Nicholas Hytner

0:05Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading creative figures reflect upon the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the theatre and film director Nicholas Hytner. Over a four-decade career, he's directed Shakespeare, contemporary drama and musicals, including Miss Saigon, which ran for over a decade in London and on Broadway. He served as Artistic Director of the National Theatre for 12 years, overseeing more massive box office hits, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and War Horse.

0:42Productions that he directed himself include One Man, Two Governors and The History Boys, one of several collaborations with Alan Bennett. In 2017, he co-founded London's Bridge Theatre, where his productions have included Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Guys and Dolls. One of the most influential and successful figures in British theatre, Sir Nicholas Heitner was knighted for services to drama in 2010. Nicholas Heitner, welcome to This Cultural Life. I'm really delighted to be here. It's recently been announced that you've sold the Bridge Theatre, the theatre that you've set up and have been running for the last nine years, since stepping down as director of the National Theatre.

1:21In the 25 years or so of running these two major arts organisations, what has been the biggest change in the sector in which you work, in a nutshell? I think the biggest change has been that, contrary to popular or reported opinion, average ticket prices have gone down and costs have shot up. So it's now really hard to make ends meet. everybody's struggling with this across the sector, across the performing arts sector. It's not a hopeless situation because it's prompted degrees of ingenuity, but the gap between income and expenditure. So you're talking about relative prices because, I mean, anecdotally everybody would say it's almost impossible to go to, you know, take a family to see a musical in the West End because it is so expensive.

2:10It is expensive. It's certainly expensive in the West End. If you book well ahead and book the most expensive tickets, But I'm going to say that I'm very much in favour of dynamic pricing because mostly the dynamic is downwards. If you wait until all the tickets go out, I'm shooting myself in both feet from a business point of view. If you wait until they're on all the apps, you can get tickets very reasonably. There's a kind of perfect system of supply and demand as far as theatre tickets are concerned. The really hot shows are, yeah, ludicrously expensive. Even that I have some sympathy for because you need to kind of exploit the ones that hit the target.

2:50The ones that do very well no longer do quite well enough. And that's what's driving a whole amount of performing arts policy at the moment. Since 2019, since before Covid, more people are coming to the theatre. They're paying exactly collectively what they want to pay. And that's the argument for dynamic price. In real terms, that is actually genuinely lower than it was. Why did you sell the British Theatre then? I think after nine years defying gravity, it was time for someone else to have a go. It was always the offer to our investors. It was an entirely private enterprise that at some point we would get out and return to them their money.

3:31And to the principal investors, we did return their money. We'd have returned a great deal more without the six and a half million pound debt we owed to the government, which very satisfyingly we were able to pay off on the Monday we sold the theatre. That debt was now wiped out. And that's the debt because they loaned you the money during Covid, during the shutdown. And servicing that debt was essentially our margin. So there was no room for error. And I think that it just felt sensible to get out when we could. The thing I loved most of all was being responsible for so much that I wasn't myself directing.

4:06I loved working with other directors. I loved the creation of a repertoire that I thought would interest our audience, enlarge our audience. And I will very much miss that.

4:22On This Cultural Life, Nicholas Highton, my guests choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. And your first choice for this programme is the clown, Charlie Caroli. Where did you first see him? In Blackpool, I presume? Yes, at the Blackpool Tower Circus. I was brought up in Manchester and every year we went as a family to Blackpool to see the Illuminations and to go to the circus. And I was besotted by this clown. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Charlie Caroli and company. I've since discovered how demanding clowning is and I'm no great expert in it.

4:59But his rapport with the audience, his way of delighting an audience and also the fact that he was so multi-talented. Children, if you see anybody touching my guitar, can you give me a shout? Well, will you? He was a musician. His pato was great. Impressionist as well. Yeah, I mean, appealed to me, to my sense of humour as a kid and the audience participation. I was the kid whose hand shot up when volunteers were asked for. Were you on stage with him? Yeah, you know, when he wanted a kid to hold the bucket, which turned out not to be filled with water but with confetti, or the kid who dodged the custard pie.

