Balancing Acts Read online

  I served most of my apprenticeship in opera houses, so I learned early how to manage vast casts on huge stages. Then I directed everything from the Christmas panto to Elizabethan tragedy in repertory theatres in Exeter, Leeds and Manchester. Afterwards I bounced like a pinball from Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos to Alan Bennett’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows; from Miss Saigon, a musical with its heart on its sleeve at the enormous Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to Ben Jonson’s Jacobean satire, Volpone, at the intimate Almeida. “Hail the world’s soul, and mine!” cried Volpone, flinging open his chest of gold, while the tills rang at Drury Lane.

  Richard Eyre, successor to Laurence Olivier and Peter Hall, asked me to be an associate director of the National in 1988. My memory of our first meeting is coloured by the account of it in his evocative diaries: I was gossipy and opinionated, he was wry, generous and shrewd. I reminded him of Jean-Louis Barrault, which is the nicest thing anyone has ever written about me. But I always felt he saw me more clearly than I saw myself. He made space for me to become a better director, I watched him do the same for all the other associates, and only gradually realised that his manoeuvres were as much for the National’s benefit as for ours.

  Under his leadership, the repertoire was wide enough to celebrate the gap between art and show business even as it tried to close it. I directed new plays by Alan Bennett and Joshua Sobol, a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and The Recruiting Officer. In 1994, when Richard announced a three-year countdown to his departure, I couldn’t imagine taking the National in a different direction. He seemed to be running it as well as it was possible to run it; and, no more solipsistic than any other busy theatre director, I must have thought that as I was getting my shows onto the stage, there wasn’t much that needed putting right.

  So I didn’t apply to succeed Richard, and neither did any other of those thought eligible at the time. I’d just made a movie, The Madness of King George, so I got myself an American agent, and told myself how interested I was in American popular entertainment. This added up to an uncomfortable attempt to make American movies, though I shrank from the kind of scripts that would actually have provided popular entertainment, and soon found myself directing Shakespeare in New York.

  In a significant act of public service, Trevor Nunn stepped into the breach at the National Theatre. He was, and remains, a mighty figure in the British theatre. He needed the National far less than it needed him, and he was unlucky to start in 1997. During the 1990s, government-funded theatres were told to charge what the market could bear. Ticket prices rose, which meant theatres took fewer risks, which led to the mainstream audience losing its appetite for risk. At the National, Guys and Dolls, which at the time had seemed like a groundbreaking attempt to redefine a great musical in the same way that we redefined great plays, was followed by a large part of the canon of Broadway classics. They were all good productions, but there were too many of them, and they took up too much space in the repertoire. The new Labour government wasn’t ready yet to increase investment, so the National needed them to boost the box office; and in any event, Trevor loved them. But they fed the suspicion, never altogether fair, that the National was playing an unadventurous repertoire to a greying, conservative audience.

  Few theatres were able to programme large-scale new plays, so the young generation of playwrights was herded into a network of tiny black-box studio theatres. In rooms on top of pubs, there was an explosion of creative energy that played to an enthusiastic coterie devoted to New Writing, always capitalised as if to emphasise its special status. I was exhilarated by how much the new playwrights had to say, and by how they said it. But I started to wonder why they couldn’t work on a larger canvas, and whether new plays could be dragged back into the limelight, which is where they were in London in 1599 and at the Restoration, in Dublin and New York in the mid-twentieth century, in London again in 1956. Now, even at the Royal Court, for decades a magnet for playwrights, much of the most exciting stuff was happening in the tiny Theatre Upstairs, in front of no more than ninety people a night.

  Meanwhile, two small theatres had seized the initiative in the classical repertoire. Under the direction of Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid, the Almeida Theatre was mining a vein of rarely performed European classical plays, impeccably mounted and beautifully cast. At the Donmar Warehouse, Sam Mendes was producing revelatory re-evaluations of plays and musicals from the recent past, as well as the classics.

  Jonathan, Ian and Sam were all shrewd showmen. They attracted to their theatres actors who would once have headlined a long West End run, but who now gladly accepted a tiny weekly salary in exchange for a short engagement that didn’t interfere with their schedule of film and television work, which is how they made their livings. It was all upside for the audience that managed to get in. The cognoscenti who were savvy enough to book ahead were treated to a string of superb productions of fascinating repertoire. The downside was that actors and directors were increasingly reluctant to expose themselves in big theatres: they now preferred to work in miniature. And there seemed to be a real danger that the entire theatre, new and classical, was withdrawing from the larger public, and from the wider cultural conversation. Just as in the early 1600s the English court developed a taste for tiny indoor theatres that excluded the groundlings, so a new court was created in the small, uncomfortable auditoriums of the Donmar and the Almeida. The tickets themselves were not expensive, but the only way that you could be sure of getting hold of them was by writing a cheque and joining up as a supporter. The shows were terrific, the audience congratulated itself that it was there, and everybody in the charmed circle was happy.

