Richard Eyre

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty five, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Richard Eyre0:29

This week, our castaway is the very successful theatre and film director Richard Eyre.

Richard Eyre0:35

Richard, music is part of a director's stock in trade. Is it also important in private life?

Presenter0:40

It's indispensable in private life. I'm afraid I'm one of those people for whom musak was invented. I have an unnatural fear of silence, and I'd marginally prefer silence to bad music, but only marginally. Do you have musical skill? Can you play an instrument? I used to be a three-chord man on the guitar. I'm about a thirty-three chord man, but there's progress. There's progress. My musical skills are mostly vicarious. Do you have a collection of discs? I have a.

Richard Eyre1:02

Yeah.

Richard Eyre1:09

Quite large collection of desks. Did you find it very difficult to cut that collection down to just eight?

Richard Eyre1:15

I think it's probably the most difficult thing I've ever had to do. What's the first one you have on that little piler?

Presenter1:21

The first time I ever became aware of the the power of music to move me was I I was in the school choir and I got roped into singing with the school choir as part of the choir accompanying the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, singing the Vedi Requiem in Sherbourne Abbey, which was uh the the abbey attached to the school I went to.

Presenter1:44

And that the experience of singing in that choir was like being harnessed to some giant celestial toboggan, and I've never forgotten that. We haven't got your own recording. Which one are we going to hear? Well, this is a Schulte recording for no special reason, but for the fact that I've owned this recording for the last twenty years.

Richard Eyre3:05

The Sanctus from the Verde Requiem, the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by George Shelty.

Richard Eyre3:14

Yeah.

Presenter3:14

What part of the country do you come from, Richard? I was born in Devon, but we moved when I was about four to Dorset. And uh I was brought up in Dorset and and didn't leave Dorset till I was about eighteen, so I'm a country boy.

Richard Eyre3:27

Okay.

Presenter3:27

Taken to the theatre a lot? Not at all. I made a rare visit to Pantomime at Weymouth or Bournemouth. I saw an early variety performance of Morecambe and Wise, I think must have been early fifties. But the annual treat was to be taken to London to see the crazy gang. We always sat in the front row, and I could never understand why we sat in the front row because we didn't seem to see very well. All we saw was acres of five Tiller girls. And it was years later when I understood my father's secret purpose in buying us front row seats.

Speaker 13:55

Never

Presenter4:03

Uh you went to Sherburne. Was there a a theatre tradition at school?

Richard Eyre4:06

Uh

Presenter4:07

No. There wasn't really a strong tradition of anything except for what was, in my opinion, the worst traditions of the British public school experience, which was sport and muscular Christianity. Now on to Cambridge to Peterhouse to read what? To read English. I had the good luck to have Kingsley Amis as my supervisor. He had gone there at the same time as I did. In fact, I think I'd been recruited to Peterhouse because they were scavenging for students to read English. And he was a breath of fresh air because he taught me that there were no received opinions about literature and the important thing was to work out for yourself what you thought about a piece of literature. And he used to ask me if I'd submitted an essay on a Shakespeare play. He'd say, This is all very well, but what do you think of the play? I'd say, but Twelfth Night is a great play. He said, Yes, but why is it a great play? And are the jokes funny?

Presenter5:06

And that seemed to me a very refreshing kind of heresy. What extracurricular activities did you take part in? Well, I'm afraid that I spent an awful lot of time in the amateur dramatic club. And for the first two years that I was there, I was single-mindedly obsessed with acting. What was your ambition at that time? I don't think I had a recognisable ambition. If anything, I wanted to be a a writer. I was beginning to be aware that I would never be a sufficiently good actor to satisfy my own criteria. You did consider that? I did consider that. And when I left Cambridge, I worked as an actor after having worked as a barman for about all in all, about 15 months. Successfully? I think more successfully than as an actor. In retrospect, I'm extremely proud of my skills as a barman and wine waiter, much prouder of that than my skills as an actor.

