NT : Archive : History of the NT : Alan Bennett on the NT
Alan Bennett on the NT
Alan Bennett gives a personal view of 25 years of the National on the South Bank (April 2001)| Alan Bennett in rehearsal for The History Boys Photo by Ivan Kyncl |
The first time I set foot on the stage at the National was in November 1987 at the Cottesloe. It was an inauspicious début. Patrick Garland had put together an evening of Philip Larkin's poetry and prose entitled Down Cemetery Road, done as a two-hander with Alan Bates as Larkin. This was then revived at short notice for some extra performances but Alan wasn't available and I agreed to substitute. The change of cast hadn't been advertised and many of the audience, having come along expecting to see Alan Bates, must just have thought he'd gone downhill a bit since they last saw him wrestling naked on a rug with Oliver Reed.
I was also in the middle of some extensive dentistry, which involved the removal of several bridges and, though the dentist had assured me that the effects of the anaesthetic would have worn off long before the evening's performance, I often took the stage feeling as if large sections of my mouth were coned off. The anaesthetic did indeed wear off during the course of the performance so that when I hit a suddenly tender spot there was the occasional agonised yelp uncatered for in Larkin's muted verse. Even at the best of times the poet didn't care for the public performance of his works so it was perhaps fortunate he had died two years previously.
What the audience felt I tried not to think though I remember coming off at the interval and en route for my dressing room meeting Judi Dench and her attendants bound for the Olivier stage. “Not many laughs tonight”, I said. “None at all with us” she replied but since she was appearing in Antony and Cleopatra this was hardly surprising. There was one unscheduled laugh one night, though, as it was while she was appearing as Cleopatra that she was made a dame. On the evening in question Michael Bryant, playing Enobarbus, turned upstage and muttered en passant, “Well, I suppose a fuck's quite out of the question now”, an extra-textual remark, such is his never other than immaculate diction, that was heard by the first ten rows.
About the NT building itself I've always had reservations. It's better inside than out and the foyers, in particular, are interesting and lively, even living up to those fanciful drawings in which architects populate their constructions with idly gossiping creatures who seem to have all the time in the world. They always have oval heads and are wholly intent on using the space the architect has so thoughtfully provided. Oval heads apart, the foyer of the National is a bit like that and works, just as Denys Lasdun envisaged it doing.
Nor are the three theatres too bad, with the Olivier, to my mind, the best. From an actor's point of view (or that of someone with a weak bladder) the huge central block of seats of the Lyttelton is daunting. The Olivier is more broken up, though that, too, has its drawbacks and it's said that Michael Gambon got so used to playing the vast space that even in private conversation he would still slowly move through the necessary arc.
The outside of the building, though, I've never much cared for, which is harder to admit having been impressed by Denys Lasdun talking about it on television not long before he died. The first truly modern architecture I saw as a a boy was the Royal Festival Hall in 1951, which I've always found exciting, light, airy and playful, which the National isn't at all. I don't like stacked horizontals, which Denys Lasdun plainly did as they figure in the National and in his Royal College of Physicians building in Regent's Park. Moreover the back parts of the theatre seem to me both depressing and inadequate. Actors are used to slumming it, particularly in the West End but there was no excuse for treating the backstage as if it were the servants' quarters.
That said, though, I've no doubt that the building will grow in the public's affections. The appeal of most modern buildings slowly diminishes over a period of fifty or sixty years at which low point they stand in greatest danger of demolition or substantial alteration. If they survive that then they begin to acquire a period charm and their future is assured and so, I imagine, it will be with the NT.
| Photo of Prunella Scales and Alan Bennett in A Question of Attribution photo by John Haynes |
A few years after the building had opened the late Ronald Eyre, having directed one or two productions here, said that it would be better for all concerned if the National Theatre could straightaway close again and be converted into an ice-rink and/or a dance hall… the Olivier, I suppose most suited for the ice-rink, the Lyttelton for the palais de danse. Then, after twenty years or so, when the corners had been rubbed off the building and it had acquired its own shabby and disreputable history, all the cultural stuffing long since knocked out of it and every breath of Art dispersed, then it could be reclaimed for the theatre. As it was it was too much of a temple for him and altogether too worthy; somewhere ordinary was what he wanted and with no pretensions.
