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The audience as a means to an end By Michael Handelzalts Tags: Theater, Israel  I could have started by describing the interviewee, the National Theater's director Nicholas Hytner, but I don't think anyone can do better than Richard Eyre, one of his predecessors at the South Bank-based theater on London's River Thames: "He has a face like a mime - Barrault from "Les Enfants du Paradis" - oval face, arching eyebrows, animated, almost over-animated. Flights of fancy and gossip, riffs of enthusiasm, indignation, then repose; latent violence, subverted by a childlike smile. He's prodigiously talented, has a great facility for staging and a great appetite for work." That was written 20 years ago, and Hytner has not changed much. Ten years ago, Eyre wanted him to follow in his footsteps and into the director's job at the National, but Hytner turned the offer down: "I worked very closely with Richard, and I didn't think what I could do that was different from what he was doing. He seemed to be doing it right. Five years later, after some break from him, I could see a different way of doing it. It wouldn't have been right to run it the way he did, because every time you are directing, it means a new way of looking at things, and by the time I leave somebody will be able to see everything I was doing wrong." The five year's break was Trevor Nunn's tenure. Hytner says that Nunn, being a great director and keeping the theater full, did not realize that the world changed faster than he did. And also, Nunn had his share of luck: "When a politician is making a comeback, the journalists who know him are bored by him". Advertisement Now, five years after he started to run the ship moored at the South Bank, Hytner can look back and assess where he has succeeded in terms of the aims he set himself: "I think we had some success in energizing the young generation of playwrights to think on a larger scale. "It is now very clear that the National is in the business of finding the big stories, the big plays engaging on a larger public scale with contemporary Britain and the rest of the world. The theater feels very different than it felt five years ago. It feels now that it is fully engaged with contemporary Britain, even, or particularly when, it produces works from the classic canon, however they are produced. Today's National doesn't have a permanent company: "We haven't for a long time. That's more or less impossible in London now. If we would be a simple classic theater company, we could plan a repertoire around a company, but because the most important thing is that we are ready to respond to new plays, and new ways of making theater..." How many new ways of making theater are there? "Who knows?" And if there is a constant search for the "new," what makes the National more than an umbrella for many other things? "Because the defined center is there, which is the classics, new plays and the literary tradition. Much more than half is the great English literary tradition, however imaginatively it's been done. With all these new ways, are there things you will not stage at the National? "People can write about anything as far as I'm concerned, there is nothing that is off the menu. What we discovered was that if we produce with genuine conviction and at a price you can afford we are always full. So we don't anymore have to produce shows purely with eyes on the box office. That is what we don't do anymore." The work comes first, audience second There is a lesson to be learned here, from something that is happening on the British art scene: "If the objective of an arts organization is to attract a particular kind of audience, if that is the chief objective, then the art suffers. The audience is a means to an end. The audience is there to support the most possible exciting work. "Obviously, you want to be full, you want to ensure that everyone who can enjoy what you do gets to know that you are there, and you want to make sure its affordable, but it is the work first and the audience second. The best the audience can do is demand that the work is better and more exciting. "What happens incredibly quickly, and it happened in the National, is that if you start programming conservatively, sure, there is an audience for that, they love that, but that audience is a relatively narrow section of the potential audience, and that is the audience you are left with, and it wants you to be more and more conservative. It's a vicious circle. "If you program with a sense of adventure, if you program with a sense of panache and risk, then the audience keeps demanding greater adventure, keeps demanding that you are constantly inventing. That's the virtuous circle. "The great thing in having a diverse audience, the old traditional audience and the new, more radical audience that is diverse in culture, diverse in race, the great thing about that audience is that you can play anything to it. It is not the end. It is the means to an end. And the end is a repertoire that is as challenging as possible as well as being as responsive as possible to what makes great plays great." When he was appointed, it was pointed out that like his immediate three predecessors (Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre and Peter Hall) he was white, middle aged (52 at the time), middle class and had read English literature at Cambridge. He said then, semi-frivolously (he says now) "I'm also part of very interesting minorities ?