Interview: Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director

When did you first know what your chosen field was going to be?

Sir Trevor Nunn: I guess I was five years old when I first said to my parents, who were just working-class people, "I want to be an actor." And it caused great hilarity. I'd never been to a theater, so I think it must have been something to do with listening to radio during war-time years. And having some sense that sometimes people were playing parts, and sometimes people were speaking as themselves. And it never went away. I just involved myself in every kind of amateur theatrical activity, really from the time when I was seven. Then, I developed a real passionate idolatry for a school teacher of English literature. In my teens I was thinking maybe I want to do something that he would more approve of, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar. And then, there was this discovery one fine day that the more complex plays really have to be directed. A lot of acting instincts, a lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so also is analysis, conception and having a sense of literature.

When I was 17, just before I left school and very arrogantly I put an advertisement in a newspaper saying, "I want to form a theater company." I formed this young theater group. Probably nobody was older than 21 or 22. I directed Hamlet, a great, sprawling, ambitious production that ran for five hours. It had ridiculous symphonic incidental music, and a very spectacular set that took a great deal of time to change from one scene to another. But, what a wonderful learning process! Actually, one of the things that I did in that production, I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience. I remember seeing the film of Kiss Me Kate how Petruchio was out in the audience on a platform. So in this production I had a runway and Hamlet would come right out into the middle of the audience and talk. "Shall I kill myself, or shall I go on living? How am I going to deal with this problem with my father?" Curiously thinking that at the age of 17, I've always believed that about Shakespeare's soliloquies. I've always wanted to have that sense of dialogue.

Did you get any encouragement from your family when you were a child with these dreams?

Sir Trevor Nunn: I never had discouragement. In the sense that we were a very poor family. In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was really very, very poor. So, I grew up in an area where it wasn't expected that kids would have any kind of scholastic career, or go to grammar school, or anything like that. When I started to talk about the possibilities of career that would take me away, my parents never said, "No, no, no, no, no you mustn't consider that," or "You must stay here, stay in this area," or anything like that. I think they were bewildered because there was no theater or entertainment business of any kind in our family. So, therefore, there was a fear that I would occasionally encounter with my parents and other members of the family. "Do you quite know what you're doing?" My mother would telephone and she would say, "Now, you have to be careful what you say." I said, "Who do you mean?" Well, she said, "They listen." Who do you mean? Who do you mean 'they'?" "Well, you don't want to ask, but you know...They." There was this feeling of, if you come from this area of society, "You'd better be on your best behavior and you'd better not upset people and challenge other people's assumptions." So, I was always aware of that degree of fear, but then once I did involve myself in professional theater there was a huge amount of encouragement and pleasure from my parents.

Do you remember the first time you saw a theatrical play?

Sir Trevor Nunn: I think I was seven-years-old. I was taken to a place called the Ipswich Hippodrome. "Hippodrome" is a word that means a stadium where horses are going to be on view, but lots of vaudeville theaters were called hippodromes. I was very excited that at last I was being taken to a theater. I had no idea what the inside of a theater would look like. Even in this area - it was just a kind of vaudeville house - there was this feeling of red velvet cushions. Probably it wasn't velvet; I don't know what the material was, but some feeling of plushness that I found very exciting. As we sat there, I heard an orchestra tuning up for the first time. I say an orchestra -- it was probably six musicians, eight musicians, I don't know -- but I heard violins -- an E being struck, and a clarinet being played. And then, the overture, and I have never forgotten that completely visceral excitement. That -- butterflies in the stomach and a show is about to begin. I can't remember much else about the show, except that there was a woman in it who had a very shiny black skirt and it was split right up to the waist. That image remains. I would imagine, therefore, that I was being taken to a show that was pretty inappropriate for a seven year-old. Heaven knows what kind of blue jokes were coming down from that stage! But, it was an indelible thrill.

Do you think you were a gifted child?