Richard Eyre6:04

You also worked as a photographer's assistant for a while.

Presenter6:07

Very briefly, yes. Putting his ladder in place and that sort of thing. Yes, changing film and changing the um mixture in the darkroom. But firmly at the back of your head was acting? I would say not so firmly, rather vaporously at the back of my head. I simply didn't know what I wanted to do, except that I wanted to do something in the arts.

Presenter6:29

Your second record? Being a child of the fifties, or at least a a teenager in the fifties, I was and am deeply attached to rock and roll, in particular Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Presley. And this is a a Chuck Berry track which is called School Day. And apart from being wonderful rock and roll, it has the most delightful lyrics.

Speaker 46:55

Welcome and I'll

Speaker 46:59

The teacher is teaching the golden rule American history and practical man. You study him hard and hope him to pan.

Speaker 47:10

Working your fingers right down to the bone The guy behind you won't leave you alone

Speaker 47:18

Ring ring goes the bell.

Richard Eyre7:23

Chuck Berry School Day.

Richard Eyre7:26

So you were going to be an actor, Richard. Where did that happen? I mean, you came out of the photographer's studio.

Presenter7:32

I was in a production of Henry V at Hornchurch, which was something of a landmark in the art of course acting. I was playing most of the English and French armies, and uh this consisted in it was a very narrow theatre. We picked up arrows one side of the stage and thrust them in some sort of extemporised bow and uh shot them to the other side of the stage where they probably bounced back off the wall onto the stage. We ran across, picked them up, changed helmets and shot them back the other way. That's true economy. Yes, I suppose that's some kind of artistic lesson. And after that I got a job in the chorus of the boyfriend, which has subsequently been one of my least favourite musicals. I had a sort of experience the road to Damascus was just uh sitting in front of a a mirror attempting to put on this wildly implausible makeup prior to going on stage to um perform extremely badly in The Boyfriend. And I realized that there was no way that I could uh

Speaker 17:55

Prophetic

Speaker 48:13

Yeah.

Presenter8:35

Hold my head up in public again if I went on doing this.

Presenter8:39

You decided to move out to the provinces? Yes, I did. I was working in in Leicester and there was a director there called Clive Perry who became a kind of patron in that he suggested to me that I'd be better off to consider myself as a director than as an actor. And he had the foresight and in my view the courage to back me and he underwrote for some time my productions in Edinburgh where he'd become the director and I became his associate. And for several years I was the principal director in the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh where I more or less took my pick of the world's classics with a number of really outstanding actors both Scottish and English. And of course you worked at the festival which must have been. Yes I did. Well that was always an intoxicating period.

Richard Eyre9:23

Yes I did.

Richard Eyre9:26

And for three years running you won an award for presenting the best new theatre production in Scotland.

Presenter9:33

Yes, I did. It has to be said that there weren't a great number of new stage productions in Scotland every year. So I think the competition wasn't considerable, but it was incredibly gratifying to get this award three times running. Looking back, what was your best piece of work in Scotland?

Presenter9:51

I would say two productions. One was a production of The Changeling, the Middletown play, Jacobean play.

Presenter9:59

and the other was a production of The Cherry Orchard. I've always been obsessional and passionate about Chekhov's work, and have done three productions of The Cherry Orchard, the last of which was for television.

Presenter10:15

Let's move on to your third record. What's that? My third record reflects my affection for jazz, which was really born when I was at Cambridge. And I came in contact with a number of extremely good undergraduate jazz musicians and made friends of several of them and started to listen regularly to a great deal of jazz. And this is a record from the period of John Coltrane, who was one of my favourite sax players.

Presenter10:43

Unusually with Ellington, and it's a remarkable conjunction of two really great musicians playing from quite different styles.

Richard Eyre11:50

John Coltrane and Duke Ellington in a sentimental mood.

Richard Eyre11:55

Yeah.

