Long before Nicholas Hytner’s present position as artistic director of the National Theatre, he directed a play by Joshua Sobol there called Ghetto in 1989, inspired by the true story of a theatre that operated in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. But though that kind of theatre had a vibrant part to play in the life of its community, as the play showed, Nick has – since he took the National over five years ago – been determined to keep his particular theatre from becoming part of the ghetto of London theatres that appeal only to an inner circle of people whose “business and chief passion is the theatre”, as he said yesterday at an informal press lunch to mark the National Theatre’s publication of its annual report for 2006-7.
I remember him once dismissing what he called the “court” theatres, like the Donmar and Almeida, that almost inevitably only play to a particular coterie of London theatregoers – those who get organised enough to actually buy tickets to go to them. And yesterday he rose to this theme of wider accessibility both in his published introduction to the report and in person. [click below to continue reading]
One of the National Theatre’s functions, he pointed out, is to be “the most public, the most visible and the most welcoming face of the subsidised theatre.” As a company, they regularly play to over a million people a year – in the last financial year covered by the report, the 24 productions seen on the South Bank played to 85% capacity overall, or 722,000 paid attendance, with a further 132,000 people seeing the National’s tours of The History Boys, The Seafarer and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, plus an extremely profitable West End season for The History Boys (three quarters of the investment of which was provided by the National themselves, with the remaining 25% provided by National Angels, a group of National Theatre benefactors) taking the total who saw National Theatre productions to 1.1 million.
Achieving these large numbers was, he wrote in the report, “an exhilarating necessity: necessary because we need to sell the tickets, exhilarating because we are obliged always to look beyond the theatre ghetto by engaging with the concerns and interests of a much wider public.”
He went on, “There is a temptation for all the performing arts to create an audience of initiates, to which it can play happily to the mutual satisfaction of those who play and those who feel part of the club. As its best, the club can be thrilling hospitable to experiment and the breaking of new ground. At its worst, it ossifies and talks only to itself. The National, by the very scale of its operation, needs to set not just a theatrical agenda but to take part in a much larger national cultural discourse, which on occasion echoes internationally.”
Away from the pages of the report, he went on that the National has to be a “big meeting point between the wider audience and that which is culturally plugged in”. And commenting more generally on what a great time it seems to be for the theatre overall, from the “outstanding generation of playwrights” we have (with the National, he revealed yesterday, recently securing a new play from Michael Frayn, whom he thought had retired) to a “new generation of writers and directors” who “really want to work in the theatre”, and find that there’s “greater potential for satisfaction there than in any other medium”. (He wasn’t so worried about new generations of actors, as he said there will always be those. Nor did he rise to the bait thrown down by one journalist to dismiss reality TV casting programmes: “I was totally hooked on The Sound of Music one”, he admitted – but then admitted to “loving crap TV”. So watch this space, presumably, to see the National participating in one themselves….)
And on a day when several of the assembled critical throng were on their way that evening to BAC to see Punchdrunk’s new immersive installation event, The Masque of the Red Death, he used it to illustrate some of the new frontiers that were being reached with theatre of this sort: “I was so moved by the rigour and dedication and discipline and imagination of the group that put it together – I had a quiet kvell, as my people might say,” he reflected.
Myself, I thought that, however impressively put together, it is precisely the kind of thing that Nick referred to in his report when he spoke of theatre that created “an audience of initiates” – part art installation, part club night, part burlesque entertainment and part student theatre indulgence, it is a living testament to something that Nick said “can play happily to the mutual satisfaction of those who play and those who feel part of the club.” And what with the heavy cloaks and uncomfortable masks you are given to wear, I felt part of a very uncomfortable club: I came out a sweaty mess. The masks discriminate, too, against the wearers of glasses: it was impossible for my partner to wear them comfortably on the inside or outside of his mask, so he gave up trying to wear them at all – which may have been a good thing. The show may be full of atmosphere, but it doesn’t stand up to close inspection.
Talking of not withstanding close inspection, nor do the reviews of the Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker, who produced one of the most embarrassing howlers in memory when he wrote on Sunday of the Laurence Olivier celebratory performance at the National, and referring to the clips from Olivier’s Shakespearean film performances asked, “Would even Larry have been allowed to black up as Iago today?”
The surprise isn’t just that Walker made such an elementary error, but also that there was no one – no arts editor, no sub-editor – to spot it at the paper, either. There’s also an embarrassing degree of would-be familiarity with his subject: he refers to Olivier no less than eight times (in nine paragraphs) simply as Larry. Did Timmy actually know Larry personally? We need to know!
