on the Thames, between Tower Bridge and City Hall, five minutes’ walk from London Bridge Station. The local authority, Southwark, had made substantial cultural provision a condition of its planning consent.
Six months after I left the National, we made a deal for 45,000 square feet of empty space, big enough for a 920-seat theatre and a foyer with breathtaking views over the river and the Tower of London. Our old friend Steve Tompkins has designed a beautiful, flexible auditorium. We’ll make shows behind a proscenium arch, on a thrust stage, in the round, or we’ll take out all the seats and have the audience stand in the pit: whatever’s best for the play. The money to build it and to produce what happens in it comes from a small group of investors who are interested both in making theatre and in making money. So were the first businessmen who built theatres south of the river more than four hundred years ago, and although none of our investors would compare themselves to Shakespeare, we hope to make for them as handsome a return on their investment as Shakespeare took with him on his retirement to Stratford.
The Bridge Theatre will open in the autumn of 2017. We’ll produce around four shows a year in it, and I’ll direct half of them. Maybe we’ll stick at one theatre; maybe we’ll build others. Whether we succeed or fail, it will be another balancing act, and this book is its prologue.
Cast and Creatives
This book does not record everything that happened at the National Theatre between 2003 and 2015, and cannot come close to acknowledging everyone who made it happen. I have devoted too little space to the shows that I didn’t myself direct, because I remember less about them than the shows I lived with in the rehearsal room. I wish I could pay tribute to them all.
Everybody involved in National Theatre 50 Years on Stage deserves applause. I have only scratched the surface. Benedict Cumberbatch and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith were needle-sharp in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In addition to playing Mrs. Sullen, Maggie Smith appeared in a clip from Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, directed by Coward himself: nobody doubted that they’d seen a comic miracle. Deborah Findlay was the matron in Peter Nichols’s The National Health; forty-five years after it opened, Charles Kay occupied the same bed. Gawn Grainger and James Hayes, two other Olivier-era veterans, were also on the ward. Clive Rowe stopped the show in Guys and Dolls, as he always did. Andrew Scott and Dominic Cooper were deeply affecting in Angels in America. Roger Allam’s lament as Walter Heisenberg for his ruined German homeland in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen was heart-stopping. Helen Mirren flew in from a film set in France, and in a wild burst of adrenaline murdered Tim Pigott-Smith in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. The show was superbly designed by Mark Thompson and lit by Mark Henderson.
On a typical Monday, the casting team included over the years Charlotte Bevan, Alastair Coomer, Juliet Horsley and Charlotte Sutton. In the Literary Department were at various times Chris Campbell, Sarah Clarke, Ben Jancovich, Tom Lyons, Clare Slater and Brian Walters. Among the stage-management team were Fi Bardsley, Rosemary Beattie, Angela Bissett, Barry Bryant, Ian Connop, Ben Donoghue, Cynthia Duberry, Ian Farmery, Val Fox, Peter Gregory, Sara Gunter, Harry Guthrie, Nik Haffenden, Ernie Hall, Janice Heyes, Anna Hill, Emma B. Lloyd, Eric Lumsden, David Marsland, Kerry McDevitt, Neil Mickel, David Milling, Trish Montemuro, Jo Neild, Alison Rankin, Brew Rowland, Andrew Speed, Jane Suffling, Shane Thom, Lesley Walmsley and Julia Wickham. The marketing team was led first by Chris Harper, then by Sarah Hunt and finally by Alex Bayley. Nick Starr and I often took advice from my brother, Richard, who was deputy chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi and is now a global advertising guru. The front-of-house team was led by John Langley, catering and commercial operations first by Robyn Lines and then Patrick Harrison. The genius production managers included Jason Barnes, Katrina Gilroy, Tariq Hussein, Igor, Sacha Milroy and Di Willmott. In the workshops, the head scenic artist was Hilary Vernon-Smith, the head of props was Nicky Holderness; Paul Evans was head of scenic construction. Carol Lingwood was head of costume, and head of wigs was first Joyce Beagarie and then Giuseppe Cannas. Almost all the American (and British) donors were delightful, none more so
than Barbara Fleischman, a nonagenarian whose politics are as radical as her enthusiasms.
I joined English National Opera in 1978 as a staff producer, which was what they called an assistant director, at £55 a week. I learned most from John Copley, who trained as a dancer until he was told one day by Dame Ninette de Valois, the founder of the Royal Ballet, that he’d never make it, so she was having him transferred forthwith to the Opera. There was no aspect of the performance of opera that he hadn’t learned at the coal face. He stood in for Maria Callas when she withdrew to her suite at the Savoy, and played Tosca at the stage rehearsals of the famous Zeffirelli production opposite Tito Gobbi’s Scarpia. He still needs no encouragement to sing Act 2, particularly in restaurants. I followed him from wardrobe to prop shop, from paint frame to rehearsal. I watched him light a show, and move the vast chorus over the stage as if he were painting with them, all the time entertaining them with stories of his wicked adventures in the world’s fleshpots. In 1979, I was approached out of the blue by Norman Platt, the founder of Kent Opera. He needed a late replacement for Harold Pinter whom he’d hoped to be able to persuade to direct Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Being second choice to Pinter didn’t seem like a problem to me. Nor did The Turn of the Screw, which always works: I’ve never seen a bad production of it. The opera itself was one stroke of luck. Another was Norman himself, an ex-singer with stronger opinions about how opera should be staged than the fiercest German deconstructionist. He insisted above all on truthful acting and vivid music-making. It was impossible to imagine offering him ideas that were sloppy, self-serving or merely fashionable. My education continued at the old Leeds Playhouse, then run by John Harrison, a model artistic director. He shared with me both his theatrical know-how and his determination to put it primarily at the service of his audience. He knew exactly how to take the community with him.
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