Roughly halfway through his tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre, Richard Eyre put on David Hare's play Racing Demon. A panoramic study of the Anglican communion in the modern age, it offered an interesting comparison between two institutions travelling in different directions. The Church was a crumbling edifice, horribly at war with itself, and suffering declining congregations: the theatre, despite the idiocies of the punditocracy, was healthy, vibrant and attracting increa-singly large audiences. I don't know how many people visit the theatre each week and how many take Communion, but I suspect the Church would be embarrassed if the figures were ever made public.
If there was an equivalent to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the theatre, it would surely be the director of the National. The job is an almost impossible task, and the ludicrous collection of roles and responsibilities involved is well documented in Eyre's diaries: politician, promoter, publicist, polemicist, producer and, somewhere within all of this, artist. The asphyxiation of his creativity was obviously a source of great pain to Eyre, although he managed to stage a number of beautiful productions. Just as the incumbent of Lambeth Palace has to reconcile the faith with the figurehead, so does his neighbour on the South Bank.
Eyre's book is a compulsive and rewarding read. It seems almost unfair that besides his extensive list of achievements - as a director, producer, film-maker - he can also write extremely well. He can be pithy; he can be painterly and, occasionally, surprisingly tender. There is an almost Nordic gloom that descends over everything. Painful moments, in particular the death of both his parents, are recorded with a modest and honest grace. Yet elsewhere this tendency to gloom can seem obsessive. It was clear from Eyre's earlier book Changing Stages that he is a great believer in suffering as the foundation of art. His diaries reveal that he sees suffering as something that gives life authenticity. After all, it is often only the inconsol-able who get things done. But occasionally, as he describes successful shows in all the National's auditoria, great press, professional adoration and the best job in the country, you crave a little old-fashioned camp frivolity. Just a touch of "Ooooh, aren't I great" wouldn't go amiss.
It would be hard, however, to overstate the grinding misery that running a theatre company can entail. No, it is not the same as going to war, or driving an ambulance, or running a bank; it is not in any conventional sense dangerous, or traumatising, or utterly tedious. It has enormous compensations: endless good company, plenty of opportunities for sex, and lots of drink and drugs, to name a few. But it can still be miserable work. The combination of will, imagination and discipline needed can be draining, and it also demands a thick skin, in order to ignore occasional public indifference and the cruelty of the critics.
During my first year of running the Bush Theatre - a far smaller concern than Eyre's - I woke up every morning in despair. I would open my eyes and it would feel as if the barrel of a gun were pressing into the back of my head. With complete conviction, I would wish the imaginary gun to go off. After a while, I would get up, put a face on and head off to work.
Eyre had to contend with far greater problems than I did. Everybody thinks they own the National; everybody has an opinion on what it should be doing. It is a huge operation, full of good spirits and a small portion of malcontents. It has to justify its existence every night in three separate spaces. It has to present a variety of work as old, new, mad and mixed as the country for which it speaks. How Eyre managed to retain his sanity is a mystery.
It is time we admitted the crucial role of theatre in our national life, and wrestled the argument away from the lazy pundits who say theatre is dead. Eyre's august, authoritative book shows how great his own contribution was, and advances an argument for the importance of theatre itself. Would the memoirs of George Carey matter to us as much? I doubt it.
Dominic Dromgoole is artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company and the author of The Full Room: an A-Z of contemporary playwriting (Methuen)
