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INSIDE THE FORTRESS OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE

Once, the National Theatre just put on plays—laced with strife. These days, it’s bigger, busier and happier. Robert Butler spends a month there to paint a composite portrait of a vibrant institution ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008

One Sunday in September you could stroll along the Thames from the London Eye, past street entertainers pretending to be statues and queues for organic slow-cooked pork, secondhand-book browsers and skateboarders doing fliptricks, until you reached the National Theatre and a statue of Laurence Olivier.

When the National opened here in 1976, in an area badly hit by the Blitz, you would have had to stop at this point—at a wharf and a warehouse used by the Daily Mail. Now you can continue east to Shakespeare’s Globe, Tate Modern and the steely curves of Norman Foster’s City Hall. There have been many changes at the National over 32 years, but the biggest has been in the location. The stretch of riverbank that runs from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge, taking in the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the British Film Institute and the Hayward Gallery, now has an annual footfall of 19m people. That makes it London’s high street for the arts and the National one of its flagship stores.

The quaint statue of Olivier as Hamlet, unveiled for his centennial last year, stares grandly at the hilt of his outstretched sword. If he were to lower his gaze on this particular afternoon, he would see a crowd sunbathing on deckchairs surrounded by buggies, scooters, sandwiches, bottled water and Sunday papers, on an Astroturf  lawn, by a giant three-piece suite, also covered in Astroturf. A tent showing “Le Grand Peep Show” features two mime artists in black bodysuits performing courtship rituals to rinky-dinky music.

Into this almost seaside atmosphere step two men, both 50-ish, in untucked shirts, jeans and trainers, beaming proprietorially. The slighter, wirier one is the latest of Olivier’s successors, Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National; the dark-haired one is Nick Starr, the executive director (both pictured). The place is open on a Sunday for the first time ever, after years of negotiation with the unions.

The National has been called a castle, a cathedral, a temple of art, a palace of culture and a nuclear-power station (Prince Charles’s verdict). A new epithet surfaced this morning in one of the papers lying on the fake grass. Hytner had written an article to mark the Sunday opening. “I sometimes regret that we are no longer at each other’s throats as we were during the furious theatrical battles of the 1950s and 1960s,” he wrote. “If the ideological fury...is missing, what has replaced it is the vitality of the carnival.”

To recapture the flavour of those early days at the National, you have only to walk a few yards to the theatre bookshop and dig out the diaries of Olivier’s immediate successor, Peter Hall. Under “National Theatre” in the index, you’ll find heart-sinking entries for “delays and building problems”, “financial problems”, “press attacks” and even “strikes”. In those embattled years actors had to cross picket lines; Hall stood on a table at a press conference to attack the government and threaten to close a theatre; and one of his directors, Michael Bogdanov, faced a private prosecution and possible imprisonment under the Sexual Offences Act for a scene in Howard Brenton’s “Romans in Britain”.

Puritans have had a unique relationship with British theatres. In the 1600s they closed them down; in the 1960s and 1970s they designed and ran them. Hytner has called the National Theatre’s architect Denys Lasdun “a puritan maniac or a maniacal puritan”. He means it admiringly. When the National was planned, in the 1960s, Lasdun had never designed a theatre, but he wowed the selection panel with the remark that “the essence of designing a theatre is a spiritual one.” His modernist vision involved stacking concrete horizontals like geological strata around two central towers. The earnest mood of the time can be sensed in the gritty stencilled NT logo (which survives, just) and the democratic way every actor’s name was listed on the poster in alphabetical order (which doesn’t survive). The National was a place, Alan Bennett has remarked, where everything was done with capital letters: “Art. Theatre. It’s never just a play.”