  By 2000, after my dalliance with American show business, the charmed circle seemed like a wonderful place to be. Jonathan, Ian and Sam were old friends, and, still hopping from gig to gig, I was happy they wanted me to work with them. Jonathan and Ian sent me an intriguing new play by Nicholas Wright about a washed-up old actor who trained boy players in the London theatre of the 1630s. Cressida was doubly attractive because Jonathan and Ian had become restless with the exclusivity of the Almeida, and had taken a West End theatre, confident that their flamboyant programming and casting no longer needed the protective confines of their Islington home. Responsible for delivering their West End season was their executive director, Nick Starr, who was planning director at the National in the 1990s, when I was one of Richard Eyre’s associates. He already knew that he wanted one day to return to the National, and he knew, before I admitted to it myself, that I did too.

  Backstage plays are enchanting to those of us who make our lives in the theatre, though they usually play less well in London than they do in New York, perhaps because show business is a better reflection of the American experience than of our own. “You’re going out a youngster but you’ve got to come back a star,” says the director to the chorus girl in 42nd Street, which is an apt enough metaphor for the American Dream; over here, we back warily into the limelight, ambition shrouded in self-deprecating irony. We’re suspicious of the rampant individualism of A Star Is Born. But Cressida’s central role was written for Michael Gambon, so it was never going to be a problem to persuade the London audience that it was worth their time. And Nick Wright was less interested in coming back a star than in what happens when the new star throws out the old rules of engagement. In Cressida’s best scene, Michael Gambon teaches a fourteen-year-old boy how to play Shakespeare’s Cressida, the part he played himself thirty years ago, when Troilus and Cressida was new. The boy has his own ideas about how to act. He thinks that the old actors are artificial, and that he can do it more realistically. Gambon shows him why the old way of doing things, the strange old gestures that look like so much posturing, conceal a deeper truth. In many of the great stories about acting, the new generation stuns the audience by appearing not to act. The young actor says to the old actor, “I don’t believe you.” The old actor says, “I don’t understand you.”

  It was the first time I’
d worked with Michael Gambon. He’s a big man with long, exquisite fingers: an extraordinary combination of brute power and feline delicacy. He looks like he could chop down a forest in the morning, and weave lace in the afternoon. In fact, he restores seventeenth-century duelling pistols, which is only a step away from making lace. In Cressida, Michael Legge and Daniel Brocklebank, who played his pupils, were scarcely out of their teens. They pressed Gambon for everything he could tell them about acting. Like the kids in the National Theatre’s fiftieth-birthday show, they never took their eyes off the old pro. Gambon watched them from the wings and hung out with them in the pub after the show. “What do these beginners know that I don’t know?” is what he was thinking. Good actors never think they’re good enough.

  The actors in Cressida effortlessly reached the back of the 900-seat Albery Theatre. Michael Gambon has the voice and personality always to be in close-up however far you sit from him. In 1983 he gave a shattering performance in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, in the smallest of the National Theatre’s three auditoria, the 300-seat Cottesloe. I saw it again after it moved to the 1,200-seat Aldwych Theatre in the West End. The performance was still astounding, and the circumstances were preferable. The mid-century classics of the American stage were written for Broadway in its pomp, a great public arena, prey to the commercial imperatives of the box office, but for a brief golden age hospitable to dazzling balancing acts of ambitious popular theatre.

  It was on one of these that I had my eye for the Donmar. Orpheus Descending was not one of Tennessee Williams’s commercial hits, and it is not as perfectly achieved as The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire. Even so, it doesn’t need to be reined in and reduced in scale, but I thought it would be up Sam Mendes’s street, and I was flattered by his invitation. Sam was about twenty-three when I first met him, another University Wit, straight out of Cambridge. Even then, he was perfectly poised between confidence and humility. I was at a party with my friend and contemporary, the director Declan Donnellan. Declan, like me, had taken his time to build a career. Here was Sam, fresh from a production of The Cherry Orchard with Judi Dench in the West End. “We’ll all end up working for this fucker,” I said to Declan, after he’d mysteriously charmed us into submission. “Why don’t I want to kill him?” Twenty-five years later, I still don’t, even after his Oscar and billion-dollar James Bond. We often take in a show together like a couple of old matinee ladies, then gossip over dinner about who’s up and who’s down in the London theatre.

  Back in 2000, he was keen on Orpheus Descending. So, to my delight, was Helen Mirren, who had played the queen in The Madness of King George. Helen later had no problem playing Racine’s Phèdre to a crowd of 14,000 in the ancient theatre at Epidaurus. Now, in front of a mere 250, she played Lady Torrance, a shrivelled captive to her dying husband in a dry-goods store in a small town in the Deep South, whose inhabitants have sucked out whatever was left of her soul. Heat and light arrive from nowhere, like magic: Val Xavier wanders into the store looking for work, a wild boy wearing a snakeskin jacket and carrying a guitar. He electrifies Lady: they make love and she comes back to life.

