Steve Capra’s Interview with Nicholas Hytner, Director of The National Theatre
July eighth, 2008

Sir Nicholas Hytner became Director of the National Theatre in London in 2003. He had previously been Associate Director of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre. He was knighted in the 2008 New Years Honours List for services to drama. Steve Capra met him at the National Theatre in London.

SC: There used to be a lot of talk in the States about how you had a national theatre here in the UK and we didn’t in the US. What does it mean to be a “national theatre”? Is it more than a name?

NH: I think it means something different in every country that has one. We are the johnny-come-lately of national theatres. It was long in coming, and I think that’s largely to our advantage.

We were certainly conceived on the model of a Continental national theatre, but right from the beginning, when the idea was first mooted by the playwright Harley Granville Barker and the critic William Archer at the end of the 19^th century, the notion was that it would not be a theatre for the cultural elite but a genuine part of the social and intellectual life of London, and genuinely popular. And in that respect, it is specifically in the English tradition.

The English theatre has never been a court theatre – it was conceived as a popular theatre. The German and French theatres, by contrast, were court theatres at their inception. We look to the French and German theatres for a kind of institutional model, but we bring to them a determination to be public and to reflect here, on the South Bank, what the theatre did on the South Bank at the end of the 16^th, beginning of the 17th century – to have widespread appeal, to play for everybody, to challenge as well as reflect, to be vaguely disreputable. It’s very important it’s on the South Bank. The Elizabethan theatres were on the South Bank because the city fathers wouldn’t have them in the city.

You’ll notice I use “English” and “British” interchangeably. That is one of the most fluid and least defined aspects of our national theatre.  Are we the British National Theatre? Are we the English National Theatre? There is now a Scottish National Theatre, which nevertheless doesn’t seem to me to suggest that we have no responsibility north of the border.

SC: Then you see English culture as one culture and you have no concern – or fear – of being local. After all, most people in the UK can’t get here easily.

NH: Well, geographical ubiquity is impossible anyway. It’s what gets on the stages that makes it national – not how widely we travel geographically.

Much more interesting than how far we travel is what we think national means, generation to generation. It means something completely different now than what it did in 1963, when The National Theatre became a reality. Both what national meant and what theatre meant would have gone more or less unchallenged in ’63. There are much more contentious – creatively contentious – ideas now. The country has changed completely. London, as a crucible for the rest of the country, has changed completely. In 1963, you might have been able to reflect back a nation that was much more homogenous, and a theatre that was much more agreed on being part of a grand, literary tradition. You can do neither now – and that’s greatly to our advantage.

SC: Is it necessary then to take a political position?
NH: I think it’s necessary to be politically involved. I don’t think it’s necessary to have any explicitly stated political program. I think it’s necessary to be politically skeptical.

SC: Well, if you’re a popular theatre – doesn’t that imply a political position?
NH: There are things that theatre can do in the political realm that are specific to the theatre. That’s what we need to do. Anybody can take a political position – that seems to me to be a fairly narrow furrow for a theatre to plow. We want to engage an audience in a fully humanized, fully ambiguous, fully imagined examination of a political situation in its widest sense. It’s not our job to look at what’s exercising Parliament and perform plays on those issues. It’s not an issue theatre. But if there is something of burning public interest that feels like it might be illuminated by what the theatre can do, then it’s necessary for us to get involved.

That can take many, many forms. Most obviously in recent years, when this country and yours were involved in fighting a war in Iraq which was extremely contentious, we were able, by producing Henry V, to use a play to reflect light on a current situation in way that was not obvious and in no way unambiguous. By taking a play written in 1599 about a war of dubious legitimacy, we were able to create a dialogue with a war that was happening 400 years later. That’s interesting! That’s theatrical!

At the same time, we commissioned from David Hare a play that was specifically about the build-up to the Iraq war. He made no effort to conceal that he thought the war was a terrible mistake. But the play itself was much less concerned with arguing a political position than it was in examining, in all its human ambiguity, the situation and the people who found themselves maneuvered into – and maneuvering each other into – a series of events that had terrible human consequences. It’s the unpredictable, unanalyzable emotional undertow of great social issues that comes alive on the stage.

It’s an establishment cliché that audiences come together to be told what they think already. I’m not sure audiences come together to be told what to think, or even to worry about what to think. I think audiences come together to explore emotionally, at a level beyond rational political analysis, what it feels like to be collectively human and caught up in events which appear to be beyond individual control. That’s what the theatre does. That’s what makes it public.

SC: Not to be skeptical, but does it have an effect, in terms of votes?