5:39I can't remember how many times I actually got chosen. I would shrink from that now, but my hand shot up. And just for those people who don't know, he was born in Italy. He's Anglo-Italian. There's an amazing story that when war broke out, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, he went to the end of Blackpool Pier and apparently threw off the end of the pier a watch which had been given to him, I think, by Hitler. By Hitler. I think Hitler gave him a watch when he appeared, I don't know where, Munich or somewhere, towards the end of the 30s. But he'd stayed in Blackpool. He lived in Blackpool. These were family outings then, whether they were treats to go when you were on holiday in Blackpool or would you go from Manchester just to go and see Charlie Caroli?

6:20We would go for a weekend, see the Illuminations, see Charlie Caroli, do the donkeys, the whole thing. And I think that heady feeling of delighting a vocal audience was something that never left me. And Alan Bennett has referred to my iron streak of tinsel, which is sadly apt. And I think it was the circus, the panto. Let's just ask about that iron streak of tinsel. I mean, what you talk about is the sort of allure of showbiz and comedy in particular, because, of course, as well as the Shakespeare, the opera, the serious contemporary drama, you have done so much comedy, not least one man, two governors.

7:03You're linking that back then to Charlie. Well, yes, and I do love doing comedy and I do love being involved in making the audience laugh. We were a typical middle class culture Jewish family. And we would go also once a year to Stratford. I think my brothers and my sister were slightly less interested than I was. So there was never really a distinction in my mind between the panto and the Shakespeare. And I saw some fabulous Shakespeare in the 70s when the RSC was in its pomp with John Barton, Trevor Narn, Terry Hans. I saw Peter Brook Midsummer Night's Dream in Stratford. Hello, spirit. With a wonder you.

7:51Absolutely as inspiring, as brilliant, as exciting as everybody says it was. It really was. and I think my parents, they identified that I was particularly interested in it. What did your parents do? My dad was a barrister in Manchester. My mum was very young when I was born. She was 20 and it took her time to discover what she wanted to do. I can remember that happening as I was growing up and eventually she followed me to London and got involved in fundraising for theatre companies. So they were always very interested. At what age did you start having an interest in theatre as a life choice?

8:30Did you imagine yourself on the stage? I did, yes. I imagined myself as an actor. I think a hell of a lot of directors try acting, try writing, realise there's only one thing left. I think there is a difference between the way an actor concentrates and a director concentrates. An actor's concentration has to be so single-minded. You have to see the world, the world of the play, through one pair of eyes only. and when I tried to act as a student, I realised I was all over the place. But I think I started enjoying the school play more than anything else. But you're saying that as an actor, you couldn't just concentrate on being that one person.

9:08You were always more interested on the whole ensemble and what was going on in the world created by this play. I was and I think I was at first looking at everybody else and thinking I could get a bigger laugh and then looking at everybody else and thinking they're all better than me, which was the time to try to start to direct. There was one teacher at school, a man called Brian Fidian, who taught English, ran the Dramatic Society, conducted the Wind and Brass Band. I played flute okay. I was mesmerised by him. And I think I wanted to do what he did. He was a really good director. When you were seeing these productions at Stratford with your parents, were you aware of those names?

9:56John Barton, Trevor Nunn, Peter Brook? I became aware because Brian, the teacher, also did a weekend in Stratford for members of the Dramsock every year. I used to see six shows a year at Stratford going from Manchester. And yeah, I became totally aware and totally aware of the quality and the charisma of the actors. I was watching Shakespeare for the first time with Judi Dench, Donald Sinden, Elizabeth Spriggs, Ian Richardson, Ian Holm. Incredible actors. and I think the legacy of Peter Hall, both at the RSC and the National, real serious scholarship married to flamboyant showmanship. I think by the time I was in my mid-teens, I could absolutely tell the difference.

