Balancing Acts
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright 2017 © by Nicholas Hytner
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2017.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hytner, Nicholas author.
Title: Balancing acts : behind the scenes at London’s National Theatre | Nicholas Hytner.
Description: First American edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017016630 | ISBN 9780451493408 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451493415 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hytner, Nicholas. | Theatrical producers and directors—Great Britain—Biography. | National Theatre (Great Britain) | Theater—England—London—History—21st century.
Classification: LCC PN2598.H96 A3 2017 | DDC 792.02/33092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016630
Ebook ISBN 9780451493415
Cover photograph by Matthew Williams-Ellis/Alamy
Cover design by Chip Kidd
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
PART ONE: SET-UP
1. National Identity
2001
2. Imaginary Forces
2002
3. A Really Good Time
2003
PART TWO: NEW THINGS
4. Ourselves and Each Other
New Plays
5. A Way of Looking at Things
Alan Bennett
6. Knowing Nothing
Movies
PART THREE: OLD THINGS
7. A Reason to Do It
Shakespeare
8. The Original Production
Staging the Classics
9. The Age and Body of the Time
More Shakespeare
PART FOUR: SHOW BUSINESS
10. On the Bandwagon
Musicals
11. What They Best Like
Entertainment
12. One Night Only
Packing Them In
Prologue
Cast and Creatives
A Note About the Author
Introduction
In a National Theatre rehearsal room, Michael Gambon has been wrestling for three days with Alan Bennett’s new play The Habit of Art. Michael has given many prodigious performances at the National, most recently Falstaff in Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays, though there were occasional memory lapses which he covered with Elizabethan rhubarb. I had a couple of letters complaining that my production had made Sir Michael incomprehensible, to which I replied politely, although he’s a famous hoaxer so he may have written them himself. One of them compared him with suspicious pomposity to that admirable Shakespearean and model of clarity, Simon Russell Beale.
He now seems much less confident than he was as Falstaff. He’s playing an old actor who is struggling with the part of the poet W. H. Auden to Alex Jennings’s Benjamin Britten in a play about Auden and Britten within a play about a theatre company putting on the same play. Alex has an almost mystical faith in the great tradition of British acting, so he’s urging Michael on. With them on stage is Frances de la Tour, who in the face of life’s absurdities has an eyebrow permanently raised and a voice permanently tuned to deadpan. She’s playing a stage manager, and I’m sure that she can nurse Michael through anything that goes off-piste.
But at the moment he can barely get to the end of a sentence. And then, suddenly, the blood drains from him. He staggers, and falls into a chair. We call for help, an oxygen tank is hurried into the room, then a stretcher. Michael is wheeled out, the oxygen mask over his face. One of the stage managers goes with him in the ambulance to St. Thomas’ Hospital. As he’s carried into A&E, she asks him whether there’s any message he’d like her to take back to the rehearsal room.
“Don’t worry about those bastards,” he says. “They’re already on the phone to Simon Russell Beale.”
And as he speaks, I’m with Alan Bennett and the rest of the company recasting the part. Simon Russell Beale is doing something else, probably making a documentary about Renaissance choral music: he is as erudite as he is audible. So he’s not in the running. But once we know that nothing serious has happened to Michael, we barely have a thought for him. We’re in the canteen, overlooking the river. Tourist boats glide under Waterloo Bridge, and glum office workers stare at computer screens in the building next door, while we make a list of actors who are available for the part, all of them distinguished, none of them immune to our brutal assessments of their suitability. By the end of the day, Michael has been advised to withdraw from the play, and I’ve called Richard Griffiths, an actor renowned for his delicacy and wit, but also for his immense girth. Alan has already written lines to justify the casting of a fat actor in the part of Auden, who, although dissolute, was not even plump.
You start with a vision, and you deliver a compromise. And you’re pulled constantly in different directions. So although you want the actor who plays W. H. Auden to be as much like W. H. Auden as possible, you know that the play will work best with an actor who can remember what the playwright wrote.
You know that what works generally trumps all other considerations, and you also know that if you care only about what works, you’ll end up with something slick but meretricious.
You want a play to be challenging, ambitious, nuanced and complicated. You also want it to sell tickets.
You want playwrights to write exactly the plays they want to write. You also want what they write to reflect your own image of what your theatre should stand for.
You want your theatre to vibrate with the rude, disruptive energy of the carnival. But in your heart of hearts, you recoil from the chaos: you seek intimations of celestial harmony.
You want to look into the abyss, and make sense of human misery. But you flinch from pretension, despise self-importance, and take refuge in irony.
You want Shakespeare to be our contemporary. You also know him to be writing very specifically about a world that is separated from our own by four hundred years.
You want to tread a tightrope between all your conflicting impulses, to find poise and balance. But you despise yourself for your caution; you want your work to be full of jagged edges and careless abandon.
