Trevor Nunn
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Trevor Nunn (Original Director) Currently Director of the National Theatre, his productions include Arcadia, Not About Nightingales, Oklahoma!, The Merchant of Venice, Speer, The Cherry Orchard and My Fair Lady. In 1968, he became the youngest ever Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company directing a host of productions including Nicholas Nickleby (five Tony awards), and Les Miserables (eight Tony Awards). Amarica has also seen his stage productions CATS, Sunset Boulevard, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love and Chess; his TV productions include Antony & Cleopatra, Macbeth, Comedy of Errors, Othello, Porgy & Bess, Oklahoma!, and The Merchant of Venice; and his films: Hedda, Lady Jane, and Twelfth Night.
-From a CATS playbill
Cats don't particularly like me. I boast no phobias, I am above obsession, but it is clear to me that my faint unease in the presence of felines is instantly apparent to every one of them with whom I have ever come into contact. So I confess to being ill-qualified to ddirect a show devoted to the manners and mores of the cat world.
However, when Andrew Lloyd Webber approached me on this treacherous subject, I was able to tell him that even if I didn't know much about cats I did know about T.S. Eliot in general and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in particular, and that I shared his admiration of this unique collection of children's poems for adults.
I knew that Eliot had written many of the poems 'off duty' in letters to children of his friends, but I had a suspicion that the great poet of our century would not have forgotten that his friends would be reading the verses over their children's shoulders. It is this quality in the poems of hidden sophistication and double entendre that is so satisfying to grownups. Each poem is, of course, a precise and accurate definition of a particular kind of cat, but at one and the same time Eliot seems to be satirising the cat's owners, and the English society in which they live. 'Bustopher Jones' is an aristocrat, the 'Gumbie Cat' is sort of nanny cum housekeeper in the middleclass household. 'Skimbleshanks' is a proud and vigorous member of the nation's workforce, and 'Gus' has known better days but is now so poor he can't afford the price of a drink.
In its published form, Practical Cats doesn't amount to the picture of a whole society, feline or human, but there is the sense of an England now lost and never to return, a quality that Andrew Lloyd Webber has described in his music for instance in 'Old Deuteronomy'. Eliot had in mind a larger work, about both dogs and cats, but this was abandoned. From unpublished material furnished by Valerie Eliot, it is possible to deduce that this work might have had something approaching a plot; at least there was to be a guide who would link the various passages together. However, all that has come down to us is a collection of poems with no discernible narrative link, and the major task confronting Andrew and myself was to put the poems in an order which would allow them to connect up with each other in a free flowing way without distorting their original content or intention. Over several months we experimented with many versions and we were rigorously self critical if impermissible liberties started to creep in; but we recognized that what we have done in giving Eliot's material a theatrical structure is entirely subjective and that the connections we see may be different from what aficionados of Eliot and his cats would have proposed.
The discovery of the fragment about 'Grizabella the Glamour Cat' was a fulcrum moment in our work. Here in eight lines, Eliot was describing an intensely recogniseable character with poerful human resonances, while introducing the themes of mortality, and the past, which occur repeatedly in the major poems. We decided if Eliot had thought of being serious, touching, almost tragic in his presentation of a feline character, then we had to be doing a show which could contain that material, and the implications of it.
Time, experience, and hindsight have led me to believe that some of our first conclusions should be revised so I was delighted to have the opportunity to make a second version of the show. But as in the first production, we recognize that we must not take our seriousness too seriously. In 'The Ad-dressing of Cats,' Eliot says, you should have discovered by now that cats are very much like human beings; that, I imagine is the point of his work, and it most certainly remains the pint of ours. We are fascinated by cats, for a multitude of reasons, but perhaps most of all because in a mysterious way they allow us more clearly to see ourselves.
-Trevor Nunn
After the event we tend in the theatre to take an Olympian view of our successes and falilures, and looking back through diaries and notebooks, we find there was meaning and purpose, as there is in tea-leaves. The making of CATS can be commemorated as many ways as there were collaborators to draw their subjective conclusions, but it seems to me that a brief record of mishap and might-have-been can only add piquancy to a volume that illustrates what finally was. -Trevor Nunn
I have on occasion been tempted to believe that some of Shakespeare's plays had the unlikeliest origins; a chance remark, a broadsheet, and unrepeatable joke. I was not in the least surprised to discover that Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats was Eliot's book of strays--half-thoughts without a grand design; and I am not in the least abashed to admit that our musical based on T. S. Eliot's book was created haphazardly, through fervent trial and regular error.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's fascination with the poems came first. He discovered that Eliot was a lyricist as well as a poet; not only were the metres inventive, the rhyme schemes full of wit and the beat unfailingly maintained, but also the poems abounded in colloquialisms, catch phrases and choruses.
