How to run the National Theatre

Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre. By Nicholas Hytner. Jonathan Cape; 314 pages; £20. To be published in America by Knopf in November.

THEATRE directors are often judged to be gushing and self-important. Sir Nicholas Hytner is an exception. “Balancing Acts”, his memoir of his tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre (NT) between 2003 and 2015, is a masterclass in creative leadership. It is as instructive about the challenges and compromises of running a large organisation as it is about the process of putting on plays that change lives.

The NT was founded in 1963 under Laurence Olivier. When Sir Nicholas took over the organisation, which comprises three auditoriums of differing sizes, it had a reputation for unadventurous repertoire, pricey tickets and an ageing and conservative audience. Public funding accounted for 40% of its annual income of £37m ($47.8m). He was determined to discern what a national theatre should be and for whom; he had no interest in keeping it for an exclusive club. Among other considerations—balancing old plays and new, serious and irreverent, plays that look out as well as in—he wanted to expand audiences and give everyone a “really good time”.

By the time he left, Sir Nicholas had overseen the staging of 100 plays and established many of the features that people now take for granted, among them cheap tickets and live-cinema relays. He had also helped to produce some of modern theatre’s triumphs: “War Horse”, “One Man, Two Guvnors”, “The History Boys”, “His Dark Materials” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. Annual turnover in 2015 had climbed to £117m, of which just 15% came from the public purse.

Sir Nicholas’s prose is crisp and convincing, like his direction. He is candid about his limitations. (The NT produced few turkeys on his watch, but he answers for the ones it did.) Writing with unsentimental honesty, he ascribes to his many collaborators on the South Bank a brilliance that he denies himself. If much of the success of the NT under his directorship “is the result of grand larceny”, he writes, “I stole from the best.” His praise for actors is precise and specific. He offers insights into the technique and working practice of many cast members. He admires Ralph Fiennes for his “speed of thought, his vocal penetration and his ability to work through the text to an underlying emotional truth”. Dame Helen Mirren knows “when to allow laughter as an escape valve”. The result is an evocation of backstage life that is as engrossing as it is entertaining. If you happened to see the productions in question, they are vividly resurrected by the revelations of how they were put together. If you missed them, the regret is all the keener.

As a director, Sir Nicholas likes to begin with the text, but he soon encourages his actors to get up on their feet and physically inhabit a play. “I don’t like a rehearsal studio to feel like a seminar room,” he insists. The fifth artistic director of the NT, he was the fourth to study English at Cambridge University (only Olivier managed without). For the most part, he wears his considerable intelligence lightly. His descriptions of developing new work with Alan Bennett, Sir David Hare, Sir Tom Stoppard and Mike Leigh are incisive. Of Mr Bennett, he says: “I sometimes think that he deliberately buries clues in his first drafts. The director has to sniff out the good stuff, like a pig hunting truffles.” Only when recalling his terrific 2013 production of “Othello” does he lose his balance, indulging in a longish episode of over-satisfied literary criticism which, even if it did arise from an actor’s observation in the rehearsal room, feels out of place. Elsewhere the memoir is leavened with waspish wit: Sir Nicholas’s ear for comedy is as sharply attuned for the page as the stage.

Britain sits somewhere in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to public subsidies for the arts. If it does not have the generous private philanthropic culture and tax incentives that exist in America, it is not continental Europe either, where theatres are often still financed almost entirely by governments and can get away with scorn for public taste. Along with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera House, the NT is one of Britain’s most prominent centrally funded arts organisations. Sir Nicholas, who has also been successful on Broadway and on film, never loses sight of the responsibility that comes with accepting several million pounds of public cash.

Nor does he let people forget what becomes possible with it. “If the enemies of arts subsidy had seen two actors walking in a circle with cardboard boxes on their heads pretending to be horses at the taxpayer’s expense,” he recalls of an early workshop of “War Horse”, “they would have had a field day.” It is inconceivable that a commercial producer would have taken a risk on “War Horse” and the puppets that were used to bring to life Michael Morpurgo’s children’s classic about the first world war. But after the play opened in 2007 it went on to run in the West End for seven years and then in New York, Toronto, Berlin, Amsterdam, Beijing, Cape Town and beyond, and also toured across America and Australia. It won five Tony awards and, by the time it closed in London last year, had played to more than 7m people. It also returned more than £30m to the NT’s coffers.

A new British tour begins in the autumn, but Sir Nicholas will probably be too busy to catch it. His next project will be a 900-seat playhouse, along the Thames from the NT, which opens in October and will be the first big new commercial theatre to open in London since the 1930s. Its inaugural season looks irresistible. At 60, he appears to be merely getting started. “What’s past”, as Antonio says in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, “is prologue.”