Sir Trevor Nunn: I have absolutely no idea about the genetics of it. I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity. As a family we would go around to see an uncle of mine and there'd be some other relations there. I discovered that on one of his shelves there were seven or eight books. We didn't have books in our house.

There was a brown volume and I pulled it down and it was the works of William Shakespeare. And my response to it was, "I want to find a speech that I can read out to everybody." Not, "I want to take this book off into a corner and I want to discover about a whole play, and I want to read it privately to myself." And so, with a strange precocity, I would stand in the corner of the room and I would deliver Shakespeare's speeches, with no sense whatsoever of the context, or of the role that I was playing. I mean, I would gradually begin to put two and two together with these speeches, and begin to understand what must be going on in the play. I still have that volume, because my aunt gave it to me when I was going off to university. That's a very treasured possession. But, I just have to be grateful for whatever gift was handed on to me. In terms of performing, yes of course, I used to feel nerves. I used to feel adrenaline, but I also used to feel a huge magnetism. I really want to do this. I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or performances being canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.

Later on, when I was trying to justify having an academic education, and wanting to apply the performance gift, whatever it was -- then I did study. I did think very carefully about the role of the director. I read a great deal of director's memoirs. I read a book by Tyrone Guthrie that hugely influenced me, inspired me. And, I have done ever since because I really enjoy discovering how other people deal with the contradictions. The thing is, there is very little formal training for being a theatre director. There's a little bit more for being a movie director. There are film schools. Most theatre studies places don't actually accommodate directors or have a program for them. Certainly not in England they don't. In a way, I sympathize with that because there is something unteachable about it. Really, what you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to anything. It's to do with listening. It's to do with humility and a sense of yourself.

What do you consider your first big break?

Sir Trevor Nunn: The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone. I was incredibly lucky. I thought that I was going to a purely academic place, and I discovered the most thriving student drama situation in the world. I found myself there with contemporaries like Derek Jacobi, and Ian McKellen, and John Cleese, and Peter Cook and David Frost -- all kinds of people who went into the entertainment business. I felt very inspired by them, and was amazed when they told me that they enjoyed doing things with me. It's such a stimulating and thrilling thing to discover you are amongst your peers and you're being pushed and challenged. You don't necessarily have the limits that you thought you had.

After University, I applied to some twenty-odd professional theaters, and most of them replied with a sort of pro forma statement: "I read from your letter that you have no professional experience, so you must go and get some professional experience and then apply to us again." A vicious circle. Everyone is telling you to go get experience, but you can't get experience unless someone gives you the opportunity to do it professionally.

I was fantastically fortunate. When I was 13 years old, a professional theater company in my town needed a kid actor. I auditioned, and I got the part, so for just a few weeks I became a member of the company and I met some professional actors.

There was a young, juvenile romantic actor called Tony Stedham. And I used to talk to him in dressing rooms back stage, and tell him about all the things that I wanted to do when I grew up. And one of the theaters that I had applied to had a director called Anthony Richardson. And eventually, I got a note from this Anthony Richardson saying, "Maybe you could come over to this Midlands town, Coventry, and we could have a talk." I hitchhiked over there, and I waited around outside his office until several hours passed, and eventually he was free. And I went in through the door and Anthony Richardson was Tony Stedham. He'd changed his name. It was the guy that I'd used to -- when I was 13 -- have all of those dream talks with. He hadn't realized that either. It wasn't that he was preparing a surprise for me. Discovering that extraordinary bit of happenstance had occurred, he said, "I guess that settles it. I'm looking for an assistant, so I'd better stop interviewing people because this is such an extraordinary accident. I will appoint you."

That theater where I first got a job at, just happened to be 15 miles away from the theatre that I had the biggest fantasy about of all, which was the theatre in Shakespeare's birthplace, which is also in the Midlands, Stratford-upon-Avon -- just 15 miles away was the place where it was all happening, as far as I was concerned. Peter Hall was just organizing for the first time, the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time. It never occurred to me that an extra bit of good fortune had happened to me. I just thought, "This is wonderful. I'm close enough to be able to go see what's happening at Stratford all the time." It never occurred to me that when I did something good at the theater that I was working at, the people in Stratford read about it, and they were only 15 miles away, and they came over and saw what was going on.

