Contents

About the Book

You start with a vision, and you deliver a compromise.
You want a play to be challenging, ambitious, nuanced and complicated. You also want it to sell tickets.
You want to make art, and you know you’re in show business.
These are some of the balancing acts that the National Theatre, and this book, is about.

This is the inside story of twelve years at the helm of Britain’s greatest theatre. It is a story of lunatic failures and spectacular successes such as The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors; of opening the doors of the National Theatre to a broader audience than ever before, and changing the public’s perception of what theatre is for.

It is about probing Shakespeare from every angle and reinventing the classics. About fostering new talent and directing some of the most celebrated actors of our times. Its cast includes the likes of Alan Bennett, Maggie Smith, Mike Leigh, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren.

Intimate, candid and insightful, Balancing Acts is a passionate exploration of the art and alchemy of making theatre.

About the Author

Nicholas Hytner was director of the National Theatre from 2003 to 2015, where he directed plays by – among many others – Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Alan Bennett and Richard Bean and produced more than two hundred different shows. He brought in a new community of artists, introduced National Theatre Live cinema broadcasts around the world, and established £10 ticket seasons which – by radically reducing ticket prices – filled the National with large new audiences. Before running the National, he worked widely in the West End and on Broadway; and in opera – in London, Paris, Munich and New York. His films include The Madness of King George, The History Boys, The Lady in the Van, and The Crucible with Daniel Day-Lewis.

The Bridge Theatre, the London home of the new company he has formed with Nick Starr, opens in 2017.

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’ 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 the 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’ 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, literature, 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. When Richard announced a three-year countdown to his departure in 1994, 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