(he is Jewish and gay). "If people ask me who I am culturally, I am someone who was brought up in England to revere the traditions of English literature and English theater. I also was brought up in Europe to revere Western art and Western music, but it is very important that I try and stay open, we all stay open to different traditions, different cultures as far as they are interesting, enlivening, true, perceptive and exciting. And I try to have colleagues who will tell me how good and how authentic stuff I don?t know about is. If there is a weak point in the Nationa'?s very diverse repertoire, Hytner agrees, it is the lack of contemporary non-English plays. "I think there are reasons for it. You could say that the English theater, like England itself, is hovering by the edge of Europe, but the truth is that our playwrights are absolutely central to the rest of Europe. The playwrights are enormously popular and are produced a great deal. Our directors are of no interest to them at all. "I think there is connection between the two. The mainstream continental theater, whether it is the French or the German, the Spanish, certainly the Belgian and Dutch tradition is so heavily centered on the director, so the writers write half plays, for the director to complete the other half. "It is very interesting that they want our plays because our plays communicate so much better than theirs. They don't realize that maybe there is a connection between what they find uninteresting in our directors and what they find interesting in our plays, because essentially we still think that the director is there - that the director?s primary task is to serve the play. You still can do a great deal, but you are communicating the play. You are not using it as an excuse for an ego trip." He recently directed "Much Ado About Nothing" starring Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker, and "Major Barbara," again with Russell Beale. ?Bernard Shaw is a writer I always had trouble with. But he is a part of the great English tradition. So, finally last year, out of a sense of duty, I thought we had to program some Shaw. So I went back, read "Saint Joan", and it was really pertinent. I don't like to use the word relevant, but it felt it had a real connection. "It is about a girl who wages war because she hears voices, because God tells her - a religious fanatic of the kind who blows up a tube in London. So, we put on Saint Joan, and it was an enormous success. Shaw was out of fashion so long, that there is a whole new audience. So now we have done another one which I've directed myself, Major Barbara, which is about an arms dealer, and it is also a success." Alan Bennett's new play What next, then, for him as a director? "It is going to be published only in Hebrew, right? It is a new play by Alan Bennett which he will not let me talk about." (By the end of the interview, when he was told that there will be an English version, Hytner sighed philosophically, "Oh, well"). He directed, among other Bennett plays "The Madness of King George III" and "The History Boys" (both on stage and screen). "Alan Bennett always delivers an unfinished play. Always, no matter how much he wants - the question always is, "What do you think works?" Alan's question is, actually very often, "What do you think I'm saying?" "It's very interesting, we have now worked together many times and we have a relationship of total mutual trust. It is actually the most creative relationship I ever had or will ever have, and I know I have to be careful. He doesn't want to hear too much, and I know what I have to do is to identify what is it that he wants to be told. It is almost as if he holds back until someone says... and he always does what he wants." After five years on the job, how do you see the theater five years from today? "Yes, you have to think strategically all the time, in my job, but you have to be ready to respond to what people want to do. I don't write the plays. I have to create the environment where people write the best at their best. We have to respond to what happens in the wider world. But we also have a sense of direction of where we are going - a repertoire - we want to find a British middle way, a repertoire that is constantly reenergizing, but also a repertoire that is creating the tradition of the future. "We want it to be classical, but also at the same time we want it to be constantly in the avant-garde, reacting quickly to new ways of expression, new currents in society, reacting quicker than any art form, which actually we seem to be able to do." Hytner came to Israel for two-and-a-half days, to attend a staged reading (in Hebrew) of five English "political plays." This is the second half of a joint project with the Habima national theater (five Israeli political plays had a staged reading in English at the National in London last October). He does not understand Hebrew, but was favorably impressed by the actors who participated in the readings. He knows the plays; he directed David Hare's "Stuff Happens" production the National. The only full production in Hebrew he attended was "Anna Karenina," an English adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, directed by Habima's artistic director, Ilan Ronen. He also participated in a discussion about political theater, where the English of the Israeli participants (Ronen's particularly) left much to be desired. And then back he flew back to London. "If you run a theater, and I'm sure everyone who runs a theater knows that feeling, every morning, you look at the box office figures, and you are amazed that people are still buying tickets. You always have the feeling that today nobody will pick up the phone. Bookmark to del.icio.us   My three homelands French Vogue chose Lizzie Doron as one of Israel's influential authors. 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