The play that changed my life: ‘Comedians got me the job running the National Theatre’

I very nearly lost my job in advance over Comedians. Apart from that, it led me to work with a group of actors who then went on to be astonishingly well-known – Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Rea, Tom Wilkinson. It was transformative for all of us. And it had one catalytic accident that got me the job of artistic director of the National Theatre.

I was 30 and running Nottingham Playhouse. In those days, I had a sort of kamikaze policy. I thought if a writer would commit to writing a play, then I announced it was going to be done. The writer would be forced to walk the gangplank.

I’d met Trevor Griffiths a couple of years earlier in Edinburgh and asked him, are you going to write a play? He said: “I’ve got this idea about an evening class for club comedians.” Once you write it, what’s it called? “Comedians.” About a year later, he delivered the play .

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The first act is in a classroom. Six would-be comedians are being taught, by an old pro, the difference between good and bad comedy; bad in the sense of belittling races or classes or sexes. Underpinning it was a sense of, are you trying to achieve some sort of social justice through your comedy? Or are you simply looking for a fast buck?

The second act is the club acts performed live. So you watch through the lens of what you’ve learned in the first act, only to find yourself laughing at these sort of Bernard Manning-style jokes told by a couple of comedians who have decided to completely ignore the advice of the teacher.

It forced you to examine the mechanism of laughter and your own prejudices. And then the last act was done by Jonathan Pryce as an almost sociopathic revolutionary who just took it out on the audience and wasn’t really funny.

I had told the board that this was a play we were going to do. And they read it and said: “You can’t do this.” Partly because of the politics and partly because there were a sprinkling of swear words. Very demure by today’s standards. I said if it fails, I’m out.

In Jonathan Pryce’s act, he abuses two dummies as sort of perfect middle-class operagoers. It was very, very violent and very frightening. He turned to the audience and said: “I made the boogers laugh, though.” And he just stared at the audience through ice-cold silence. At what turned out to be a key performance in Nottingham somebody shouted up. “You didn’t! You didn’t!” He stared at them as if he was going to murder them. And then he walked off stage. Nobody applauded, the lights came up, and you felt terrified.

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And it was a sort of incandescent success. Peter Hall, who had taken over the National Theatre, took it. And then we went to the West End and a producer picked it up for Broadway.

Years later, I was talking to the garden designer Mary Keen, and described that audience reaction. And she said: “It was me.” I said, well that’s the moment that actually got me to become Peter Hall’s candidate to take over from him at the National, because he thought that it was a piece of direction – that I had an actor in the audience who intervened. And Peter said to me: “ Brilliant, a brilliant episode of courage! What a coup.” And I didn’t confess.

• As told to Lindesay Irvine.