Nicholas Hytner: All the business world is a stage
 |  Hytner: Good leadership means having a vision that inspires people. |
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- CNN Financial Editor Todd Benjamin speaks to Nicholas Hytner -- director of Britain's National Theatre -- on what business can learn from the theatre world.
Benjamin: How much of the National Theatre's recent success has to do with your personality?
Hytner: Oh, I don't think very much at all. I'm so behind the scenes. The National Theatre's image is all about what happens between the actors on the stage and the audience night by night. I hope quite a lot of it comes from a sense of new direction and I think that happens every time a new director comes in to the National Theatre, which doesn't happen very often. I'm only the fifth.
Benjamin: What was your vision coming in?
Hytner: I thought it was time for the National Theatre to reflect the richness and the diversity and the energy of a whole range -- not just of cultures in London and the rest of the country -- but a whole range of ways of doing theater.
When the National Theatre was founded in 1963, under its first director Laurence Olivier, there was a much more homogenous audience, a much more homogenous population in London and the rest of the country and a consensus about what theater meant. It was very much a classical theater, a literary theater, and predominantly we still are a literary theater. But no there are so many young theater artists making theatre in all sorts of different ways. The people who we serve are much more various than the people the theater served in 1963.
So what I came in with, first and foremost, was an image of a national theater that was really reflecting the new meanings that both those elements to our title -- national and theater -- now carry.
Benjamin: You've described yourself as a pragmatic opportunist. How does that play out everyday at the theater?
Hytner: I think it's very hard if you're in the theater, not to be both those things. What it means is that I'm constantly -- as are my colleagues -- looking for who's creating good work, who's talented, who's writing exciting new kinds of stuff, who's looking at the world in new ways. But I've also obviously always got an eye to the box office, not because we want to make a profit, we don't make a profit. We just need to make our books balance, that's all we want to do. But we do want to fill our three theaters, we do want to fill 2,400 seats a night. So I'm pragmatic in the way that I will very often cover some of the more adventurous, ground-breaking work by programming against it work which will carry large numbers of performances which will keep the box office sizzling while we're taking risks.
Benjamin: How do you see yourself as artistic director -- more in artistic terms or more in business terms?
Hytner: I work with a very close-knit team who are much more expert than I am in executive management, in the financial imperatives that drive the National Theatre. But I don't really make a distinction and neither do they. We see as indivisible the need to program exciting work and the need constantly to revitalize the great traditions of the British stage and the need to make sure the National Theatre is solvent.
Benjamin: What do you think makes good leadership?
Hytner: I'm no management guru. Such leadership skills as I have have been developed over years in the rehearsal room or on the film set. I think there has to be a burning vision, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a restrictive or easily, briefly, concisely expressible vision. But it does have to be a vision once communicated, that inspires. And therefore, the second great attribute is an ability to communicate it. And if you're running a theater you have to communicate it both to those who work with you and to those outside who might want to share it by coming to watch what you're doing.
Benjamin: When you work within a corporation, people fall in line with the boss. You work with individualistic people. How do you balance your vision against their need to interpret a certain work?
Hytner: Well, my vision as the director of this theatre, includes, in fact depends upon, the theatre's ability to encourage a whole range of different creative talents to express themselves to the greatest degree possible. My vision does not extend to telling great directors, great writers or great actors exactly how to do their job. My vision on the contrary wants to give them room to spread their wings and to fly.
Even when I'm directing a play, if I take directing a play as a microcosm of running a theater, I'm not telling an actor like Michael Gambon or an actor like Helen Mirren or Maggie Smith how to say the lines. That's not what I do. What I'm trying to do is find a stage world for them to exist in, a foreword movement to a play that includes room for them to bring the fullest possible life to the parts they're playing, to find a context for them and for all the other actors to work together. I think there are some similarities between running a theatre and running a corporation. Maybe one of the similarities -- and I have experience running a corporation -- is precisely that what you value most, this is a no-brainer, are the maverick talents. You have to find room for them. In the theater if you don't, you're dead.
