Nick and Nina take the spotlight
I’ve just seen two virtuoso solo turns: today, Nick Hytner announced that the NT would broadcast “live” performances by satellite into cinemas around the country and abroad (America, Canada, probably Scandinavia, possibly Australia) starting with his own production of Racine’s Phedre starring Helen Mirren on 25 June.
And this news wasn’t even contained in the printed Press release for yesterday’s meeting with the media.
Cool as a cucumber, and unfazed by a gang of schoolboys pulling faces and yah-booing through the windows of the “cathedral” Olivier foyer, Hytner dropped his bombshell while simultaneously confirming the new Alan Bennett play about W H Auden and Benjamin Britten (Bennett has given Hytner two titles and the director prefers the first but hasn’t yet told the author) and Mark Ravenhill’s adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s new desert island novel Nation.
And last night, hot on the heels of the sensational performance of Adrian Schiller in the Ian Dury celebration at the Leicester Square Theatre, I caught Nina Conti with her hand up her monkey in the basement venue of the Barcode club in Archer Street.
There are times when the simian features and cold stare of Nick Hytner give him a rather forbidding, steely appearance. He always looks like someone about to say something either witty or cruel, possibly both.
But he’s grown into his own public persona with amazing ease over the years. He never dodges a question and always has an answer. And when he can’t think what to say, he says, “I can’t think what to say.”
He sees no sign of the recession on his own patch. Sponsorship levels are higher than ever, attendances over the past six months have been 93% overall, everything’s fine, nothing’s a problem. He doesn’t even understand why there’s 40 per cent advance booking for his own production of Richard Bean’s new play about racism and immigration, England People Very Nice.
This confidence and impregnable belief in the value of the NT and its constituency is both impressive and scary. If he ever wakes up in the middle of the night worrying about anything, you couldn’t tell.
And what on earth could ever upset Nina Conti? Her half hour set in the Barcode last night was one of the funniest vent acts I’ve ever seen, especially when she was hypnotised by her own puppet monkey who then sang Nessun Dorma while she spaced out on another level.
The poor little chap tells Nina towards the end of the act that he can no longer tell his own arse from her elbow. I wondered where I’d seen those unflinching eyes, that prominent forehead and car-door ears before.
And then it dawned on me: Nick is Nina’s other monkey, and he can now conduct his Press conferences without her even being there, let alone taking her pleasant prompts or being animated by her rectally inquisitive digits.