That’s the biggest change Olivier would notice: the mood is informal and lower-case. In the afternoon sunshine, the two Nicks chat to a man in a stripy shirt and loud sunglasses who runs Watch This Space, a programme of 200-plus outdoor events. Last year the 26 productions in the National’s three main theatres were seen by more than 900,000 people; 170,000 of those were paying just £10 ($15) under the Travelex scheme (the National takes around £15m at the box office, and receives an Arts Council subsidy of £18m). There were 300 music events in the foyer, 80 platform talks, 80 events on the Deck, a corporate-entertainment venue on one of the terraces, plus midnight performances, a late-night green room with resident DJs, 15 exhibitions, and backstage tours taken by 20,000 people. Add to that three bookshops, a restaurant, four cafés and seven bars. The mood is caught every night by the LED lights that transform the concrete exterior into a winning display of orange, purple, blue and green.

Many of the activities have been going on in some form for years, but only now, as they reach a critical mass, are they changing the National’s idea of itself. What none of those enjoying the sunshine could know is that the two Nicks plan to take the carnival spirit, or as they call it “the big hello”, to a new and surprising level: one that will change the building, the neighbourhood, and the entire reach of the work they do.

As a warning, it’s a perfect tease: “The techniques featured in this film are highly dangerous and should not be attempted at home, at school, or by any untrained person.” The words flash up on the National’s website, before a clip from the armoury department which shows (should the occasion arise) how to use compressed propane to simulate a plane crash in 1940s north Africa. It’s this explosion that nearly kills Harold Macmillan (Jeremy Irons) in Howard Brenton’s “Never So Good”, recently staged in the Lyttelton. The armourers also offer tips about swords and firearms: “a nitro-powdered blank gives us a nice bang and a big muzzle flash.”

One click of the mouse from armoury, and you can land on scenic construction, the paint-frame, wardrobe, dye, music, props, lighting, carpentry, scripts, casting and box office. This is a new website, “Discover” (it used to be called “Education”), which takes internet users into areas of the National that would normally require a swipe card. “Something we’ve been slow to pick up on”, Hytner tells me, “is there’s a tremendous thirst for knowledge about the theatre, from all age groups, not just schoolchildren.”

There was a time when theatre, like the royal family, retained its mystique by not letting in daylight. If you want theatre and education, the argument went, go and see a play. Now the National is turning the spotlight on the people who never even appear on stage. One of its strengths is that it didn’t outsource any of its activities during the 1980s and 1990s, unlike the BBC under John Birt. The National’s present chairman, Hayden Phillips, has compared the building to a medieval town. If it doesn’t employ a butcher or baker, it can certainly muster a wig-maker, painter, carpenter, hairdresser, tailor, electrician, accountant, armourer, caterer and, yes, candlestick-maker. When the fire alarm goes off (as it did during rehearsals of “His Dark Materials” in 2003), about a thousand people gather outside the stage door by the Thames: 150 actors and 850 permanent staff. An incident officer in a yellow jacket organises everyone into groups. It looks like a sports tournament: the security guards wear black, the caterers wear white, the cleaners wear blue shirts with red collars, and the actors wear jeans.

Anyone who spends time backstage will be struck by the incongruities. The wig department is like a cheery hairdresser’s, with women chatting, listening to the radio, and combing hair; only the hair sits on faceless mannequins. A man in a dark suit and dog collar appears in the dye department and it’s hard to tell if he’s an actor or the theatre chaplain. A table-tennis table in the dock area might be a prop or it might be there for stage hands to relax (the latter, it turns out). In the miles of windowless corridors you might pass a New York gangster, French courtesan or Victorian gentleman, or hear fierce arguments from inside the dressing-rooms and not know if actors are rehearsing lines.

On this five-acre site, it can take ten minutes to get from your office to the exit. In the basement, the humming of the boilers sounds like the engine room of an oil tanker. At the top, there’s a staircase leading beyond the fifth floor to the roof (access is “absolutely prohibited”) from where you can see Battersea Power Station, Crystal Palace, Blackheath and beyond. What the “Discover” website can’t capture is the range of smells that identify parts of the building: from the bleach, sweat, woodshavings, paint, polish, petrol and hairspray to welders, photocopiers, washing machines and kitchen ovens. The website deals with each of the departments as separate entities, but the building is most itself during one of the big productions—a “South Pacific” or “His Dark Materials” or “War Horse”—when all the departments join together. The human and physical resources available here, especially the drum revolve, are so impressive that it’s impossible to transfer some of their biggest hits to anywhere else. 