Andrew set many of the poems, gathered some friends, and at his festival at Sydmonton presented a first performance. In a sense the event was entirely in keeping with the manner in which Eliot came to write about his cats- for friends, for the children of friends, for an admiring circle, finding a huge audience only diffidently, stepping backwards into the limelight; all very English.
When I first heard the 'Sydmonton Tapes' (a shorthand phrase used repeatedly during our preparation period that always fell upon my ear as le Carre-esque) I felt sure the right thing was to recommend to Andrew that he should be thinking of a chamber theatre event, with at most five talented performers and a quintet. Certainly I found it hard to reconcile theis material with dreams of creating a popular show which could dismantle class and ethnic barriers, and which would be celebratory and uplifting, the familiar fantasies of all who set out to conquer The British Musical.
Clearly the main problem was-some would say still is- the absence of a narrative. Eliot didn't write one and to be at all true to his intentions, we too would have to make do without one. I doodled many a spectral plot-line as I re-read Alice in Wonderland, casting Eliot's Man In White Spats- a figure he proposed should be our guide in the cat world, a sort of Debrett of the felines-as the White Rabbit, and envisioned a dream-like landscape full of improbability. Curiously, many ideas from that early stage of development have survived like ancient remains discovered intact above ground. Eventually it became clear to us that we had to find the suggestion of a narrative within or beneath the poems.
The discovery of the fragment about 'Grizabella the Glamour Cat' was a fulcrum moment in our work. Here in eight lines, Eliot was describing an intensely recogniseable character with poerful human resonances, while introducing the themes of mortality, and the past, which occur repeatedly in the major poems. We decided if Eliot had thought of being serious, touching, almost tragic in his presentation of a feline character, then we had to be doing a show which could contain that material, and the implications of it. Furthermore, we would have to achieve the sense of progression through themes more than incidents.
I had established with John Napier that we needed an environment rather than a set, and that we would have to find our space before we could make a start on the design. After a long search, the New London Theatre, well known as London's greates theatrical white elephant, was measured for the task by John, beneath the baleful gaze of Producer, Composer, Director and Theatre Manager. The Choreographer danced in it a bit. Many heads were shaken and gloved hands thrust deeper into astrakhan overcoats. We would have to creat a new auditorium configuration inside Sean Kenny's adaptable theatre. Not for us the tailoring of our show to a thatre; we had to be tailorign a theatre to a show.
We talked of the need to create in feline scale an alley, or a backyard. A few days later John spread a crinkled watercolour rendered on cheap paper on the floor of my office at the Aldwych. I hope he still has it. It's the equivalent of the first draft of a poem by a major writer- hundreds of changes to be made, but the thing itself, the reckless thing itself, was there.
Auditioning on an unprecedented scale (Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, London) proceeded in the time-honored American manner (low-level shots of rushing train wheels), structuring of the material made slow or rapid progress depending upon which restaurant it was being undertaken in, and the collaborators complained, as they always do, that somebody else knew more about what was happening than they did.
A cast was decided upon by a mixture of first impressions and last rounds, more cruel than Chorus Line could ever reveal: there is no pleasure in having the power to decided. At that level of work it's not possible to say 'she is less good than she', but only, subjectively and irrationally, 'she gets the part...she doesn't'.
The cast were suddenly in danger of not having a show, though they didn't know it. The owners of the New London decided that conferences could only take place there, and CATS wasn't a conference. The protests were many and after a suspenseful week the decision was reversed and CATS had another life.
Rehearsals satrted in Chiswick, which was only all right for Gillian Lynne who lived round the corner. However, since she was working harder than anybody else the arrangement was indisputable. I cannot resist turning aside here to pay tribute to this indomitable and inimitable choreographer/director/colleague/friend. And while aside, I am tempted to remark that directing hasn't necessarily got anything to do with telling people whre they stand (neither necessarily has choreography). I mention this because critics in print have said, since the show is danced from beginning to end, that they were unclear about writing and structuring material, conducting improvisations, delineating character, finding and communicating textual meaning and marrying the text with physical expression, pacing and phrasing the various sections of the show, arbitrating and adjusdicating, connecting the many collaborators together by attempthing to describe the intention of the whole, and carrying the can.
