As theatre production gets back into gear in what everyone hopes will remain the post-lockdown era, so too is director Sir Nicholas Hytner. His the latest play is Straight Line Crazy by Sir David Hare, starring Ralph Fiennes.
This is the intended subject of our interview. But as is typical with Hytner, the conversation is more wide-ranging than that. Over a scoffed lunch during rehearsals, we end up talking about the effect of Covid on the arts, British Jewish identity and the war in Ukraine. He also tells a cracking story about his great-grandfather Leib Heitner, an innkeeper from the Ukranian village of Werbiwci (pronounced Verbivtsi).
Much of the story was discovered when the 65-year-old director travelled to Poland with World Jewish Relief. He met a genealogist, who exhumed from his records some astonishing facts about Hytner’s antecedents, the Heitners and Schmetterlings of Galicia. But more of that later.
Wearing jeans and a shirt with the faintest hint of lumberjack about it, the director — formerly of the National Theatre, which he ran for 12 years, and now of Bridge Theatre, which he later co-founded — guides me through the light-filled rehearsal space of his latest production.
Guy Paul (Henry Vanderbilt) and Ralph Fiennes (Robert Moses)
We walk past the intimidating, powerful figure of Fiennes, who is dressed in a loose, dark suit and appears to be the only actor in the room who is still in character even though it is lunchtime. Fiennes plays Robert Moses, the maniacal, Machiavellian developer who dominated New York planning and politics for 40 years. The son of assimilated German Jewish parents,
Moses was not raised Jewish and so was not circumcised. Yet because of his name, he was excluded from the clubs and societies that liked to be Jew-free.
“He didn’t care to be a Jew,” says one of the characters in the play. “If someone said, ‘But your name is Moses,’ he’d reply, ‘I’ll show you my pecker. There, does that settle the matter?’.” Yet the play is not about identity, but unelected power in a democracy.
Like Hytner, the rehearsal room is calm. But to describe the director as getting back to work like the rest of British theatre would be wrong. The truth is, Hytner never stopped. When Covid became kryptonite for live performance, forcing impossible social distancing restrictions on both actors and audiences, even after everyone was allowed to leave their front door, more often than not the doors of Bridge Theatre stayed open.
Hytner’s answer to Covid was simple. If two performers on stage have to be socially distant, just have one. And there are few, if any, better one-person plays than the Talking Heads series by Alan Bennett.
Helen Schlesinger (Jane Jacobs)
So Hytner produced all 12 of them for the BBC, performed by actors drawn from the cream of British talent, including Monica Dolan, Kristin Scott Thomas, Tamsin Greig and Martin Freeman — and then staged most of them at the Bridge. In the process, he single-handedly kept British theatre and television production alive.
“Not single-handedly,” he says, now sitting in a backroom with a salad and a sandwich. “The BBC called and said, ‘Can you think of a way of doing it? You can have the EastEnders set’.”
He assembled the team he used for the film version of The History Boys, the Alan Bennett play he turned into the stage and screen smash hit that launched the careers of James Corden, Dominic Cooper and Samuel Barnett. (In Hare’s play Barnett plays another Jewish character, Ariel Porter, a by-the-book planner who works for the charismatic loose cannon that is Moses.)
“Every single time it was possible to perform, we were there performing,” he says of that time when Covid laid siege to theatre. “That’s just temperamentally, who I am,” he adds.
It was also what the Government requested.
“We [British theatre-makers] were actively encouraged, from the Prime Minister downwards, to go out there, be confident and make British theatre what it is — a beacon for the rest of the world. I’m really glad we did it.”
Alisha Bailey (Mariah Heller)
The thing is, the way Hytner did it was unique. As a theatre journalist, it is difficult to overstate just how significant it felt to cycle through streets with closed shops and dark pubs, under a sky with no planes, over a Tower Bridge with no traffic, to the theatre the bridge overlooks where people tentatively gathered to form what was probably the only audience in the country. Hytner made that possible.
Yet the performance that moved him most during the dark days of Covid, and as much as anything he has seen in the last 20 years, happened at the Royal Opera House. The orchestra still couldn’t play in the pit, so they were in the stalls while the audience scattered above them in the tiers. The evening included the prologue to Sleeping Beauty.
“Not even top-drawer Tchaikovsky,” says Hytner. “But, oh my god. It was completely overwhelming.”
Then two Royal Ballet principals came on and did the pas de deux from Carousel with Kenneth McMillan’s choreography. Hytner “barely saw it”, so full of tears were his eyes. “I was just a total mess,” he says.
He shares the memory a little hesitantly. He worries that he has “identified myself as someone who isn’t in touch,” even though it does the opposite and reveals his fathom-deep need for the arts.
“The way I live my life, I have to be in a rehearsal room or watching dance or listening to an orchestra,” he says as if listing basic food stuffs, which of course they are to him. This is why not even Covid could stop him making theatre. “I’ve got nothing else going on,” he shrugs.
“You know,” he says, lowering his sandwich, “my connection to British culture, British history, British English literature is more intense I would think than my connection to Jewish culture.” Which is to say it is very intense indeed.
“This is a function of the way for the last 130-odd years that, for all the problems, the British have treated the Jews,” he muses.
True, only the week before we were discussing the Hershel Fink affair at the Royal Court (which led to the theatre’s launching an enquiry into how an antisemitic stereotype ended up in one of their plays), which he put down to British attitudes towards Jews having changed little since Shakespeare created Shylock.
But compared to Hytner’s forbears, who lived in what was then Galicia (now western Ukraine), he has become acutely aware that his bond with the country in which he lives is far greater than anything his ancestors felt.
When great-grandfather Leib lost the right to sell alcohol because the ruling Polish aristocracy took away his licence (the Poles preferred Jewish innkeepers possibly because, Hytner suggests, they were less likely “to get smashed out of their heads” on vodka), Leib left for New York with the tutor who lived with the family.
Guy Paul, who plays Henry Vanderbilt
It was, explains Hytner, common for Jewish families who lived away from Jewish communities, such as those about 60 miles to the north in Lviv, to take in a tutor from a yeshiva. This tutor could speak English, unlike Leib, and persuaded Hytner’s great grandfather to pay for them both to go to New York. Once Leib had made his fortune, he would send for Hytner’s grandparent Moses (later Maurice) and his sisters. But straight off the boat, the tutor scarpered, leaving Leib with no money and less English.
“Poor Leib had to work his way back to his second choice, England,” says Hytner.
“Moses and the sisters found their way to Hull, I’m going to guess via Hamburg. They walked across the North of England and met in Manchester. Voila,” says the Manchester born and Manchester Grammar School-educated Hytner.
“And what an unbelievable series of painful historical ironies brings Werbiwci to the present day,” he adds.
“A village where the tiny synagogue still stands (I Googled), which has been in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, in Poland, USSR, under Nazi control, USSR again, Ukraine — and until recently inhospitable to Jews but now inflamed with patriotic determination by a Jewish president, at this moment the world’s most courageous and admired man.”
As Hytner walks back into the rehearsal room, he wonders aloud: “Who gets to write the movie?” This time, he himself may be a central character in the next big scene.
‘Straight Line Crazy’ is playing at the Bridge Theatre until June 18. Visit bridgetheatre.co.uk
