Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre: Ten years and a million cheap tickets

The director of Britain’s most important theatre on taking risks and finding hits

‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh to direct the musical Miss Saigon. ‘It just felt like a huge lark,’ he said at the time. The show ran for ten years in the West End and on Broadway and the royalties enabled him ‘to do what I wanted to do thereafter. It was a massive stroke of good fortune.’ Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship of the National Theatre. Hytner grew up in a prosperous south Manchester family and his fascination with music and drama asserted itself in early boyhood. Aged nine, he had a season ticket to the local concert hall. And he kept a model theatre in his bedroom where he moved a toy figure of Laurence Olivier around the stage. As an adult he would run the theatre Olivier founded.

In 2003 he took over from Trevor Nunn, whose reign had produced a lot of hits and a lot of problems too. Staff morale was low. There were whispers about Nunn’s autocratic style. Worst of all, no one was turning up to watch shows. Poor attendances had plagued the NT for years. In 1994, The Seagull, starring Judi Dench, played to just 63 per cent capacity. When Hytner himself directed The Winter’s Tale in 2001, he failed even to match that modest target. Unfilled seats drain a theatre of energy. Actors hate going on stage and performing in an echo chamber. Audiences are quick to detect low spirits in the dressing-room and the word spreads. Despair is self-reinforcing. It then becomes impossible even to give free tickets away to drama students and friends of the company. In commercial terms, a vacant venue is the black spot.

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