Nicholas Hytner: Denationalised

At the end of his last public platform on Friday, the house rose in unanimous ovation, like a pot coming to the boil. At the centre of the great Olivier Theatre revolving stage, the slight figure hesitated for a moment, framed by the night sky and towering ship’s timbers of the Treasure Island set. He smiled his thanks and made his exit, stage right, against the starlight. After 12 remarkable years, Nick Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre, was saying goodbye.

Later, at the party for colleagues and friends in the vast scenery dock, the staff had laboured to dangle significant props and set up frames with cutouts of the director’s elfin features for innumerable jokey “selfies”. Actor Alex Jennings celebrated their 35-year working relationship and Frances de la Tour improbably cried: “He is my husband!” ...

At Friday’s party the man himself spoke last, from a heart that seemed very close to the surface. He talked of how the job had educated him, freed his spirit and offered the rare power to take artistic risks and “just say – Do It!” to innovators restlessly looking for new ways to create and stage truth, tales and entertainments.

He told how, at the NT’s 50th birthday gala, he longed to dash backstage and sit awhile in the green room with actors: a dizzying assembly of legends and fresh stars who spanned the half century. But he lost his pass, borrowed one that didn’t work, and vainly bashed the security door with such frustration that he broke the glass. “I am,” he said, “just a fan like anyone else… and I was locked out." ...

Telegraph.

Nicholas Hytner: By Alan Bennett

Some thoughts:

His rehearsals are sometimes lessons; they are never lectures.

He has no sense of entitlement. As director of the National Theatre he has found himself drafted on to prestigious committees and in quite august company. He doesn’t take this as his due but is delighted by it.

He likes risk and is always up for it. The dodgiest parts of my stuff – the talking furniture in The Habit of Art, the porn scene in People – are what gets him going.

He delights in spectacle and is not afraid of being popular. I’m not sure if I said this or someone else (I hope a well-wisher) but there is in his character an iron streak of tinsel.

And he gives lovely parties. ...

From The Guardian - from the National Theatre programme for Man And Superman.

Mr Hytner has now left the National...

In Conversation: Alan Bennett And Nicholas Hytner

Enjoy!

Daily Mail: A National Disgrace

Sir Nicholas Hytner will soon finish his stint running the Royal National Theatre. One of his parting gifts to us is John, a dance-influenced production about unprotected sex in gay saunas.

How brave! How enlightened! Perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a seamy, sorry exercise, shorn of morals, commissioned in a moment of silliness by an artistic director who, for all the hyped indulgence and baubles he has received from the Establishment and the London Evening Standard, has had an erratic tenure...

It starts with clever depictions of the disruptive upbringing of a man called John and his sexually violent father. After about 15 minutes of this impressive if explicit material we switch to a gay sauna full of men showing us their whatnots, in at least one case semi-erect

For the next hour, sauna sex is everything. We are told of an orgy of 15 men. We see two blokes seemingly pleasuring themselves. There is a ballet of buggery, an offstage gay rape, endless talk about what complete strangers get up to in saunas. One charming scene is devoted to the amount of excrement left in saunas after a busy night. You taxpayers are helping to fund this...

Having written in support of gay rights since the late Nineties, I hope I can say without being accused of homophobia that John is, despite the artfulness of its performers, a disgrace.

Not that Sir Nicholas will mind. He will rub his little millionaire, State-enriched hands in glee at having created controversy. He has his knighthood already. There is even talk that he will soon be sent to the House of Lords, there to moralise and legislate over us.

This, folks, is the state of art and politics in 21st- century Britain.

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail.

Queeny Quentin's really got her knickers in a twist about this. 

Textbook stuff.

And how ironic that his 'review' will sell a shedload of tickets.

The History Boys: The Nation's Favourite Play

Alan Bennett's The History Boys has been named the nation's favourite play.

The poll, commissioned by the English Touring Theatre to mark its 21st anniversary, asked people to vote for their favourite English language play.

Michael Frayn's farce within a farce, Noises Off, came second, followed by Shakespeare's Hamlet - one of four Shakespeare plays in the top 10.

The History Boys, first staged at the National Theatre in 2004, made stars of James Corden and Dominic Cooper.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, and featuring Richard Griffiths in a lead role, it was adapted into a hit film in 2006.

Winning both Laurence Olivier and Tony Awards, the play follows a group of pupils at a northern grammar school as they prepare for their Oxbridge exams under the guidance of three eclectic teachers.

More than 7,000 theatregoers voted in the online poll, open to people in the UK and abroad...

BBC News.

Not bad for a play about schoolboys' suppressed sexuality and with an old pederast as its lead character.
Well done Mr Bennett!

Alan Bennett: Bicycle Repairman!