It's certainly true that audiences (and critics in particular) come to the National Theatre in a different frame of mind from when they go to see a play on Shaftesbury Avenue. They're more reverential, more inclined to invest what they're seeing with significance (or deplore its absence). It's all in capital letters: Art, Theatre; it's never just a play. I first noticed this twenty-five years ago in the Lyttelton. It was the second night of the opening week and the play was John Osborne's Watch It Come Down. It wasn't one of his best but as always with Osborne even when I disliked the play I found his tone sympathetic. I was in a minority. To give a flavour of the audience, Edward Heath was sitting in front, Alec Douglas-Home behind and the rest looked as if they'd come on reluctantly after the Lord Mayor's Banquet. Of course, audiences were bound to get better and broader and they have but there's still a feeling that this is Something Special; it's not yet the community-minded place that subsidised theatres (those that survive) manage to be in the provinces.
Nor is it particularly comforting. When I was acting in Single Spies I never got over the nightly walk along the corridor from my dressing room, pushing through the swing doors and suddenly being hit by the amplified roar of the audience. They were just chatting before curtain up but to me they sounded like the crowd at the Colosseum waiting for the massacre to begin.
Mind you, this is not peculiar to the National Theatre. All theatre is theatre of blood. I once had to give a talk at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and was accosted on my way in by two sabre-toothed pensioners.
“It had better be good” warned one of them. “We're big fans of yours”.
| Alan Bennett at Oxford, 1955 |
Still, whatever its shortcomings or the fear that stalks its corridors the bleakness of the building has always been compensated for by the cheerfulness of the staff and I have never felt other than welcome here. This is particularly true at the stage door and in the visiting directors' office, run in my time by Ghita Cohen and Sharon Duckworth. It was a cosy spot where you could always drop in for gossip and a not always loyal verdict on current productions. Royal visit nothing, Ghita's retirement party last year was one of the most distinguished occasions the theatre has seen in all its twenty-five years.
Ghita could always procure house seats even for the most sought-after shows though one didn't always need them. One of the inestimable privileges enjoyed when working at the National is the use of the directors' boxes at the back of the stalls of both the Lyttelton and the Olivier. Both are entered not through the auditorium so that one can slip in and see an act of a play then slip out again, much as one could at a Victorian music hall. As a playwright I perhaps ought to deplore such bite-size theatre but it suits me no end. The boxes are also sound-proof so one can even groan aloud.
With all my grumblings, I am thankful to have had a small part in the National's history. The Wind in the Willows and The Madness of George III, both directed by Nicholas Hytner, were two of the happiest plays I've worked on and when I recall the ending of the first part of Wind in the Willows with the snow coming down and the mice singing 'In the Bleak Midwinter' and the wonderful bravura opening of The Madness of George III when the whole cast comes over the crest of the hill and down onto the stage I am glad to have been at least the occasion for such spectacle.
Of Single Spies my memories are only less fond because the cast was quite small and looming up at the end of rehearsal there was the awful prospect of having to go on stage and do it. Also, though the technical side of it wasn't particularly complicated, things did tend to go wrong. In the scene in Buckingham Palace where the Queen comes upon Anthony Blunt hanging a picture, there were two console tables trucked in from stage left and stage right. On the tables were various objets d'art which the Queen would pick up and comment on as she chatted to her Keeper of Pictures. These tables had a life of their own, only occasionally trucking on submissively as they were meant to do, but more often coming on, taking one look at the audience then retreating shyly into the wings. This meant that Prunella Scales, playing the Queen, instead of idly fingering an object and discoursing on its origins (“This ostrich egg was a present from the people of Zambia”) had instead to dive off stage, locate the item in question and fetch it on for Sir Anthony to admire, so that she looked less like the Monarch than one of those beady ladies queueing up with their treasures on the Antiques Road Show.
© Alan Bennett, April 2001