Balancing Acts Read online

  I pushed hard at the door, but it wouldn’t open. On the other side, down the stairs, was the green room, but I was locked out of my own theatre. I started to beat at the door, in a fury of frustration and disappointment. Harder and harder I battered the door, hammering with my fists at a reinforced glass panel, which suddenly shattered, though as it was reinforced it didn’t give way, and I still couldn’t get through.

  I retired hurt, though the new suit still looked sharp, and I slunk back into the auditorium. It seemed like a brutal reminder that the clock was ticking on my twelve years at the National, so I told nobody what I’d done until, eighteen months later, I fessed up during the farewell speech at my leaving party. Out in the crowd, a contingent from Security nodded gravely. They’d known all along. I’d been caught on CCTV.

  It’s Monday morning first thing. I’ve been in the job a couple of years. I’m in my office on the fourth floor, which has a view over the Thames to Somerset House, and though I’m growing used to it, I’ll never get used to the noise of the recycling van collecting last night’s empties from the goods entrance below my window. The National Theatre regularly appears on lists of both the ten most loved and the ten most loathed buildings in London. I love its uncompromising exterior; I love the concrete fly towers when they’re etched sharp by the sun against a blue sky, and even when they go soggy like an egg box in the rain; I love the buzzing, purple-carpeted foyers; but I’m not crazy about the vast rubbish bins that occupy one of the best river frontages in Europe.

  On my desk is the current repertory chart: for each of the National’s three auditoria, the next eighteen months are divided into slots for six or seven shows to play in rep: around twenty shows every year. The top of the chart looks good. We’ve planned promising shows for all three theatres: the 300-seat Cottesloe, the 900-seat Lyttelton and the 1,150-seat Olivier. Nine months in, gaps start to appear. By the bottom of the chart, there’s next to nothing. Choosing the repertoire and shepherding it onto the stage are at the heart of my job.

  In the office next door, Nick Starr is already hammering at his keyboard. As director of the National, I’m its chief executive; but Nick, its executive director, runs the building and the organisation, while I manage the writers, directors, actors and designers whose attachment to the theatre is more intermittent.

  “You busy?” I ask.

  “Board papers,” he says.

  Nick has an encompassing grasp of the National’s business, but behind his managerial nous is the student idealist who volunteered at the Half Moon, a radical fringe theatre that twenty years ago was where the action was.

  “Still nothing in O3,” I say, waving the rep chart, meaning that the third slot in the Olivier hasn’t been filled yet.

  “What happened to Oedipus at Colonus?” he asks.

  “I got another letter from Scofield, apologising for being so enthusiastic in his first letter,” I say. I would have loved to bring Paul Scofield back to the stage one last time, and for a few tantalising days, it looked as if he would play the dying Oedipus in Sophocles’ strange valedictory tragedy, but he’s decided against it. “I’m afraid I responded in a moment of euphoria at being invited by you to do it.” Without him, there’s no point in doing the play.

  “How was Friday night?” I ask. Nick has been to see a show at a theatre for which neither of us has much time, because nothing that reaches its stage seems to bear any relation to the world as it actually is.

  “Entirely self-referential,” he says, “ridiculous.” We spend ten satisfying minutes slagging off stuff we don’t like.

  I leave his office and go down the corridor to the casting office and catch up on which actors have accepted our offers, and which have turned us down. Then I move on to the literary office, where the shelves groan with thousands of scripts, arranged alphabetically by author from Aeschylus to Zweig: old plays we’ve done, plays we might do, successive drafts of new plays that we’ve commissioned. I ask whether the play we’re expecting from a young writer we all admire has come in yet. It hasn’t, which makes me even more nervous about the gaps in the chart. Then everyone tells me what shows they’ve seen over the weekend, and we do some more slagging off.