Benjamin: Staying with his theme, what do you think the best way to motivate artistic types is? Is it different from motivating an employee of a company?
Hytner: There are different types of talent, different degrees of contribution different people make here. We have, for instance, extraordinarily skilled scene painters. The way to motivate them is to provide for them adventurous, exciting and greatly gifted designers with whom they can work and to insure the finished product is part of a whole, a show that excites them to watch. That suggests that the next thing you have to do in order to motivate your highly gifted scene painters is to make sure that you're giving the designers space to flourish and they in their turn are inspired by great plays.
Everything is inter-dependent here but what it comes down to is we have to gather together the people with interesting things to say who have interesting ways of saying them. That's what we do.
Benjamin: One commonality with all these people is they have passion.
Hytner: That's undoubtedly true. We don't pay anybody really well so we exist on people's frankly idealistic commitment to the idea of live theater.
Benjamin: Where does this commitment you have come from? Why are you so passionate about theater?
Hytner: I think most people who love theater get the bug when they're kids. Most people who work in the performing arts get the bug when they're kids. One of the reasons we do it and one of the things that drives us is to pass that bug on to other kids so that it survives as an art form.
Benjamin: But what is it that is so fabulous to you about it?
Hytner: There is something mysteriously magical about being in the same room, however large the room, as other people who are devoting hours of their time to telling you a story, to weaving a spell around you, to sucking you into a new world. Maybe sometimes, I hope often, bombarding you with ideas which are disturbing, uncomfortable. I am very, very happy to sit in a theater and be greatly discomforted. I'm always excited to sit in a theater and be offended. There should always, especially in a place like this where there are three auditoria and 16, 17, 18 shows a year, there should always be room for very abrasive theater as well as the kind of theatre which is magical in the way that the first shows we ever saw when we were kids were.
Benjamin: What could business learn from staging a play?
Hytner: It's tough. I'm so ignorant of the ways of business. Here we put ourselves up for judgment, brutal judgment up to 20 times a year. We have up to 20 opening nights a year. It's exhausting, buts it's also salutary and inspiring and it's, if you like, a rod that we've invented for our own back.
We know that 20 times a year we are going to be told by our audience and in the pages of the national press whether we're good or whether we're bad. We can never ever be complacent. It's simply not part of the way things are in the theater. Complacency instantly kills and is just not in our DNA, it can't be. Because as soon as we've decided we've found a formula, as soon as we've decided we know how to communicate, how to please our audience, our audience turns around and tells us we've got boring. That's not a feature of how well we're doing our job. That just is our job.
Benjamin: Is there anything you've learned about yourself through theater?
Hytner: I think probably most of the things I know about myself I've learned in theater ... if you deal with greatly talented writers and giants of the past, if you deal for instance -- to take an obvious example with Shakespeare -- I think it's safe to say, nothing that can happen to you in your life that isn't reflected back to you by the greatness, the insight of his art.
If you take theater seriously, if you take it as an art form and not as mere entertainment, if you challenge yourself by working with people who as artists pour the whole of themselves into what they are doing, you are constantly astonished by the way great artists, great theatre can explain to you what it is that you think and you feel. We hope that we can share some of this with our audience, but those of us who are lucky to work in it, a couple of months in rehearsal with Shakespeare or with Mozart, you very profoundly sometimes come out knowing more about what's just happened to you in your life.
Benjamin: This season the National Theatre is doing "Henry IV." You're directing it. What do you think it is about Henry IV's personality that business could learn from?
Hytner: Well it spreads over two plays. These two plays "Henry IV" part one and part two are, some people think, Shakespeare's greatest achievement.... Henry IV began his reign by deposing and essentially organizing the murder of his predecessor, Richard II. This is, the plays suggests, not a terribly good idea, so I think the first thing that business leaders could learn from these two plays is to be careful in the way they dispose of their predecessor. The other thing they could learn from this king is that it is impossible fully to control that which will not be controlled. The greater part of these two plays is concerned with Falstaff and his gang of irresistible degenerates. They're uncontrollable. There are some human appetites, which you simply can't suppress.