10:43I knew what you were going to get from a John Barton show and I knew what you were going to get from a Trevor Non show and maybe I can date how judgmental you become as a director from being overexcited about seeing a Peter Brook production of And in Cleopatra with Glenda Jackson and Alan Howard. And it was a kind of misfire. It was disappointing. I think working out why Peter Brook might have directed a show, which I think by common consent was not on a level with The Midsummer Night's Dream. He didn't have that electric charge. That, I think, fed into wanting to try and do it myself.

11:37Your next choice, Nicholas Heintner, is Kent Opera, the company where you made your earliest work as a director in 1979. You were already an opera fan then. Yes. My parents' wide cultural sympathies were enormously influential, unfortunate. I discovered opera without them. They weren't that crazy about opera. My dad loved Gilbert and Sullivan and so did I. But I started going to the Halle every Sunday evening on a season ticket with them at the time that John Barbarale was the music director. My two brothers went to Old Trafford with my grandfather on a Saturday afternoon. I went to the Halle on a Sunday evening.

12:14And you had no interest in football? I'm ashamed to say that to begin with, my grandfather tried to take me as well. And I sat through George Best, Bobby Charlton, Nobby Stiles, Dennis Law. And I sat there wanting the marching band in the interval. That was my highlight. So when my youngest brother was born, I gladly gave over my plays to him. But music was, I've always been excited and moved and inspired by it. I used to play, I used to sing in a madrigal group. And I think I heard all the mainstream repertoire for the first time conducted by Bob O 'Rolle. Opera, I became nerdy about in my late teens.

13:00Used to go whenever opera toured to Manchester. I used to go with a friend, eventually tried the ring. By the time it got to go to Demerang, I think I was on my own. That's where the first jobs were for me. I was an assistant at English National Opera at the Coliseum. Staff producers, they were called in those days. But how did you land the job at Kent Opera? Because I think you were probably only 22. 23. I was 23. It was last minute. I think it had been offered to various people, The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten. I think at one point it was even offered to Harold Pinter. So I was about a goodness knows what choice down the list.

13:38I think the extremely single-minded director of Kent Opera Man called Norman Platt had heard about me on the Gravevine and he'd never seen anything I'd done. Nobody had. And he took a flyer on me. The Turn of the Screw was a real stroke of good fortune because I've never seen a bad production of it. It's almost impossible to mess that one up. The conductors that I worked with at Kent Opera and Roger Norrington and Ivan Fisher, they were a revelation. They opened my eyes to the way music worked. And then when The Turn of the Screw was on stage working, I thought, oh, I'm good, I can do this job.

14:14Which aspects of directing opera at the time influenced your later work in the theatre, particularly working with the musicals? I think I've always been torn between the flamboyantly operatic and the careful, the rational, the naturalistic. I kind of waver between the two. The extravagance that opera requires in its delivery, the necessity to make something real of a form that is not in any way a direct imitation of reality. This is exciting to me. I'm thrilled to it. And I think it usefully buoys me up, even when I'm doing something that, on the face of it, requires that kind of theatricality to be suppressed.

15:04And in the years since that work at Kent Opera, you have directed many operas, including at the Royal Opera House, at the ENO. I don't think anything, though, for the last 10 years or so. No. Why is that? Does directing opera not appeal in the same way anymore? I think, if I'm going to be honest, I'm so ashamed of how badly I speak French and Italian. I can't speak German at all. You know, so many opera singers these days have fantastic stagecraft and they all speak seven languages. And I just thought this just covers me in shame. And I think that was the main reason. The musicals that you have directed include a very successful carousel in the early 90s and more recently that very acclaimed Guys and Dolls that you put on at the Bridge Theatre.

15:51But the musical that really made your name was Miss Saigon, obviously a sort of reworking or reimagining of Puccini's Madame Butterfly as a Vietnam War love story. That ran in London, I think, for ten years. It ran on Broadway for ten years. So a very early, big commercial success for you. What did you learn from that production? I stumbled into that. Cameron McIntosh asked me to do it. I had no idea that it was going to be one of those big, long-running, hugely popular juggernauts. Had he seen opera work by you then? Because you hadn't actually done much at that time, had you? No, I think he had seen opera, yeah.

