My Life in Pieces (45 page)

The book is a house of many mansions, celebrating his enthusiasms and focusing sharply on what he deplores: he remains an Attlee boy, and can only see modern life as a
dégringolade
(especially under the present ‘Labour’ government, as he parenthesises it). His account of his own illness is strikingly restrained and all the more powerful for that, utterly eschewing sentimentality. In fact, what emerges from the book, and is perhaps the key to why he is so cherished, is a man who refuses to be anything other than who he is. He describes how, when he failed to become an officer during National Service, he identified himself: ‘What I was not was a joiner. And so in due course not a CBE, not a knight.’ Elsewhere he tells us that he is ‘reluctant to be enrolled in the ranks of gay martyrdom, reluctant, if the truth be told, to be enrolled in any ranks whatsoever’. Except, of course, that he has joined the ranks of the non-joiners. Beyond all his varied brilliance, the wisdom and the profundity of so much of his work, it is his insistence on refusing to be other than who or what he is, that has made the British people take him under its wing. He is his own man. He sees the hilarity, however, when the National Gallery makes him a trustee on the grounds that he represents the man in the street. If only.

Alan was extraordinarily easy to work with, which, when you consider
that he was being directed in his own play by the actor he was acting
with, is remarkable. His only day of anxiety came at the technical
rehearsals when the paintings that hung in the corridor of Buckingham
Palace were first brought on. They were in an unfinished state, and Alan
was told so, but he flew into a state of terrible agitation, all the more
alarming because hitherto he had never once so much as raised his voice.
No matter how often I explained to him that they would be hugely better
very soon, he remained agitated to an almost medically troubling degree.
Richard Eyre was sent for, and, talking him down very calmly, eventually
restored his equilibrium. Later Richard told me that on
Kafka’s Dick
, which
Richard had directed at the Royal Court, Alan had become obsessed by
the suit which Jim Broadbent (Kafka’s father) was wearing, until he had
finally gone to Savile Row and bought him a new one with his own money.
‘Displacement anxiety,’ Richard said. A great artistic director; and a
remarkable and somewhat unexpected man. I wrote this review of Eyre’s
diaries,
National Service
, in 2003.

Richard Eyre is a strikingly handsome man, compact and perfectly groomed. He is physically and intellectually elegant at all times, unfailingly courteous and searchingly intelligent; whatever he says is perfectly phrased and shot through with self-irony; he is both fastidious and ascetic. His quiet authority is unmistakable, his kindness palpable; power and sensitivity are present in equal quantities. It would not surprise you, on meeting him, to discover that he was Head of the Foreign Office, a clinical psychologist, or an internationally acclaimed architect. In other ages, he might have been the personal confessor to a Bourbon monarch, or the master of a great medieval college. Sanity, balance, control are at his core.

So how did this man come to confide these words to his diary: ‘I’ve started a course of an antidepressant, Prozac. I feel as if my brain has a number of compartments, like dog traps, out of which wild things emerge – insects, spiders, frogs, snakes and wolves, surrounded by a gnawing cold damp wind that permeates everything. The drug has closed these traps and I feel that sand, or snow, is piling up outside them. I’m not happy, just not in pain.’ How did that man write those words? Why, because of the theatre, of course; more precisely because of The Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, that century-old dream turned into concrete nightmare. Eyre ran it for an extraordinary ten years, and for a large proportion of that time, he felt overwhelmed by the task. Coming across a list of the symptoms of depression, he ticks off four: insomnia; feelings of worthlessness; diminished ability to think; recurrent thoughts of suicide. Not that anyone would have known. ‘I have to clam up at the
theatre. Don’t give the game away.’ He kept a diary ‘to remind myself that what is unbearable today will be bearable tomorrow’.

