I once opened an interview with Trevor Nunn with what I thought was a tongue-loosener and got a surprising answer. How was he enjoying his job as the National Theatre director? “Not at all,” he replied, explaining that the theatre's subsidy had been at standstill for six years and the search for private funding was swamping his creativity, his time and his life. But when I put the same question to his successor, the answer is very different. “Enormously, enormously,” says Nicholas Hytner, that affable clown-face breaking into a grin. “I have been enjoying every moment of it.”
What, even though he's on record as saying, soon after his staging of Miss Saigon in 1989, that he'd never get stuck in running an institution, spending half the day on accounts and pandering to conservative tastes? “Well, back then I was callow and shooting my mouth off. In the six years I've been here I haven't spent my time doing the accounts and I haven't programmed anything I didn't want to programme.
“When I took the job, my belief was that we had to do what felt important and exciting, hope to take the audience with us and not second-guess what it wanted. And if that didn't work? Well, good try. I'd retire hurt, with egg on my face. But it hasn't worked out that way.”
Nor has it. He even suspects he'll want to remain in his post when his contact is up for renewal in 2013. True, it hasn't all been War Horse, Alan Bennett's History Boys and Michael Frayn's Democracy. There has also been the odd flop, such as Tony Harrison's Fram and Howard Benton's Paul. True, the National didn't get as many Olivier nominations for 2008 as it has in previous years. But overall things have gone so swimmingly that Hytner sounds perturbed by the theatre's popularity: “I would prefer to fail gloriously than be too careful or slick. In fact, I get a little suspicious when everybody likes something. I start to think: ‘Are we getting bland?' I think: ‘Oh come on, where's Nicholas de Jongh” - a reference to his severest critic - “when we need him?'”
But he's the first to point out that he inherited a theatre in good shape in 2003 and that he was luckier than his predecessors, since a big increase in Arts Council subsidy coincided with his arrival. Moreover, £5 million a year has been coming from private sources, prime among them Travelex, whose bounty has brought six consecutive seasons of £10 seats and, as a result, a broader spread of audience. The annual report in September showed a trading surplus on a turnover of £49 million, even though the theatre's total of 26 productions was two more than first budgeted. And in the past six months 93 per cent of seats have been sold, in the past three 100 per cent.
But it is, Hytner agrees, too early to be sure that the theatre will buck the recession. “Don't know is the only place to be,” he shrugs. However, Travelex continues its support this year and, whatever the future, he's determined to press on with cheap-seat seasons and not to play safe. “Uncompromising”, “challenging”, “adventurous” and “unexpected” are Hytner's hurrah words and you'd have to gag him to stop them pouring from his mouth.
Indeed, 2009 brings two bullish events. Having packed out all three of its theatres during a three-month experimental period last year, and begun to plan the intricacies of days off for a vast staff, the National will be offering plays on Sundays from July. “We'll be a seven-day operation for ever,” Hytner promises. “For ever.”
Also, the National will launch its “NT Live” on June 23 with a performance of Phèdre that takes Racine's play and Helen Mirren's lovelorn heroine by satellite to maybe 150 cinemas and arts centres in the UK and abroad. Hytner isn't yet sure of the identities of the three other productions that will follow it, but he's robust in his defence of a project that would obviously lack the human contact that makes theatre theatre. Couldn't those performances seem as artificial as, say, Olivier's Othello did when it was transposed from stage to screen?
“No, because tastes have changed. If you see archive recordings, some performances seem hammy and cheesy, but in their day we thought them amazing. Also, these will be outside broadcasts, not films, not cinematic experiences. But they'll bring what we do to far, far, far more people than we'd ever be able to reach on one of our tours. And we've now got the technology to do it really well, so let's try, let's see if it works.”
Hytner doesn't discuss his private life in interviews, saying, “it's interesting only to me; others would be bored”. But talk of Olivier brings up a personal memory. When he was a boy in Manchester, he saw Olivier as a majestic Shylock in Jonathan Miller's touring NT production of The Merchant of Venice. But that was the only time he saw the actor onstage. If he'd lived where he does now, in Camden, he'd have gone to all his performances, but if he was still trapped up North he'd have welcomed NT Live as a substitute - “5,000 times better than nothing”.
