In Willy Russell's play, Educating Rita, Rita's succinct proposal for staging Peer Gynt was "do it on the radio". Richard Eyre's challenge was to "do it on the telly" - to present the history of British theatre in the 20th century in a six-part television series. Although this prolific theatre and film director and former artistic director of Britain's National Theatre was steeped in the material, he soon recognised the difficulties of presenting a live, transient, artform on television.
Filmed versions of plays, archive clips, and the creative use of location shots had to compensate for the impossibility of showing stage performances. So watch Richard Eyre galloping on horseback along the shore at Provincetown, standing on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, in ruminative mode on the coast of Inis Meain or crossing Brooklyn Bridge, speaking to camera. His script is a distilled version - "like haikus" - of the book, Changing Stages, which he co-wrote with playwright and director Nicholas Wright. "We had to condense the book into journalism - to tell a story, with necessary simplifications, which yoked together ambiguities and contradictions," Eyre says. "But I also wanted to refute the received in the history of theatre. These are journalistic conveniences, not how people work in real life. Things mostly happen through a series of accidents - there are no revolutions."
The story he tells places Shakespeare at the heart of British theatre, "our theatrical DNA", and traces the emergence of modern theatre, through the key playwrights and actors and some influential directors, notably Harley Granville Barker and Joan Littlewood. The tone of the book is personal and celebratory; Eyre is a passionate advocate for the theatre's unique qualities and unreproducible elements, its capacity to get under your skin, "to ravish the eyes and ears and enchant the soul".
Irish playwrights: Yeats, Shaw and Wilde, followed by O'Casey, Behan and Beckett are the subject of one programme; Americans - O'Neill, Miller and Williams - another. Both groups are credited with revitalising British theatre at different times during the past century, awakening it from insularity or complacency, injecting it with energy and a sense of purpose.
In Eyre's own directorial career, it was the American playwright, Tony Kushner, who was a reinvigorating force. Kushner's Angels in America was an unsolicited script that landed on Eyre's desk at the National Theatre, where the play was premiered in 1992. Speaking on a recent visit to Dublin, Eyre tends to present his life as a series of happy accidents, opportunities that came to him because he was receptive to them. From running the Nottingham Playhouse in the 1970s, to being head of Play For Today at the BBC's Drama department, to his 10 years at the National Theatre, "everything I've done has been at someone else's suggestion", he says. The latest suggestion is to make a feature film based on John Bayley's memoirs of his late wife, Iris Murdoch, describing her suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Eyre is currently working on the 11th draft of this script, with Charles Wood, with whom he collaborated on his memorable BBC film about the Falklands war, Tumbledown. "This will not be a film about a victim of a disease," he says. "It's about marriage, love, old age." Eyre's mother had Alzheimer's and he has written about its painful effects in newspapers and in his memoir Utopia and Other Places (1993), in which he examined his difficult relationship with his late parents. "I was asked to write a book about the theatre but the only thing I wanted to write at the time was a family memoir."
Did the book help to lay the past to rest? "It helped me a bit, but it didn't close the relationship. If anything, my communication with the dead has become more voluble. In writing about your parents, thinking and talking about them, you are trying to decide who you are, why you behave in the way you do. If I hadn't written it, my unacknowledged, unresolved feelings would have festered.
"So, it started a process of self-examination and for that I'm very grateful. I'm interested in the journey."
For Eyre, the theatre fulfils his desire for a surrogate family. "Through the collaborative work you form very strong, intense attachments. Relationships are accelerated and condensed. People think this is sentimental stuff, but it's not an inferior form of emotion - it's real. It's not mockable, it's desirable. In the theatre, the director creates a little self-contained world, a small society, where people can give according to their abilities. That's why I love it, and it also explains the resentment of `luvvies'. It's very enviable to create a society with definite, shared objectives and to get an audience who corroborate that - sometimes."
Valuing the bonds forged in the theatre does not, in Eyre's case, result in nostalgia or stagnation. One of the leitmotifs of Changing Stages is the importance of an ongoing process of renewal, replenishment and evolution in the creative process. Theatre companies reach the limit of their lifespan, "few manage to sustain artistic ardour beyond seven years". At the end of the excellent chapter on Shakespeare's plays and their performance history, the authors suggest a moratorium on public performances of his plays for two years, to "let an appetite breed on starvation". They wish to rescue the Shakespearean canon from a diminishing "spiral of repetition" - its recycling and re-examination over the past 30 years by the two national companies in Britain, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre.
Eyre also argues the most successful performances of Shakespeare in recent years have been in small, intimate spaces and his own, superb, production of King Lear in the smallest auditorium of the National Theatre demonstrated his point.
While he recognised that, for him, 10 years at the National Theatre, from 198897, were sufficient, and he wanted to move on, Eyre does admit to missing it still. Part of the withdrawal process was getting used to living without the staff on whom he'd become dependent - "I was meandering for a while, really, like a deposed White Russian," he laughs. "For me, working in the National was an irreducible part of my life, like an emotion that is always with you. Yes, there were lots of meetings, but I enjoyed them because they were with friends, people I had chosen to work with. It was a great adventure." "In my view, institutions can be virtuous as well as malign, despite their bad press and all the talk about bureaucracy. At the most basic level, some bureaucracy is essential - people like to be paid, for example, and I think every organisation needs to cherish the people who pay the bills! There are dangers, of course, when institutions turn inward. They must keep asking, what do they exist for? To perpetuate themselves? My mantra is that, while the ancillary virtues can be itemised, the only thing that justifies the National Theatre is what goes on the stages - the visible evidence."
Changing Stages: a View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century continues on BBC 2 on Sundays at 7.05 p.m. The accompanying book of the same title, by Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, is published by Bloomsbury (£30 in UK)