“Folks, can we stand by please?” said the stage manager, “Tom and Marianne, are we running on?” It was the middle of the technical rehearsal for “War Horse” and actors in army uniforms, helmets and rifles mingled onstage with stage crew in T-shirts with headphones and walkie-talkies. Beyond, in the Olivier auditorium, a dozen tables had been erected over the purple flip-up seats. The tables were laden with computers, printers, keyboards, headphones, mobiles and anglepoise lights to accommodate the high-tech demands of the design, music, sound, video, lighting, choreography and puppetry departments. The dressers sat on the side with people from wigs, costumes and make-up. The two directors of “War Horse”, Tom Morris and Marianne Elliott, sat in the aisle seats.

Morris had been on stage with a microphone and black notebook giving out notes. “Let’s try and shoot Friedrich about here—can we mark that place please?” “Can someone have a look at the flooring and make it more secure?” “Joey, you went a bit early there.” Joey is the central character of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel, which follows a young horse’s journey from a Devon village in 1912 to the Western Front. The star of the production of “War Horse” is a lifesize puppet made of cane and gauze. During breaks in the technical rehearsals, three stools are brought on, two for the puppeteers inside Joey, who carry the frame of the horse on their shoulders like rucksacks, and one for Joey’s head. “Once more,” Morris said, resuming his seat, “without running on.”

In the next moment Joey would confront the two inventions that effectively put an end to the use of horses in modern warfare. He rears at an armoured tank, gallops across no-man’s-land, and gets embroiled in barbed wire. “This is the clash between industrialisation and the raw animal,” the sound designer explained, as he fine-tuned the rockets which, unnervingly, he sometimes cut off before they had time to explode. Next to him, the composer typed in some harsh new chords to join the trumpets, drums, cymbals and rattle that accompany the entrance of the tank. “Listen everyone,” said Morris, introducing a further change, “we’re going to have two bangs before the barbed wire goes up.”

This intricate blend of puppets, video and choreography in “War Horse” reflects a wider phenomenon. Companies once regarded as fringe or experimental (Kneehigh, Punchdrunk, the “War Horse” puppeteers Handspring) are now doing successful mainstream work at the National. At the same time, the idea of what constitutes a play has been pushed to its limits. In Katie Mitchell’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”, also playing in September at the Cottesloe, audiences saw actors put together scenes for cameras that we simultaneously watched as a movie. People found this either dazzlingly original or rather arid. (“Interesting concept,” said an audience member, filing out, “for ten minutes.”) Later in September, Juliette Binoche would appear with the dancer Akram Khan in a disastrously narcissistic piece called “in-i”. Some feel that the eye-catching allure of physical theatre and multimedia productions amounts to a threat to the text, even the death of the text.

If there’s an ideological crack here, it could be glimpsed the next week at the first night of “War Horse”. Michael Morpurgo, wearing a red suit, sat on one side of the aisle, opposite two of the National’s veteran playwrights: Howard Brenton and David Hare. In the mid-1980s Brenton and Hare wrote “Pravda”, a satire on the newspaper industry, which was one of the Olivier’s biggest hits. Hare had his first success at the National, “Plenty”, 30 years ago. He was now in rehearsals at the National for “Gethsemane”, his 14th play there, a satire about lobbying and political donations. Hare’s passion for rhetoric runs so deep that he claims to be one of the few people who look forward to the groom’s speech at weddings. Here he was watching a three-hour play where the main character is a puppet that doesn’t speak a line of dialogue.

