Filmmaker Richard Eyre's new book details his 10 years as the director of Britain's National Theatre. He talks to Donald Clarke about depression, didactics and defying his father.
In his diary entry for January 3rd, 1988, Richard Eyre, then the recently-appointed Director of Britain's National Theatre, remarked, "I'm not steeped in theatre lore and I'm not sure I like theatre enough to act as its propagandist and evangelist. I don't love it." Bravely, Sir Richard has included this heretical musing in the published version of his diaries, National Service, which takes us through his decade in charge of that most unwieldy of institutions. I imagine he will be asked to explain himself by many of his colleagues.
"It just strikes me as a bit camp to shout, 'Oh, I love the theatre!'" he says in his gentle voice. "Well, I don't love the theatre. I love and admire some things about it. I find it a very congenial thing to work with a group of people, united in mutual admiration, to produce something that goes in front of an audience. But I don't love the theatre in the sense of all that campery. I don't love the trappings." Considering that his predecessor at the National was the big, brash ("A man of huge appetites," Eyre says) Peter Hall and that his successor was the great populist Trevor Nunn, it is unsurprising that Eyre has come to be seen as one of the quiet men of British theatre. Yet his achievements are substantial. During his time on the South Bank, in between fretting about the catering and dining with Princess Margaret, he shepherded such productions as Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III, Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. And through it all, he directed his own shows even as he was tied up in the day-to-day running of an organisation akin to a medieval city-state (complete with its own brutalist ramparts).
The pressures of such a job are unimaginable. And, with characteristic sangfroid, Eyre explains in the diaries how he was driven to depression and how he took refuge in Prozac.
"I wouldn't dignify it as a breakdown," he tells me. "But I did get clinically depressed. However, I think that was as much to do with the death of my parents as it was to do with the National Theatre." This is interesting. The shadow of his parents - and more particularly his father - hangs over the diaries. Commander Richard Eyre RN sounds like a fairly terrifying piece of work; brutalised by his own father, he joined the navy at 13 and never seems to have had much time for the gentler things in life. Eyre Junior paints a picture of a cold, angry philistine who delighted in telling his son that "Shakespeare was balls". It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the future Sir Richard entered the theatre as an act of rebellion.
"Oh, it would certainly be fair to say that," he agrees. "In some way my getting involved with the arts was a way of defining myself in relation to him. Why is anyone driven to run the National Theatre? I would say in my case there is a satisfactorily Freudian explanation in that I was doing it to attract the attention of my father." The commander thought that going to university was a waste of time, so Richard duly went up to Cambridge where he discovered an unlikely mentor in Kingsley Amis. After graduation, he had a brief crack at acting before realising that his real talents lay in direction. His first production was for the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester in 1965 and he subsequently went on to direct for companies up and down the country before becoming Artistic Director of the prestigious Nottingham Playhouse in 1973.
Eyre was a member of a highly-politicised theatrical generation which included bolshie talents such as Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton and David Edgar. Did he see himself as a Marxist? "I was a sort of a Marxist," he says. "In my autodidact stage I went through a period where I thought, oh, yes, Marx explains absolutely everything. By the 1970s I didn't feel that. When people talked about the revolution, I just thought, oh, come on!" But many of his contemporaries really did seem to feel that there would be heads on spikes before the 1970s were out.
"I suppose some of us did. We used to talk about the revolution and do plays about it, but I always saw it more as a metaphor than a reality, because I could never see myself submitting to the discipline of [fist-brandishing Marxist actor\] Corin Redgrave." So how would the Richard Eyre of the 1970s react if he was told that both he and his frequent collaborator, the writer David Hare, would end up accepting knighthoods? "Oh, we would have been incredibly scornful," he says. "Incredibly scornful . . .
"When I went to the National Theatre my wife said, 'If you do it successfully, they'll offer you a knighthood. And if they do and you accept I'll leave you'. But, you know, it is interesting that, without a single exception, everybody I know who has turned down an honour has somehow managed to let that information leak out." So how did his wife react? "I think she was actually rather proud. Why did I accept? Vanity, I suppose." With refreshing honesty, Eyre goes on to point out that it is impossible to serve as director of the National Theatre without somehow becoming part of the establishment. And the diaries chart his gradual progress though élite circles of power. By the end of the book he finds himself a governor of the BBC and, quite possibly, an ornament of the nation.
Moving in the circles he does, one imagines he could have filled the book with delicious gossip. But National Service is diplomatically restrained about the bad habits of the great and the good. There is none of the cattiness one finds in Peter Hall's published diaries and certainly none of the psychotic indiscretions one encounters in the journals of Kenneth Tynan, a founding father of the National Theatre.
"No spanking you mean?" Eyre laughs. "Well, I realised that I would like to be able to look people in the face afterwards. I think that is part of the difference between me and a proper writer. You have to have a certain steel in the heart to be a real writer. And I don't have that hardness." Indeed, it is hard to escape the notion that Eyre might have been a little bit too nice to run a great organ of the state. Frequently in National Service we find him tearing himself apart when he has to sack somebody or pass on bad news.
"I suppose I am prepared to see the other person's view to a fault," he says. "If somebody says they don't like something in a production I will probably say, 'Oh yes, you are probably right' even if I feel really hurt by it. That is probably a bad thing in a politician, but if you are an artist who also has to manage people, I think it is probably a good thing." Since leaving the National in 1997, he has returned to freelance directing and now devotes much of his attention to film. Having directed for the BBC's Play for Today slot in the 1970s and made his big-screen debut with 1983's Ploughman's Lunch, he already had an impressive cinematic résumé when the big job came along in 1987. Two years ago, his film Iris, the story of the last years of Iris Murdoch, won him much acclaim, and he is currently editing Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which deals with the boy actors of the Shakespearean era. Meanwhile, he has continued with stage work such as his recent production of The Crucible on Broadway and has found time to write and present Changing Stages, a history of theatre for the BBC.
Iris appeared to show Eyre again connecting with his parent's legacy. National Service movingly describes his mother's decline from Alzheimer's Disease, the same condition that afflicted Murdoch.
"Actually, that had nothing to do with my doing Iris," he says. "That was just serendipitous. The truth is you don't work like that as an artist. You don't think, oh, this is too close to home. You are always working by analogy. You are working like a surgeon. You are always quite detached." The Richard Eyre who sits before me seems a much less angst-ridden character than the man we meet in his diaries. He is now 60 years old and is in danger of becoming a grandee. Is he happier? "Oh sure. I am much more sanguine," he says. "Even during the worst times on this current film I was able to say, even if it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world. I am much more content." And then he pauses to muse. "But happiness? That is much more difficult to identify."
National Service: Diary of a Decade by Richard Eyre is published by Bloomsbury at £18.99.
