I spent most of yesterday with Nick Hytner – in spirit most of the time, but in person for part of it. In the afternoon, I went to see his production of Much Ado About Nothing again – one I recently declared to be one of my five favourite shows of last year, so it was a pleasure to see again. Then, after the show, I conducted an onstage interview with Nick himself on the stage of the Olivier Theatre that had been arranged for the National’s priority members who had seen the production in the afternoon, too.
Immediately afterwards, I stayed backstage to do a face-to-face interview with Zoe Wanamaker (and discovered that she’d heard the interview with Nick on the theatre tannoy – including his declaration that she had sulked when she worried that she wasn’t going to do something that Simon Russell Beale does in the show; and Simon, in turn, popped into Zoe’s dressing room to say he’d heard it, too!). Then I crossed the river to see The History Boys again – my fourth time, but my first with Des Barrit (I’d previously seen Richard Griffiths and the original cast on its opening at the National in 2004, then again on Broadway, then last year when Stephen Moore led the cast of the West End transfer to Wyndham’s).
Phew! So much for my New Year’s resolution to slow down…but re-visiting these wonderful productions is an extraordinary testament to both how Hytner has personally galvanised the National, but was also to be part of two packed houses that were finding fresh delight in work I already knew well.
It’s also an interesting fact that weekday matinees in the theatre have acquired a fresh popularity. At the National, with its loyal, older audience – of whom Priority members, of course, are a core part – matinees have ever been thus, but when I recently interviewed David Haig during the run of The Country Wife at the Haymarket, he told me how he’d noticed a sea-change in the West End, too. “When I was first in the West End you could not rely on the matinees to be full,” he told me, “but nowadays you can rely on the matinees to be full and not the evenings. I think it is to do with a generation of the public who used to go in the evenings, but who are now older and more comfortable going to a matinee.” There is also something uniquely reassuring to feel the warm glow of appreciation that comes from an audience who have invested in going to the theatre all of their lives. I only hope that my own generation will be there to take over from them when they move on.
Talking to Hytner onstage after the performance, he was his usual affable, focused self – and particularly galvanised when responding to a question that often plagues the older generation of theatregoers, namely the audibility of the actors. The person who asked the question – sitting fairly close to the stage, it has to be said – congratulated Nick on the audibility of this cast, but pointed out this wasn’t always the case, and wondered what is done to encourage it to be so. Of course, it is often as much about listening as it is about hearing – and with actors of the calibre and experience of the cast of Much Ado, they make the audience listen effortlessly. Miking, as I pointed out sometimes happened during Trevor Nunn’s regime there (and Nick replied also takes place in War Horse and did in His Dark Materials, because of the underscoring), isn’t always the answer, either; the actors come to rely on it and don’t push as hard. But though Nick was too tactful to say so to this particular audience, I have heard him say before that it’s a perennial problem – as we get older, we get deafer, but don’t want to accept it!
I also couldn’t resist asking Nick (and the audience) if the surprise that the production contains was still a surprise, after most of my colleagues revealed it in their reviews, as I previously blogged here. In fact, Nick said, he wasn’t so much surprised that they gave it away as that I hadn’t – he expected the critics to do so. But he also pointed out that even if audiences had read that, they were likely to have forgotten it by the time they saw the show – unless their friends had told them about it as well. Reviews usually lingered longer, he said, in the memories of those they were written about than to those who read them!
But not Zoe Wanamaker, who reminded me backstage that she doesn’t actually read them herself. I’ve known her professionally all my London theatregoing life, ever since I first saw her with the RSC in Once in a Lifetime in 1980; and I first interviewed her when Mrs Klein that she first did at the National transferred to the Apollo Theatre in 1988, which I remember most of all for her making and smoking roll-ups throughout it. (Some things never change; she was still smoking them yesterday, but blowing the smoke out of the window this time!) But over the last few years, I have come to know her socially a bit, too, as we have a mutual friend, a casting director in New York called Mark Simon who was once a producer and had transferred a Manhattan Theatre Club production of Loot that starred her to Broadway in 1986. We have all gone to the theatre together and I have been to collect him from her house when he’s in town. A few months ago, he was my guest for the opening of You Can’t Take It With You at Southwark Playhouse that starred Zoe’s husband Gawn Grainger, so we hung out together again.
Work and pleasure, I always tell people, are often the same thing for me; but never more so than on a job like this! And then going to see The History Boys again, felt like re-visiting an old friend, too. Can life – or the theatre — get any better? It was a great end to a great day.
How gratifyng it is to read someone as passionate about the theatre as I am.The warm glow that Mark gives out with his daily blogs, and this one in particular,make it such a pleasure to read him.
I did in fact see the divine Zoe Wanamaker in LOOT in New York and am a great admirer of hers whether in comedy or tragedy.She's like that other great actress of ours,Penelope Wilton(why isn't she a dame?),who is consumate in both.
On a more personal level, I have a tenuous connection to Ms W in that,way back in 1948,I appeared with her husband,Gawn Grainger,as elves in WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS at the Comedy Theatre.Before she was born!!!
So how was Des Barrit? I loved Stephen Moore as Hector, having gone into the theatre thinking he would be hard-pushed to equal Richard Griffiths in the part. Same for the adorable young chap who replaced Samuel Barnett in the 2006 tour - forgotten his name, however. He may have been a Stephen something as well.
Good to see unreserved praise for Hytner's achievement at the National. Comparisons are odorous but he has achieved outstanding productions of his own and an overall programming in all three spaces that is probably better than his two predecessors Eyre and Nunn, good though they were. We're lucky to have him in charge.