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Sir Trevor Nunn discuss the making of Gone With The Wind
Sir Trevor Nunn has the look of the cat that got the cream, quite literally,
with his darting, feline eyes, his thick, glossy hair (darker than it has a
right to be in a man two years from 70) and the comfortable midriff of a
contented creature. Did I like him? Impossible to say. He wasn’t unfriendly,
answered questions readily, but he seemed utterly remote sitting just six
inches away, which is curious for a famed people-person who grows moist-eyed
eulo-gising the great humanists – Shakespeare, Picasso, Mozart.
What can I tell you? With his neatly trimmed goatee, denim shirt and
rehearsal-room jeans, he looks like what he is: Labour-voting arts
aristocracy, distinguished interpreter of the classics and an impresario who
ran the RSC and the National Theatre, and made a reputed £30m from the West
End and Broadway projects Cats, Sunset Boulevard and Les Misérables. In
short, he is the man who got the dream package, including the beautiful
younger wife, Imogen Stubbs, and who needs do nothing more than complete the
Shakespeare canon (31 plays so far, six to go, he clearly wants the full
house) and involve himself with whatever appeals. The choice to direct a
musical version of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind owes
much to the largesse of somebody rich enough to please himself, impressed by
feisty women who ambush him at stage doors – in this case, an unknown
writer, Margaret Martin – and brave enough to take a risk.
Actually, he has always done that. Whether through workaholism or ambition,
Nunn has been both unflagging and unpredictable; a champion of highbrow
modernism and then cheery populism. Bashed for “selling out” by
concentrating on commercial work, he donated £2.5m of his royalties to the
National. When we met he was deciding whether or not to have Rhett Butler
say “frankly” (Clark Gable’s ad lib) before he doesn’t give a damn. “It’s
not in the novel, but one doesn’t want to offend...” The action-packed story
will star Darius Danesh from Pop Idol as Rhett Butler and the Broadway
actress Jill Paice as the tempestuous Scarlett O’Hara, 16 at the start of
the war and 28 at the end of the story, by which time she’s been married
three times, had three children, has delivered her love rival’s baby
single-handed, rescued her family from burning Atlanta and run a business
like a man.
More personally, the theme of the emancipation of the slaves fired Nunn’s
liberal instincts. But with her Southern racism, Scarlett is a flawed
heroine for modern times. “You want your novelist to be ahead of their
time,” agrees Nunn, who also struggled with Victor Hugo’s view of the poor
Thénardiers. “But you also must understand the extent to which they are of
it. Mitchell gives the black characters a potent sense of morality; on a
number of occasions, Mammy, Uncle Peter and Big Sam are the book’s moral
arbiters.”
What appealed to him was the challenge of getting the epic saga on stage.
“Nothing in the work that you’re reading should be denied on stage,” he
says. “The whole point is, you can do anything. You’ve got to find the
theatrical way of doing it, you’ve got to harness the audience’s
imagination. At the start of Henry V, Shakespeare has somebody coming on
saying, ‘May we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright
the air at Agincourt?’ How are they going to do it? It’s impossible. And he
says, ‘Think when we talk of horses that you see them printing their proud
hoofs i’ the receiving earth.’” This famous exhortation to imagine was his
mantra while adapting the 1,200 pages of Nicholas Nickleby at the RSC, and
again with Les Misérables; he thinks it will serve him especially well for
this third literary juggernaut.
In conversation with Nunn, all roads lead back to the Bard. He admits to
feeling “total idolatry” towards his hero. The declaration sounds grandiose,
but maybe he just likes to remind himself, and us, where his true heart
lies. In times of trouble, some people lean on religion, some on therapists;
Nunn has Shakespeare – a verse, a character, a line for every situation.
Has proximity to all that wisdom helped him with life, with divorce, parenting
his five children, professional battles, all of which he has come through
with remarkable equilibrium? “It constantly reminds me of how far short I
fall,” he smiles. “At the climax of Cymbeline, Posthumus says, ‘The power I
have over you is to forgive you.’ It’s Nelson Mandela: the power we have
isn’t revenge, it’s forgiveness.”
Shakespeare has forged the tracks along which Nunn’s life has run: grammar
school boy with a passion for theatre, Cambridge degree in English, called
to the RSC in 1964 by his mentor, Peter Hall, a decade his senior (best not
mention Hall, it sets off an unstoppable panegyric), four years later
becoming its youngest artistic director at 27. In 1996 he took over at the
National Theatre for a buoyant, solvent six-year reign, where Oklahoma! and
new writing were always anchored against his meticulous rereading of the
classics.
Shakespeare even provided him with his wife, Imogen Stubbs, 20 years his
junior, the love of his life (just beating Ipswich Town FC), whom he
recently cast in Ingmar Berg-man’s Scenes from a Marriage at the Bel-grade
theatre in Coventry, where he began his directing career. He had noticed
her, but not cast her, at the RSC and years later tried to get her for
Desdemona. “She wasn’t able to do it because she was going to be married to
a delightful Frenchman, and then she was pregnant.” Nunn was “paralysed” by
her unavailability. “But the Fates operate in a very mysterious way.” Weeks
later, he heard there had been a miscarriage, and then the boyfriend had
helpfully disappeared. “We met very tangentially, with no planning involved.
It was just the usual muddle.”
Stubbs is the third Mrs Nunn, after Janet Suzman and Sharon Lee Hill, and the
couple’s life seems an enviable one: shelves groaning with awards (112 in
six years at the National); the summer house in Cornwall, where they filmed
his movie of Twelfth Night, with Stubbs as Viola; their collaboration on her
play We Happy Few, which flopped but to which he is still fiercely loyal.