Hare watched blank-faced for a while, his chin jutting forward, and then he yawned, and ran one hand through his hair, and then he shifted in his seat, and looked at the roof, and then he ran two hands through his hair, and looked at his watch, and so it went on. At one moment, when Joey narrowly escaped death, Hare caught Brenton’s eye and they exchanged a conspiratorial grin. At the end, Morpurgo and quite a few others gave the production a standing ovation. Hare brought his hands together, prayerfully, then moved them an inch or two apart, then brought them gently together again, as if careful not to make a noise. He did this a dozen times, before entwining his fingers.

A stout defence of text-based theatre had been offered on the Olivier stage earlier in the year. One of the characters in Tony Harrison’s “Fram” is the early-20th-century Greek scholar Gilbert Murray, who explains why the messenger in a Greek play would always be superior to news footage. Murray contrasts “a messenger who’s thought about the things he’s seen” with “an unmediated image thrown on to a screen”, arguing that, “if the messenger’s on target, the mind’s eye of the hearer more than vision itself brings horror even nearer.”
No one had a better chance this year of proving Harrison’s point than the actor who was rehearsing the messenger in Sophocles’s “Oedipus”. Gwilym Lee left drama school in the summer and the first job he’s got is playing the messenger and understudying Ralph Fiennes as Oedipus. The freshest face in the building was playing one of the oldest roles in the repertoire and word was getting round that he was someone to watch.

In a rehearsal room the size of an aircraft hangar, he emerged between wooden doors to deliver the news that Jocasta, the queen, had killed herself and Oedipus had taken her brooch and blinded himself. It’s a big speech at the end of the play and halfway through it goes into the present tense. Lee wove his way through the dozen-strong chorus and approached the front, where the director, Jonathan Kent, was standing. Quite calmly, he extended his arm, and with the palm of his hand almost caressed the scene he was describing. The toughest part (he told me in the lunchbreak) was trying to combine reliving the moment, and how that must affect his character, with staying professional about relaying the news.

Lee had studied the body language and behaviour of war reporters and witnesses to disasters. When the play was first performed, around 430BC, people had communicated across distances by lighting bonfires. Lee had gone online. “I went on YouTube”, he said, “and typed in 9/11 and eyewitnesses.” A role written nearly 2,500 years ago would be informed by witnesses to an event from seven years ago. “They’re often quite focused and still.”

If you want to know how well the National is doing its job of putting on classics and new plays, turn to the critics and the box-office figures. Both were in evidence mid-September at the launch of the annual report. The two Nicks sat at one end of a conference room with the chairman, Hayden Phillips, and 20 arts correspondents and critics sat in rows like gourmands waiting to hear the head waiter announce the day’s specials. Naturally candid, Hytner has provoked some lively controversies. He told one reporter there were too many “dead white male” theatre critics who didn’t appreciate female directors, and he bemoaned the lack of right-wing playwrights who might challenge the liberal consensus. Most recently, he was attacked by the playwright Simon Gray (shortly before his death) for running scared of plays that address Islamic fundamentalism.

Today Hytner announced a new play by Richard Bean called “England People Very Nice” which deals with four waves of immigration in Bethnal Green and addresses this issue. “Richard’s play is written with a boisterous bravura,” he said, “very much in the tradition of the South Bank city comedy. It has that kind of dash.” “Are you braced for some sort of response?” asked one journalist.  “I think…” said Hytner. “You know…um…the best thing for me to say is that I’m not particularly wanting to invite a response. We’re not a controversy magnet.”

The Sunday Times asked about the two modern verse dramas, “Fram” and Michael Frayn’s “Afterlife”, that had been critical duds: “I imagine we won’t be seeing more like that.” “Actually,” said Hytner, “I liked both of those.” His taste is catholic, his style collegiate and inclusive. With four associate directors and a team of 16 associates, he seems unthreatened by others’ talents. He almost forgot to mention the news that would get the most column inches next day. He was going to direct Helen Mirren, The Queen herself, in Racine’s “Phèdre”. When he announced Fiona Shaw playing Brecht’s “Mother Courage” directed by Deborah Warner, the Daily Telegraph critic (well-known for his aversion to Brecht and austere feminist drama) couldn’t contain himself. “That ticks all the boxes!” he said to laughter. “Did you do it just for me?”