NH: I don’t think it’s remotely part of our business to be telling people how to vote! We’re not politicians! I don’t think that is the way in which art gets politically involved. I don’t think anyone writes a novel to tell people how to vote. A presidential candidate might write an autobiography hoping that he might solicit people’s votes, but nobody’s writing a play in order to solicit a vote. That’s not what art does.

SC: In light of the fact that there are film and television, can theatre have the influence – whether political or personal – that it had for Ibsen’s audience?

NH: Well, I think it can. It is precisely because theatre is live and real, and because it involves real human interaction that it can continue to have what you call influence – what I might call a profound effect.

There’s something irreplaceable about the genuine interaction in real space and real time between a person on a stage and people in an audience. In Norway, in the 19^th century, there was little else available in the way of mass entertainment, so those who went to the theatre must have received it in a context different from those who go now. But I can’t imagine that any more people went then than go now. Still people go – still people see the plays of Ibsen. Nowadays they were successful – then they weren’t.

SC: I’m interested in the way theatre reflects its own nation, while on the other hand Miss Saigon and History Boys, for example, have been so successful outside of the country. What am I to make of that – that the great musical hits of the post 20 years have been international? It concerns me that it’s theatre that’s no longer reflecting a specific culture.

NH: Well, we couldn’t have this conversation in France. They wouldn’t know what you were talking about, because a French playwright, a French theatre director, would assume  – I’m going to generalize but, there’s more than a grain of truth in this generalization – would assume that the stage is an arena for reflecting the interior world of the  playwright, the essentially literary imagination of the playwright. There isn’t really a public theatre in France. You speak to French theatre people, and they’re either envious or, occasionally, contemptuous of a theatre that is as socially engaged as the British theatre effortlessly is.

You bring up History Boys, which turned out to been enormously popular play because it struck chords elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But was it socially engaged? Yes, it was fantastically socially engaged! Why was it successful? Because it was the product of a humane literary and theatrical imagination. It was popular because it put on stage a group of people with whom an audience were very, very happy to spend two-and-half hours.

But it was a terrific play not just for those reasons, but because it was urgently concerned with our relationship to our past, with the meaning and uses of literature, and with the purpose of education. It was written by an English playwright who is never particularly concerned with whom he’s addressing – who always assumed there are people who want to listen, but who had no idea that what he was writing would be vibrant for audiences outside of this country. It was a quintessentially National Theatre play in that it was popular and entertaining, and  its concerns were, in a very broad and profound sense, deeply political.

SC: That’s encouraging, because I worry about theatre losing its definition specific to a country. You’ve said for example – I think it was in a BBC special, that Brecht and Beckett influenced world theatre.

NH: One conversation that we hold less successfully than Olivier did is a conversation with the contemporary theatres of our continental neighbors. That is a very interesting conundrum! It’s because our theatres have travelled off in such different directions. The plays that come out of the contemporary German, French, Italian, Spanish theatre travel much less successfully than they used to. It might encourage you that despite of, or maybe because of globalization and The European Community, there is no pan-European theatre culture. Or if there is, we are really on the outside of it.

We have much better dialogue between our theatre and other English-speaking theatres. Our dialogue with the Irish theatre and the American theatre has always been extremely fruitful and extremely interesting. It would be fair to say the American theatre and the Irish theatre keep in touch with us and each other and the same way that we do – always have! Always have!

SC: Without loosing their sense of identity.

NH: We’re gonna take the Steppenwolf production of August: Osage County. That’s an essential part of a continuing theatre exploration. We can’t put up walls and say “We’re only going to show you English theatre!” We’d stop knowing what it was to be English!

What you look for is what’s the same and what’s different. That’s why you go to the past – what’s changed, what hasn’t changed. You put on Henry V, and you find out that there are some aspects of Tudor and medieval warfare and diplomacy that are entirely remote, and some which are completely unchanged. The way men and woman fought for each other was the same 25 hundred years ago – the gods they believed in, completely different – the food they ate, completely different – the fact that they got hungry, the same.

You mustn’t confuse a genuine dialogue between individual national cultures with specifically-created global product – which I’m not gonna knock! I’m not gonna knock the Pixar animated films! I watched that last Pixar film, Ratatouille, and I think that is as good as movie gets. It’s a brilliantly confected piece of global entertainment! But does it have more or less value than something from Spike Lee? No. It’s just that they’re looking for something different.

SC: Can we talk about the specifics of directing for a minute? How do you manage to approach Twelfth Night and Miss Saigon and History Boys and be so successful in all of them? It would seem that the whole premise of something technical, like blocking, would have to be different.

NH: Well, no, I think that the basics are the same. Truthful acting is truthful acting – a story’s a story. How you stage a show, how you block a show, how you create a world… How you make sure that things ebb and flow, that you provide an audience what it needs in order to make up its mind how it’s gonna get involved. Those actually are the same.

