Feature interview: Nicholas Hytner

Nicholas Hytner: “I was lucky enough to be taken to the theatre when I was a kid and I was also taken to symphony concerts. I had terrific drama teachers at school, English teachers at school, so it was very much part of my childhood and I emerged from my childhood into university knowing that the theatre was my great enthusiasm.

“There's been a fairly conventional route into theatre direction and indeed into the artistic direction of theatre over the last few decades. You start to do it at University, discover that you like doing it at university, you then serve an apprenticeship when you’ve left university. There's not very much formal training available for theatre directors, but there are fantastic apprenticeships available where you assist directors who already know there way around. You do what you can. You get out into small theatres, into regional theatres. You work with people who have the bad luck to be around you when you're making mistakes, and learning why you make mistakes, and you try to get better.

“I would unequivocally say that it is not necessary to go to university. I would add to that very firmly that if you’re remotely academically inclined university’s a good idea. But there's a big problem, if for instance you want to act, I do think it’s a good idea to undergo three years’ formal drama training. There are lots of ways of getting into the theatre. I know lots of people who are phenomenal actors, phenomenal directors and particularly phenomenal writers who have no University background whatsoever. The biggest thing you need is experience. You can get experience from the ground up in the theatre by starting the most traditional route of all which is by sweeping stages, getting dogsbody jobs. Some of the best people have come up that way. Of the great established generation of playwrights, some went to university, some, like Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, who only died recently, didn’t. Shakespeare didn’t go to university. He did OK.

“The only way to get on in the performing arts is to work your way up from the bottom, and there's a brutal truth about the performing arts which is that the jobs are really hard to come by and that the only people who get them are the people who are absolutely determined to hang on in there. For the jobs that require talent, if you don’t have the talent ultimately you're not going to get the jobs. If you do have the talent, if you want to be an actor, if you want to be a musician, if you have the talent you will absolutely make it because talent is gold.

“I think it’s a really good idea for all kids in all schools to have access to the performing arts. To find out if they are for them, it’s not compulsory. Some people are bored by them and aren’t turned on by them and aren’t galvanised by them, but there are an awful lot of people who are, and an awful lot of people who would turn out to be gifted if they were given access in the first place. I think recently the government has taken some very, very positive steps towards making sure that there is performing arts provision for everybody and the government has laid quite a lot of stress on creativity in schools. government for the last ten years has been committed to investing in the arts to make sure that everybody who wants to be interested is interested.

“There isn’t a theatre, an orchestra, a dance company, a museum in the country that isn’t totally committed to being as available as possible all of the time. This theatre is on the road at least 28 weeks of the year. We have productions in schools all the time. It’s something that is simply part of our DNA. There is nothing inaccessible about the Arts. One of the many, many activities that we’re involved in to make sure that everybody who wants to see what we do can come to see what we do is we are going to start live broadcasts in cinemas of several of our productions. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, I've no idea. But what I do know is that there is nothing inaccessible about the performing arts. The accessibility part was cracked quite a long time ago.

“We are world leaders because we have the talent and we have the tradition and there's nothing that’s going to… the recession isn’t going to be a problem. Traditionally performing arts, entertainment have done extraordinarily well in a recession. We provide something that is very high quality, and we provide it, for the most part, cheap, so we will do OK.”