Another Change of Direction

It’s a tough job, trying to pin down Trevor Nunn’s identity. His life and career can be viewed in any number of ways; it all depends on how close to him you stand.

To the world at large, Nunn is the maestro of the modern musical. As director of “Cats,” “Les Miserables,” “Starlight Express,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Chess” and “Aspects of Love,” he has assisted at the birth of spectacular stage productions (four of them composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber) that, starting in the 1980s, transformed the very notion of what a musical was and could be.

“Cats” and “Les Miserables” continue to pack theaters all over the world, and Nunn’s share of the gross, plus his royalties for writing the lyric for the ubiquitous “Memory” from “Cats,” have made him a multimillionaire--in pound sterling terms, let alone dollars.

That’s the broader world’s view of Trevor Nunn. The British know him equally well in another context. For 18 long years, from 1968 to 1986, he was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In that period he averaged one Shakespeare production a year and co-directed, with John Caird, two stunning successes, “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Les Miserables,” which transferred to commercial theaters. He also supervised the opening of the RSC’s new London home at the Barbican in 1982.

Zero in even closer and talk about him with his collaborators, and yet another picture emerges--of Nunn the earnest scholar, painstakingly unraveling Shakespearean texts until they yield hidden meanings. It’s a habit he learned in his younger days at Cambridge University, where he sat at the feet of the legendary don F.R. Leavis and became a disciple of the Leavisite school of literary criticism.

The acting community generally likes Nunn because he furnishes them with so much detailed information about their characters and their motivations. “No one ever sees this side of him,” says one actor, who has worked with him, “but he’s very good inside the rehearsal room.”

On one hand, then, there’s showman Trev, delivering an assembly line of expensively produced hit musicals to mass audiences. On the other, there’s solemn Mr. Nunn, poring over the text of “Twelfth Night” to see what Shakespeare was really saying, deep down, about gender issues.

Recently, Nunn has further confused people’s perceptions about him. After more than a decade as a freelance hired gun in the commercial sector, directing lucrative musicals, he returned in October to the fold of subsidized theater and became artistic director of the Royal National Theatre. It means that, like his mentor Peter Hall, he has headed both of Britain’s world-class theater companies, the RSC and the National.

This summer, Nunn has been busy at home directing an ambitious revival of “Oklahoma!” for the National; at the same time, he has also been finalizing details to bring a National touring company to Los Angeles, where the first production he directed for the company, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” will open at the Ahmanson Theatre on July 22.

Ian McKellen takes the lead role of Dr. Tomas Stockmann, a medical officer in a Norwegian coastal town who finds the local baths are contaminated. His attempts to reveal the scandal are thwarted by a cover-up on the part of politicians and the press, and he is vilified in the town. The production attracted almost unanimous rave reviews in the British press, and played to crowded houses throughout its London run.

“It’s about society and the individual,” Nunn reflected, sitting at his desk in his office at the National on the Thames’ south bank, which afford glorious wide-screen views of London that stretch as far as St. Paul’s Cathedral to the east.

“In so many areas, Ibsen was uncannily accurate in terms of predicting how things were going to go in this century.

“There have been countless examples in recent years of individuals who have blown the whistle about corruption and a cover-up or some other danger to society. And what happens is they’re turned into pariahs. They’re marked, renounced and ridiculed.”

It may be stretching a point, but one can see why Trevor Nunn might feel a pang of sympathy for Dr. Stockmann and be drawn to a play about the frailties of the press. While hardly a pariah, Nunn enjoys a relationship with the British media best described as combative.

Put simply, he is slightly distrusted. Parts of the British arts establishment feel Nunn let their side down by leaving the classical theater of the RSC to enrich himself by directing vulgar musicals. Much of this was pure snobbery; the class system continues to thrive in British theater, as it does throughout British society. Yet there was also widespread comment about how much time Nunn spent away from the RSC in his latter years to work on various Lloyd Webber projects--even he described himself at the time as “an absentee landlord.”

The big question now surrounding Nunn is why he agreed to take on the National in the first place. He, of all people, already knew about the pressures of running a large, eminent, British-subsidized theater company.

The job involves maintaining a level of quality in productions that will satisfy critics, while keeping box-office numbers healthy. It also involves constant confrontation with the government about levels of subsidy. And all these battles are fought in the glare of a media spotlight; it is a highly public position. Yet Nunn has shown in the past that he is highly sensitive to criticism. So, after 18 years in the RSC trenches, why would Nunn want the National? Given his vast wealth, it certainly wasn’t for the money.

“There’s no great mystery to it,” he said. “I left university, spent two years in a regional subsidized theater in Coventry, where it was possible to form an ensemble, and had a wonderful time. Then I moved 15 miles down the road to Stratford. Therefore my whole education in theater is about conditions where, first of all you have to define the standard, then get the resources to achieve it.”

He spent time as an associate director for Peter Hall, who was then running the RSC, and whom Nunn calls “the single greatest impresario and theater innovator in our country this century.”

