Partly due to having been talking a lot in NYC I have been thinking about Tim and my's job and about Artistic Directorship in general, and what exactly it means.

I have nothing much more to say right now other than how interesting a job it is, but stumbled upon this interview with Nick Hytner on the subject so thought i would post it up. I think it's rather inspiring.

Please help Tim and I, and all of us, by collecting such thoughts, articles and ideas here.

Cheers

Al





Interview with Nicholas Hytner, Director of the National


Who does what, between you and Nick Starr, in the day-to-day running of the NT?
It overlaps hugely; neither of us does anything really without involving the other. Essentially, he runs the organization and I run what goes on on the stages, but it isn't as simple as that. It would be wrong to say that I confine myself only to the repertoire – I don't. I think how we allocate our resources, exactly what we spend money on, is always an artistic decision. I think the amount of attention we give to what goes on in the foyers, what goes on outside, how the building looks at night, the amount of attention we give to our education work and our website are all artistic matters. They all stem from a sense of the artistic direction of the organization. That is ultimately my responsibility, but none of it gets decided without consultation with Nick, and to a large extent with others around us as well.

Repertoire planning: who decides on the plays and what are the factors taken into consideration?
That's easier because ultimately the buck does stop with me. Very occasionally I will take a unilateral decision because I just want to take a decision quickly. If a great play arrives from a great playwright, one of the things I try to do is make an immediate decision, and I have on occasion just said yes. The buck does stop with me but I always want my Associates' input.

Does the Board ever get involved with repertoire?
The Board never gets involved. It would be hard to point to a precise date when the Board stopped getting involved with repertoire choices, but it doesn't any more. I report to the Board what the repertoire will be, on a meeting-by-meeting basis. They always have a clear idea of what the artistic direction of the theatre will be, moving forward. If I suddenly decided there was going to be a radical shift in the direction the National Theatre was going to take – if for instance I decided the National would do no more new plays, or no more classics – then they would intervene, and they would be right to intervene. But they don't consider it to be their job to intervene in the day-to-day running of the National and that would include the choice of repertoire. But they do very much consider it their job to be overall custodians of what the National Theatre is.

Do you think about themes the rep might take, in advance?
I think there are over-arching themes. The rep should reflect the world we're part of, and it should put the society in which we live in the context of the past and, as far as we can, of the wider world. But I'm not a great fan of themed seasons. They seem to me to be of interest to journalists – it's useful to have a hook to hang what they write on. I'm not a great fan of anniversaries. I think of the National much more as dynamically reflective of the world it is part of. Year by year, we have a very strong sense of the kind of breadth the repertoire should have.

Have you made a deliberate effort to broaden the National's repertoire?
I think our repertoire is more diverse than it's ever been and I think that reflects a more diverse society and a more diverse audience. The aim, though, was not to go out and find a diverse audience but for the repertoire to reflect a greater diversity in our culture. That in its turn attracts a more diverse audience. It is our job to reach people who don't know about what we're doing but would be interested in it if they did. The job of our marketing department is not just to sell tickets but to make sure that those tax payers who would be interested if they knew about us get to know about us, and to know how easy it is to come here and how welcoming we are. In that respect it differs from a West End marketing exercise. We don't just aim to sell the tickets, we aim to make sure that everybody who would enjoy it gets the choice of whether to buy a ticket or not. So, yes there is a sense that the repertoire should be – not eclectic for its own sake, but eclectic enough to provide as wide a reflection as possible of the interests and concerns of as wide as possible an audience. That includes the selection of new plays and also the balance of new plays with old plays. I will say this in block capitals: IT'S NEVER SUCCESSFUL ENOUGH. Never. It cannot be, almost by definition. It's always possible to say that the repertoire fall short of this aspiration. I don't see how it can ever not fall short. There are always areas of experience, particular sensibilities which are not reflected in our repertoire. I suppose inevitably, it will always be reflective of my sensibility, however hard I try (and I think I do try), to make my sensibility catholic and representative and to ignore my personal blind-spots. In the end there is one Director of the National and I have to stand or fall by what mast I'm prepared to nail my colours to.

How do you commission and select new plays? You don't necessarily go to an author and say “We need a play about…”?
We sometimes do. There's a wide variety of commissions that we offer. Some of the best playwrights simply won't take a commission. They don't want one. They don't want a deadline, don't want to feel that they're obliged. Alan Bennett, for example, will never take a commission, or Michael Frayn. Sometimes we do think it would be good to address a particular topic and we'll go looking for a writer who might be interested in engaging with that. Obviously sometimes we ask for things to be adapted. But if you can't find a writer who is fired by a subject, then it's not worth going ahead. Some writers we will commission “blind”. In other words, we simply want the next play from an individual writer, and we will offer a commission which is entirely open. Sometimes a writer will come to us with an idea which we like, and we'll commission that idea. Sometimes the Studio will commission something independently.

