Nicholas Hytner Quotations

I think there would have been a time when the basic history would have been common knowledge. You could have been certain that when the king comes on at the beginning -- 'So shaken as we are, so wan with care' -- they know he's wan with care because the country's been in a state of perpetual civil war since he deposed the previous king, Richard II.

Mike was a little nervous ... We weren't, because his reputation is so immense.

They are all kind of the same letter, all handwritten or typed. They all assume that the play is about Paul's being homosexual and misogynist; they assume it's going to be a prurient hatchet job.

There is a new climate of religious intolerance in Britain. Whatever the government says, this new bill is pandering to that intolerance.

With an artist like Mike Leigh, you give him what he wants. I'm thrilled. ... I think it's an absolutely brilliant family drama.

That would be doing to our audience and our repertoire what I'm moaning about.

We really opened up for the film of King George, but then the places where its characters lived and worked cried out to be opened up. The world of this story is the school, so the big decision we took was not to twist ourselves in knots trying to give it a false sense of scale. Closed worlds like schools, army bases, prisons or hospitals are fantastic, because they stand as a microcosm for a bigger world.

They have been working on it for the past nine months and I have been absolutely thrilled by the stuff they have been producing together.

Even in rehearsals, I didn't realize it would be as popular as it proved. After I read it, I said: 'It's brilliant, but it's quite esoteric.' We scheduled 70 or 80 performances.

I had a guess what it might be about, but this took me completely by surprise. And he delivers a play, as he puts it, before he truly knows what it's about. He wants a conversation about what it is that appears to be working, and where it is he appears to be going. Until he's got to that point, nobody knows about it.