When Nunn took over the RSC at the age of 28, he recalls: “It was inextricably my life. Everything to do with my personal life, my friendships, every house I ever lived in is crowded with memories of the events, the meetings, the crises. I wouldn’t have kept going for 18 years if I didn’t believe in some messianic way that what I was doing was vastly important, that we were expanding our audience, making a difference and changing our culture.”

Nunn finally left the RSC “because there were just too many film and commercial theater projects I was having to say no to.” And “Cats,” which he directed during an agreed five-week leave of absence from the RSC, became an extraordinary global hit, and Nunn was needed to replicate the show in theaters all over the world.

His days directing musicals were enjoyable, he says now: “I got longer holidays and of course I had absolute freedom of movement.” But he missed the RSC and working with two kinds of ensemble: “First, it’s administrative. When you know you’re engaged on something missionary, you don’t say your business day ends at 6. There’s a zeal you all share.

“In the work I missed the continuity of people you not only knew and admired, but whose development you had some part of nurturing. In the RSC, young actors could join and six years later were playing leading parts, and went on to become stars. We made our own stars. Our judgment was that Ben Kingsley, Roger Rees and Helen Mirren were very special. After I left it happened with Ralph Fiennes.” What Nunn will not say is that he found directing mega-musicals less than satisfying, or the material inferior. He calls himself “an unashamed populist” and is decidedly unsnobbish. “You have to fight hard for standards in commercial theater,” he says, “because you constantly come across people who say: I don’t want to spend that kind of money, it won’t be noticed or make any difference to the profit. There are different pleasures doing commercial theater. I had a wonderful time doing work of that kind. But there was a vacuum.”

His arrival at the National last year was not greeted with universal approval. For one thing, Nunn is 58, a year older than Richard Eyre, his predecessor at the National for 10 years. Many of the other leading candidates for the post (including Stephen Daldry from the Royal Court, Sam Mendes from London’s Donmar Warehouse and Jude Kelly of the West Yorkshire Playhouse) were at least two decades younger.

“I think [Nunn] was a bad choice for the job,” says Charles Spencer, drama critic for the London Daily Telegraph. “It doesn’t move the National on. He’s already had the job at the RSC, he’s older than Eyre, and there was a sense his applying for the job was redeeming a somewhat tarnished past, all those huge musicals. It looked like he wanted to be respectable again.”

One reason Nunn may attract such unfriendly comment is his own personal style. Not much given to eye contact, he is famously verbose, and can turn an interview into a monologue; if attempts are made to curtail his flow, he raises his voice slightly and keeps talking over the interruption. It was widely noticed that when Nunn appeared at a press conference to announce his appointment at the National, he did most of the talking, and potential collaborators like playwrights Christopher Hampton and Michael Frayn were hardly allowed to get a word in.

Nunn has also said injudicious things in public. He once complained that the use of the word “luvvies,” English media slang for actors who talk gushingly about their craft, was as reprehensible as a racial slur. And he once complained about homeless people stationed around London’s theater district; he suggested they should be put to work sweeping up the city’s litter-strewn streets.

Nunn also has been known to complain about the stresses involved in being wealthy, which failed to endear him to the British press. Indeed, the media here like to dwell on Nunn’s enormous riches; it is a British trait to resent people who are both artistically creative and affluent.

His private life gives gossips even more to discuss. He has five children by three marriages to progressively younger wives. For 14 years he was married to the distinguished South African actress Janet Suzman, then he wed singer-dancer Sharon Lee Hill. Now, his wife is actress Imogen Stubbs, 36, who, associates say, is his intellectual equal; she graduated with honors in English literature from Oxford.

Nunn affects the youthful appearance of one who never quite got over growing up in the ‘60s. His shaggy dark hair is shorter than it was, but still strays well below his collar; he wears a blue shirt with the top two buttons undone. He does not look his age, and inadvertently offers a clue about this: Joining the RSC at 24, then running it from age 28, he said, “robbed me of some of my youth, in the sense I never really had a time of wild experiment and trying different things. Because I was responsible for a big budget, a huge organization and employing 600 people.”

He grew up in a modest house in Ipswich, a pleasant, unremarkable town northeast of London in the mostly rural county of Suffolk. His father was a carpenter and cabinet maker, his mother a seamstress. Trevor was a bright boy who formed a folk-influence pop group in high school, became the school’s first student to direct the school play (“Hamlet”), and developed a taste for analyzing Shakespearean text. By the time he graduated, he was ready for Cambridge and Leavis.

Hall, also raised in Suffolk, soon discovered Nunn’s theater work in Coventry, the nearest sizable town to Stratford, and quickly recruited the brilliant young man for the RSC. One might expect that Nunn’s dazzling string of successes began from this point, but his first RSC production, an improvised musical about the 1926 British general strike, went so badly wrong in rehearsals it never opened. Nor is it Nunn’s only flop: He directed and invested in a West End production of Stephen Schwartz’s “The Baker’s Wife,” but it closed after six weeks.

