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Nicholas Hytner photographed in Borough, south-east London
‘If we have good stuff, people will come’: Nicholas Hytner photographed in Borough, south-east London, home to the new Bridge theatre. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
‘If we have good stuff, people will come’: Nicholas Hytner photographed in Borough, south-east London, home to the new Bridge theatre. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

Nicholas Hytner: ‘I’ve always thought of theatre as a cure for loneliness’

This article is more than 6 years old
The former National Theatre director talks about his new memoir and the launch of his latest venture, the Bridge – the capital’s first commercial theatre in 80 years

Nicholas Hytner makes several appearances in the diaries of Richard Eyre, one of his predecessors as director of the National Theatre. The most arresting of them, however, is definitely the first. “He has,” writes Eyre, after the pair meet for lunch in 1987, “a face like mime – Barrault from Les Enfants du Paradis – oval face, arching eyebrows, animated, almost over-animated. Flights of ideas and gossip, riffs of enthusiasm, indignation, then repose; latent violence, subverted by a childlike smile.” Eyre goes on to praise Hytner’s talent and appetite for work, but it’s those two words, “latent violence”, that linger in the mind. Picturing a dagger poking through an arras, you wonder what on earth he could have meant.

In his office by Borough market – the nerve centre of his new theatre, the Bridge, which will open in October – Hytner looks amused. “I dunno,” he says, when I ask what Eyre was getting at. “It’s always alarming to know what perceptive people have seen in you. The wonderful thing about a comment like that is that I may be so latently violent I don’t even know it about myself.” Still, it’s possible that on this occasion, the beady Eyre was mistaken. “I think Alan [Bennett, his friend and collaborator] would say that one of my faults is that I side-step conflict. I can be stubborn and strong-willed, but sometimes I will just duck out and put up a wall rather than have the row.” He shakes his head. “I really don’t like a row.”

This is certainly the impression he gives in his own memoir, out this week, a book whose very title, Balancing Acts, suggests a nimble equanimity. Even when Harold Pinter abuses him loudly in a restaurant – “You’re a fucking liar, and you’re a fucking shit!” – Hytner takes it in his stride, meekly offering the playwright an apology (he had failed to revive Pinter’s short play, Celebration). But this is not to suggest that it is totally in thrall to the actors and directors who throng its pages. Hytner, it’s true, isn’t willing to dish as Eyre did – and nor, in any case, did he keep a diary during the years (2003 to 2015) that he was running the NT. Nevertheless, the book is what you might describe as a safe space for those who maintain, as I do, a deep-seated fear of theatrical memoirs (“Darling Ken was so marvellous in Henry V!” etc).

For one thing, there is his modesty. Never reluctant to call out a flop – in the old days, he will tell me, a favourite backstage game at the NT was: “What are the 10 worst productions we’ve ever done?” – Hytner is as likely to claim that he always knew this or that play was destined to be a hit as he is to put on a farce by Ray Cooney. (After seeing a preview of the international juggernaut that was War Horse, for instance, he deemed it: “Too long. Too slow. Not clear. Indulgent, long, pretentious…”)

War Horse at the National Theatre.

For another, there is his willingness, when necessary, to send up the theatre. Even he is embarrassed by it, sometimes. “I started to sweat, hoping it would end soon,” he writes of Benedict Cumberbatch’s audition for Frankenstein, a 25-minute fiesta of grunting, mewling and twitching. By Hytner’s telling, it was often left to him to think about fun at the NT, some of his more earnest colleagues being rather neglectful of the idea of entertainment. Pondering his first season, he looks at the list of productions, a “repertoire that might have come straight from the Granville-Barker playbook”, and worries that it all seems too worthy: “An evil spirit whispered in my ear: boooring.”

Balancing Acts reminds the reader, almost inadvertently, of the astonishing success the National Theatre enjoyed during the period he ran it. Hytner transformed its box office, previously feeble, through the introduction of the Travelex season with its £10 tickets; he oversaw the staging of hit after hit, productions such as War Horse that made tons of money for the theatre when they transferred to the West End and beyond; and he oversaw an £80m redevelopment of its Grade II* listed building, a project that saw the Cottesloe, its smallest auditorium, reopen, bigger and better, as the Dorfman. What makes this all the more amazing is that the job did not (as it seems to have done to others) drive him mad or make him depressed – though we must add one proviso to this, which is that the theatre’s dustbins, in his eyes located in entirely the wrong place, did become something of an obsession.

Again, he laughs. “All roads led to those bins,” he says. “In the end, sorting them out had to be part of an £80m project. Of course, that could very easily have got to me if I’d had to work it all out for myself. But I didn’t. That was up to Nick [Starr, then the NT’s executive director, now Hytner’s partner at the Bridge theatre] and Lisa [Burger, then its chief operating officer]. I think Peter Hall [another of his predecessors] and Richard Eyre both did a lot of worrying. Peter fought a lot of battles so that his successors didn’t have to. He was this great buccaneer. But no, my book is not about my dark nights of the soul, probably because I’ve always found directing theatre to be the easiest part of my life.”

Wasn’t it lonely sometimes? “I’ve always thought of theatre as a cure for loneliness. For me, it’s therapy. I’ve always been rather timid about facing… [emotional] turmoil head-on. A rehearsal room isn’t cosy by any means. But ultimately, it’s not dangerous the way ongoing friendships and relationships are.”

In extremis, he would plonk himself on the casting department’s sofa and “shove” any problems he might have been having with a particular actor on to them. “And there was always somebody around: Simon Russell Beale would usually be flopped somewhere with some huge volume about Palestrina, or something.” (Beale is a former chorister with a passion for classical music.) Didn’t he ever lose his rag? “Yes, once or twice, and I always regretted it.” He came to recognise the look in the eyes of the theatre’s permanent staff – the lighting and sound teams – when they knew a show was not working. But unless he was directing the production, there was nothing to be done. It was up to the director to fix it. “Most of the time, you can only say to the people who know it can be better, that yes, it can – though, of course, sometimes it can’t.”