Presenter11:55

You next settled at Nottingham Playhouse? Yes, I did. I'd left Edinburgh, I suppose this was the beginning of the seventies, and I freelanced around in a rather sporadic way, and then was asked to go as director at of Nottingham Playhouse. You had a campaign there to find new playwrights? I did. It was less of a campaign and more of a kind of pragmatic exercise, because I knew a lot of my contemporaries were writers who had come to a stage where they were looking for large theatres in which to present their work, and they weren't on the cusp of realising their full potential. And I was lucky to get plays out of David Hare and Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths and Ken Campbell and Adrian Mitchell. You found comedians? Yes, I did. Who wrote that? Trevor Griffiths. Well, Trevor mentioned in a rather off-hand way just before I went to Nottingham Playhouse that he was thinking of writing a play about a school for nightclub comedians. And it sounded such a wonderful idea that I said, Well, if you write it, can we do it at Nottingham? And I pestered him with monotonous regularity until finally he caved in and agreed to give the play to Nottingham.

Richard Eyre13:12

You fought the good fight in the provinces for a long time. Then you decided it was time to move to London. What steps did you take about that?

Presenter13:21

Well, I'd been at Nottingham for about five and a half years and was beginning to feel rather jaded and really looking for some kind of escape with honour. And I think if I'd had to stay on another year at Nottingham, I would have resigned anyway, because there's a very finite limit to the time that one can satisfactorily run a theatre. So I had out of the blue, I had an offer from BBC Television to take over as producer of Play for the Day. And this was an offer on their part of remarkable risk and generosity, because I'd never, prior to that, worked in television.

Richard Eyre13:59

Staying with the theatre for the moment, you did a production of Hamlet at the Royal Court.

Presenter14:03

This I did.

Presenter14:05

I think it's usually referred to as the controversial production of Hamletic Royal College. Oh, that's good. Yes, it was a great um co solebre, partly because I cut the whole of the the first scene of the play and uh I cut the character of the ghost, and the ghost was

Presenter14:23

performed as a demoniacal possession by Jonathan Price, who played Hamlet. Who was afterwards to do quite a lot of work with you? Yes, in fact prior to that he'd been in my company at Nottingham and in fact had I think made his name on a national scale in in comedians and subsequently on an international scale because he he played the same part on Broadway.

Richard Eyre14:44

Before long you moved to the National Theatre, which must have been somewhat daunting.

Presenter14:49

Yes, the Olivier Theatre is notoriously difficult cavern of a theatre to fill. I sat with um John Gunter, the designer, in this enormous quarry of a space when we were thinking of doing guys and dolls, thinking how on earth we could transform it into a a place of joy.

Presenter15:10

And it was rather daunting.

Richard Eyre15:11

Indeed, during the run of Guys and Dolls you made the place a place of joy. We'll talk about that in a minute. What's your fourth record?

Richard Eyre15:20

Yeah.

Presenter15:20

My fourth record is

Presenter15:21

Bach piece, Bach wedding cantata. Like most of the classical music that I've come to know, it's music that I first heard on the radio. And because I have no musical background, I keep discovering pieces of music that I subsequently discover are incredibly well known.

Presenter15:41

And I'm now rather shamefaced about saying that I've just heard this great piece by Bach or Beethoven being told, but everybody knows that. I don't know whether or not everybody knows this wedding cantata, but it's a piece of amazing purity and and beauty.

Speaker 416:47

I'm frosted and feet.

Richard Eyre16:57

The opening of the Bach wedding cantata with Uzzula Buckel as soloist.

Richard Eyre17:04

Now we started talking about guys and dolls. New York 1950, later revived at the Coliseum.

Richard Eyre17:11

And uh at one time Laurence Olivier was going to do it at the National, wasn't he?

Presenter17:14

Yes, I think so. He was planning to do it during his great era as director of the theatre, and unfortunately he got ill. I think uh Edward Woodward was going to play Skye Masterson and Olivier was going to play Nathan. Yes. He came to see the show during the run.

