Curtain-Raiser His Directorial Talent Has Brought Re- Newed Lustre to the National; His Skills As Nicholas Hytner’S Theatrical Golden Age
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is running concurrently in London’s West Onward and Upward with the Arts End). “War Horse,” the international blockbuster, which began at the National, was also developed on Hytner’s watch. curtain-RAIsER His directorial talent has brought re- newed lustre to the National; his skills as Nicholas Hytner’s theatrical golden age. an impresario have also generated a robust balance sheet. (Last year, the theatre, bY john lahr which is open for business fifty-two weeks a year, took in an income of more than sev- enty million pounds, almost half of which came from box-office receipts.) Once upon a time, the National, which is spread over five acres, with three stages—the Olivier, the Lyttelton, and the Cottesloe—was considered “the home counties’ theatre”; now, thanks in part to National Theatre Live—a program that Hytner developed in 2009 to broadcast the National’s perfor- mances via satellite to cinemas around the world—the joke no longer applies. In 2011, the National’s productions were seen by more than a million and a half people in twenty-two countries and broadcast in venues as far-flung as Bulgaria and Tasma- nia. Helen Mirren, who starred in Hytner’s 2009 staging of Racine’s “Phèdre,” which was N.T. Live’s début, told me, “He will be remembered as overseeing an incredible golden era in British theatre.” n Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think Iabout its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding. (The National’s subsidy this year is more than seventeen million f you stand on London’s Waterloo unmatched in its nearly fifty-year history. pounds.) Laurence Olivier, a statue of Bridge, overlooking the Thames as it In his twenty-three-year association whom faces the current buildings, which carriesI the dust of the ages toward the sea, with the National, the past nine of them were designed by Denys Lasdun and you will find yourself in one of the most as artistic director, Hytner has been re- Peter Softley and opened for business in strategic spots in Great Britain. To the sponsible for staging some of the theatre’s the mid-seventies, was the first artistic di- east, behind the refulgent dome of St. most popular and memorable shows: rector. Hytner is the fifth. (The others Paul’s Cathedral, is the City, one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel”; were Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, and banking capitals of Europe; to the west the two-part adaptation of Philip Pull- Trevor Nunn.) Presiding over a vast range are the Houses of Parliament; to the man’s “His Dark Materials”; Martin Mc- of writing, performing, designing, musi- south, at the apex of this triangle of Brit- Donagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan”; cal, and directorial talent, Hytner is a kind ish power, is the Royal National Theatre, Alan Bennett’s “The Madness of George of commander-in-chief of British culture. where the worlds of spirit, money, and the Third” and “The History Boys”; and, “The job is about projecting confidence politics come together in play. These days, most recently, “One Man, Two Guvnors,” about the British theatre,” he told me. the Church is embattled, the City is in Richard Bean’s adaptation of Carlo Go ldo - Hytner was recruited for the National disrepute, and Parliament is floundering, ni’s 1743 commedia-dell’arte classic “The by Richard Eyre, whose attention he’d but the National, under the canny stew- Servant of Two Masters” (which opens at caught with productions at Manchester’s ardship of Nicholas Hytner, is on a roll New York’s Music Box on April 18th and Royal Exchange, the English National Opera, and the Royal Shakespeare Com- Hytner at the National Theatre, in London. Photograph by Gareth McConnell. pany. “He has a face like a mime—Barrault 32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2012 TNY—2012_04_23—PAGE 32—133SC.—livE ArT r22094—ExTrEmElY CriTiCAl PhoToGrAPh To bE watchEd ThrouGhouT ENTirE PrESS ruN—#2 page—new changes to title and deck at top of page from ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’—oval face, against older folk coming here and having arching eyebrows, animated, almost over- a good time,” he said, “but the age of the animated,” Eyre wrote in his diary in audience will come down when we reflect 1987, after the two first met for lunch. something other than the homogeneous “Flights of ideas and gossip, riffs of enthu- concerns of a white, middle-aged, middle- siasm, indignation, then repose; latent vi- class audience.” Hytner told me, “It was olence, subverted by a childlike smile. very callow . a ridiculous thing to