One of Hytner's feats has been to give women directors opportunities they never had in the National's early days, an era when an American critic could complain that “all British directors are men and called Peter”. In the coming months Clare Higgins will star in Marianne Elliott's production of All's Well That Ends Well, Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner's revival of Brecht's Mother Courage and Melly Still's staging of Terry Pratchett's Nation. But Hytner himself will be directing an as-yet-untitled Alan Bennett play about the ageing Benjamin Britten and the still older friend he rejected, W.H. Auden.
But that's for November. Now he's rehearsing Richard Bean's England People Very Nice, which involves four waves of immigration: French, Irish, Jewish, Bangladeshi. Since the last batch are Muslims and the play aims what Hytner calls “a very scurrilous sense of humour” at new arrivals who start by scaring the locals and then become embattled and sometimes hostile locals themselves, could the production prove provocative? Hytner doesn't think so: “If we can all laugh at each other, as I hope, it will say something about where we've arrived.”
Not that he's scared of controversy. After all, he began his regime by staging that mischievous musical, Jerry Springer - The Opera, and recently saw off a London rabbi who, without seeing the play, thought the New Labour fundraiser in David Hare's Gethsemane an anti-Semitic portrait, “worse than Fagin”. He is, he says, delighted if the National has an impact not only on the nation's arts pages but in its comment columns: “We should be part not just of the cultural but the political discourse. The National should be part of the national conversation.”
Indeed, he's happy that playwrights seem less to be looking inwards, as they often did in the 1980s and 1990s, and, like Bean, are looking outwards at a Britain that has hugely changed since the National's founding in 1963. This means that programming for the Olivier and Lyttelton, a problem for his predecessors, is a task that he embraces with relish, whether he's presenting new work or classics, such as The Revenger's Tragedy, that speak to the present: “I hope all our productions are investigative, but those that excite me most are large-scale, big, public, social plays.”
But it's another change, the toppling of the barriers between the so-called fringe and mainstream theatre, that he calls “the biggest thing that's happened in my professional lifetime. When you think how rigorously separated they were only 20 years ago, hating each other, it's astonishing.” And Hytner regards it as a prime task to sniff out what's fresh and different, supporting maverick troupes such as Shunt and bringing work by DV8 and Kneehigh to the National. And who co-directed the National's current revival of Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour? A man Hytner thought was too much the outsider to agree to the task, Felix Barrett, of that physically inventive company, Punchdrunk.
So how do he and his team choose work? Though he may try to interest directors in plays he thinks worth reviving, for instance persuading the anti-Shavian Elliott to stage St Joan, he believes that good work usually comes from intense personal enthusiasm rather than seemingly reliable programming: “We don't say: ‘It's time to do School for Scandal.' But if Marianne came to me and said: ‘I have this fantastic urge to do School for Scandal', we'd do it. Yes, people will come to see Helen Mirren in Phèdre, but we're doing it because Helen wanted to do it.”
Indeed, he believes that attempts to be responsibly mainstream are recipes for failure, adding that “it's when something comes completely from left field that we appear to have our biggest successes”. Think of Jerry Springer or His Dark Materials or, perhaps, England People Very Nice, which has already sold more than 50 per cent of its seats despite having no stars, a little-known author and, in immigration, not a sexy subject.
Think of Katie Mitchell's weird, difficult version of Dostoevsky's Idiot. That sold out, drawing young punters and justifying Hytner's belief that, though the National has an intellectually inquisitive core audience that sees almost everything, its repertoire must be diverse enough to attract sub-sections of society to plays that other sections might not enjoy: “Though I don't think anybody is shockable and there's no subject we can't treat, we have to relieve ourselves of the notion that every audience for every show must be a perfect cross-section of the community. We think our marketing is as much about telling people not to come as to come. It's saying: ‘If this isn't your kind of show, give it a miss.'”
Hytner's own tastes, he says, are eclectic yet catholic and he himself is a pragmatist and an opportunist. He directed the jaunty Asian comedy Rafta Rafta and will direct Phèdre. He also admits to frequent feelings of dissatisfaction with what he's staged, regular urges to try something different and a fear that there are gaps in the National's repertoire. Isn't it time he staged a Spanish Golden Age play? Or a musical, though those can be a massive drag on time and resources? Shouldn't he be discovering new European work and bringing Britain the internationally renowned directors that came to the National in Olivier's day?
“To understand who and what you are these days you have to put yourself into the context of other societies and cultures,” he says. “To be national, or the National, you have to be international.”
England People Very Nice, the first production in the 2009 Travelex £10 Tickets season, is previewing at the Lyttelton, London SE1 (020-7452 3000), and opens on Wednesday.
