Hytner apologises for Courage failure
One of the refreshing things about Nicholas Hytner is that he never beats about the bush or ducks a question. At yesterday’s Press gathering to launch the National’s annual report, he offered no excuses for the delayed opening of Mother Courage.
“It took longer to get ready than it should have, and that’s bad and it’s wrong,” he said of Deborah Warner’s troubled production, which finally opens to the critics on Friday night.
Why did it fail to make its first preview, one wonders, when Deborah is so experienced at working in the Olivier? “She didn’t work quickly enough,” said Hytner, with chilling precision. “But in the end we bear the responsibility.”
He also confirmed that he had won the battle of the titles with Alan Bennett, who wanted to call his new play about W H Auden and Benjamin Britten (and a rent boy), which Hytner is directing, Caliban’s Day.
Instead, Hytner’s title The Habit of Art is the one which stuck, although Hytner conceded in a burst of giggles that Bennett always has the last word, as he’s sneaked his own title into the introduction of his soon-to-be-published text of the play.
We learned elsewhere yesterday morning that Michael Gambon — a rare interviewee who always gives good value, but more slyly than Hytner — had never read J K Rowling or Jane Austen before appearing in the Harry Potter films and the new television Emma.
But Hytner said he was forcing him to read Auden’s poetry in preparation for the Bennett play, so let’s hope that too much knowledge doesn’t get in the way of his portrayal of the great saggy beast.
Auden has been impersonated several times on stage before, notably by Mark Wing-Davey in a biographical fringe play at the Bush and by John Gielgud who, in a rare instance of building a physical portrait from the outside, as Olivier did all the time, based his shabbily dressed poet Spooner in Pinter’s No Man’s Land on Old Grizzled Features himself.
Auden, with his corrugated, sallow skin and untidy hair looked just like that cake someone left out in the rain in the Macarthur’s Park pop ballad first performed by Richard Harris.
Gielgud got something of that, but also wore the crumpled look of a lived-in suit and grey socks worn with sandals.
There were no such sartorial blunders at yesterday’s conference, though NT chairman Sir Hayden Phillips was pleased to see that four of us were wearing ties.
Executive director Nick Starr wore a wonderful Oswald Boateng shirt in ecclesiastical mauve with a very neat collar, the sort that really justifies not wearing a tie — and David Benedict of Variety wore matching mauve trousers.
Hytner confirmed that he had no current plans to mount any more classic musicals and that not much in contemporary musical theatre activity semeed to warrant his attention.
But he hinted strongly that he would be filling in a few gaps soon with a Spanish Golden Age revival, and that the NT would definitely participate in the RSC’s Shakespeare Festival for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Seeming to anticipate a Conservative Party victory at the General Election next year, he said he would be delighted to work with Ed Vaizey or Jeremy Hunt, Tory arts spokesmen, who had both been actively courting the National, not the other way around.
War Horse, following on from The History Boys as a production the National has produced itself in the West End, continues to line the theatre’s coffers, and when asked if the Queen had been to the NT lately, Nick Starr made a note to self to invite her along at last to see War Horse which is, after all, about one of her few really deep-dyed passions in life — horses.
And with a collective exhalation of “whoa, boy” we adjourned for drinks and sandwiches as the river rolled past outside on a lovely afternoon.