“It’s clearly a very bad idea to work together on a regular basis,” he says,
but you sense he would cast her constantly – “it’s her intelligence as an
actress, her incredible quickness” – holding back through a sense of
decorum. When she played Emma in the National’s Betrayal (1999), it was out
of the director’s hands. “Harold Pinter was one of the main factors. He
said, ‘No, no, no – you’ve got to cast her. She’s absolutely the person I
want.’ When the dramatist says, ‘I want you to cast your wife,’ you can’t go
against him.” And then in his 2004 “touched with genius” Hamlet, Stubbs made
Gertrude the sexy mother to a young Hamlet (Ben Whishaw). “It was essential
that I had a yummy-mummy Gertrude, a woman who would not admit to her 40th
birthday. Suddenly, the play takes on a very different set of meanings.”
We are talking in a cavernous, vast, overlit rehearsal room, sitting on
hard-backed chairs at a table, his body language revealing a desire to be
elsewhere. “Oh, no,” said his company manager, “he won’t want to sit on the
sofa,” as if I had suggested we dance naked together as a warm-up. So we sit
facing each other awkwardly; he is talkative (actually, he never stops, a
sort of gentle avalanche of words you mostly fail to stem), but although the
voice is quiet, the insistence on making his points his way is deafening.
Actors are said to adore him, but I think he mistrusts the media, the
critics and the wits who have satirised him as King Luvvie (as offensive “as
calling a black man a ‘nigger’”, he famously opined, causing Private Eye to
rename its thesp-baiting column Trevvies). Of course, he is easy to parody,
a darling of the theatre, so intense, serious, emotional that you wonder how
the writers of Little Britain overlooked him; he is an admired member of the
elite, a perfectionist, a worshipper of greatness, but not a snob.
His message is one of moderate relativ-ism – not claiming that Hamlet’s
soliloquy is equal in value to the lyrics of the great American songbook,
but that both can illuminate the human experience. His first company for the
National teamed Troilus and Cressida and Candide. His Anything Goes there
was performed by the actors also doing Love’s Labour’s Lost. He planned to
do Stephen Sondheim’s Follies and The Tempest with the same company. “I’d
still love to do that. We got to the point where Stephen agreed to do the
music for the Shakespeare songs for The Tempest, but somebody challenged us
on the rights.” Nunn’s own challenge has been to a “late-20th-century
critical prejudice that says musicals are sort of... not proper? It’s no
longer said, is it?” Indeed, the point is proven; after Nunn’s sing-alongs,
Sam Mendes, Nick Hytner and Phyllida Lloyd all followed suit, with the
Donmar’s Michael Grandage staging both Guys and Dolls and Evita side by side
in the West End in 2006. “The point that I want to go on proving is that a
musical piece like Oklahoma! is capable of investigating that community with
the same detail as any serious play.”
Far more influential on his common touch (and some might say tastes) is his
own background as the clever son of a poor Ipswich joiner, from a loving
home in which there were five books, a 78rpm-playing gramophone and nobody
quoting Shakespeare at life’s hardships. The first theatre he went to was
music hall; the most exciting sound he had ever heard was a small band
tuning up in the pit. “I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s for me!’ The Ipswich
Hippodrome had touring shows with a static nude halfway through the second
act, and all of us schoolboys used to bike down to the theatre to see if we
could see any photographs outside.” It was seeing Singin’ in the Rain,
rather than Olivier as Othello, that made him want to be an actor. On his
first youth-club trips to London he saw The Boy Friend and CanCan and The
Pajama Game, and loved them all. (He didn’t visit the capital with his
parents until he was running the RSC.) In the Nunn household there were
comic songs and dance music and – “God only knows what it was doing there” –
Hungarian Rhapsody, which he played constantly. “They would say, ‘Ooh, he’s
put that music on again. Stop it!’ But I discovered plagiarism when I
realised that the theme is the same as the middle bit of Put Another Nickel
in the Nickelodeon.”
But true to his passions, he recently returned to Cambridge to work on the
“tough and problematic” Cymbeline with his old drama group, the Marlowe
Society. “I never want to be away from doing a Shakespeare,” he says with a
sniff, shaking his head at the thought. Last year, he directed King Lear in
Stratford with his old undergraduate friend Ian McKellen (they acted
together in the Marlowe’s 1960 production of Doctor Faustus), a rite of
passage for two scholarship boys turned elder statesmen. Unlike McKellen,
who seems to welcome his venerability, Nunn refuses to grow old or to comply
with our shallow assumptions about the diversity of his work.
I ask him if working on musicals is a respite from the metaphysical
profundities of the great plays. He looks surprised for the first time in
our conversation, saying that with Lear he had a rehearsal room full of
laughter. “With the grimness and the poetic complexity of the piece, there
has to be an outlet.” Maybe I got it the wrong way round, and reincarnating
Scarlett O’Hara on Drury Lane in a new work by an unknown writer with no big
stars, in gloomy economic times, is more arduous, more unsettling than an
RSC Lear starring a national treasure. Nunn just laughs when I ask if he is
marching towards poor beleaguered Tara with the confidence of a Yankee
soldier – “I’ve never marched towards anything with confidence” – but he has
the air of a man who will relish its success but live lightly with its
failure, as if the real tests of this glittering career are to be found
elsewhere. In fact, they have already been passed.
Gone with the Wind is previewing at the New London, WC2