The other thing -- it's a play intimately concerned with leadership -- the other thing that the king learns is those that help you to the top will ultimately resent the fact that you have the top job and not them and they will turn on you. And the dodgier the means by which you reach the top the more troubled your reign at the top is going to be because the more people there are going to be whose resentments you're going to have to deal with. These are two plays, which I would recommend whole-heartedly to those who worry about leadership style.
Benjamin: Best play about communication and motivation?
Hytner: You're putting me on the spot now. Communication and motivation ... Henry V I guess, Henry V. Another dodgy leader in my view, a leader with a cooked-up and extremely questionable cause. All of the first act of Henry V is concerned with the king and the Archbishop of Canterbury inventing a reason to invade France, but once they've found that reason, boy does he do it well.
Benjamin: Of all the plays you've done, the character that was the best leader?
Hytner: The most effective leader is Henry V, not the best by any means. I'm just thinking about the last couple of years. I just directed a play by Alan Bennett called "The History Boys." There is a hugely inspirational teacher in that play called Hector who is a mess, a shambles and has all sorts of unforgivable features to him, not least that he has an irresistible predilection to fiddling with 18 year old boys. Not good, not terrific, but his ability to communicate, his love of poetry, his devotion to, if you'd like, art for art's sake, is unmatched on the recent stage in my view. I think what the play says is great leadership doesn't necessarily come hand in hand with great moral worth but inspirational leadership should possibly be prized wherever it can be found.
Benjamin: What do you think business could learn from staging a play?
Hytner: When it works, when it's going well, there is a real sense of common purpose. From bottom to top, there is a passionate engagement with a very clearly defined goal. It's relatively straightforward. You want the show to be good. You want every moment of it to be vibrant to an audience. It works best when everybody involved understands what it is that they're doing, understands the story that is to be told, understands the way they're supposed to be telling it and is passionately engaged with it.
Now rehearsals for a play can maybe last for a couple of months. I think it's possibly relatively straightforward to inspire and engage people for two months, but what I'm looking for now in every aspect of my job, running the theatre day in, day out, is that same sense of excitement, of passionate commitment to that clearly defined goal; the thrill of the two hour passage of the stage. If that can be communicated across the board, you're away.
Benjamin: You talk about a shared vision. How do you get people onboard to share that vision?
Hytner: It's hard to con them. If you're wanting them to share in a shoddy vision, it soon dissolves; it falls apart. What I'm talking about specifically is if you're trying them to commit to a play that's no good, they soon find out. But if you can share with them as a director your admiration of, your attachment to, your belief in, your insight into a great piece of work, they'll come with you.
One of the things that I've learnt across the years is there's no such thing as a good actor who is dumb. All good actors are really smart. Different ways of being smart. Some of them with piercing intellects, some of them frighteningly intuitive. But in the performing arts and I suspect in the arts in general, that intangible necessity to communicate is at the heart.
Benjamin: Is there one character from all the films and plays that you've directed that you identify with more closely than any other?
Hytner: I think there's not. I think I find myself identifying with most everybody, even the villains.
Benjamin: Sometimes in an organization you can have people with big egos. What do you think the best way to manage those egos is?
Hytner: Well in a rehearsal room it's always down to providing the context in which the ego can make a contribution to the whole. There are all sorts of different egos. I've rarely come across an ego, which is so huge that they truly want to obliterate the common enterprise ... an actor whose ego is involved in giving the best possible performance in the role the actor is playing, is always going to know that it's going to be better if everybody else is going to be good too.
Benjamin: There seems to be a much more national commitment to theatre here than in New York. Why do you think you have this sort of commitment here in the UK that you don't find in other great cities?