The Studio by Night photo by Mark Douet

The Studio commission is a very, very creative part of the way the National operates. The Studio doesn't need to commission with an eye to eventual production on our stages, in fact the Studio is a resource for the whole British theatre. It's ultimately a resource for us but if the Studio commissions a very young and inexperienced writer, there will not be behind the commission the thought that that writer will write a play that we can produce. On the contrary, the Studio spends a lot of its time placing the plays that emerge under studio circumstances into smaller theatres all over the country. In the end, it's in our interest to find young writers, make sure they write, make sure their first, second, third plays get produced somewhere, because their fourth play might be something for us.

How have you set about attracting new theatre-goers to the NT? And what evidence is there for change?
Attracting new audiences is not, and should not be, an end in itself. I can't say often enough that I abhor the notion that you judge the success of a theatre by the way its audience looks. It's a regrettable downside of the perfectly laudable insistence by the funding authorities on access and diversity that we're constantly having, as it were, to market-test our audiences metaphorically on who they are, where they come from, how old they are, and who their parents were. It's a lot of nonsense. It happens inevitably, if the repertoire addresses a wide variety of concerns and we have a good marketing department that lets people know that their concerns, their communities, their lives are being reflected on our stages, different kinds of people will come. So the short answer is: first by making sure that the work appeals to a wide variety of people; secondly, by making sure that the ticket prices appeal to a wide variety of people; and thirdly, by trying to make sure that as much as possible of it is good.

How does the NT's financial planning work?
Making the budget work every year is highly creative, and as much an artistic process as it is a managerial one. Deciding where you're going to spend the money is at the heart of artistic direction. The £10 Season is a very good example – how intertwined all the reasons for having such a season were. There was a sense that the Olivier either needs extravagantly occupying by a designer, or not occupying at all. In other words, we thought we should develop a new aesthetic in the Olivier that was much more stripped back and metaphorical, and we thought we could re-attract an audience by lowering the ticket prices. We knew that one way of lowering the ticket prices was by spending less on the design elements of the shows we did during the £10 Season. All these things have an impact, so financial planning involves knowing that there are certain shows that we're going to spend more money on, which are going to have bigger casts; there are shows which can have big casts as long as they share those casts in their entirety with other shows. These are all part of the financial planning, and everything is intertwined. And yes, we spend less on Cottesloe shows – it's a smaller theatre, there are generally fewer actors in Cottesloe plays, but every now and again, probably once or twice a year, a big show gets done in the Cottesloe because it's worth doing.

How quickly can/should the National Theatre respond to changes in arts policy (funding, censorship), and to new trends or developments?
It has to adapt to funding decisions and it does. We've been lucky in recent years and if we start to get less lucky, we will adapt. The point about the theatre is, it's not journalism, it's not the BBC. Its job is not to report. It's not imperative that every year on our stages we should be responding to this year's or last year's events. I'm much more interested in a National Theatre that provides stimulus and a platform for major artists to write, direct and act more confidently because we are here to give them space to spread their wings. That's more interesting to me than that we should have a line on housing policy, for instance. I do, at the same time, hope that the artists who work here live in the real world and know that our highest aspiration is to reflect that world back to itself, always in the context of the way the great theatre artists of the past have reflected their world back. So, as often as possible, I personally try to make it clear to those who I know are responsive to the world around us that I'm interested in what they have to say.

What are your personal hopes for the NT over the next ten years, and what do you hope will be your legacy to the National Theatre?
There are so many hopes. I hope that my legacy will be new generations of writers, actors, directors, designers, musicians and audiences, who are all of them confident and all of them committed to the large-scale public events on which we thrive. We are different from other theatres in scale. I think because we're different in scale, honestly, we're different in impact. I think that hunger to work on a large scale, and to experience in a large scale, was abating and I hope that I can bring that back, red-bloodedly. But at the same time as talking about the new generations, I do think of it as my responsibility to maintain what's there and to make sure that the high standards and the excitement that I have inherited from all my predecessors as Director are maintained: that the great actors continue to act here, the great plays continue to get performed here, and performed well. As with all great cultural institutions, it's partly maintenance, partly renewal. I hope that my legacy is, to a certain degree, healthy enough to be maintained, and to a certain degree by the time I leave, outmoded enough to be rebelled against, because I think that has to happen every time.

What books have you most enjoyed recently?
James Shapiro's 1599; Alan Bennett's Untold Stories; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; Diarmid McCulloch's Reformation; Meredith Daneman's biography of Margot Fonteyn; Julian Barnes' Arthur and George…

What music do you listen to in your car?
Radio 3.

What would your advice be to someone who wants to direct plays?
See as much as you can. Take whatever jobs are available, to begin with. And practise ruthless self-criticism: try and get the actors, writers and designers you work with to be honest with you about when you're helpful and when you're not.

What was your biggest influence when you were at school/university?
A charismatic schoolmaster called Brian Phythian. Parents who took me to lots – theatre and music. Weekly Halle Orchestra concerts at the Free Trade Hall, conducted by John Barbirolli. Twice-yearly visits to Stratford. When I was at university, discovering European cinema – all the obvious stuff, the big names of 60s and 70s European art cinema: Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Visconti.

If you could choose any play or film to direct, free of budget, time or any other constraints, what would it be?
You see those choices on stage at the National Theatre, because that is the biggest perk of my job.