16:30He'd seen opera and he'd seen a production I did at the Chichester Festival in 1985 of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a piece of summer absurdity. It was fun. Donald Sinden, the most adorable man, playing Sir Percy Blakeney. And I kind of just let rip with it and had a lot of fun with it and threw everything I knew at that show. And actually, when I talk about being pulled between the extravagant and the subtle, Miss Saigon is at the far end of extravagance. I never quite went that far again. But boy, did he get me at the right time.

17:15Your next choice for this cultural life is working with Alan Bennett. And you sent us in advance of this recording a really extensive and detailed series of notes about each of the choices that you've come up with. Except Alan Bennett, for whom you have one line. Simply the most important creative collaboration in my life. When did you first meet Alan Bennett? That was thanks to Richard Eyre. And Richard Eyre brought me to the National Theatre as an associate in 89. The first thing I did was a new Israeli play called Ghetto by Joshua Sobol about the liquidation of the ghetto in Vilna in Lithuania during the war.

17:55after I'd done that Richard asked me what I wanted to do next and again you know ricocheting from one extreme to another I've said I'd like to do a Christmas show and I wanted to do The Wind in the Willows a favourite book when I was a kid and Richard introduced me to Alan with whom he had collaborated that in a nutshell is what good artistic directors have to do they have to risk their own personal creative relationships to nurture the creative relationships of the people they surround themselves by. So Richard kind of handed Alan over to me. He was your matchmaker. Yeah, and we got on very well.

18:32Alan adapted The Wind in the Willows. I think he was kind of stuck at the time. He doesn't really like adapting stuff and I don't think he has adapted anything since. But Wind in the Willows appealed to him. And did you get on well, creatively, straight away? Yes, we had no small talk to begin with. But the nature of the deal was, Alan said, how do I do a train? How do I do a barge, a horse? And I said, you don't need to worry about that. You write the words, I'll deal with all that. And that's kind of the deal. It still is. And that was 1990. The following year, you directed The Madness of George III, also at the National.

19:11Yeah. Had Alan Bennett already written that play or did it emerge out of the success of Wind in the Willows? I think he was liberated by Wind in the Willows. I think it unblocked him. And I'm sure Manus George III was at the back of his mind. I didn't know he was writing it. He just delivered it one day. In those days, his first drafts were enormous. They went on for a very, very long time, as if to say, find what you think is interesting in this play. So the first thing with Madison George III was to sort out from this really long collection of fantastic scenes what the thread through might be.

19:52As always with Alan, the plot is beside the point. The king gets ill, he gets better. But digging out what the play eventually became was the first job. And how do you go about doing that? Because do you suggest to him that maybe those scenes are not needed and let him go away and trim? Or could you as director take the manuscript and just red pen? Oh, he's quite keen on the red pen. He doesn't mind that at all. The example that I remember really vividly was from the History Boys, where he kind of throws down hints. It's often said that Brando used to give a new director six takes. And if the director chose the right one, he would then trust the director.

20:36I sound like saying Alan's like that. Here's a lot of stuff. If you pick out the best of this stuff, then I know I'm OK with you. Because he already instinctively knew which was the best. I think so. But in the History Boys, there was this extraordinary teacher at the centre of it, flawed, complicated, charismatic, funny. There was a series of extraordinary classroom scenes in which he entertained, galvanised, messed around, but there wasn't a scene which justified what everybody said about him, which was that he was a great teacher. So that's the kind of thing that you say as a director. We need the scene where he teaches brilliantly, and the best scene of the play came out of that little prompt.

21:20The best moments in reading are when you come across something, a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things, that you had thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand had come out and taken yours.

21:59Let's just have that last verse again and I'll let you go. There's a play about a class of sixth form students in a grammar school prepping for Oxbridge exams. Having been a Manchester grammar school boy who went to Cambridge, was it a play that particularly resonated very strongly with you? Yeah, you bet. And Alan was at Leeds Royal, I think, in the 40s. And the play set in Sheffield, in fact. The play set in Sheffield in the 80s. I was at school in Manchester in the 70s, and it was this weird hybrid of 80s, 70s and 50s. Because, yes, of course, it even looked as I remembered my sixth-form life to be.

