Nicholas Hytner interview

In The Times, Benedict Nightingale talks to National Theatre boss Nicholas Hytner.

...he's happy that playwrights seem less to be looking inwards, as they often did in the 1980s and 1990s, and, like [Richard] Bean, are looking outwards at a Britain that has hugely changed since the National's founding in 1963. This means that programming for the Olivier and Lyttelton, a problem for his predecessors, is a task that he embraces with relish, whether he's presenting new work or classics, such as The Revenger's Tragedy, that speak to the present: “I hope all our productions are investigative, but those that excite me most are large-scale, big, public, social plays.”

But it's another change, the toppling of the barriers between the so-called fringe and mainstream theatre, that he calls “the biggest thing that's happened in my professional lifetime. When you think how rigorously separated they were only 20 years ago, hating each other, it's astonishing.”