say. He’s prodigiously talented, has a great fa- I’ve learned that there are scores of audi- cility for staging and a great appetite for ences.” Nonetheless, in his first season, de- work.” Two years later, Eyre brought termined “to charge less for a more de- Hytner into the fold as an associate direc- manding repertoire,” Hytner jump-started tor. When Eyre retired, in 1997, Hytner the slumping box office at the Olivier knew the workings of the organization Theatre—the National’s largest stage—by well, but he resisted Eyre’s pressure to selling two-thirds of the seats at ten apply for the job. “I wasn’t ready for it,” pounds and the rest at twenty-five. (Trav- Hytner told me last February, when we elex agreed to underwrite the scheme.) At met in his small fourth-floor office at the a stroke, the National opened its doors to National, overlooking a string of barges a whole new public. moored in the murky Thames. “I really Eyre had capitalized on American tal- didn’t see how to do it differently from the ent, mounting an early production of Tony way Richard had done it.” Kushner’s “Angels in America” and the Hytner had earned his fortune di- première of Wallace Shawn’s “The Desig- recting “Miss Saigon”—Claude-Michel nated Mourner,” as well as important reviv- Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s loose re- als of Tennessee Williams’s great plays. telling of “Madame Butterfly,” in which a Hytner made a counterintuitive shift away U.S. marine deserts a Vietnamese woman from the classic (and profitable) Broadway and their son during the fall of Saigon. musicals, which he felt “had all been done” (The show ran for a decade on both sides and were “in danger of defining this place.” of the Atlantic.) And he was able to in- (“Guys and Dolls,” “A Little Night Music,” dulge in the freelance director’s “life of “South Pacific,” and his own staging of glorious promiscuity,” as Eyre called it. “Carousel” had been huge hits.) Instead, he He made Hollywood movies, including débuted Richard Thomas and Stewart “The Crucible” (1996) and “The Object Lee’s campy and controversial 2003 musi- of My Affection” (1998), though he now cal “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” and threw claims to be proud only of his film adap- the stage doors open to a new, “scrappy, tation of Alan Bennett’s “The Madness of pugnacious, energetic, and ambitious” gen- George the Third” (1994). “I don’t in- eration of British playwrights, directors, stinctively think through the camera,” and performance groups. Since Hytner Hytner said. He flirted with opera, but, took over, more than thirty new writers despite some success, he felt that his work (Lee Hall, Mike Bartlett, Lucy Prebble, became too “timid” and was an “aesthetic Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh mistake.” He told me, “My premises were among them) have seen their works per- wrong. I tried to find the kind of circum- formed at the National. In his first season, stances where I could achieve in the re- he premièred Kwame Kwei-Armah’s hearsal room an illusion of spontaneity— “Elmina’s Kitchen,” a play about drugs and a form of spontaneity which is not useful crime in London’s West Indian commu- and not expressive to opera singers trying nity, which won its author the Evening to get on with the business of delivering Standard Award for Most Promising an opera.” By the time the National job Playwright. Hytner was “slightly sticking came up again, in 2001, Hytner had “been his fingers up to the demographic that ac- around the block,” as Eyre put it, and the tually comes to the National,” Kwei- artistic directorship of the National Armah, who has now had three plays pro- offered him a unique opportunity to be- duced at the National, told me. come his own producer: if he wanted to stage a show, he had only himself to ask. n a bright morning in February, Hytner’s big idea from the outset was Hytner sat down with Simon Rus- to democratize the National. At his first sellO Beale, one of the nation’s great Shake- press conference, he made, by his own ad- spearean actors, and the designer Tim mission, a rookie mistake. “I am not Hatley to discuss the 2013 season and THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2012 33 TNY—2012_04_23—PAGE 33—133SC. how he planned to approach “Timon of mations of apocalypse. There is some and her friend Carrie Pipperidge work. Athens”—the story of a wealthy Athenian sense that the whole thing can be brought The sumptuous sweetness of Richard who gives away all his money and is then crashing down.” Rodgers’s “Carousel Waltz,” playing softly, refused help by his former “friends.” Re- Hytner handed Russell Beale and underscored the frustration and constric- treating to the wilderness, Timon discov- Hatley his revised script of the play.