SC: But when you block to reveal the psychology of the characters in History Boys, certainly that’s not the same as blocking, creating a stage picture, in Miss Saigon to make us enjoy spectacle.

NH: No, but there’s an element of spectacle in History Boys as well.

I’m not going to say History Boys is the best play I’ve ever directed, but it’s my favorite of recent years. It involved, as directing always does, an element of teaching, because I was working with a lot of quite young actors. It involved the processes that all directors go through, which attempts to unlock a text and to find a way of making it, on the one hand, spontaneous, and, on the other hand, delivered in such a way as to include an audience in its literary richness. That process is not dissimilar from the kind of process you would go through if you were directing The Importance of Being Ernest or The Man of Mode, or indeed, Twelfth Night. It’s something which those who work firmly in the English literary tradition – or the Irish literary tradition, or the American literary tradition – are no stranger to.

But The History Boys also involved some very specific technical challenges. The very first thing I thought when I read that play was “Hang on a minute! This is a series of seminars! This is a series of lessons! How am I gonna keep that theatrically alive?” The next technical challenge was that it’s not a series of classroom scenes – there are other scenes too. There was the purely scenic challenge of seamlessly getting from one place to the next. The answer to that was those video scene changes. They gave to the play an impression of much greater movement than it would otherwise have had, and they covered scene changes which would otherwise have been very boring. And, more important, they expanded and defined the world of the play. Those totally nuts-and-bolts technical things are the same whatever you’re doing.

 I am very conscious – I think you are inevitably conscious – of where any play fits within a theatrical tradition. I find myself most useful, honestly, with plays that require both a certain degree of spatial expansiveness and a degree of literary extravagance.

SC: Those of us who work off-off Broadway in New York, doing bold theatre, progressive theatre, political theatre – we have no connection with Broadway or The West End, or even regional theatre. How can we hope to fit into that? Is there any hope of assimilating our work into the larger theatrical consciousness?

NH: From my observation, it’s hard to be part of a serious American theatre. There are plenty of British groups like yours out in our streets at the moment thinking “How the fuck do we get ourselves noticed by The National Theatre?” There is no institutional reason why not. There is no endemic reason why not. Over the last five years, the number of artists that we’ve engaged with – who, because of the taste of my predecessors, would not necessarily have found themselves in the National Theatre before – is high. Some of them have been theatrically out of the mainstream, some of it has been politically out of the mainstream, but there is no institutional reason, no economic reason, why you can’t come and play The National Theatre.

You’ll never play Broadway because all those people who come, spend two nights at the Marriot and eat in the restaurants, are not gonna come see your show. Does that say anything about your show? No – all it says it that you can’t get 250,000 people to pay 120 dollars to come see it. Why do you care?

SC: Well, I’d like Broadway to be more challenging. I'd like Broadway to affect on society.

NH: You’re wanting the wrong thing. What you’re gonna want is some shift of perspective in the American theatre that puts Broadway where it should be. Those who produce in The West End have a harder job than I do, but West End is neither the seal of quality nor a mark of influence or importance. Not at all! It’s just there, as part of the wider ecology.

I fear that those whose business is Broadway have a vested interest not only in being economically productive, not only in being a branch of the PT Barnum entertainment industry, but also in proclaiming their own creative and theatrical importance, It is so interesting to talk to our Chicago colleagues for whom that doesn’t register. If you’re making theatre in Chicago, what happens to be making money on Broadway is of much less interest than it is to someone who’s making theatre in New York.

It’s not so much what Broadway is but what Broadway stands for. Broadway’s terrific! It’s glitzy! It’s exciting! We love it when our shows go to Broadway. But for us, it’s… What did it say about The History Boys that it played Broadway and made a profit? Just that it was very surprising that that play which seemed so parochially English turned out to have wide international appeal. It was great that the National Theatre made a bit of money out of it, but did it make it important to us? No. No, what made it important was that we thought it was a good play.

Maybe it’s just that we’re terrible snobs here. Far more people go see Dirty Dancing at the Aldwych than will see the show that Katie Mitchell’s just about to bring into the Cottesloe, …some trace of her, which is right out on a theatrical limb – a weird meditation on Dostoyevsky’s Idiot. Far, far more people will see Dirty Dancing. Does anybody here worry about that? Not for a second! Are we being snobbish about the coachloads who go see Dirty Dancing? Have I any objection to the fact that the coachloads prefer to see Dirty Dancing? No! Would I even suggest to those people that they might be better off seeing Katie Mitchell’s meditation on Dostoyevsky’s Idiot? No! They’re probably having a better time at Dirty Dancing! Good for them!