22:39The History of Boys, I think, was once voted the nation's favourite play. Yeah. How well do you think it's aged? Well, you know, I think I'd like to test that out one day. Well, I was going to say to you, would it be possible to put on as it was now. There are elements of it which would be more troubling now than they were then, although they were pretty troubling then. You're talking specifically about the relationship between Hector, the teacher, and the boys, and the idea that he's grooming them, in effect, as well as educating them. He doesn't groom them. He does, they say... Well, he gropes them, specifically.

23:18He does grope. And it could be argued that inviting them to ride home on his moped every night is a kind of form of grooming. Yes, we would take that more seriously now. The truth is that there were eight actors in their early 20s who included people who've gone on to have enormous careers. Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett, James Corden, Russell Tovey, they were all there. None of them were alarmed by it. All of them had been 18-year-old boys who had known about kind of low-level abuse at their own schools and nobody had taken it very seriously. Quite rightly now, we do take it more seriously. But I think it's still possible to accept what we would undoubtedly correctly define as abuse now as part of a complex and sympathetic portrayal of a teacher who was very deliberately played by Richard Griffiths.

24:15One of the reasons Richard immediately occurred to me and Alan immediately said that's the one was because Richard is essentially harmless. He's unthreatening. And in fact, it was anatomically impossible for Richard Griffiths to reach behind him on a moped and grope even a knee. And I thought... What, because he was so large? Because he's large, yeah. He was large. And I think probably we all relied on how absurd it felt that Richard could be in any way dangerous. So that really wasn't an issue that you were grappling with at the time. Not at the time. And you're talking about that cast of young actors, most of whom were unknowns at the time, including Russell Tovey and James Corden and Dominic Cooper and all those people.

24:57Was there a sense, though, with that script in rehearsals of kind of immediate electricity? Because it's got so much energy in the delivery of that. Yeah, well, the energy was from them. No, I think they were a little suspicious of it. There were one or two who were absolutely on top of its vast range of reference. And there were some who really weren't. and I had to take my word for it. And for instance, there was a scene early on where they do an absurd charade in French, which they really didn't believe was funny until we put it in front of an audience. But the energy, the electricity, that was all theirs.

25:33I'm just going to backtrack quickly to the madness of George III, which was filmed as the madness of King George. I think because the American producers were worried that audiences might think they've missed the first two parts of a trilogy. how different was it directing on a film set to being on a theatre stage? Well it was the first film I ever did and I don't think I'm a born or fluent movie maker I love doing it when I get the chance and I remember Andrew Dunn, the cinematographer, saying to me you only ever make your first movie once by the time you make your second movie you'll be worried about all the things like where to put the honey wagons but just ask for whatever enters your head and they may say yes and it was a wonderful piece of advice there are things that happened during that shoot changing location in the middle of a day i wouldn't and practical stuff like that yeah i've got better at trying to think through the camera which is again it's not second nature to me but all the stuff that you find yourself worrying about when you understand how movies are made.

26:41I didn't know about that. But it was your debut. It was hugely successful. It was. Won an Oscar, in fact. Yeah, yes. I think it was probably my most successful movie. And there is maybe a lesson to be learned in the fact that it was my first and I didn't know what I was doing. Did it feel very different then? Different instincts, sort of creative instincts that you were having different creative muscles that you were flexing on a film set? Yes, I can walk into a rehearsal room and just know now that instinctively I can put something together. I can organise, and I can organise it pretty quickly.

27:13A film I really have to think very carefully about. I mean, there are several films on your CV. There's a film of the History Boys, The Lady in the Van. Yeah. I mean, do you regret not having done more or was it something you quite happily left behind? I am a theatre person and I've always loved movies. Obviously, you know, I mean... You loved watching movies? Loved watching them. Did you love making them? I find myself far more apprehensive every morning on a film set than I do walking into a rehearsal room. I loved making the movie I made a couple of years ago, Alan Bennett, again, the choral about a choral society in Yorkshire in 1916.