After just two years in that first theater company, I was employed to be an Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Then, two years after that, I was asked to be the person, to be the Artistic Director. I was 27. I said no, as forcibly as I could, which was rather weakly, kind of shuddering and nervous and saying, "I don't think I'm up to this." Peter Hall said, "I'm sure you are." He was my absolute mentor. Fortunately, he's still a very dear and close friend who I see all the time. That push into 'this is something that you can do,' I found myself actually responsible for the whole thing which was even at that stage, it was the biggest theatre company in the world, at just about my 28th birthday. By the time I left, I retired 18 years later, it was probably the biggest theater company in the world by double. It was often called the best theater company in the world, the called the most famous theater company in the world. We had extraordinary worldwide successes.

The route from first going to college to that place didn't involve years of suffering, and deprivation. It didn't involve a great deal of rejection. I remind myself of that as often as I can, when I'm auditioning, when I'm interviewing, when I'm hearing other people's stories. First of all, you have to have the luck. Secondly, you have to be ready to use it when it happens. I can't just shrug and say developing an internationally famous theater company is just a preordained or lucky thing. Of course it takes a lot of application and determination. There were a huge amount of downs, as well as the ups, particularly struggling with financial crises. Once every two or three years, we were about to become extinct.

You've had a lot of personal challenges, have you ever been afraid?

Sir Trevor Nunn: Yes, I have, and I think it's necessary.

Unquestionably, the first few weeks when I took on running The Royal Shakespeare Company, it wasn't just self-doubt. I mean I was deeply frightened. I was frightened that I was going to be exposed, or even -- you know, I was going to have to go through the ignominy of being rebelled against. You know, that there were people working for me who were going to say, "I'm sorry, I'm not going to go on doing this because I don't respect the leadership sufficiently." I mean, I was deeply frightened that that was going to happen. There have been a number of other occasions, but it's to do with trusting your judgment. At one stage we were in bad financial shape at Stratford, and I decided to do a rare Shakespeare play and to spend more on the design image of it than had been spent on other productions. People said, "This is totally crazy, with the financial situation that we're in." And I said, "I think we've got to give the opposite message. I think we've got to get people into the theater because we're giving them more and the word will spread." Having taken that decision, in the weeks or the days immediately prior to the opening of that, yes, I was deeply frightened that that was a mistake and that would mean the end of the regime, the end of my job. And the opposite happened.

What kind of setbacks did you have along the way?

Sir Trevor Nunn: The biggest was the discovery that I was working 14, and sometimes 16 hours a day, and I had no time for the marriage I was supposed to be developing. So, I really couldn't be surprised when I was told, "You should stay married to your job, because I have to go." That was a lesson. I'm not sure I learnt from the lesson quickly enough. Trying to get work and life in balance is the most difficult thing. I have that knowledge now, but it was a setback at the time.

Pretty early on I discovered that there was a financial corruption in the organization that I was running. That was a very, very hard one, because I did feel considerably too junior to be the investigating body and the adjudicating body, and the person saying, "The only conclusion from this is: you have to go. You have to lose your jobs." That made me feel 20 years older overnight.

And, of course, there were critical ups and downs.

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford. The play had a sort of talismanic hold over me. I guess that was another lesson learned because quite simply, I think I tried too hard. That's possible to do. I analyzed this text that's almost beyond analysis to within an inch of its life. I think I made another extreme mistake that I felt that I had the solution that I could write about it. I could publish my production in some way as the answer to all of the contradictions of this endlessly contradictory work. Actually, what I'd got on stage was a kind of literary exercise. It was something that was just over scholarly and somewhat inert. It didn't work. It was not well received critically. It was something that didn't make the journey that a lot of other productions did of going to London and in one way or another going abroad. It was a production that had an early death. I was very dented by that. If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance. I think all directors have to fight against that, have to fight against being the be all and end all. You know? The person about whom other people say, "There but for the grace of God goes God." It's not an enviable condition. But it's not a task that you can successfully dispense if you are in the midst of racking self-doubt.