There was plenty else on offer: Wole Soyinka’s “Death and the King’s Horseman”, directed by Rufus Norris; the National’s first production of Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well”, directed by Marianne Elliott; Buchner’s “Danton’s Death”, directed by Michael Grandage; J.B. Priestley’s “Time and the Conways”, directed by Rupert Goold, and Marlowe’s “Dido, Queen of Carthage” directed by James Macdonald. “A season where all your putative successors are showing their wares,” said the Independent.  “Yes,” said Hytner, “but I’m going nowhere.”

The sociologist Max Weber described the spread of religious ideas in terms of the “charisma” of the founders and the bureaucratic “routine” that sets in and dulls the original message. His terms might well apply in a theatre where an artistic director’s creative vision gets deadened by the relentless pressure of staging (as the National did last year) 26 productions, 19 of them new: theatre as factory.

The job certainly sounds a grind. Before Richard Eyre took over as artistic director from Peter Hall in 1987, he reread Hall’s “Diaries”. “They’re a catalogue of misery,” Eyre writes in his own diary. Six years into the job, Eyre records his own depression and despair. “Is this state of mind endemic to running the nt?” He gets overwhelmed by the “tunnel” of “planning, scheduling, nurturing, caretaking”. Five years later, Eyre’s successor, Trevor Nunn, was suffering repeated attacks in the press and couldn’t shake off the phrase “troubled Trevor”. Nunn told me then: “It isn’t fun.”

Hytner looks like the first artistic director of the National who’s actually having a good time. He appears to sidestep the Weberian trap of routine by welcoming in as wide a range of new talent as he can find (charisma arrives from many directions) and planning restlessly for the future (nothing can settle). As a department head told me, “This isn’t a building any more that just puts on plays and sells tickets. It’s very forward-looking.” That attitude is taking shape in “A Strategy for the Future”, the spur for which is not the Olympics in 2012, but the year after, when the National celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first production at the Old Vic in 1963.

One thing we can be sure of is that they won’t be dusting off any old productions to mount a cosy reprise of their 20 greatest hits. Among the buzzy concepts that surface in the annual report—“inclusiveness”, “accessibility”—the one that stands out is “porousness”. In his office overlooking the Thames and St Paul’s, the executive director Nick Starr spreads out the architectural plans of the National and its surrounding streets and gives me a tour of the future.

Starr’s role as executive director exemplifies a point made by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil that social change comes not from idealists or intellectuals, but from managers who know the nuts and bolts of organisations, how they work, and how to change them. Someone in the advertising department had asked Starr to define his “beehag” (= big hairy aggressive idea). He has two. “We want to get two things done,” Starr says, “One is digital and broadcast. The other is bringing more people into the building and opening it up.”

There’s no doubt that many more of the 19m passing by are hanging around the front and back of the refurbished Festival Hall (moving between the shops, restaurants and concert halls) than are at the National. So there’s a big incentive to catch up. “We can be porous in all sorts of ways,” Starr says, “in ticket prices, Sunday openings, Watch This Space. But one thing that contradicts this is the building, particularly in the southern aspect.” The National has a great deal of “inert frontage”. Starr uses the image of “the medieval cathedral surrounded by stores, clutter, retail and everyday life”. As the National Theatre is Grade II* listed, any change takes careful negotiation. English Heritage didn’t want a series of piecemeal requests, they wanted to see an overall plan. “We’re doing a much longer run-up,” says Starr. The National commissioned a 350-page survey from Haworth Tompkins, the architects who redesigned the Royal Court, the National Theatre Studio, and the nearby Coin Street development. “This is not about modernising,” says Starr, “It’s about adapting and adjusting.”

