johalputt: Charlotte Higgins

Director credited with giving National Theatre a golden decade of hits will leave along with closest colleague Nick Starr

Sir Nicholas Hytner, who has presided over what has been, by near universal acclaim, a golden decade in the history of the National Theatre, is to step down as its artistic director by March 2015.

He said: "It's been a joy and a privilege to lead the National Theatre for 10 years and I'm looking forward to the next two. I have the most exciting and most fulfilling job in the English-speaking theatre; and after 12 years it will be time to give someone else a turn to enjoy the company of my stupendous colleagues, who together make the National what it is."

Hytner, 56, has been credited with making the National an artistically vibrant theatre that has produced strings of popular hits, such as War Horse and The History Boys, and become a place where Britain can hold a mirror to itself politically and socially, whether through bold new commissions that inquire into the state of the nation, such as London Road, or by timely revivals of the classics, such as Hytner's own version of Henry V, which played as Britain and the US invaded Iraq in 2003.

One of his chief achievements was persuading the firm Travelex to sponsor cheap seats – so that many tickets for the National's largest stage, the Olivier, are £12, less than a West End cinema ticket. During his tenure the theatre has also begun transmitting its work in cinemas, bringing productions to a wider audience.

Hytner's resignation comes as no surprise: he has repeatedly said that a decade is about the right period for an artistic director to preside over what is, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain's most celebrated theatre.

He has also signalled in the past that the optimum time to depart would be after the National's 50th anniversary, which falls this year, and the theatre's current £70m redevelopment, which sees its smallest stage, the Cottesloe, transformed and renamed; the creation of a new riverside bar and gardens; and a new education centre. Work is due to be completed in 2014.

Hytner's closest colleague, the theatre's executive director, Nick Starr, has also announced his departure in 2014 to make way for a new senior manager to work with the incoming artistic director.

The pair will continue to work together, Starr told the Guardian. "We have plans, but it's not quite the moment to speak about them," he said. "We have a wonderful working relationship, and we don't want it to end yet."

In an interview with the Guardian in November, Hytner signalled his desire not to become a freelance director, as many former artistic directors of theatres have done, but to continue working as an artistic director and producer in another guise – leaving open the intriguing possibility that the pair aim to run another British theatre.

"I doubt I'd want to be a freelance director again," he said. "I like producing too much." Asked whether he would found a company bearing his own name, he said: "No not that. I'd want to continue to do something that wasn't just about me. I'm a director and always will be, but I love the relationship I have with directors, writers I have never worked with directly, and actors I have never worked with."

The search is now on for Hytner's successor – which will be one of the most hotly fought recruitment processes in the arts, with no shortage of potential contenders such as Dominic Cooke, until recently artistic director of the Royal Court, Tom Morris, currently revitalising the Bristol Old Vic, and Marianne Elliott, associate director at the National.

Adverts for the job will be published next week and a new artistic director announced, it is hoped, by the autumn. It is anticipated that Hytner's successor will be in post in early to mid-2014 as "director designate" with a period of overlap until Hytner's last programmed works are played in March 2015. The new director's programme will take over in April 2015.

John Makinson, the National's chair, paid tribute to the "two Nicks", saying: "Nick Hytner and Nick Starr have led the National Theatre to undreamed levels of creative and commercial success over the past decade."

Makinson will be joined on the search committee for Hytner's successor by the novelist Kate Mosse, the British Museum's director Neil MacGregor, the Film4 boss Tessa Ross and the producer and agent Peter Bennett-Jones.

National Theatre

Nicholas Hytner

Theatre

London

Charlotte Higgins

via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/apr/10/sir-nicholas-hytner-national-theatre

08:06

English theatre study claims Arts Council cuts mean cancelled shows, fewer new plays, fewer commissions and smaller casts

The English theatre scene is "shrivelling", according to new research, with two-thirds of venues cancelling productions, half producing fewer new plays and commissioning fewer writers, and the same proportion obliged to insist playwrights focus on smaller cast sizes.

Sonia Friedman , the successful West End producer, warned of "a short-termism that will damage a multi-billion industry over a generation" – arguing that damage done to theatre as a result of the 30% cut to Arts Council England's budget in 2010 will harm future success in TV, radio and film.

The research, which drew on detailed surveys completed by 26 English theatres, was undertaken by playwright Fin Kennedy and Helen Campbell Pickford, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford.

The report provides detailed testimony showing that the "research-and-development" side of theatre is being particularly hard hit after the cuts, as organisations hunker down to protect core work on their main stages.

But there are fears this reduction in resources available for the early development of plays – workshops, writing groups, youth theatre groups – will have a serious impact on the future health of theatre.

Sir Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, told the report's authors: "The consequences of inadequate public investment will be fewer risks, inadequate development of new work, a substantially less interesting theatrical environment and a less successful one."

Max Stafford-Clark, of theatre company Out of Joint, reported that "2012-13 is the first year in our 19-year history that [we] will not have produced a new play".

Laura Wade, the writer of the hit play Posh, about the privileged members of an elite Oxford dining club , explained how that piece of work got to the stage of the Royal Court in London: "It looked like … rapid-response to the political situation, but it had actually been in development for three years." The success of Posh, which ran in the West End in 2012 and is now being adapted into a film, "would not have been possible without that early funding for research and development time from the Royal Court", she wrote.

Nick Payne, the author of Constellations, which began in the Royal Court's 100-seat theatre, transferred to the West End and won the London Evening Standard award for best new play, reported a similarly slow and patient gestation. "Such an outcome would not have been possible without public subsidy," he told researchers. "Between 2006 and 2010, I experienced first-hand the extraordinary support the Royal Court is able to offer; a combination of one-on-one tutorials, workshops and readings."

It is precisely this kind of support that many theatres are cutting. Christopher Haydon, artistic director of the Gate theatre in London, said: "We have no money at all for R&D. So if a writer feels that they need a workshop (or even just a reading) to try something out, we can only do this on an ad hoc basis when we can find someone else to support that … All of this inevitably puts severe limitations on the creative ambitions of our writers."

Friedman, who has produced plays including The Book of Mormon and Legally Blonde – The Musical and receives no direct subsidy, urged a holistic view of drama in England, and a recognition of the fact that success in TV, radio and film is dependent on grassroots, subsidised theatre. "I don't get subsidy. I don't need it. But I do need the subsidised sector," she said. "That is where the talent finds its training. Writers, actors, designers and directors all cut their teeth in that environment … We need to take an overview of the cultural body politic."

The report was undertaken in response to an encounter between Kennedy and the culture minister, Ed Vaizey, in December 2012.

Meeting Vaizey at an event at parliament, he was surprised to hear the minister claim that the cuts had had no impact on theatre. After giving his view to the contrary, Vaizey challenged him to provide evidence: the result is the report, titled Battalions – reference to a line in Hamlet ("When sorrows come, they come not in single spies/But in battalions").

Responding to the report, Ed Vaizey said: "Theatre remains extremely well-funded in England. I am confident new writing of high quality will always have a chance to be both commissioned and performed."