If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe that whatever criticism, whatever comment is received, is meant. And, if they pick up the message of "I might mean this. On the other hand, I'm feeling rather doubtful about myself, so maybe I don't mean it. And maybe you've got a better idea. Or maybe actually what he said is better." Then, of course, chaos reigns. And self-doubt is something that communicates very quickly through an acting company. It's contagious.

I don't just mean that everybody in that company perceives the self-doubt in the director, they begin to doubt themselves, because there's no parity of purpose.

I have been through experiences with given productions, where I felt to an acute degree, "I can't do this." or "I can't do this, anymore. Whatever judgment I had it's gone." It's a hard lesson to learn, too. You would think, as you do plays, or works for television, works on film, that you pick up where you left off. You assume that you have learned all the lessons of your last outing and then you pick up right where you left off, and the truth is you don't. You pick up somewhere in the midst of an unknown project and you flounder often the same way. You repeat mistakes that you've made before. You say to yourself, "I don't believe that. I made that mistake 10 years ago, how have I done that again? And how did I not see I was doing that again?" So, yes. All of those things have happened to me. And equally, I've experienced the opposite. I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm. And then, that's been sort of a launch pad for a very good period, you know. "I do know what I'm doing. I do trust my ideas. That odd dream that I had two nights ago, I'm going to go with that. This imagery in there, I think I know what that's about, and I'm going to go with that. And I'm going to apply that to this play." You know, there's a lot of potentially hubristic activity in directing, following a random idea and trusting to it. But then of course, the pendulum can swing too far the other way, and you continue to trust your craziest of ideas and you come crashing down.

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do. I love to have as much input as possible. However, I also think there's a point where structure is extremely important. All of those energies have to become one energy. When all of those inputs and all of those energies are bouncing into each other and conflicting, then there's no strength to the enterprise at all. It begins to be self-canceling.

I think a director does have a huge responsibility to draw strands together and to seek extension and development of his or her own ideas. I don't say that involving other people's input is at all going into the rehearsal room saying, "I don't have any ideas about this, I hope somebody else does." No, not at all. No. I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

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.

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.

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.

How did the transition from Shakespeare to the most modern of productions occur?

Sir Trevor Nunn: It wasn't really a leap.

The first theater that I went to was a vaudeville house, and the great experience was hearing the band striking up. I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera. I've never wanted to categorize them, or to feel that they should be done by different people, different specialists. I've never believed in that. So, when I was at university, I suppose this was expressed through the fact that there were two famous societies at Cambridge. One of them was called the Marlowe Society that did all the classical plays. And the other was called the Footlights, and they did the musicals and the revues. And in my last term at Cambridge I did both productions. I did the Marlowe Society and the Footlights. I directed both of them.

I didn't have any problem about it. It seemed perfectly straightforward. It was just two versions of the same thing. So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War. Since Joan Littlewood had made this sensational musical called, Oh, What a Lovely War about the First World War, somebody had the idea that all the social pressures that became almost a revolution in England during the General Strike could be a stage musical. That was the first thing that I worked at under the RSC banner. Don't castigate yourself that you haven't heard of it, because it never saw the light of day.

I had the feeling that a classical theater company ought to be able to embrace popular things as well. I did a children's play by Robert Bolt with 17 songs in it, the lyrics for which I wrote. I did a production of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and I transformed it into a musical. Not the Broadway musical, Boys from Syracuse, but keeping all of Shakespeare's text, turning a lot of the text into lyrics, and then providing some lyrics of my own.