Presenter17:31

and was extremely generous about it. But he couldn't resist characteristically saying to me that he thought it was very good, but he said, You know, the accent's a bit of a melange.

Presenter17:43

And I I had a a perfectly clear vision of what his performance would have been, that no doubt about it, the accent would have been placed exactly to the right street corner.

Richard Eyre17:51

Into the right street corner.

Richard Eyre17:54

Your production was when, nineteen eighty-three? Eighty-three, yes. Had you seen any of the previous

Presenter18:00

No, I hadn't. I'd never seen it before. I knew the film very well. And I was gratified to find when I listened to the record of the Broadway production and read the book of the Broadway production that it was very, very much better than the film.

Richard Eyre18:14

National, it was a very big investment. You had a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.

Presenter18:19

Yes, and it's to Peter Hall's credit, he never made me feel that uh

Presenter18:24

There was a lot riding on that production. And now that production we're going to see again is coming to the West End. Yes, it's on a provincial tour now and it'll be coming into the West End to the Prince of Wales Theatre in June.

Presenter18:36

After you did

Richard Eyre18:36

guys and dolls, a very modest tribute to John Gay, a rather small scale beggar's opera.

Presenter18:44

Yes, it's an irony that when Guisendolls first opened in London, Cantainen described Guise and Dolls as the beggar's opera of Broadway.

Presenter18:53

And it seemed to me an ideal companion piece, and I wanted to do it in a way that for me vindicated Gay's original at the expense of Brecht's version, because I think Gay's version is both musically and politically a much better, sharper piece than uh the Brechtweil version of Beggar's Opera. So part of wanting to do it was uh to vindicate the name of Barnstable born John Gay and partly because I had the company to do it with.

Presenter19:25

Your fifth record.

Presenter19:26

I think one of the things that would happen on a desert island is that I would start to think a lot about love.

Presenter19:34

And if I was thinking about love, then I would have to have somebody who sings about love in a matchless way, and that would be Billie Holliday. She seems to be able to combine both the uh joy and misery of love and give an account of it that is slightly melancholy but never depressing. And this is uh a song called I'll Never Be the Same, which apart from Billie Holiday features Lester Young on tenor.

Presenter20:04

Uh Uh

Speaker 420:06

God have known their meaning for me.

Speaker 420:13

I'll never be the same.

Speaker 420:17

Nothing what it wants you to see

Speaker 420:23

And when the songbirds at single

Speaker 420:27

Tell me it's spring, I can't believe their song.

Richard Eyre20:33

I'll never be the same Billy Holiday with Teddy Wilson in his orchestra.

Richard Eyre20:39

Richard, you've mentioned you were invited to be the producer in charge of the BBC's play for today.

Presenter20:44

Yes, that's right. I'd never worked in television before, with the exception of a small brush in the late sixties with Granada Television when they produced a play that I'd written that had been on at Hampstead Theatre Club. But uh after that I'd had ten years totally untainted by contact with television and um I entered the BBC in a state of um ignorance or innocence, whichever you prefer to to think of it as.

Richard Eyre21:12

As well as your administrative job, you also directed some players yourself, obviously.

Presenter21:17

Yes, I did, and this was part of the the terms of my contract.

Presenter21:22

The first film I directed for television was a film written by the novelist Ian McEwan called The Imitation Game, which was a story set in the last war about a woman joining the army and attempting to enter a male-dominated world. And there's a piece of music that is irrevocably connected in my mind with that film, which is a Mozart piano piece, the Fancia in C minor. And this ran parallel throughout the whole film to the story of this girl attempting to achieve the impossible. And she was, as well as trying to enter a male-dominated world, she was also attempting to play this impossibly complex piece of Mozart. And this is the next piece of music you'd like to hear? Yes, it is. It's a piece, a mixture of extraordinary ferocious violence mixed with rather tense lyricism.