And though Nunn loves directing films, he admits: “I am not a born film director.” His attempts so far have been patchy: “Lady Jane” (1985) introduced Helena Bonham Carter to film audiences but failed to make its money back, while his “Twelfth Night” (1996), with his wife Stubbs playing Viola, was greeted politely rather than with enthusiasm.

This ever-present sense of possible failure may explain his tentative manner. Nunn talks relentlessly, yet he constantly qualifies his own statements, and expounds his arguments at full length before summing them up in a single sentence, starting with the word “therefore.”

Still, despite his prickly public image, he does not lack defenders among his peers. Adrian Noble, now his counterpart at the RSC, says: “Very few directors have created entirely new forms of theater, as Trevor Nunn has. His talents are both populist and scholarly.” Jude Kelly, a possible rival for Nunn’s present position, notes: “It’s nice to think someone like Trevor is willing to come back into public service. His status will allow the National to attract top artists, which in turn gives him scope to bring on new writers and performers.”

One such star is McKellen, the National’s leading player during Eyre’s directorship; he is known to admire Nunn, whom he first met when they were both Cambridge students. When McKellen called Nunn to congratulate him on his appointment at the National, he offered his services for the opening season; he seems certain to stay with the company long after “An Enemy of the People” closes in Los Angeles.

In fact, McKellen is now on the National Theatre board: “It means I could be viewed as Trevor’s boss, as the board appointed him, which I occasionally feel moved to remind him,” he says jocularly.

Eyre bristles at his successor’s detractors. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” he said. “It was a little unfair to charge a man before he’s walked out in the street.” So far, it is generally agreed that Nunn’s first year at the National is shaping up well. “An Enemy of the People” was a great critical and box-office hit; Charles Spencer was in a tiny minority in complaining that Nunn staged its opening scene “like a spectacular musical production.” Nunn has since directed “Mutabilitie” by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness, which London critics disliked; Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Flight,” which the critics loved but has suffered from poor box office; and a lesser-known Tennessee Williams play “Not About Nightingales,” a confirmed commercial and critical hit that also recently toured to Houston.

“Peter Pan,” with McKellen as Hook, was received sufficiently well to establish itself as a future perennial Christmas production for the National.

Nunn is also relying on star names and talent to attract audiences. Fiona Shaw has opened in the title role of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”; in the fall, Helen Mirren returns to the National in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

In directing the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma!” he is continuing on a well-established path: The National has come to rely on big, well-crafted musicals, brilliantly staged, to fill seats--something achieved in recent years by revivals of “Carousel” and “Guys and Dolls.”

“It’s very pure and simple, but very profound,” says Nunn of “Oklahoma!” “I think there’s psychological depth there. A sense of natural beauty and the wonder of nature is there in so many lyrics. A lot of people know the film, which was made in the ‘50s, when naturalism didn’t have to include crumpled clothing, dirt, sweat and the actual conditions of people living out beyond civilization. But we are dealing with it in those terms.”

Whether or not the public is ready for a dirty, realist “Oklahoma!,” some British critics have already questioned whether the National should be offering such populist material as part of its repertoire. The triumphs of “Carousel” and “Guys and Dolls” would seem to make such questions redundant, but Nunn still seems stung by them. “We’re in a context where arts commentators say they don’t think the National should be doing this or doing that,” he complained. “They think we should be doing things that are more esoteric and rare. Yet this organization works on the basis that we have to do an average 70% box office. No commercial theater organization in the world would do that. They’d say, 45% to break even, 50% maybe. But that’s what we take on board, that’s what we have to achieve.”

It doesn’t help that the government has applied a principle of “stand-still funding” to the National’s annual subsidy, awarded through its Arts Council, currently just over $19 million.

“Clever phrase, ‘stand-still funding,’ ” said Nunn. “Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? ‘We won’t cut the grant, we’ll keep it at present levels.’ But wages and prices don’t stand still, and there’s a high inflation ingredient in theater construction, because so many things have to be created.

“This government talks about ‘accessibility,’ and we’re committed to that. But what they mean by access is cheaper seats for people who can’t afford to come and don’t think of theater as something they normally do. Yet if we cut prices, our revenue falls. The sums don’t add up.”

So back to the original question: Considering he could still make a handsome living directing musicals, is being artistic director of the National worth all the stress? Suddenly, Nunn stood up, unfolding a huge flow chart on his desk. “It’s certainly stressful,” he said abruptly. “There are three theaters here, you’re looking at 15 or 16 productions in repertory on a weekly basis, it’s vastly logistical.”

Then his body language seemed to soften. “But what you’re doing is advancing a plan. And it’s thrilling, it’s wonderful.” He resumed his seat and his voice grew almost dreamy. “You read plays all the time. You have wonderful meetings with writers. It’s really filled in a gap for me.”

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“Enemy of the People,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens July 22, 8 p.m. Regular schedule: Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m. Also Sun., 7:30 p.m. (July 26-Aug. 16) and Thur., 2 p.m. (Aug. 20-Sept. 3). Ends Sept. 6. $15-$52.50. (213) 628-2772.

David Gritten, a regular contributor to Calendar, is based in London.