Running any theatre is a challenge, but the National is in a class of its own, both in itself and emblematically. When they were looking for a successor for him, David Hare briskly listed the three tasks of its director: 1 – plan a repertoire of seventeen shows a year; 2 – run the building; 3 – be a spokesman for the British theatre. The first of these demands, which seems perhaps the most straightforward, is, as Eyre puts it, like ‘three-dimensional chess in the dark’. He describes the process to his board; they are, understandably, horrified and awed: ‘Here’s the equation: three theatres, three shows in repertoire in each theatre. If you want to play your successes and nurse your failures you need total freedom of manoeuvre, but if you cast an actor in two shows you restrict your freedom of programming, and if you cast one in another auditorium, you’re scuppered. As you are if you want to tour a show. Or have an unusually complex set. Or stage a musical. You have to guess at the number of performances for each show, i.e. predict your successes, or worse, your failures. And if you want to transfer a show to the West End you have to anticipate getting an option on the actors. And the freedom to change the repertoire according to demand is restricted by the three-month print deadline of the brochure. If you shorten that you diminish the advance booking and therefore prejudice your cash flow. And so it goes…’

Why, he asks himself, did he ever take on the task? He lists the obvious motives: ambition, vanity, hubris, finally – conclusively – ‘because it was there’. But when it comes to it and he is appointed to the job, at the press conference he feels as if he’s ‘performing a character called Richard Eyre about whom I don’t have enough information to give a credible performance’. But this is temporary. He knows that at a deeper level ‘I like danger. I like the feeling of having a gun pointed at my head: dance, perform, live a bit.’ This is a very striking phrase, the theatre as an antidote to respectability, normality, complacency – safety, perhaps. Theatre as bungee jump. Well, if he wanted a gun at his temple he certainly got it: the daily dread of failing, both personally (in his own productions) and in his responsibilities to his company and his audience. Rarely has a director so nakedly described the panic that attends every production, the hopes, the fears, the minute-by-minute anxiety about the piece, the actors, his own work. He had a number of brilliant successes during his tenure at the National –
Richard III
, David Hare’s trilogy,
King Lear
with
Ian Holm – but an equal number, by his own account, of abject flops. It’s hard enough under any circumstances to live with failure but when you’re running an organisation, and everything hinges on your judgement, to have to face your colleagues and find the necessary self-respect to continue to articulate policy with any authority is a very particular test of character.

Eyre’s solution to the challenge is the only possible one, but rarer in practice than hen’s teeth: ‘The most important attribute for anyone who runs a theatre is generosity: you’ve got to be prepared to enfranchise people who are more talented, more successful, and just
different
from yourself.’ This he did, consistently, during his tenure. It was harder to be generous with himself: ‘I’m a Catholic in everything but religion – I believe in guilt, I believe in suffering as the cost of happiness, failure as the cost of success.’ Public service is in Eyre’s genes: his sense of duty exceeds every other impulse, and he was deeply loved by his colleagues for it. He worked unceasingly to balance the books, to maintain and exceed standards, to tame and liberate the beastly building itself (in the teeth of the uncomprehending resistance of its vainglorious architect Denys Lasdun and the Lasdunites who openly called him ‘a barbarian’). He knew every one of his fellow workers by name (a feat not achieved by every director of the National Theatre); he forged a team.

This had been his first ambition for the theatre when he was appointed: ‘to encourage a sense of community, a sense of family, a desire to share a common purpose: in short, to make the NT into something that was more than the sum of its parts’. Like many people in the theatre, he has sought to create in his working life what he never knew in his childhood. His magnificently awful father dies during the course of Eyre’s time, but not before having finally manifested the tenderness he was incapable of showing when Eyre most needed it; his mother, too, is at last liberated from the twilight zone of Alzheimer’s syndrome where she has dwelt for too long. He becomes an orphan, and sits with his wife and daughter reading
King
Lear
by candlelight, finally grasping its meaning: ‘I’m no longer prepared to judge, everyone’s to blame, everyone can be forgiven.’ The fine production of
Lear
for which this was preparation and by which it was so profoundly informed was his last at the National; released from his chains, he feels bereft, but at his farewell party, he quotes William Shawn: ‘Whatever our roles we did something quite wonderful together. Love was the controlling emotion; we did our work with honesty and love.’

