Creating a Director: Directing a Creation

National Service – Diary of a Decade at the National Theatre by Richard Eyre

Star-struck after interviewing Richard Eyre for the Cambridge Film Festival, I read his diary recording his life and work as director of the National Theatre from 1987 to 1997. When I spoke to him, loath to seem sycophantic, I didn’t say too much about his new film, Stage Beauty. But after the interview, he asked me what I thought of it, as if he really cared about my opinion and was genuinely worried about how his work would be received by the press. How could such a successful man have been so disarmingly diffident? I was intrigued.

If like me you wonder about the creative process, this book will fascinate you. It reveals the inner life and personality behind the planner and politician, and an insight into an extremely challenging job.

Although not a great work of literature (as he admits in the Introduction), a surprising and brilliant character emerges. Often insecure about his plays or choice of plays, he nevertheless, or perhaps in virtue of this fact, went on to direct and programme hit after hit. For this he earned himself a CBE and then a knighthood. He socialised with politicians and royalty, playwright, novelists, journalists and actors, who featured among his close friends. Yet he was without a trace of superiority, insisting that all crew members be treated equally.

Juggling the three theatres which make up the National, he shows us a fine balance of excitement and exhaustion. In a newspaper headline which he turned upside-down (as he was fond of doing), he said of himself, ‘HE DIES FROM A JOB MOST PEOPLE WOULD WALK AWAY FROM’, rather than, ‘HE WALKS AWAY FROM A JOB THAT MOST PEOPLE WOULD DIE FOR’. I think this diary truly brings both aspects of the job to life – the glory and the pain - and leaves us to decide whether it is worth it, like militaristic Service to one’s country.

Within these pages are also clues to his inspiration as a film director and the reasons why he chose certain films to direct. He was a thorough researcher of the settings and characters of his plays, but for his two triumphs of film, Stage Beauty and Iris, his life and work sufficed as background.

In October 1991, the Japanese Kabuki Theatre visited the National Theatre and Richard Eyre talked to Tamasaburo, male actor of women’s roles. Tamasaburo had been apprenticed to the previous master of this art since he was a child, and was a national star in Japan. This contact must have contributed to the inspiration of the Ned Kynaston character in Stage Beauty, who is at the height of his cross-dressing glory in the film, as was Tamasaburo when Eyre met him.

Another key personality from whom Eyre appears to have drawn inspiration for Ned Kynaston is John Osborne. Osborne had written a number of very successful plays in the 1950s when he was in his late twenties, including Look Back in Anger, Luther, The Entertainer, Hotel in Amsterdam, Inadmissible Evidence, Tom Jones (screenplay), but thereafter descended into mediocrity. He felt he was ‘cast out of paradise’ with his loss of talent, as Ned Kynaston fell from glory following the Royal decree (of Charles II) that only women could act women on the stage. In June 1993 Di Trevis directed a revival of Inadmissible Evidence, about which Osborne had been extremely caustic, making it impossible to continue performing under his critical gaze. Following a talk with Eyre telling him as much, Osborne felt he had been banned from rehearsals of his own play, just as Ned Kynaston felt he was no longer welcome to either act or guide in the new theatre where women acted women. This, from John’s painful and furious letter to Richard in June 1993, could as easily been written by Ned Kynaston, ‘There is no place left for me in the theatre’. Ironically, Eyre and the critics felt the play was good. Ned’s despair at the theft of ‘his’ female roles to which he had devoted his life and the audience’s enthusiastic response to the new actresses in his place is comparable to John’s disapproval of the way his play was produced and his dismay when everyone else liked it. Eyre may also have been inspired by the Othello directed by Sam Mendes in 1997, which was a successful play in Eyre’s last year as Director of the National. In Eyre’s diary he commented that the Othello was strong, and just as good as the Iago. To pull off Stage Beauty Eyre said he needed the death scene from Othello to be very powerful, which I recall it was in the 1997 production at the National.

For Iris, he was inspired by more personal events. Interlaced with his hectic working life two people recur consistently for the first half of the diary: his mother and his father. Drawing from both their sufferings in old age, his mother’s Alzheimer’s and his father’s stroke, Richard painfully and lovingly created Iris. This film traces the life of philosopher-novelist, Iris Murdoch who slowly and completely lost her prized mind. The receding memory and personality of his mother enabled him to so convincingly and sorrowfully evoke Iris’ diminishing mental powers. Meanwhile, the decline into old age marked by the disarray of his father’s house is conjured with a poignant reality in the film – a sad and jumbled mess of a previously vital existence. As his father’s condition worsened the relationship with his girlfriend, Margaret deteriorated (Mr Eyre had been living with her since Mrs Eyre’s profound dementia). In Iris this is portrayed by Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent’s heartfelt evocation of crisis in the face of illness and imminent death; as frustration mounts and necessity requires her husband, John, treats Iris like a child. Despite difficult relationships with his parents when he was younger, Richard shows a great tenderness for them in his diary. This affection is certainly conveyed in Iris, both for and between the characters.

For a more personal insight into his life, Utopia and other places: memoir of a young director talks about his childhood and family in more depth, adding layer upon layer to our understanding of his creative talent which has so well served theatre and film in this country.

‘Her Majesty the Queen: Is the National in an up or down phase? Theatres do go up and down, don’t they?
Richard Eyre: Up, I think, Ma’am.’
- Eyre on receiving his CBE for his work at the National Theatre