Ten Years of Stratford
THoughts on shakespeare
The Observer
At Cambridge Trevor Nunn racked up 32 productions for university drama societies. You can still see the persistence (‘I overwork sometimes’) nowadays when he is in his tenth year as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In mid-rehearsal for Jonson’s The Alchemist (opening on Monday week at Stratford’s Other Place), dark and stock in the inevitable denim, he looks ruffled, sounds urgent but contained. A short beard gives him a slightly Mephistophelian air. He is not smooth, however; earnest if anything, though an acquaintance says that Nunn and his wife, the actress Janet Suzman, make as witty a couple as he has ever met. They have no children; home life is split between Hampstead’s Vale of Health and the director’s house in Stratford (‘nice but not extravagant’ is the official description). He is the kind of leader whose charm derives from being almost one of the boys. It works with students, and it works with actors.
Still only 37, he was 28 when he succeeded Peter Hall at Stratford; Hall, in similar case, had been all of 29. Both were Suffolk-born as well as Cambridge-bred; Nunn’s father was a cabinet-maker. Both are grammar-school products. Both are scholar-showmen, intent on the texts they present. ‘Our goal,’ says Nunn, ‘is to do Shakespeare better than anyone else.’
The main method of achieving it is self-crtiticism; his team of directors regularly flay and analyse one another’s work. ‘One thing there’s nothing of in this company is smugness,’ even though, he admits, ‘that may not be borne out by our public image.’ The RSC have always had a keen sense of public image; needing to be noticed in order to survive, they have reiterated their own achievements.
They have always needed to squeeze money our of the Arts Council (they pioneered the process) and curt references to ‘the Stratford begging-bowl’ are not unknown among the sceptics. The grant for this year has been brought into line with inflation but, Nunn says darkly, no more more than that. They will manage, he adds laconically, largely by their own efforts.
Nunn’s public image is that of a man who doesn’t want one. He speaks ruefully, but not guiltily, of his ‘failure to beat the drum as much as it should be beaten.’ There is another reason for his anonymity: his own identity has merged with his company’s. He went to Stratford from Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre as a very young Associate Director in 1965. After a first year of legendary disaster, directing a sequence of productions that failed open or just failed, he found his feet quite spectacularly wth The Revenger’s Tragedy for which he more or less invented style.
The following year The Taming of The Shrew and The Relapse confirmed his mastery, a controlled flamboyance rare in a generation of young scholastics. They were productions that looked fun to be in, and in fact Nunn’s popularity with actors has rarely been in doubt. When his appointment as director was announced in 1968 the company is said to have clapped. At first there were complaints from actors who felt they were being rather coldly manipulated, not so much in plays as in the organisation. These grievances seem to have died away. His claims to have democratized the company are prone out by actors. ‘You get to see him,’ said one. ‘With Peter Hall, you get to see his secretary.’
Last year’s successful season is regarded as his personal triumph. Not all the productions were good, but even the weak ones had a spirit about them. Not all the productions were his, but he was sole or joint director of five of them: a record in recent years. His achievements included Macbeth at the Other Place crammed with imaginative energy: the completest realisation of a Shakespeare play—and that one about the most difficult in the canon—in a long time.
In the intervening years he has been a difficult director to pin down. One expected him to be intelligent, imaginative, thorough, and usually he was. But it is not easy, looking back to differentiate his productions from those of his colleagues. He has kept the same team throughout: John Barton, Terry Hands, David Jones, Clifford Williams and hors concours Peter Brook. The continuity is, as he insists, remarkable (compare the mortality rate among directors at the National Theatre and the Royal Court).
Very few other directors have worked at Stratford during Nunn’s tenure and I have often felt this to be damaging. He counters that working on that stage, for that organisation, that few young directors could cope with it, and that most are not interested in the classics anyway.
He has often seemed to be interested in nothing else; in the past 10 years the only non-Shakespearian play he has staged was Hedda Gabler. He used to find most contemporary drama ‘pretty thin gruel' staged from a sense of duty, a sin of which the RSC—at their London end, the Aldwych—were themselves guilty. Now he wants to amend his neglect of modern work. The choice of new plays at the Other Place last year was all his own, and an important part of the RSC success. Another was the development of the Other Place itself as ‘a Midlands regional theatre. At Stratford for most of the year you play to a million passers-by. But our season now lasts into January and you don’t get tourists then.’
His schedule is punishing, though he has succumbed recently to nothing more than a two-day cold, caught when forgetting to put on an extra sweater after joining in one of the company’s ‘crucifying’ movement classes. Most of last year’s repertory was taken for a five-week theatrical blitz on Newcastle on Tyne, the prelude, he hopes, to a permanent RSC base in the north. Now all the plays are coming to London.
He is far from exhausted or bored with it all, though he has other ambitions. ‘I'm covered with conventional embarrassment at saying so, but I want to spend some time writing. I'm not sure that when I finally leave here I want to be a director of anything.’ The second half of that is the kind of thing people always say, and one is inclined to discount it. It will be a pity and a waste if we never have the chance to access Trevor Nunn as a director outside the RSC. But it would leave him appropriately mysterious.