Soon there were no longer some dancers, some singers and some actors, but a group of performers probing a mystery, eqully unfamiliar with the demands being made and equally prepared (that most vital of all rehearsal conditions) to be foolish in each other's eyes. From thence mysteriouly flows mutual respect.
Every group has a natural leader. We lost ours unexpectedly and tragically in the third week of our work. Judi Dench was walking across an almost empty rehearsal room when she collapsed, crying out as if felled by a blow. As friends rushed to her assistance she spoke words that chilled the hearers. 'Who kicked me?' The possibility of a snapped Achilles tendon passed through many minds at that moment, and by late evening Judi, who could only move if carried, knew the worst.
She could be back with us encased in plaster just before our preview performances were scheduled to begin. In the meantime she would be in the hospital, recuperating from an emergency operation.
When nearly three weeks later Judi joined me in a deserted theatre in the Haymarked where we had been rehearsing, she could hardly move and she was as vulnerable as only the truly ill can be. The theatre creaked, ghosts walked, and she sang her songs into the darkness of the empty auditorium for the only time. Two days later, when she came determined to rejoin the show as scheduled, she lost her balance in a flurry of crutches and pitched off an entrance ramp into rows of ungiving seats and hurt herself worse than before. Her bravery was not lost on a company who could build on her example even if they now had to face the loss of her genius.
The theatre thrives on myths, exaggerations, miracles. Elaine Page, more out of a sense of Andrew Lloyd Webber's need than anything, generously agreed to take over Grizabella. Pursued by journalists and cameramen, we rehearsed for two days in littered rooms with rickety furniture and naked light bulbs. Grizabella rooms. Ah, the glamour of the theatre. Crisis is a great leveller. An already unified and committed group were galvanised to require yet more of themselves. Our first preview took off. The adrenalin raced in the company and audience alike. Elaine got through. The cheers rang out. Detailed work could now begin.
It shouldn't end for a long time to come. Improvising is the only way to stand still in the theatre; everything else is going backwards. We will do the show in different spaces, in different towns in different lands. We will know precisely where to begin next time, precisely what to say and how to say it, precisely what to avoid and what to master. But nothing will compare with the memory of the ecstatic strain and the grim joy of the first time we made CATS.
Tape running. What would you say are the differences between theatre in New York and theatre in London?
I was asked that a hundred times during the CATS rehearsal in New York but somehow what I said never got into print. So here at last is the answer an anxious world has been waiting for.
Surprisingly little I would say if we are discussing working conditions or the expectation of talent from an original cast-there is nothing that cannot be achieved in any field of theatrical expression, with equal success on either side of the Atlantic, contemoporary or calssical, legitimate or poular, musical or straight.
In my view there is no truth in the geralisation that the English artist cannot do musicals and that his American brothers and sisters cannot handle language. It is true that a much smaller part of English theatre training is devoted to musical work, and this should be remedied instantly and urgently; and it is true that American performers are not frequently asked by American dramatists to have a heightened sense of language, which is a shameful wastage of resources, since most American actors I have worked with can quarter a thought and double an entendre with the best of them back in the Old Country.
But there are differences. In New York the commercial theatre, dominated by the theatre-owning organisations and the producers, is the sole form of theatre that reaches a large public, and therefore taste, judgement, potential risk and permissible innovation are answerable to, even one might say formed by, the box office. In London the scene is dominated by government-subsidesed theatre, and the dwindling commercial sector takes in much of tis product from national and regional subsidised theatre companies. Therefore the London theatre is fundamentally more experimental and less traditional than the Broadway stage, and in something of a chicken-and-egg situation, the Ldondon theatre enjoys a wide coverage in a host of newspapers genuinely interested in the theatre as an art, and prepared to give interesting developments the benefit of the doubt. In New York there is only one serious taste-forming newspaper (hightly consious of and jealous of its power) which is interested in the art form but is more interested in delivering the judgement of success or failure, up or down, like a Roman Emperor's thumb.
A theatre business that has only smash or flop categories is problematic for investors, because if the critical judgements of journalists go against, there is no management skill or expression of faith that can alter the doom of the stricken show. So not surprisingly, nobody wants to back a high-risk enterprise; if it had been necessary to originate CATS in America, it might not have got off the ground.