  “There’s a meet-and-greet in Rehearsal Room 2 at ten o’clock,” says my assistant Niamh Dilworth when I return to my office. On the first day of rehearsals for a new show, the acting company and the creative team gather to meet colleagues from every department in the National: stage crew, lighting, props, costume, front of house, marketing. As I go downstairs, there’s an announcement on the tannoy. “Would the darlings on the Lyttelton crew please go to the stage?” Linda Tolhurst at stage door has discovered that English National Opera has issued new guidelines to its staff about acceptable forms of theatrical address, and darling isn’t one of them. She is now like a dog with a bone.

  In Rehearsal Room 2, the stage managers have marked the outlines of the set for the new show on the floor. The sixty people who have gathered for the meet-and-greet hover on the edges of the mark-out, as if it would bring bad luck to step into it. Everyone gathers in a large circle. It’s my job to welcome the new company of actors, the director, the designers, and the playwright if the play is new, though this morning’s playwright is Henrik Ibsen. I say how excited we are to be working with them, which is always true. It’s even truer today, as this show is the first to be directed at the National by Marianne Elliott, whose work has bowled me over at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Marianne addresses the circle; she’s inspiring, and staggeringly well prepared. I’m already looking forward to the opening of the show, six weeks later.

  By now, it’s time for me to go to my own rehearsal, if I have one. I direct maybe two shows a year (after twelve years as the National’s director, I’d done twenty-six). But if I’m not in rehearsal, I go back up to the office.

  “Could Nick Hytner call extension 3232? Thank you, darling,” says Linda on the tannoy, as I climb the stairs. 3232 is Lucinda Morrison, head of press. Lucinda and I go to the ballet together when she isn’t quietly feeding the arts press the stories we want them to tell, but this morning she says the Daily Telegraph is after 1,500 words about why the government should support the arts. “But I’ve written that piece at least fourteen times already,” I say. Lucinda says I haven’t written it for the Telegraph yet, and the case can’t be made often enough. I say I’ll write it as soon as I can.

  Beneath my window, a saxophonist has started to play “Moon River” very badly to the passers-by on the South Bank. He will keep this up all day, every day, until the day I leave. Another of the stage managers puts her head around the door. I rely on them to be my moles: if there’s trouble in rehearsal, I want to know. In Rehearsal Room Three, a director and a playwright are locking horns. I’ll talk to the director later, and I’ll probably take the playwright’s side in whatever tussle they’re having, because in the end, it’s her play.

  I pull up the weekend’s show reports on my computer screen. They include box-office results for our shows at the National, in the West End and on tour, as well as anything that struck the stage managers as noteworthy. In the Olivier, “the understudy was excellent as the Fish Woman this afternoon but the Gypsy was very late on as he was in the wrong place and couldn’t find his heather. We had to cut the Knicker stall.”

  I have a meeting with a young playwright, who wants to write an ambitious new play for the Olivier; it’s an entirely convincing pitch, so we commission it. Then I push through the pass door at the end of the corridor outside the office into the sepulchral dark at the back of the Olivier, to see how the technical rehearsal for the next show is going. It is during the tech that tempers sometimes fray: a show that has been painstakingly created over six weeks in a rehearsal room is forced onto the stage, all its design and technical components suddenly thrust onto the actors over two or three days before its dress rehearsal. I’m in time to see a heavy wall descend slowly from the flies and shudder to a halt six feet above the stage. �
�Is it stuck?” the director calls from the stalls. I don’t hang around to find out: the final run-through of this show in the rehearsal room worried me, but there’s nothing I can do about it until I’ve seen it in front of an audience at its first preview tomorrow.

  In a windowless studio beside the lift on the fourth floor, Wendy Spon, the head of casting, brings in five actors at twenty-minute intervals, to audition for a part in my next production. I talk to them a little, ask them to read from the play, work with them on what they’ve read. Their lives are an endless parade of rejection; directors sit safely in judgement, though very few of us are wiser or more expert than the actors we judge. A candidate walks into a room, and often if she doesn’t look right, she’s finished before she’s opened her mouth. She’s a victim, maybe, of the director’s lack of imagination. He wants someone stockier, or brasher, or more like Julia Roberts.