So when Richard Griffiths picks up the phone and says, “It may interest you to know that you have called me from my exercise bike,” you dismiss the unrealistic thought that he may be thinner than he was when you last saw him, because you know it doesn’t matter. You explain to him the pickle you’re in, and you aren’t surprised that it doesn’t occur to him to remind you that you might have asked him to play W. H. Auden in the first place. But Richard is always a model of good grace, and he says he’ll start on Monday.
Monday comes, and Richard is stuck in traffic on the A40. He calls to say he’ll be half an hour late. He’s one of the world’s great raconteurs, but his stories never have a destination and they go on for hours. And we’re now two weeks behind, which is why Alan Bennett says plaintively from the back of the room, “Start rehearsing as soon as he arrives or we’ll be here all morning with Traffic Jams I Have Known.”
So that’s what we do. And The Habit of Art, though not
as popular, or probably as good, as Alan’s previous play, The History Boys, turns out to be worth a couple of hours of the audience’s time, as it is provocative, funny, touching, sad and original. The playwright, the actors and I have spent the short rehearsal time left to us trying to reconcile our high ideals with what’s achievable. We want to make art, and we know we’re in show business. It’s one of the balancing acts that the National Theatre, and this book, are about.
Michael Gambon was back four years later, in 2013, for the National’s fiftieth birthday, formidable in a scene from Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, in the part originally played in 1975 by Ralph Richardson. He and Derek Jacobi, who played John Gielgud’s part with all the finesse of his predecessor, were part of a two-hour celebration of the National’s history, which brought together actors from all of its five decades in a programme of scenes from many of its most memorable productions, broadcast live by the BBC. Michael and Derek recorded a brief and irreverent introduction to Pinter, admitting that they had no idea what his plays were about. They wouldn’t have dared if he’d still been alive.
There was never a chance that the fiftieth-birthday celebration could in a mere two hours balance the need to do full justice to the range of the National’s achievements against the need to deliver a good show. But as much as a single evening could, it touched on most of my preoccupations.
It started as the National itself started at the Old Vic Theatre in 1963, with Act 1 Scene 1 of Hamlet, and Shakespeare haunts these pages as his plays haunt me. I was afraid that Hamlet might be too high-minded for an opener, but “Who’s there?” is an unimprovable first line; and when Derek Jacobi, who played Laertes in the 1963 production, appeared in armour as the Ghost, he was a reminder that high-minded can also be showbiz gold.
Hamlet himself doesn’t appear in the first scene of Hamlet, but later in the evening, Simon Russell Beale stood on the vast Olivier stage, as vulnerable and lonely as he was in 2000. “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.” Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear had only finished their run of Othello a couple of months earlier. Their gripping account of the climax of Othello’s descent into jealousy gave way briefly to a tape of Laurence Olivier and Frank Finlay in the legendary 1964 production, recorded live at the Old Vic. Time turned somersaults.
Olivier was the National’s founding director, and, according to many of those who saw him live, its greatest actor. Archive footage of his stage performances is a spectral counterfeit of what it must have been like to be there. But a few days before the show his wife, Joan Plowright, returned to the Old Vic to film a scene from George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, fifty years after she’d first played it. She asked if she could stop if she forgot or stumbled over her lines. I said we could stitch her performance together from as many takes as she wanted. The cameras rolled, and the years rolled back. She did the whole thing in one take. A young guy on the camera crew had no idea who she was, and no idea that she was playing a girl who was going defiant to the flames, but he was still in tears.
Among the biggest regrets of my twelve years as the National’s director is that I found nothing for Maggie Smith, who, like Joan Plowright, was part of Olivier’s first company. She was aware of the irony when I asked her to be in the birthday show: irony is one of her special subjects. But she suggested a short, enigmatic speech from George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem. She said she remembered it because when she played Mrs. Sullen, it took her so long to work out what it meant. I didn’t believe this: in a rehearsal room, she’s always several steps ahead of everyone else. At the party after the show, she spoke to William Gaskill, The Beaux’ Stratagem’s director in 1970. He admired how still she’d been. “You told me not to move my hands,” she said, pleased that he’d noticed. More than forty years on, she still remembered his note, maybe because it was so practical and unpretentious, and a lesson in how a director should talk to an actor. Judi Dench arrived one afternoon to rehearse Cleopatra’s elegy for Antony, after a gap of more than twenty-five years. “Any notes?” she asked, when she’d finished. How do you give notes to someone like Judi Dench? Or Helen Mirren? Are any of us really up to Maggie Smith?
