Richard Eyre - National Service: Diary of a Decade at the National Theatre

My grandfather an Antarctic explorer wrote diaries in meticulously clear writing even when on a ship rolling in a gale or in a hut battered by a blizzard. There was never any doubt of his intended audience: he wanted to leave a testament for his family in the event that he failed to return from his journey. I had no such exalted motives. I wrote my diaries in a barely legible blue biro in large black notebooks late at night or early in the morning in the comfort of my house, partly for fun, partly for practice, and partly for solace to remind myself that what is unbearable today will be bearable tomorrow.

Writing is not my profession but I'm enough of a professional to recognise that I'm the author of a text which, from a literary point of view, has a number of shortcomings: the narrative is exasperatingly intermittent and incomplete, the judgement is uncertain, the style is inconsistent, and the tone is the essentially Pooterish one that afflicts any conversation with oneself.

'A journal exists only if you put into it, without reservation, everything that occurs to you,' said Cocteau. Even if I have always tried to follow Cocteau's dictum, I have found it as hard to write unreservedly of my feelings as it is to suck my own toe. I have always felt guarded even with myself about objectifying some of my more disturbing, louche, disloyal, violent, and ungenerous thoughts. So, like most diaries, the problem with mine is that, if true, it is never quite true enough.

I can't understand why I've frequently not recorded events that I know were important at the time and even more so now, but I take solace from the fact that in Kafka's diaries, written from 1914 to 1918, there is not a single line that refers to the First World War. In my case there is little enough about the things that devoured most of my days meetings and rehearsals and there are conspicuously few entries which refer to my immediate family my sister Georgina (Gorg) and the people who shared most of my life and much of the burden, my wife Suze and daughter Lucy.

In editing my diaries I have been given help by some of the friends who feature in these pages, not always to their credit. I'm very grateful to them for their friendship and for their disinterested generosity. I'm also grateful to Liz Calder, friend and publisher, who encouraged me to think that the decision to publish these diaries was something more than vanity and less than folly. For better or worse, this is a prejudiced and wholly unobjective account of my life at the National Theatre over a decade.

I was first courted by Peter Hall, then Director of the National Theatre, to become one of his associates in 1978 when I left Nottingham Playhouse to join BBC TV as producer of Play forToday. I was content for a while with television and for two years didn't work in the theatre at all. In 1980 I was asked by Max Stafford-Clark, the Director of the Royal Court Theatre, to direct a play there. I think he hoped that I might suggest a new play or a timely revival, a 'play for today', but he accepted my suggestion of Hamlet with Jonathan Pryce with no visible ideological struggle.

After that I started to feel drawn to the theatre and when Peter Hall asked me again in 1981 to join him at the National Theatre I accepted. I directed three productions there in 1982 Guys and Dolls, TheBeggar's Opera and Schweyck in the Second World War and then I left to direct a film for the newly created Channel 4: The Ploughman'sLunch. I remained an associate at the National Theatre and returned in 1985 to form a company with the playwright David Hare. He directed his (and Howard Brenton's) prescient satire on the rise and rise of Rupert Murdoch, and I directed a production of The GovernmentInspector with Jim Broadbent and Rik Mayall.

One day while we were preparing that season, after a lengthy, frustrating and inconclusive meeting with Peter Hall and fellow associate directors, I walked with David Hare into the office I shared with him. The office was then occupied by Howard Brenton, who was still writing, or rewriting, Pravda with David. Howard paused for a moment in his two-fisted assaults on the typewriter. 'How was your meeting?' said Howard. 'Mmmm,' I grunted, for once rather sympathetic to Peter Hall's problems. 'I wonder if I could ever run the National Theatre?' 'But you must,' said Howard. 'It's your destiny.' And so it became.

Peter was restless after twelve years as Director, and he sounded me out. 'Would you,' he murmured, 'ever think of yourself as my successor?' 'Only,' I said, 'if I could find someone to run the theatre with me, someone who would share the job with me of being both impresario and administrator.' I suggested the Director of the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, David Aukin, and Peter, who had had some bruising experiences with administrators at the National Theatre, warmed to the idea. So much so that he approached David to take the job. David accepted, and I assumed that there was a tacit strategy, which Peter had yet to sell to the Board, for me to succeed Peter with David in place.

By the autumn of 1985 press speculation seemed to confirm my supposition. So did Terry Hands, then running the Royal Shakespeare Company, who invited me to a meeting in November 1985 in order, as it turned out, to deter me from the National and hitch my wagon to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

We met in an empty restaurant looking out over the tundra of the Barbican courtyard. He looked, as usual, like a worker priest: black polo-neck and black jeans. He was nervous with me, and I with him, but he made a spirited attempt at geniality. After ten minutes the entire directorate of the Royal Shakespeare Company walked in and peered suspiciously at us; I waved ambiguously at Howard Davies, who looked both bemused and amused. Possibly Terry had arranged for me to be seen with him pour encourager les autres. He described the glories of the Royal Shakespeare Company with an evangelical fervour: 'There is literally nothing that the company can't achieve; we've even started marketing a programme for box office and theatre accounts. Our work can extend infinitely a New York offshoot, a film studio.' He talked of the National Theatre as a cottage industry, marginal, somehow pointless, a building not a company. But the more he talked of the Augean stables of the National Theatre, the more I felt attracted to the ordure. I realised that I was hooked: I really did want to run the National Theatre.