  Some of the actors this morning, all of them men in their twenties, can’t conceal their nerves: as they read, their eyes keep darting towards me as they try to work out whether they’re hitting the target. They give it everything they’ve got under the harsh fluorescent lights, but four of them are simply wrong for the part: I probably haven’t described accurately enough to Wendy what I’m looking for, or maybe I’m only discovering the part through seeing it done by good actors who don’t nail it. So the audition process is constructive for me, but a painful injustice for the four actors. I’ve seen the fifth on stage in another show, so I’m eager to meet him, which could be why he’s the first who seems not to care what impression he makes. His name is Rory Kinnear, and when he reads the part, he’s totally immersed in it, so I ask him to play it.

  When I return to the office, a group from Marketing are waiting with proofs for the next leaflet. Niamh reminds me that I have lunch with a potential donor. I groan, but Niamh knows how to cheer me up: she tells me that over the weekend, Security found a famous actor up to no good with an autograph hunter in the underground car park. I’m usually the last to know about this sort of thing, so I run down the corridor to share it with everyone else. It turns out that I’m the last to know again.

  The potential donor is staying at the Savoy hotel, and I walk across Waterloo Bridge, looping and re-looping a tie. She’s American, and an admirer of President Bush. I steer the conversation onto how theatre can transform the lives of disadvantaged young people, and how anxious we are to extend the reach of our Learning Department. The potential donor is all in favour of the transformation of young people’s lives, as long as it isn’t big government doing the transforming. I keep quiet about the money the National receives every year from the Arts Council.

  I return to the theatre through the Espresso Bar, and buy coffee from Jay Miller, who will soon leave to turn an old factory in Hackney Wick into a theatre of his own called the Yard. Behind the National’s bars, selling programmes, tearing tickets are an ambitious army of young people who are tomorrow’s writers, directors, actors and producers. Back on the fourth floor, one of the production managers wants to see me about the designs for a show that goes into rehearsal in a couple of months. Production managers are responsible for delivering designs to the stage on time and on budget, and these designs are much too expensive. I think the show would benefit from a less extravagant set, so I tell the production manager to stand firm, happy that I can use the budget to nudge the show in the right direction, without having to engage the director and designer in another awkward conversation about why I don’t like what they’re doing.

  Outside the office I hear Niamh fighting off someone from Development who wants to brief me about a fundraising event later in the week. “He has to go to a run-through. Come back tomorrow,” says Niamh, whose ferocious gatekeeping is belied by her infectious cackle.

  The run-through is in Rehearsal Room 1, next to the workshops, so I spend a few minutes with the scenic artists, carpenters and prop makers. Up on the paint frame is a vast and gorgeous cloudscape. Next door in props, someone is working with punctilious delicacy on a severed head. I tear myself away and go into the rehearsal room, where the actors are warming up as light streams in from the high windows. It’s my first sight of a show that started rehearsals four weeks ago, and I’m impatient to see how it’s come together. I sit with a gaggle of dressers who are there to work out when they’re going to be needed backstage for quick costume changes. At the end, I’m expected to give perceptive notes to the director, who this afternoon is Howard Davies, laughter and fierce conviction fighting for possession of his sky-blue eyes. But his productions never need any intervention from me. “It’s great,” I tell him, though he’s already worrying about everything he thought was less than great.

  Jeannette Nelson, the head of Voice, follows me back upstairs to the office, wondering whether I’d been able to hear the actor who has come back to the theatre after three years on television. Jeannette is serene and sane even when actors are losing their heads, and helps them find vocal reserves they never knew they had. The actor was excellent, but I tell her I’ll check him out again when the show moves into the Lyttelton.

  Nick Starr is in his office with Lisa Burger, the finance director. I slump onto his sofa. “Howard’s show is terrific. Any ideas yet for O3?” I’m still worrying about the vacant third slot in the Olivier, but Nick and Lisa are onto next year’s budget, so we’re soon talking about O2 next year and O1 the year after that.

  “And what about the goods entrance? And the rubbish bins? Anything in the budget for that?” I ask, not for the first time.

  “It would cost millions,” says Lisa, “but one day we’ll do it.”

