The National Theatre Story by Daniel Rosenthal – review

In 1976, as the National Theatre moved into its new home on London’s South Bank, its literary manager Kenneth Tynan observed: ‘It’s taken 123 years to get here: 60 of Victorian idealism, half a century of dithering, and a final 13 years in the planning and building.’

Today, still under Nick Hytner’s dynamic and broad-church directorship, the National is in rude health both artistically and economically. But as Daniel Rosenthal makes clear in this magnificently detailed history, published to mark the theatre’s first half-century, the journey has been a supremely hazardous and contentious one.

Right from its Victorian beginnings, the idea of a state-subsided theatre was met with indifference, cynicism and hostility, not least from West End theatre managers and actors: Charles Wyndham called it ‘alien to the spirit of our nation’, while Seymour Hicks wondered ‘if there are really half a dozen people insane enough to think it will ever come into existence’. Even as late as 1961 John Osborne, fearing ‘some kind of awful museum’, declared: ‘If it is ever built I only hope someone sets fire to it.’

Yet the first detailed blueprint for the creation, organisation and management of such a theatre, provided in 1904 by Harley Granville Barker and William Archer, gradually gained support — though only after decades of committee wrangling, continual changes of site and government reluctance to fund it. And when Denys Lasdun’s brutalist concrete building finally rose up by the Thames, it attracted massive public opprobrium; in one poll it was voted the worst building in Britain.

Rosenthal has had full and unfettered access to the National’s extensive archive of letters, memos and board papers, and has interviewed 100 actors, directors, playwrights and administrators over a period of ten years. The result is a full and fascinating account of the contrasting regimes of the theatre’s first five directors: Laurence Olivier, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas  Hytner.