An extract from Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre by Sir Nicholas Hytner

The summer of 2011 looked particularly grim: Chekhov, Ibsen, Jacobean tragedy, the Ipswich serial killer. “No balance here,” I said to the planning meeting. I’d just done Hamlet, so nobody saw why it shouldn’t be my turn to deliver the laughs. I pretended to groan under the intolerable burden of giving people a good time. “It’s time James Corden came back to the theatre,” I said. “Does anybody have any ideas for him?”

During The History Boys, James showed me the scripts for a sitcom he’d written with his friend Ruth Jones, called Gavin and Stacey. It was quickly picked up by the BBC, adored by the viewers, and catapulted James onto the front pages as National Treasure. He went to a few parties, had a few drinks, said a couple of stupid things, and appeared in a bad movie. This was more than enough for the tabloids to turn on him. The Guardian devoted a page to a solemn analysis of “one of the steepest and quickest falls from grace in showbiz history.”

Sebastian Born, head of the Literary Department, suggested an eighteenth-century Venetian comedy by Carlo Goldoni, The Servant of Two Masters. I knew it well enough to feel my lip curling. I played the title role at school, dressed in the full chequered harlequin gear, in a production reverent of the conventions of commedia dell’arte, and insistent on the physical dexterity of the Harlequin. I managed no more than a couple of cautious somersaults, and I didn’t remember the play, or me, being very funny. Still, it was a classic of the Italian repertoire, which we’d not done before, and it had a theoretically funny title role, so I uncurled my lip.

As I read The Servant of Two Masters for the first time since school, I thought: the farcical mechanics of this play are good, the central part’s ok, the dialogue is lame, I’m not interested in recreating the world of commedia dell’arte, I don’t want to dress James as a Harlequin, but there must be some way of doing it that would play to James’ strengths. What, I wondered, was the English low-comedy equivalent of Italian low comedy? It could have a whiff of end-of-the-pier farce, and the Carry On films, and Ealing comedy. Goldoni has his two masters escape to Venice from Turin, because Venice has hotels where you can hide from the law and hole up for a dirty weekend. Maybe that’s Brighton, in the fifties or sixties. And it could have elements of the kind of variety show I used to see at the Manchester Palace Theatre in the sixties, with Ken Dodd, Arthur Askey, or Morecambe and Wise.

I often direct a play because I have a hunch I’ll discover it as I go along. This time, with my back against a wall, needing a comedy, I thought I had a big idea.

The idea itself wasn’t funny: it was just an idea. So I called Richard Bean, with the play, the idea, and James. He wasn’t at first wild about any of them, but he said he’d give it a go.

Then I called James. “I have this play, it’s an old Italian comedy.”

James interrupted: “Yes.”

“You don’t want me to tell you what it’s about?”

“I’m in,” said James.

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By now I had my shtick ready about the common roots of all the great European comic traditions, Plautus, music hall, Max Miller, slapstick, panto. None of it added up to funny. I can cast it, I thought; I can ask Mark Thompson to design an end-of-the-pier pastiche; but I can’t do the physical stuff, I can’t even turn a proper somersault. So I called Cal McCrystal, who made shows for Spymonkey, a company that traded in exactly the kind of controlled physical anarchy that I couldn’t create by myself.

In The Servant of Two Masters, Beatrice flees to Venice from Turin disguised as her brother Federigo, who has been killed by her lover Florindo. Beatrice’s servant, Truffaldino, loiters hungrily outside the inn where she’s staying, when Florindo arrives and offers him a job. Truffaldino accepts it, and spends the rest of the play trying to keep his two masters apart.

FLORINDO What’s this inn like?

TRUFFALDINO Very decent, sir. Comfortable beds, good mirrors, excellent food. The smell from the kitchen makes my heart lift.

FLORINDO And what do you do for a living, my good man?

TRUFFALDINO I’m a servant, sir.

Richard Bean’s first draft arrived not long after he reluctantly agreed to have a go. Rachel Crabbe flees to Brighton from London disguised as her psychotic twin brother Roscoe, who has been killed by her posh boyfriend Stanley Stubbers in a gangland brawl. Her minder, failed washboard player Francis Henshall, is hanging hungrily outside The Cricketer’s Arms, where she’s staying, when Stanley arrives with an enormous trunk.

STANLEY What’s this pub like?

FRANCIS Groundbreaking. It does food.

STANLEY A pub? That does food? Buzz-wam! Whoever thought of that? Wrap his nuts in bacon and send him to the nurse! What are the rooms like?

FRANCIS World class.

STANLEY Not that I care. I’m boarding school trained. I’m happy if I’ve got a bed, a chair, and no one pissing on my face.

I know how to do this kind of crazy, I thought. Find the right toff, put him in a rehearsal room with James, and make sure they don’t go over the top. Meanwhile, the toff offers Francis a second job, and he takes it:

FRANCIS (Aside) I’ve got two jobs, how did that happen? You got to concentrate ain’t ya, with two jobs. Kaw! I can do it, long as I don’t get confused. But I get confused easily. I don’t get confused that easily. Yes I do. I’m my own worst enemy. Stop being negative. I’m not being negative, I’m being realistic. I’ll screw it up. I always do. Who screws it up? You, you’re the role model for village idiots everywhere. Me?! You’re nothing without me. You’re the cock up! Don’t call me a cock up, you cock up!

(He slaps himself.)

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You slapped me!? Yeah I did. And I’m glad I did.

(He punches himself back.)

That hurt. Good. You started it.

(A fight breaks out, where he ends up on the floor, and going over tables.)

No problem here either. Cal McCrystal will show James how to pick a fight with himself and beat himself up.