Hytner: Well, you do find it in some of the great continental cities, but amongst a much smaller proportion of the population. What we have is a popular tradition of theatre, which is also subsidized. Our great theater, our great classical theatre flourished at the end of the 17th century as a popular form. The Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre held 3000 people and there were only 200,000 people in London. A hell of a lot of people went to see those plays. Essentially, London crossed the river to see those plays at the Globe. They still needed a bit of subsidy and they got it from the Lord Chamberlain and later from the king himself at the beginning of the 17th century.
We've always had a popular tradition with some kind of state support. In continental Europe, there isn't a population tradition. It's always been a court theatre. In France and in Germany for instance, the great theaters are court theatres. They are often a great deal more avant-garde than our theatre is. They are often a great deal more adventurous because they're addressing a much smaller public.
The difference between here and the Untied States is there is no tradition of state subsidy. It's a popular tradition and the great days of Broadway, the mid-20th century, provided possibly the richest stock of great plays that the entire 20th century provided. When first Eugene O'Neill and then Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were at their height ... and the whole musical theatre tradition, there was nobody else in the world at that time as creative as Broadway was. But to achieve what I think we continue to achieve here in London, you need state subsidy and it doesn't feel to me that's coming anytime soon in the United States, not with the current government.
Benjamin: What's a typical day like for you?
Hytner: Yeah, it depends on whether I'm actually directing a play. I direct twice a year. So if I'm directing a play, I'll arrive not too early, 9-ish. Work, there's generally a meeting ... four out of five days I have a meeting 9:30-ish. I'll rehearse 1:30 to about 6. And then I'll stay on, do some office work, then maybe a show to see here. There's very often a show to go see elsewhere in London so that I can keep up with who's doing what. So most evenings I'm either here or at some other theater.
Benjamin: When you read a new work, how do you know or what is it that makes you think: I want to stage this?
Hytner: There is usually a very quick gut reaction by about page 20. Very often the gut relaxes and by page 60 it's let you go, but I can only say that it's a physical experience. There is a physical possession that takes place when a new play about which you know nothing before you open it takes hold of you.
Benjamin: Are you intellectualizing it or visually seeing it?
Hytner: Not the first time through. First time through I'm always relating viscerally to a play. I can then start to analyze what might make it good. But first time through ... different features of it might take hold of you. And now directing a theatre, not just directing plays, I have the great satisfaction of knowing a play is exciting, knowing I'm not the right director for it, but nevertheless being able to do something for it.
I very often, throughout my career, read scripts which I know to be good, and I know to be exciting but I know I'm not going to be useful to because they don't necessarily play to my strengths. But now I can read stuff and start to think who might be best to direct it.
Benjamin: Good leaders always know what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are. What are yours?
Hytner: Well, I hope my strengths include, as director of this theatre, knowing there's a hell of a lot that I would not direct well on the stage. So I hope that one of my strengths is that I have a realistic view of my own limitations as an artist.
Benjamin: Why do you think you're good for certain plays and not for other plays?
Hytner: There are plays, which require a kind of forensic patience, which require the kind of minute concentration, which I'm not necessarily good at unless the context is a whole world. I like creating big vibrant worlds on the stage. It's short hand and it's not entirely true, but I like big plays, not small plays. But small plays are very, very often the plays that pack the biggest punch and provide the biggest experience. And I don't do them very well.
Benjamin: At this point what do you think you would want your legacy to be?
Hytner: One specific legacy: I want there to be a new generation of playwrights who write big, if you like, epic plays that can occupy our two big public spaces. This theater, the National Theatre, two of its three auditoria are big auditoria with big stages. There is a tradition going back centuries here of large-scale plays which have a kind of national ambition, a national importance, and a national sweep. The playwrights who are still writing those plays confidently are the same playwrights who were doing it 25 years ago. I don't want to move on until we've got a new generation.