  And I believe her, because she knows where to find the money, and if she can’t find it, she and Nick know how to raise it. I tell them I want to see another preview of the new play in the Cottesloe before it opens on Wednesday. Most shows at the National have around six previews before they open officially to the press, and it is during previews, when everyone involved in a show can gauge how it connects with an audience, that much of the most valuable work is done. Scenes are cut or rewritten, performances are adjusted, sound and lighting improved. So Lisa, Nick and I go down to the canteen to grab something to eat with the actors, ushers, dressers and technicians. The neighbouring building is deserted: everyone has left work to play with their children, argue with their partners or watch TV. At the National, we’re fuelling up for the evening shows.

  The play in the Cottesloe has much improved, so I have a cheerful drink with its cast in the green room, where in defiance of puritan good sense there’s still a bar, though the days when the actors downed a few pints before going on stage are long gone. And although some of them are starting to fret about the last train home, none of us would swap our lives with the office workers’ next door.

  I can remember day after day like this, though maybe I’m merging many Mondays into one, as I kept no diary, and this book isn’t an exhaustive account of what happened when. But I spent twelve years as director of the National, thinking about what to put on its stages, about what made an evening in the theatre good and about what was good about the theatre. And I rarely thought alone. I talked, my colleagues talked back, they shaped my thoughts, and they allowed me to tell them their ideas were terrible knowing that ten minutes later I’d play back to them the same ideas as my own. If a lot of what follows is the result of grand larceny, I stole from the best, and the balancing act I will never be able to perform is the one that does justice to how much I enjoyed it.

  PART ONE

  Set-up

  1

  National Identity

  2001

  At university, I realised I couldn’t write and I couldn’t act. I could time a laugh, though not always appropriately. As a tyrannical general in The Queen and the Rebels, an intense play by Ugo Betti, I brought the house down, to the despair of the director. There were legions of mediocre writers and actors in Cambridge, eager to insert themselves into the student theatre scene by calling themselves directors.
That’s all you had to do: call yourself a director. Drama wasn’t on the curriculum, so the undergraduates had it to themselves, which may be why so many of them have thrived in the professional theatre. If you had the nerve, you pitched an idea to a committee of your fellow students, and you hustled them into giving you a show. The happy few were given a giant Meccano set.

  In the bar of the ADC Theatre, which was one of the many places you could put on a play, was a signed photo of Peter Hall, the first director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the director who led the National into its new building on the South Bank. “To the ADC—with thanks for giving me the opportunity to learn by my ghastly mistakes.” Nobody taught you to direct. If you wanted to learn, you had to keep a ruthless eye on yourself. Then, after three years, you tried to repeat the same trick all over again, this time with the professionals, and find yourself an apprenticeship. University graduates have arrived in London and infiltrated the theatre for more than four hundred years. The so-called University Wits of the 1590s included men of genuine talent, like Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and Christopher Marlowe. Among those who bypassed a university education were Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, so it doesn’t seem to have been a prerequisite. I was the fifth director of the National, and the fourth who went to Cambridge and read English. Olivier managed without.

  The University Wits muscled into a business that lived or died at the box office, and had a hard time surviving if it didn’t entertain. They sneered at the uncultivated excesses of the vulgar players, and hit the audience over the head with the range of their classical learning; but they still courted popular success with tales of the rise and fall of swaggering heroes, like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. These days, their successors are less learned than Marlowe, but like him we have to reach out to the multitude. The Elizabethan court provided patronage, but not much in the way of subsidy. The queen paid the actors when they performed at court, but the bulk of their income came from ticket sales on the South Bank. When the French and German courts got interested in the theatre, they gobbled it up whole, funded it lavishly, and used it as an instrument of princely prestige. French and German state theatres are still funded almost entirely by government. They are accountable to ministries of culture, and are ambitious, demanding and superbly scornful of popular taste. Our theatre still tries to juggle substance with pleasure. Like the Elizabethan players, who rubbed shoulders with the bear pits and the brothels, we are part of the Entertainment Industry.