He is absolutely sure, now, that he left at the right time. Still, it took a while to get used to the feeling that the NT was no longer his responsibility. “There was one show I went to [after I left] where I was aware pretty quickly that the audience was bemused,” he says. “I rather liked it, but as the audience distanced itself, I felt a trickle of sweat go down the back of my neck.”

James Corden in One Man Two Guvnors at the National Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

He remembers all too well the first NT production he saw that had nothing to do with him: “Yes, because Dr Freud might have had something to say about it.” Soon after the noisy opening of Lyndsey Turner’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the sound of Angela Hewitt playing Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring on the piano could faintly be heard. “What an odd choice for Lyndsey to have made, I thought. But then people started looking round and I realised I must have pocket-dialled my iTunes. I remember thinking: unconsciously, I have deliberately disrupted this show.” Him, of all people. Why on earth hadn’t he just turned the phone off? “Honestly,” he protests. “I had muted it. I didn’t know that wouldn’t affect iTunes.”

His book isn’t gossipy, but it is revealing. What we, the audience, take for magic, is often only technical expertise, and relatively small changes – sometimes, a single, subtle adjustment – can turn a play that has no spark at all into one that sets the theatre ablaze.

A few days before Richard Bean’s hugely successful farce One Man, Two Guvnors opened in 2011, for instance, the theatre invited 50 schoolchildren to watch a run-through. They didn’t take to it – something to do, Hytner thought, with the performance of its star, James Corden, which was too smart-alecky by far. “Those kids recognised him from the telly, and he played off that, which meant they failed to get something essential about the show, which was that they were supposed to be watching a simpleton in a seaside postcard Arcadia.” A couple of days later, another 50 children arrived, and this time Corden staked out his territory, hapless and bewildered, from the start: “A few high-definition bold gestures, and everything was fine.”

Nevertheless, it’s all but impossible to guarantee something will be a hit, especially a comedy. “If you could, you’d do it every time. Sometimes, a play is just not the story the audience wants to be told. With The History Boys [by Alan Bennett] there was this weird feeling five minutes into the first performance that it absolutely was. But on other occasions, a play just sits there, inert, and you can’t do a thing.”

Hytner is a neat, compact, contagiously enthusiastic figure: slickly warm, a good talker, slightly guarded, definitely circumspect, but also adorable, somehow. He does not remotely look his age, which is 60. Excessively private people are often that way for rather pompous reasons, but his reticence suggests only a certain vulnerability. He grew up in Manchester, the oldest of four. His father was a QC, and the family was prosperous, though when he attended Manchester grammar school it was grant-maintained: the council paid his fees.

He went to Cambridge, where he did some acting and directing, and afterwards worked as an assistant at the English National Opera. Later, after moving into theatre, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh – down the impresario swooped, cawing excitedly having seen Hytner’s production of Handel’s Xerxes – to direct the musical Miss Saigon, a gig that meant (he was on a percentage) he would no longer have to worry about money in future. It is a mark of his personality – work, for him, is indivisible from life – that in the years since (it opened in 1989) he seems hardly to have stopped; and yet he has taken relatively few missteps in his career, perhaps because – and this is further evidence of his sanity – he has such a clear idea of what he is good at (theatre, opera, the occasional low-budget film), and what he is not (Hollywood, mainly).

Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour in The History Boys at the National Theatre. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

What would his young self have made of this career? “Oh, I was miserable [then]…” he says, answering a question I haven’t quite asked. “I enjoyed school. I was quite a bookworm, and I loved music and theatre. But Manchester in the 70s was, bluntly, a miserable place, a shadow of what it is now. And I was really unhappy about being… you know…” Looking a bit agonised, he takes a breath. “There were one or two courageous boys who were wonderfully effeminate, and just got on with it, and looking back I think: what backbone they had.”

Not so long ago, he returned to his school for the first time in ages and was shown around by a sixth former with whom the staff had decided he would get on. “He told me he was in the dramatic society. ‘And of course I’m gay, too,’ he said. He started telling me what clubs he went to, and I was so moved by it. I thought: how much easier life would have been [if things had been different in my day]. But maybe I would not have ended up in the theatre if I’d been able to go down Canal Street when I was 16.” So when did he come out? “Oh, it took for ever.” He flaps a hand. At university? “Not really. I had a fling, and then… it was the 70s and 80s, and then I got confused.” What a shame, I say. “I know,” he replies. “I look at my teens and 20s and think, what a waste.”

He would not, he thinks, have wanted to write a memoir had he and Starr not been planning their new company; it would have felt too valedictory. As it is, the book is exceedingly well timed – what an operator he is – launching just as the Bridge announces its first season. (It will include Young Marx, a new comedy by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, starring Rory Kinnear, and a production of Julius Caesar with Ben Whishaw as Brutus, both of which Hytner will direct.) The 900-seat auditorium, close to Tower Bridge, is both the first new commercial theatre of any scale to be built in London since the 30s, and the first outside the West End. In other words, it must combine its considerable artistic ambitions – the emphasis is on new writing – with the need to put bums on seats.

But then, as both he and Starr will tell you, their optimism so tangible you can almost warm your hands on it, over the past 15 years attendances at London theatres have risen by 25%. “This dice we are rolling is very much on the basis that there is plenty of room for more theatre,” says Hytner, emphatically. Is he excited? “Yes, very.” Is he nervous? “How could you not be? But if we have good stuff, people will come.”

Balancing Acts by Nicholas Hytner is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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