They want a walkway that goes from Waterloo Bridge straight onto one of the terraces. They want better use of the terraces (performances on other levels) and a stronger sense of entrances. They want to animate the two side streets with “pods”, one-storey workspaces where craftsmen or companies associated with the National might have residencies. While the western side, near Olivier’s statue, works well, the other side of the front is the “goods-in entrance” with lorries, vans and dustbins. They want to put a bistro here. At the back they want one or two freestanding buildings with education and participation facilities, to reach out to the local community. All around, they want more grass, trees and shrubbery. As Hytner puts it, “It’s all about the quality of the hello.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Olivier tannoy announced, “today’s performance of  ‘War Horse’ begins in one minute.” The first-ever Sunday matinée audience filed into the Olivier, the dress code ranging from T-shirts, cut-offs and sandals to a Knightsbridge boy in a school blazer. After the show started, the ushers hung around in the foyer. Minutes passed. The stillness that descended on Lasdun’s harmonious interior of grey, purple and brown was broken when the lift doors opened and out raced a family of late arrivals. In the scale of human misery, being late for the theatre ranks fairly low, but there’s still something distressing about knowing that 1,300 other people made it on time and you didn’t.

At this moment, the latecomers meet the benign figure of Laura Benson, a front-of-house manager. Her job at this moment is to “turn the experience around”. The latecomers are calmed, offered a glass of water, a cast list, shown where they can follow the play on the TV monitor and assured that they will be taken to their seats at the earliest break in the action. “It’s London,” says Benson. “People are late. Transport’s let them down. We’re not here to tell people off. It might be someone’s first experience of the theatre.”  In the seven years that she has been working front-of-house, Benson has noticed a shift in the audience, especially since “Jerry Springer—The Opera” and the Travelex £10 seasons (they expect the millionth Travelex ticket to be sold this year). The National doesn’t have the one audience: there’s a Katie Mitchell audience, a David Hare audience, and an Akram Khan audience. More than half the tickets are bought online, and the marketing and press departments get a shrewd idea of the audience profile by how much that proportion varies. Many of the younger spectators prefer to see shows from Monday to Thursday. They have other plans for the weekend.

The National has an in-house video department that makes trailers for the website, and it won’t be long now before one of its directors, probably Katie Mitchell, originates a drama that will be shown exclusively online. But they are looking to extend the theatre’s reach beyond the building’s audience, beyond the touring companies’ audiences, and even beyond the online audience. Hytner is fascinated by the success the Metropolitan Opera in New York has had broadcasting live performances to cinemas round America and beyond. At the press conference, Hytner said that the National’s plans for filming productions had gone “beyond the drawing board”. There’s competition here. The Royal Shakespeare Company looked at the idea of broadcasting David Tennant’s “Hamlet” to catch the “Dr Who” fans who would never make it to Stratford. When the National has stars of the calibre of Helen Mirren, it’s not hard to see it finding an audience for live broadcasts in other cities around the country, possibly around the world. It would transform its role as a national theatre.

Hytner believes the long-held view of a theatre company as “a permanent ensemble occupying a single theatre doing one show a night” has never been sufficiently challenged. He defends a looser arrangement that draws in a steady influx of new talent. “There’s just too much to respond to. They bring in an awareness of life outside.” This idea of a two-way street runs from the casting to the website. “There is no limit to what we can show online,” says Hytner, “the number of doors we can open, the number of walls we can bring down.” In their book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams make a telling observation about new media that might apply more widely. “The losers launched websites. The winners launched vibrant communities. The losers built walled gardens. The winners built public squares. The losers innovated internally. The winners innovated with their users.”

There will always be a tension between the monumental architecture and the shifting demands of contemporary theatre, between the concrete and the evanescent, the castle and the carnival. Hytner finds it liberating. “It did feel like a fortress,” he says, from his office on the fourth floor, “but it turns out that the more you subvert that, the more you do with it, the more life springs from it and the better it gets.”  

Picture credit:  Brian Harris

(Robert Butler is an ex-theatre critic of the Independent on Sunday. He blogs on the arts and the environment at the ashden directory. Also in the Winter issue of Intelligent Life magazine is his latest Going Green column: Making climate change hot.)