Richard Eyre is in reflective mood. “I’m at that age where you look in your address book and find that half the people are dead,” says the self-effacing colossus of British stage and screen and former artistic director of the National Theatre. Just a few weeks ago he was at three memorial services in ten days: for the Jewel in the Crown director Christopher Morahan; for the former BBC chairman Christopher Bland; and for the casting director Maggie Lunn, who worked on Eyre’s film Notes on a Scandal. “So, yes, I’m taking stock.”
Yet the work goes on. Partly because the seemingly indefatigable 74-year-old wants to “continue to do good work”, but also for an unexpectedly pragmatic reason. He has no pension other than a state pension. One thinks of past National Theatre directors as being very well-off. Is he the poorest of a wealthy bunch? “Well I did direct Mary Poppins — that and the movies. That’s why I’m able to work at Chichester.”
Eyre is in Chichester preparing a revival of The Stepmother, a neglected, subtly feminist play of 1924 by Githa Sowerby, the author of the better known Rutherford and Son. The rising British star Ophelia Lovibond plays Lois Relph, a young woman who is trapped into marriage by the outwardly respectable widower Eustace Gaydon (Will Keen). Because women had no marital rights of possession at the time, Gaydon is able to pay off his debts with her money.
“He’s the shit of shits,” says Eyre. “The play takes Ibsen’s feminism much further. And yet there’s not an atom of polemic except the implicit kind which makes you think, ‘You can’t run the world like this!’ ”
Eyre has just made it down to West Sussex from his Gloucestershire home where he lives with his wife, the television producer Sue Birtwistle. He is sitting with a mug of green tea at a shady table in the Minerva Theatre’s sunlit restaurant. He flexes one leg, which has stiffened after the two-and-a-half-hour road journey. However, his work ethic is in rude health. The transfer of his Bristol Old Vic production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville, opens in the West End in January. And next month work begins in earnest on his latest BBC film version of King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins.
Advertisement
The latter is a kind of follow-up to Eyre’s sumptuous 2015 BBC film of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser in which Hopkins played the grandiose touring Shakespearean actor known as Sir and Ian McKellen his dresser, Norman. On set, “Tony kept saying, ‘We should do Lear!’ more or less every day”, says Eyre. The film will be eagerly awaited because of Hopkins, of course, but also because in 1997 Eyre famously directed Ian Holm in the role at the National and many see it as the finest Lear of modern times.
Is there anything Eyre can achieve on film with Lear that he can’t on stage? “Well, yes. Anthony Hopkins. And Jim Broadbent playing Gloucester; Jim Carter playing Kent; Emma Thompson’s Goneril; Emily Watson as Regan; and Roy Hudd as Fool,” he says. “And intimacy,” he adds.
“I’m going to do it contemporary. Lear is a dictator and it will be set in modern England.” Although as a general rule Eyre regards “modern relevance” as an overrated virtue and believes the phrase sounds suspiciously like “promotional copy”. Instead his updating is a poetic conceit.
“I’ve done this before with [McKellen’s] Richard III set in England in the Thirties. We won’t be changing the language. There won’t be people speaking soliloquies into mobile phones. There will, though, be a convention which we are very familiar with from House of Cards: being able to turn to camera and speak.”
“He mentions in the diaries ‘recurring thoughts of suicide’
What did Eyre think of the recent controversy surrounding the abrupt departure of Emma Rice at Shakespeare’s Globe over her refusal to stick to “original practices”? “I just don’t get it,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed many shows at the Globe, but I don’t get the thesis at the heart of it.” He knows nothing of the detail surrounding Rice’s truncated tenure. “But all I can think is that Emma Rice is a very gifted director and seemed to me to be putting on terrific shows.”
Advertisement
Theatre buildings can be complicated places. After his diaries about his decade at the National Theatre (from 1987) were published with the less than joyous title National Service, a widely held view formed that his time there was deeply unhappy. Not surprising since he mentions in the diaries “recurring thoughts of suicide”.
“I’m responsible for propagating the myth,” he says. “In many ways they were the happiest days of my life. Although the first two years were very difficult, partly because of my insecurity.” He thinks that Rufus Norris, the National’s current director, has also had a tough first couple of years. “He’s had successes, but what you learn very rapidly is that the Olivier is the financial boiler house of the National Theatre. If you make the wrong choice of productions there, you can find that you’re haemorrhaging money. In crude terms you always need a hit in the Olivier, but to tell the truth you always need a hit in all three theatres. Rufus’s luck will turn. It’ll be fine. He is the right person in the right place at the right time.”
Whatever the truth of Eyre’s time at the National, his career has gone from strength to strength since he left. He describes himself as a “late starter in everything”, be it directing theatre, film or opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Certainly he conveys the sense of an artist who has never stopped growing and is yet to start slowing.
His latest film, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The Children’s Act starring Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci, opens next month in Toronto.
“I came from a middle-class background, but books, art and theatre weren’t part of it at all,” the Devon-born director says. “I always think I’m a spectator who has worked to become a participant.”
Advertisement
In the introduction to What Do I Know?, a collection of his essays, Eyre writes movingly about his sister Georgina, a landscape architect who died from cancer in 2013 at about the time when Eyre was working on Ibsen’s Ghosts. Georgina was a “contrarian” who “loved an argument” but “would never concede defeat”, he writes. At her memorial Eyre spoke of how they were inseparable until the age of eight, when he was sent away to school in Dorset. He had a tormented relationship with his father, whom he remembers often standing in opposition to everything his son loved. At the memorial Eyre spoke of how his sister would fight on his behalf, standing — often literally — between his father and him.
“My nature was passive and was to avoid trouble. She was my champion. I miss her terribly,” he says. She sounds as forceful as some of the women in the plays he is drawn to: those Ibsens; perhaps the heroine of The Stepmother too. “It’s possibly true,” he says. “When I did King Lear with Ian Holm, Georgina was convinced I’d deliberately put our father on the stage. It wasn’t true, but who am I to say that I’m not doing the same, unconsciously, with her?”
The Stepmother is at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester (01243 781312), from August 11