Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-145)

NATIONAL THEATRE

1 FEBRUARY 2005

  Q140 Ms Shipley: Okay, you now get the female vote for your theatre.

  Mr Hytner: They are 25 years old, apparently.

  Q141 Ms Shipley: I am really trying to get at your successful model of animating the whole theatre experience and space and building, and keeping it open for the maximum amount of time doing stuff, any sort of stuff. Is that replicable without massive expense? On the smaller scale, I was putting the argument that perhaps regional theatres could not afford the professionals that you put on in the foyer space, but they could make it available to amateurs to put on things really quite cheaply. They could allow picnics to happen and make it more friendly, they could put on more exhibitions. More could be done of the model you have without massive expense.

  Mr Hytner: Without massive expense, I do not know. Different buildings provide different challenges, but, I agree with you, our experience is that it is something that is massively worthwhile. We are very fortunate, I completely agree with you, about the building. It used to be much knocked. Sometime, mysteriously, over the last 10/15 years the needle swung the other way and I think it is now a building which is loved. People like going there. Those who briefed Denys Lasdun were the great theatre professionals of the sixties, so a hell of a lot of it is designed to make the theatregoing experience and the theatre-making experience very easy. We are very lucky in that respect.

  Q142 Ms Shipley: I think so too. I missed out on visiting your educational department and backstage and things—so you might like to invite me again, please.

  Mr Hytner: We certainly will.

  Chairman: The last question.

  Q143 Ms Shipley: The other thing you do very well is marketing, I think. I think you could actually offer outwards the way the whole place is branded in the first place, in the way I have just described, which I think is part of the total branding, and then the overall marketing of what the total theatre experience is and is about, which I think is about creativity and thinking in its widest possible sense. I think that is what you offer and I think that is what you are marketing in the widest sense. I think that again is something that the regional theatres, the little theatres and what-have-you should be able to pick up on. You know, we pay a lot of money for you to develop that model, right, you have got that model, and that is the thing I think you should be transferring outwards. Is there any way that you could actually feasibly do that or is it really that the theatres themselves have to identify and take what they have got? Do you see what I am saying?

  Mr Hytner: My experience is that theatre marketers do talk to each other, and that slowly things change and there are different ways found of identifying the people who would be most interested in what we are doing and in getting the message—

  Q144 Ms Shipley: No, creating the interest in people—not identifying but actually creating it in the first place.

  Mr Hytner: I think a lot is to do with individual talent. We are very fortunate to have an extraordinarily talented head of marketing.

  Ms Shipley: Thank you, Chairman.

  Q145 Chairman: One self-indulgent question: among the many pleasures and satisfactions I have had in my visits to the National is the Sondheim you do. Is there any chance of your doing Bounce?

  Mr Hytner: It is not currently on the cards, but our relationship with Stephen Sondheim is excellent. We talk to him the whole time and his entire oeuvre is always under consideration.

  Chairman: You should be sitting here, with an answer like that. Thank you very much indeed.





 
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