My years as the National’s director brought me into the kind of contact with theatre directors that I would never otherwise have had, as we rarely see each other at work. Actors know everything about all of us, but will only under extreme provocation spill the beans. I’ve watched many of the most celebrated British actors at work, and I’m still trying to crack the mystery of how they do what they do. Many of them were there for the birthday show, but two survived only in grainy video: Paul Scofield as the composer Salieri in Amadeus (1979) and Nigel Hawthorne as the king in The Madness of George III (1991), who both grabbed the audience by the throat.
The evening was studded with scenes from modern classics that were first produced at the National. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), No Man’s Land (1975), Bedroom Farce (1977), Amadeus (1979), Arcadia (1993) and Copenhagen (1998): major plays by playwrights—Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Peter Shaffer and Michael Frayn—whose work is the backbone of the British theatre. Central to the National’s identity are the new plays that take the temperature of the nation. Peter Nichols’s The National Health (1969) was the first of them, the NHS no less emblematic of the nation’s health then than now. Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda (1985) was a prophetic account of the debauching of the British press by a proprietor eager to stick two fingers up to the British establishment, and happy to shaft his readers. Nobody who saw Anthony Hopkins lope onto the empty Olivier stage as the Rupert Murdoch avatar Lambert Le Roux will forget it. Luckily, Ralph Fiennes hadn’t seen it, or he might not have agreed to give his own terrifying performance.
David Hare’s gift of second sight was on display again in a scene from Stuff Happens, which in 2004 interwove verbatim reportage with informed speculation in a gripping drama about the build-up to the Iraq War, with Alex Jennings uncanny as George W. Bush. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992) had its British premiere at the National, before it played New York, and was as comprehensive in its anatomy of contemporary America as anything we produced about ourselves.
It was harder to chip fragments from many equally striking plays. Some of them were too challenging to sell many tickets, but the box office is an imperfect measure of success. Still, I’m eager to explore what made War Horse (2007) such a phenomenon, and why One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) made so many people laugh. What is funny? How do you do comedy? And what part should musical theatre play in the National’s repertoire? Richard Eyre’s production of Guys and Dolls (1982) marked a sea change in the way the London audience looked at the Broadway golden age. Trevor Nunn’s gorgeous My Fair Lady (2001) was the climax of a series of incisive re-evaluations of classic American musicals.
The first new musical I programmed as the National’s director was Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer—The Opera (2003), which married low entertainment to high art even in its title. The theatre has been finding ways to test the boundaries of taste since Aristotle suggested that comedy had its origins in phallic parades. There will always be a part of me that would prefer to be at the Wigmore Hall listening to a Haydn string quartet, so I’m glad that Jerry Springer did without the phallus, but it was still as blithely offensive as it was musically literate.
Many of the Jerry Springer company reappeared in a scene from London Road (2011), by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork, based on testimony from residents of Ipswich caught up in the trial of a serial killer, and evidence, if it were needed, that musicals can be as far-reaching in form and subject matter as any other theatrical genre. The immense range of the entire evening was answer in itself to one of the questions I asked myself throughout my years as director: what is the National Theatre for?
There were two scenes by Alan Bennett, who has entrusted his plays to me for the last twenty-five years. Working on The History Boys (2004), about history, literatur
e, education and eight clever schoolboys, was as good a time as I’ve ever had in the theatre. Most of the original company came back, though not, to our great sorrow, Richard Griffiths, who died only a few months before the reunion. Alan Bennett played Richard’s part, the teacher everyone wishes they’d had. He didn’t efface memories of Richard, but he landed an enormous laugh that Richard never got, because ten years previously, neither Richard nor I had understood the line properly. “It used to drive me mad,” said Alan. “Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” I cried. The history boys, all of them at least fifteen years too old for school, jeered triumphantly.
The show closed with the final speech from The Habit of Art (2009). As a National Theatre stage manager, Frances de la Tour remembered the move from the Old Vic to the intimidating new building of the South Bank. But there was no need to be frightened:
Because what’s knocked the corners off the place, taken the shine off it and made it dingy and unintimidating—are plays. Plays plump, plays paltry, plays preposterous, plays purgatorial, plays radiant, plays rotten—but plays persistent. Plays, plays, plays.
Backstage, we created a temporary green room in one of the rehearsal rooms. School benches were lined up in front of a big screen so that the cast could watch the show. Members of the 2013 company sat with members of the 1963 company, colleagues on equal terms. Actors who will be around for the National’s centenary in 2063 shared a bench with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. They’ll be able to tell actors whose parents aren’t yet born that they were there.
The green room was the place to be: even during the dress rehearsal it was a magnet for everyone involved in the show. I decided I’d slip out of the auditorium for twenty minutes during the performance and run backstage. But I’d bought a new suit and, determined to show everybody how thin I still was, I didn’t want to spoil its line with my wallet. So I came without it, and had to borrow somebody else’s pass card. Halfway through the show, I slid out inconspicuously, and ran to the pass door. The card didn’t work.