Sir Trevor Nunn Interview (page: 4 / 6) Theatrical Director	Print Interview

In what way can a theatrical director's integrity be challenged?

Sir Trevor Nunn: I've just been making a movie, the third movie that I've made. The movie business is producer-driven, which is really to say that it's box office-driven. That's no bad thing. There's a product and it has to find a market. Therefore, producer decision-making is almost invariably the final cut. The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that. You are faced with the choice: either my integrity remains intact and this is the work that ends up on the screen, or I have to leave, and I have to be known to have left. For somebody of my background, there doesn't seem to be a midway point. "Okay, I'll give you a few, and I'll hope to have a few of my own, and we'll end up in some kind of middle position." I find that very difficult.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater. And I've just accepted the job of running The National Theatre in England, because I want to be able to say to myself, "The integrity of this enterprise is finally down to me." The buck stops right here in my lap. And it's not possible, it's not conceivable for me to say, "Well, what's happening on the stage at the moment is because it's his fault, or her fault, or their fault." It's my fault. Or it's my commitment, or it's my success, or it's pleasure or whatever.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

When you're working in the classical theater, and in a subsidized situation, it's a real tightrope to walk, because you are responsible for taxpayer's money. You're in the public domain. You can't just be selfish and say, "I don't care. I've lost so many millions, but it just happens to be what I want to do." Integrity to the work that you do must involve a sense of its context and a sense of the pressures.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work. Only on two occasions have I had real face-to-face yelling matches. On both occasions, I didn't have to sacrifice what I wanted. Happily, on both occasions the pieces of work went on to be extremely successful and to play in every country in the world. So there was some kind of vindication to the argument about integrity. But it's a hard one.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision. It's who finally presses the button about what form a work is going to be in.

Has there been a time when you sustained your career on sheer persistence?

Sir Trevor Nunn: Yes. It was back in the early 1970s. My predecessor, Peter Hall, had done a massive project with the theater company of all of Shakespeare's history plays: the Henry IV plays and Henry V, the Henry VI plays, and then Richard III. So there was this sort of wonderful, contiguous, consecutive, seamless work.

Many people said to me, "Why don't you find your own big project? You really should look for one. Why don't you do that one again?" And I kept thinking, "This is foolish, I don't feel like a big project. Anyway, there aren't any other sequences in Shakespeare."

Then one day I thought, "Why did Shakespeare go back four times to the notion of the Roman state?" There's this very peculiar early play, Titus Andronicus which is about the decline of Rome. And there's Julius Caesar, whether a dictatorship is going to exist, or whether democratic freedoms are going to persist. And then there's Antony and Cleopatra, which is the Rome of a little bit later on, which has become empire building and attempting world domination, and one of the leaders decides that he wants to opt out.

And there's the very late play, Coriolanus, which is about the very beginnings of Roman society. It's about the emergence of a political state, as opposed to a set of tribal war chieftains.

I thought, "Maybe I should do all of Shakespeare's Roman plays in the same season. And just to tickle the appetite of the audience, I'll do them in historical order, rather than in the order that Shakespeare wrote them. So I'll begin with Coriolanus, and then develop on to Julius Caesar, and then do Antony and Cleopatra, and then do Titus Andronicus. You know, the rise and then the decline and fall of Rome.

Once I'd embarked on this idea, pretty early on, I had more arguments against it than for it, in my head. I've sort of sold the season on the idea that there are connections between these plays, but I don't really think there are.

A sort of professional determination of, "I have to finish this job," preceded, while a kind of intellectual, "I cannot fully commit to what I'm doing" notion was moving along in parallel.

I got through the whole of the Stratford season, and it was all right. It wasn't received as a mighty project, but it was fine at the box office. We then televised Antony and Cleopatra. I was able to do it differently on television and suddenly, just working on that one play was thrilling. We had a smash hit with it. It won the BAFTA Award and it was up for an Emmy Award, and so on, so all of that was great.

Then we had to transfer all those Stratford productions to London and do them all again. Finally, the divergence of technique and commitment became too much. I just kept plugging away, hour by hour, day by day, as the belief in the project frittered away. I got as close to a nervous collapse as I ever want to experience. I survived it, but I would never do such a thing again. I would want to be much more certain, in future, that a project of such ambition was properly scholastically founded.

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