Once CATS had opened in London, the wisdom and daring of many New York managements became apparent in offers received from various producers, who were agreed taht the streets of New York were paved with gold; but nobody talked wisdom and daring so generously as Bernie Jacobs and Gerry Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organisation. This Yin and Yang combination, two inscrutable but opposite faces representing the unknowable, must be formidable enemies, but it was our pleasure to encounter them as quietly supportive, affable enthusiasts who had yet to discover that the word No had entered the dicitionary and was available for official usage. They stuck to Yes, and in the end time decrees that they were right not to interfere or complain, then posteriety has a right to know that whatever hysteria it cost them, they kept it out of the theatre.
From the first we were given everything. Two thousand artist to audition, for instance. Meeting two thousand people with a view to getting to know them is both hard and exhilarating work. So often this person who sings flat or can't manage the dance combination turns out to the the one who has founded a children's theatre, or fought cancer of the throat, or knew J. M. Barrie, or tells you the story you wake up laughing about for weeks to come; so often that perfectly beautiful girl turns out to be hard-centered or can't alugh, or doesn't listen. What an infuriating species we are, that imperfection should be so very attractive and perfect accomplishment alienating. Americans are very good at meeting people. At auditions in England you often have to dig out what is inside like an escargot on a pin; in America it's more like soft-shelled crabs-everything is there on the plate to be eaten whole.
The improvisations lasted for many days over the first two weeks of rehearsal. Everybody played ball. Everybody was honest and serious and analytical. I kept waiting for the classic English reaction that such work is a waste of time- and it never came. Perhaps I wish I had been opposed because fighting for your life is more exhilarating than expounding the Talmud-but I wasn't opposed, and the work was ahppy and fascinating, and on several occasions we became enraptured.
Occasionally I became consious of the irony that a group of incredibly fit, exquisitely muscled and co-ordinated performers were subjecting themselves to the instructions of a sedentary middle-aged specimen fast running to seed (before any of my collaborators get worried I am referring to myself). But then I would be encouraged by the experience of attending the sessions of our musicals supremo, Stanley Labowski. Looking like a Rubens cherub in retirement, Stanly gives you that feeling that each rehearsal is going to be imbued with the spirit of Christmas, until somebody transgresses, when biological metamorphosis occurs. Suddenly ogreish and demonic, he terrifies the necessary results out of the palpitating throats of his subjects, caught in the glare of his rampant perfectionism. However, there is one thing Stanley Labowski cannot do: sing. His voice could smash Tiffany chandeliers at thirty paces. While demonstrating harmonies for the assembled company his face expresses the kind of relaxed delight you would associate with someone having a bullet removed from their thigh without anaesthetic or even a tot of brandy. It is a mystery appropriate to the artistic process that Stanley produces in others singing that is sonorously beautiful when his own voice makes frogs wince. It was a constant delight to observe and collaborate with somebody who is the best.
Our greatest unease proceeded from the greatest unknown; what would happen to the concept of our environmental piece in an auditorioum, albeit adapted, based on a procenium of configuration? The first moment of being on a set can make the ingredients of a show fall apart. Sometimes, perceptibly and instantly, the first encounter with the stage can make everything fall together. Company and crew alike seem to know that what they have been working at for weeks separately now makes complete sense, and this knowledge, which I have often but not always encountered, produces an energy which in itself diminishes problems and creates an appetite for solutions. Well, energy flowed. Everybody plugged in.
After the first run-through onstage we all cried together. Theatre is a totally emotional, some would say childishly emotional, business, but these moments of release and of feeling for each other are not to be dismissed, stil less despised. Tears of relief and need constitute incontrovertible evidence of what people have risked in a rehearsal or performance, and the only theatre the public wants to know about (though they probably don't and shouldn't realise it) is the theatre that takes everything you are and everyhting you have to get it there, and keep it there. In America. In England. Everywhere.
So, a small group of people late at night in a darkened theatre, unable to say much, were nearly ready to expose themselves to those peculiar conditions of judgement that exist in New York and New York alone. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. Life or death. If any member of that critical fraternity were ever to feel or understand the well-spring of those tears I have tried to describe, he would see how destructive and undignified it is that caprice shoudl govern the lives and livelihoods of artists. I am not squeezing sour grapse. CATS was given its life-many have predicted its nine lives-so my regret does not proceed from personal hurt. It is, in a technological age, my regreat that New York could be destroying the conditions for teh achievement of what it does best. And all because of a gesture from an Emperor who has no clothes.