Everything Eyre did for the National and at the National, he did with honour and distinction. Intelligence and taste informed all his actions; his decisions were shrewd and often innovative. And of his love of the theatre, its processes and its denizens – actors, writers, designers, technicians, publicists, caterers – there can be no doubt. The man who emerges from these diaries, however, does not quite seem to belong to the theatre himself. He is like the very finest kind of colonial administrator who has fallen in love with the land he administrates and with its people, learnt the language to perfection, knows its history better than they do, and never wants to be anywhere else till the day he dies. But the people themselves have an emotional energy which is irrational, ancestral and dangerous, and this energy is not in his blood. He writes superbly about it: ‘That’s the true actor: the true professional – experiencing the state of possession, enduring passion and yet, like a firewalker, remaining untouched by the experience.’ He quotes with approval a magnificent letter sent to him by that great beast of the jungle, Mike Gambon, raging against an attempt to make the National a no-smoking zone: ‘A theatre isn’t a place where you can impose rules on people, it’s a dirty radical place where an actor can work with a fag in his hand, a place where someone like me or you if you felt the need can piss down the staircase… surely these people should go and work at IBM or Shell… screaming at night from the stage about the plight of mankind and the world would be ridiculed in a building where you can’t smoke. The stage is like a war game and some wounded people have to smoke.’ Exactly, says Eyre, but you won’t catch him pissing down the stairwell.

Nor is this raging sense of appetite for life confined to actors. Eyre writes admiringly and a little wistfully of Peter Hall (who haunts the early part of the book) as possessing ‘a prodigious energy, a kind of devouring greed and an edge of madness’. At the beginning of his tenure, Eyre and Hare rather soberly agree that it is necessary to ‘to introduce a note of anarchy to the theatre’, but then he adds, ‘It’s hard to make an anarchistic gesture now that isn’t immediately assimilated,’ not a thought, perhaps, that would occur to any self-respecting anarchist. The riot that is at the theatre’s heart – the gaudy assertion of carnival values, upturning everything, embracing everything, roaring its pain and its bliss to the skies – cannot be reduced to a note, or a gesture. It springs from the primitive act of theatre – an actor and an audience – fuelled by an all-consuming, raging need on both parts of the equation, which is why a theatre that
doesn’t have a company at its centre will always, by one means or another, end up cerebral, and that spells death to the theatre.

Richard Eyre’s book is a superlative record of a theatre, a man, and a time. There is unconscious comedy, as, desperately overburdened, he accepts more and more additional work, lecturing incessantly, becoming a Governor of the BBC. He wanted, at the beginning of his tenure, ‘to live a bit’. Not too far along the line, he is crying ‘I want my life back’ and later, more poignantly, ‘An unexamined life is not worth living (the unlived life isn’t worth examining).’ But responsibility will always come first. He is a natural member of the Great and the Good, being himself both good and great, and he has sat at life’s High Table as of right. The book is filled with many wonderful conversations heard there; he has heard the inside riff and has transcribed it wonderfully. Not a page is without some fascinating and unexpected shaft; when he says something to somebody, as often as not, they reply with a quote from Cato the Elder. And some magnificent monsters stride across his pages – John Osborne, Maria St Just, Georg Solti, his father. Come to think of it, Eyre Senior (‘Shakespeare is balls!’) might have made a wonderful director of the National Theatre – carnival-style.

Single Spies
was one of the great successes of Eyre’s regime. The scene in
Buckingham Palace, in
Question of Attribution
, was, with impeccably
credible canvases, the smash hit of the evening, all the more electric
because it broke a centuries-long taboo prohibiting the representation of
the monarch on stage. After the show, as Alan made his getaway by bike,
all the famous people who came to see the show were ushered into
my
dressing room, where I filled their glasses with champagne and chatted
urbanely about the play. I suspect that many of them thought I’d written
it. I did nothing to disabuse my new best friends Shirley, Liza or Dustin, of
their error.

I left the play after three months in the West End because – why? – oh,
yes – yawn – I had to direct
Shirley Valentine
on Broadway – triumph
(yawn) – and then I went to Hollywood to act in
Postcards from the Edge
with Meryl Streep, Gene Hackman and Shirley MacLaine (yawn, yawn)
for Mike Nichols (no yawn, even as a joke). I wrote a sort of diary piece
about the film for the
Independent.