We had a big cult success with that in Stratford, and London, and it was televised. David Merrick wanted to put it on Broadway. It was all part and parcel of the same thing. I did King Lear in the same season, and I did Macbeth in the same season, which was also televised. John Napier designed all of those productions in that year. He's my dearest, closest, longest-serving colleague, to whom I often feel I'm married.

When we did this huge derring-do stage production of Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, which was -- I mean, that was an absolute last throw of the dice for the RSC. We were in such terrible financial circumstance that I was employing a company of 50 actors, and I only had money for one production, and no play has been written that provides for 50 roles. And I had a whole company desperate for work, and I didn't want to get rid of anybody. And I suddenly had the idea that I could go to Dickens. And it suddenly occurred to me that Dickens was the greatest dramatist who never wrote a play. And I could take all of that material and make a stage work with this wonderful company of actors, and we did. And a colleague of mine, John Caird, co-directed the show with me. And we had this eight-and-a-half-hour show that become a kind of legend in London, and then we took it to Broadway and we won all the Tony Awards. And then we televised it and won the Emmy Award for it. So, it was evidence that things can be born of the most extreme desperation.

It was that production that saved us and kept the company going. Then our grant situation was amended, and we lived to fight another day.

John Napier and I had worked on Nicholas Nickleby together and it was seen by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Andrew sought a meeting and said, "I've set to music some poems by T.S. Eliot." Well, I'd studied Eliot at Cambridge and I was thinking, "This is some ambitious thing. Andrew's set to music The Waste Land, or the Four Quartets, or something. Eventually I discovered that it was Eliot's off-duty children's verse that had been set to music, his little book called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Andrew had set 10 of them to music and he said to me, "Do you think this could become a stage musical?" I listened to the material and I called him and I said, "I think if we found four very clever entertainers and two pianos..." "No, no, no, no," he said, "You don't understand at all. I mean a big stage musical. I mean a big, epic - a big event."

I thought, "Well I'd better cut this conversation short, because we're at terrible cross-purposes here."

I went away and I thought, "He's written the story of the Passion, Jesus Christ Superstar, and he's written a story about a popular dictator who changed 20th century history in Evita.

First of all, why hasn't he offered me his musical version of The War of the Worlds? And secondly, why is he fascinated with these little children's poems?

There's got to be something in this, because he hasn't notably made mistakes about his material.

I should consider it much more carefully."

I then started thinking in terms of dance, and mime, and then of an experience that could be communicated from the point of view of cats. That is to say, from the scale of cats, that everything should be cat scale. And that human behavior would be visible through the responses of the cat -- a lot of criticism of human behavior would be -- and then it occurred to me, "What's wonderful about the material is that it's for children, but it's for adults." And then I thought, "Well, of course, that's why the poems were written." I mean, they were written for these kids, but they were also written for their parents to read. You know, to have a different kind of laugh, while reading the poem over the kid's shoulder. I thought, "This is multi-generational." It also occurred to me that because of the dance ingredient and because of the simplicity and in many ways, there was no narrative. I could make a narrative you could extrapolate, though not an imposed narrative. Then, there wasn't really a language barrier. It could be entertaining for French people, and Japanese people. It wasn't something that was limited to any one social grouping. Therefore, Andrew's perception about it was as reliable as ever. So I went to my old friend John Napier and said, "I've been asked to do this crazy project and I want you to help me." And he came up with this completely spectacular design. I said to John, "I think any design for this show should make a joke about The Waste Land. There should be some element of wasteland about it. We talked about it for a while and he said, "The nearest I can get to a wasteland is a rubbish tin." And I thought, "That's completely wonderful. This annual celebration by these cats should take place in their own auditorium, which is just a junk heap." I thought that was great, because it was street. It was the complete opposite to the idea of cats as pampered creatures. They were a surviving bunch of street cats. That design, of course, is a huge ingredient in the success of the show.

Do you ever worry that you've gone too far? Do you find yourself concerned what critics will write about what you've done?