She makes another faux pas with Alan Bennett, being under the impression that he’s a regular in Coronation Street. But they soon put this little awkwardness behind them and move on to a happier footing.
In many ways Bennett is the hero of Nina’s letters, mainly because he turns out to have an unexpectedly practical side.
Unimpressed: Alan Bates as Guy Burgess in Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad
Far from being the bumbling, unworldly figure that you might imagine, Bennett is quite undaunted by any piece of malfunctioning machinery. At one point Wilmers is bothered by a humming fridge. Bennett instantly repairs it. Then the washing machine goes on the blink. Bennett repairs that too.
‘AB suggested it was something to do with the water not heating up to the target temperature and therefore not moving on to the next part of the cycle.’
This, though, is nothing compared to Alan Bennett, bicycle-repairman. ‘AB is brilliant and just as long as you give him prior warning, he’ll get the bike upside down in the hall before supper. He seems to like it.’
One of the things that gives these letters such charm is that Stibbe is utterly unimpressed by anyone’s reputation. She’s not even a fan of Bennett’s work.
‘Everyone’s raving about An Englishman Abroad,’ she writes - Bennett’s television play about the spy, Guy Burgess. ‘To be honest, I didn’t think much to it.’
She’s much more in awe of his way with a washing machine. ‘It’s amazing how much AB knows about appliances (when you consider that he’s a writer and probably just writes all day).’

From a Daily Mail review of Love Nina: A Nanny Writes Home, by Nina Stibbe, former au pair to Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books.

A fascinating insight into the great man, which sheds new light on his work, I'm sure you'll agree.

Fagburn notes that Mr Bennett has not written a diary or anything for the LRB for almost exactly ten months.
What gives, Dame Alana B?

PS Oops! Missed this one; Alan Bennett writes for The Observer, What The National Theatre Means To Me.

Nicholas Hytner: Exit Stage Left

“It’s been a joy and a privilege to lead the National Theatre for ten years and I’m looking forward to the next two. I have the most exciting and most fulfilling job in the English-speaking theatre; and after twelve years it will be time to give someone else a turn to enjoy the company of my stupendous colleagues, who together make the National what it is.” 

Nicholas Hytner announcing that he will step down as director of the National Theatre in 2015. 
Dominic Cavendish on his "great transformation".
And more - deservedly - fulsome praise from Michael Billington in The Guardian. 

Breaking: Many People Working In The Theatre Are Gay Shock!

'I was caught napping yesterday when the announcement came about the RSC’s appointment of a new artistic director — literally. I’d been up since 5.30am (my usual waking time, as it happens) and had already met three deadlines by 9am, so I did something I very rarely allow myself to do: I went back to bed [Yeah, whatever - Get on with it, love].
'By the time I woke up again around 11.22am, saw the press release and tweeted it (hence the precision with which I know what time I woke up!), the RSC was already trending on Twitter: that says something about the viral strength of Twitter as a medium for spreading news. [Gregory] Doran, of course, was the main rival to Michael Boyd getting the job last time around; and it is greatly to the credit both of Boyd in appointing him Chief Associate Director instead, and to Doran himself in staying on undaunted by the disappointment, that his turn has come now.

'His loyalty and determination have obviously finally paid off, and the top job is now his; he’s both a safe pair of hands and has truly earned it. And it coincidentally means that both of our major national theatre companies are now run by out gay men; at the National, the two Nicks (Hytner and executive director Starr) and now Doran, who is famously partnered to RSC/National leading actor Antony Sher, are amongst a wave of gay men in charge of some of the most successful venues in the country. (Doran and Sher were one of the first couples to get civil partnered back in 2005 when the legislation allowing it first became law).
'Elsewhere, of course, there was Michael Grandage, until recently at the helm of the Donmar (whose partner is Christopher Oram, who designs many of his productions); and there is also Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court; Daniel Evans at Sheffield’s Crucible; Kerry Michael at Stratford East and Timothy Sheader at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, to name a few.
'Of course, their sexuality is secondary to their talent, and should be as unremarkable a fact of their lives as their hair colour (or even skin colour, though as I recently wrote here, that’s sometimes a remarkable fact, too, in an industry still dominated by white artistic directors). Even so, not all artistic directors are living as openly, and it’s sad that this list cannot be comprehensive.'

The Stage. 
And on that bombshell...

Alan Bennett: A National Treasure?

There is a profile of Alan Bennett in The Sunday Times titled The National's Treasure.
It's a double-ended pun as the feature's written by Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, who's directed seven of Bennett's plays.
The two men discuss their working relationship in Alan Bennett and The Habit of Art on More4 on Saturday.
Profiles of Alan Bennett seem dutybound to describe him as "a national treasure" these days - a cliche quite freely applied to other people.
"It's a funny bit of cookery," Peter York told The Guardian last year. "You need durability, you need to be fairly mature [he thinks 50 and above is about right] and you need to have a basic craft or skill."
According to The Guardian, York thinks the real national treasures are fairly mid-market performers who have been around for so long you feel they must have hidden depths ("June Whitfield, for instance") and those, such as Judi Dench and David Attenborough, "who have always been at the top of their game and you're just glad they're there. 'Don't die yet!' That's what that's about."
The Observer today is asking readers; "Help us find Britain's National Treasures".
"What connects union firebrand Arthur Scargill, maverick musician Mark E Smith and comedy actress June Whitfield..."
I bet Alan Bennett wins that one, he's one of those gay men the nation seems to treasure.
Elton John gets called a national treasure a lot, often with the explainer that he's "the Queen Mum of Pop", which I think may mean we're all suposed to like him.
And much of the recent hooha about Stephen Fry was arguably because a "national treasure" like him isn't supposed to touch on tricky topics - a bit like the Queen talking about politics.
Which you could argue it was.
Alan Bennett has said he hates his national treasure status.
Which seems to be confirmed in the Sunday Times piece.
'He pleads with those who talk about him to the press to blow his cover,' writes Hytner. '“Tell them I’m a cunt, love.”'