Richard had given his version a title by the time rehearsals started: One Man, Two Guvnors. The next six weeks brought to mind what the Victorian actor Edmund Kean said on his death bed when somebody asked him how he was feeling: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” As you work your way through Hamlet you take endless pleasure in the discoveries you think you’re making about the human condition. As you work through a farce, a company of funny actors will be funny the first time they read through a funny scene. It’s less funny second time through, and third time it’s torture. A lot of the rehearsal process is a fevered attempt to rediscover what made it funny in the first place. The possibility that the audience won’t laugh looms larger and larger. If they don’t laugh, you can’t accuse them of failing to see the play’s higher purpose. If it’s only there to make them laugh, and they don’t, it’s a stinker.

“You’ve written too many words. It’s like Ibsen,” said Cal to Richard after the first read-through.

“Are you sure about him?” Richard asked me.

Cal is a precision engineer. He arranged James’ fight with himself with scrupulous exactitude. Richard likes anyone who knows what he’s doing, so relations improved.

Among Richard’s additions to Goldoni was a skeletal 87-year-old waiter with the shakes, who helps Francis serve soup at The Cricketer’s Arms in the big set-piece scene where he serves dinner to both guvnors simultaneously. The guvnors occupy private rooms on either side of the stage, neither of them aware of the other’s existence. Alfie the waiter delivers food to Francis, who delivers it to the guvnors.

“Can we imagine it’s at the top of the pub? Can you put a stairwell in the middle and can they all enter from below?” I asked Mark Thompson. “We can keep pushing the 87-year-old waiter downstairs. That’s funny.”

Cal spent hours working out with Tom Edden, the hilarious young actor playing cadaverous Alfie, how to fall backwards downstairs and bounce back like a rubber ball, while I negotiated with Oliver Chris, another hilarious young actor, who played posh Stanley Stubbers. Oli and I disagreed where the top was, so I thought he went over it a little too often.

“But we had fun, didn’t we?” I asked him over dinner, a couple of years later.

“Except when you told me I was guilty of literally the most disgraceful piece of acting you’d ever seen your life,” said Oli.

“Did I really say that?” I asked.

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“Yup,” said Oli, “and I didn’t do it again. Though it would have got a laugh.”

“But I get an enormous laugh by it, Mr Gilbert,” said George Grossmith, the original Koko in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado about some vulgar piece of business or other.

“So you would if you sat on a pork pie,” said Gilbert, and vetoed the business.

“Stop laughing! Nobody’s allowed to laugh anymore!” I cried one day at the loyal gang of understudies who sat in the corner of the rehearsal room, laughing indiscriminately. “I’m the arbiter of funny! I get to decide!”

“Reliance on actors’ laughter is the furthest reach of self-deceit,” wrote Moss Hart in his wonderful Broadway memoir, Act One. Somebody must draw the line, to balance tight control and loose spontaneity. Somebody has to throw out the rancid pork pies.

The composer Grant Olding put together a four-piece skiffle band, called it The Craze, and wrote a series of hit songs to hustle the show along. “Some of them could be funnier,” I said to Grant. “Let’s see what we can find online.” Lying in wait on YouTube were the novelty acts that peppered the variety shows and pantos of my childhood: xylophone players, idiots playing car horns, accordionists and steel drummers. We filched everything that caught our eye: daylight robbery sustains many directorial careers. Before long, everyone in the cast had a novelty act except Daniel Rigby, who played Alan Dangle, Roscoe’s girlfriend’s boyfriend. “Do you want a novelty act? What can you do? Could you open your shirt and do a percussion solo on your chest?” Danny is effortlessly funny. He played his chest like he was Buddy Rich.

A few days before we opened, we invited fifty schoolkids into the rehearsal room to watch a run- through. They were particularly partial to Jemima Rooper as Rachel aka Roscoe Crabbe, “that tiny, weird looking, vicious, short-arsed runt of a criminal.” They loved Susie Toase as Dolly, the woman of Francis’ dreams: “He’s like a big kid. I’ve always liked that in a man, immaturity.” They roared at Tom Edden as the antique Alfie. The laughs for Oli were dangerously enthusiastic, but he stayed the right side of the top and sat on no pies. And, of course, they enjoyed James, who played them like a master and was as physically nimble as a gymnast. But the show didn’t take off. “Maybe they’re confused by you,” I said to James. “They know who you are, they know how clever you are. Francis is an innocent, a simpleton.”

James was ahead of me. “I’m like a smart-arse stand-up. I can fix it.”

A couple of days later, another fifty kids arrived for another run-through. James staked out his territory from the start: hapless, bewildered, hungry, stupid. But not guileless: three hundred years on, he rediscovered the native cunning of the Harlequin, though the delirious schoolkids couldn’t have cared less about that.

The first preview was almost as heady as The History Boys, but everybody had to hold their nerve through the first five minutes. One of the director’s jobs is to let the audience know as quickly as possible what kind of show they’ve come to see. They got the hang of it as soon almost as the curtain went up: end-of-the-pier farce, Carry On film, low comedy. So why, they wondered, are we watching this old rubbish at the National Theatre? The ice started to thaw when Danny Rigby told them why he loved his girlfriend: “She is pure, innocent, unspoiled by education, like a new bucket.” And when James came on as Roscoe’s minder, stole a peanut, threw it in the air, and tumbled

4 backwards over an armchair to catch it in his mouth, they surrendered. It was the kind of old rubbish they secretly liked better than Ibsen. By the time James asked for volunteers to come up and help him carry Stanley’s trunk into The Cricketer’s Arms, he’d led them into a seaside-postcard Arcadia.

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