  If you direct somebody else’s play, your job is to be useful to it. If you have nothing to say about it, if it means nothing to you, if you think that all you need to do is get out of its way, you end up draining the life out of it. But directors too determined to use a play as a vehicle for their own preoccupations can send it down a dead end where it locks its audience out. When you discover a personal stake in a play, you need to balance your connection to it with your need to connect it to its audience. The better the play, the easier that becomes: the connection you thought to be entirely personal is in fact universal. You sit in the theatre and realise that you’re not alone in your terror at the dry-goods store you think you’re making of your interior life. You feel the collective longing for the beautiful blues singer in the snakeskin jacket, you let him show you briefly a life on the wing, and you grieve together at his inevitable destruction.

  The only thing wrong with Orpheus Descending was that so few people saw it. The Donmar was packed, sold out before the show opened. To play it in front of 1,200 people would have taken actors with the vocal technique, charisma and imagination to project without looking as if they’re projecting, and Helen would barely have broken into a sweat. And although the show would have lost some of its intimacy, it would have gained the kind of intensity that comes from communality. As it becomes less exclusive, the theatre re-enters the cultural bloodstream. I no longer wanted to make theatre for the kind of people, like me, who were part of the club. It was frustrating that Orpheus Descending was for members only.

  So I was elated when Trevor Nunn suggested that I came back to the National in 2001. And not long after he asked me back, he announced that his tenure as director had only two years left to run. I started thinking about which plays I should do for Trevor, and at the same time, I finally started thinking about what I could do with the National Theatre. But although I could imagine choosing its repertoire and guiding it creatively, I knew enough about everything else to know that I needed an executive director to do the rest of the knowing for me.

  At which point, Nick Starr called, and we started a conversation about the theatre that has still not stopped. I told him about the kind of work I wanted to bring to the National’s stages. He told me that he wanted to reorganise how it was brought to them. At no point then or since did either of us feel that our spheres of activity were distinct. I’ve watched dysfunctional relationships between artistic and executive directors bring performing arts companies to their knees, but I trust Nick’s judgement on a new play as much as I trust it on the management of a building. Both of us are strong-willed and voluble. Our social lives don’t overlap very much. But professionally, it works better than most marriages, because neither of us is remotely protective of our patch. We welcome the other’s intrusion into it.

  Soon after starting to talk to Nick, I met with Christopher Hogg, the National Theatre’s chair. He was meeting with everyone who might be a candidate for the directorship, and everyone who might have an opinion on who the candidates should be. I warily put myself in the latter category. Chris Hogg wasn’t fooled. He took tiny notes of our meeting in a precise hand that matched the scrupulous courtesy of his manner.

  Trevor Nunn and I quickly decided that I should direct one new play and one by Shakespeare. The Winter’s Tale hadn’t been done at the National for a while, and I had a hunch that it was a different play to the one I’d generally seen. I turned out to be partially right, which is the best you can ever hope for with Shakespeare, and it laid the foundations for the way I approached Shakespeare through the next twelve years. Meanwhile, I wanted to find a big public play for the 900-seat Lyttelton Theatre that brought the energy of the 1990s black-box theatres onto the main stage: a declaration of intent. If there wasn’t a big audience at the National for the raw, sometimes violent, often exciting world of New Writing, I didn’t want to be its director.

  So I went into the National’s Literary Department and asked if there was anything new looking for a director. The literary manager, Jack Bradley, pulled from the shelf a play called Mother Clap’s Molly House by Mark Ravenhill. I’d never met Mark but I knew two of his previous plays, Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids: startling reports, frequently brutal, from the front line of 1990s consumerism. Shopping and Fucking started life at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, the Vatican of black boxes, strictly reserved for votaries of New Writing. It became an unlikely West End hit. The title must have helped, but the real reason for its popular success was that Mark’s voice reached beyond the coterie that gathered in the studio theatres, so he was exactly the kind of playwright that I wanted to see at the National. I wondered whether I’d be the right director for him: in photos he looked dour and forbidding, though there was a dark mischief, and a sexy underbelly, to his plays that made me wish I got out more.

  Mother Cl
ap’s Molly House more or less had me by the time I’d read the title. It was based on fact. In eighteenth-century London there were around forty molly houses, where men met to have sex with other men, wear women’s clothes, and call each other by women’s names. There was a gay scene stretching from Covent Garden to Moorfields, where you cruised on a path known as Sodomites’ Walk. One of the molly-house owners was called Margaret Clap. She and several of her customers were had up for keeping a sodomitical house. “I went to the Prisoner’s house,” said one Samuel Stevens, in evidence. “I found between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call’d it. Sometimes they would sit on one another’s Laps, kissing in a lewd Manner and using their Hands indecently.” Mother Clap was pilloried and jailed; three of the mollies were hanged for sodomy.