Sir Trevor Nunn: I guess the same applies to the decision to do Les Miserables. I knew that there would be a lot of people writing for the serious press, or representing the serious media in England who would say, "But, it's outrageous that one of our premier subsidized theater companies should be doing something that is appropriate to the commercial sphere." I believe that, on the contrary, it was entirely appropriate for a classical theater company to say, "We are going to take a great 19th century novel -- a complex 19th century novel -- about justice and about faith, and we are going to make a musical the like of which hasn't previously occurred. I mean, it's going to have a seriousness and a moral complexity, and a political message that hasn't previously been in the musical theater." But again, you know, just before we got started, I remember feeling extreme pangs of terror, you know. The kind of "Maybe I should call this off." Maybe I shouldn't give those people in the media the chance to say, "You see, we told you that this was disgraceful and it shouldn't happen." But in each case, you go through that cold terror and you come out strengthened by it. Therefore, when I was asked recently, "Would you consider going back into the subsidized spectrum? Would you become the next director of The National Theater?" I experienced two things. Unquestionably, I experienced that feeling of, "That's where I can be sure of maintaining my integrity, so I want to do it." The second feeling was of absolute terror because wonderful people have done the job up until now. Its reputation is unparalleled. The expectation is extremely high. Why put yourself on the line? So that, in the end people will say, "He did okay for a while, but then he did the National Theatre and completely screwed up."

Do you have any thoughts on the future of theater?

Sir Trevor Nunn: I'm scared by this question. Live experiences are becoming increasingly a special occasion, or a treat, or a rarity. With the massive revolution in communication and entertainment that's taking place right now, it's time for everybody to emphasize that live things are vital.

That sense of being at a living event is so exciting in itself. "This is happening now!" It can be recorded, but by the time it's recorded, it's become something different." Our sense of smell, our sense of fear, of atmosphere, of tension, our sense of scale, and most important of all, our sense of danger, all of those things come into play in a living event. It's like going to the live sporting event and experiencing it. It's a completely different experience when you watch it on television. The sense of danger is missing. That extraordinary visceral connection that happens with the live event is absent.

A huge potential audience is saying, "The number of times I go to a really bad movie is far less than the number of times that I wind up at some live event that's terrible and I'm very bored with it and I have to leave." There's a large element of chance in theatrical entertainment. "It only costs this to take me to the movie house. It costs me only this to watch cable. It costs me very much more to watch live actors."

The conditions of theater, particularly of classical theater, should be improved to the point where it's the seat price that can be lowered, where the working conditions are such that the standards are higher, and therefore it lets you down less often. Because when it works, when it really works, then it can change your life for good and all. There are things that can happen to you in a theater, things which can be to do with performance, to do with understanding elements of the human condition, which can be to do with ideas, can be to do with uncomfortable ideas, abrasive ideas, revolutionary ideas. But, there are things that can change you more extremely and stay with you longer because of that live visceral contact. I worry that we are possibly, towards the end of something. Rather than still flourishing right in the middle of something. I sense that we needn't be near the end of something. I sense that there's a wonderful ecological balance to be achieved between live things and mechanical things, between the indelible visceral things and the library of things that you can go back to and check out many times over. There's a balance that will ultimately be the best thing for the species. Just this morning we were cheering to Nobel Prize winning chemists who had warned us all about what we were doing to the environment, what we were doing to the ozone layer. When we get too rarefied with scientific advance, when we rely upon scientific advance that takes us further and further away from our basic human condition and we get it wrong, we have to keep coming back to our basic human condition. The basic condition of the theater actually requires no technology. All it requires is that fire last night and those costumes and the human voice and people gathered together. That's all that's required for something to happen that is life changing. Of course, there are countless sophistications of it. Keeping the two things is what's going to make entertainment, and expression, and communication so much more rich in the next century, in the next millennium.

It was wonderful to speak with you today. Thank you.