Richard Eyre23:20

Part of the Mozart Fantasier in C minor, K four seven five, played by Ivan Moravetz. And that was the music you used for your television film, The Imitation Game. Not all your television films have been made for B B C, have they?

Presenter23:34

Yeah.

Presenter23:34

No, I've made three for the BBC, and the last two films that I've made for television have been financed by Channel Four, either wholly or in part.

Presenter23:43

The first of those was The Ploughman's Lunch.

Richard Eyre23:45

The plowman's land. A Channel 4 film despite the fact that you went backstage in the BBC newsroom during the film.

Presenter23:51

Voluntary

Presenter23:53

Yes, we researched comprehensively in the BBC Newsroom, and they were extremely generous hosts. Whether they were pleased with the the outcome, I don't know, but um I'd like to take this opportunity of thanking them for their use of the hall.

Presenter24:08

You also went backstage in a Conservative Party conference. Yes, we did. Well, we went in front of the stage. I'd like to have gone backstage, but that was an area that not even we were permitted to go. But we were in the body of the hall, and there was a mood of quite astonishing euphoria, because, of course, it was the year of the Tory Party Falklands triumph, and it was being celebrated in no uncertain terms.

Richard Eyre24:34

Recently Laughterhouse, a sort of ealing comedy theme about a man who drives his flock of five hundred Christmas geese.

Richard Eyre24:43

From Norfolk to the London market.

Presenter24:43

From

Presenter24:46

Yes, I've always found it very difficult to explain the plot of this film without bursting into laughter, because it seems such an extraordinarily improbable thing to make a a film about.

Richard Eyre24:57

Whose idea was it?

Presenter24:57

This is Brown Glover's idea. The actor. The actor, writer, wrestler, teacher. Yes.

Richard Eyre25:04

Uh What I I I loved about it was that you made it into a kind of burlesque western. Here they were driving their product to the rail head, as it were. There was all this splendid far horizon western music going on in the background.

Presenter25:18

Yes. I'm s tempted to take some of this to a desert island, but I I think that the memories of the privations of making this film, the extreme cold and the perils of dealing with five hundred geese, would get me down on the desert island. What time of year did you make it? We made it in February, and uh although it wasn't quite as cold as this February, it was incredibly cold, and I felt as if frostbite was always just round the corner.

Speaker 125:31

Yeah.

Richard Eyre25:41

Uh

Presenter25:45

Well not.

Richard Eyre25:45

Meantime, you're making these excellent films. You are still at the National. You've just done the Government Inspector.

Richard Eyre25:53

It's not, let me confess, one of my favourite plays, but you've delivered a wonderful box of tricks in using every last effect that's possible in in that wonderful Olivier Theatre.

Presenter26:05

Yes, I hope it's not a series of gratuitous effects. What I was after was trying to achieve a kind of nightmarish vision. The play is a very extraordinary amalgam of melodrama, farce, naturalism, and expressionism. And what I was trying to present was something that is literally a nightmarish vision that has a kind of epic visual scale to it and at the same time preserves the kind of human satire. So whether I've succeeded or not is not my place to say, but what we were after was something that was very bold and adventurous and something that I think is quite un-English. Well, it's doing all right. There isn't a seat available in the house. I hope not. Next record.

Presenter26:54

The next record is from a Hollywood musical.

Presenter26:58

I suppose if I'm honest, I'd prefer film musicals to stage musicals. With the exception of Guys and Dolls and Kiss Me Kate, I don't think I'd like to be on a desert island with a Broadway album.

Presenter27:12

But I would like to be on a desert island with the entire film of Singing in the Rain, and if I can't take the film, then at least I can take Gene Kelly's Singing in the Rain, and then I could learn to dance the routine in and out of the surf.

Speaker 427:29

I'm singing in the rain.

Speaker 427:33

You're singing in the rain

Speaker 427:36

What a glorious feel, and I'm happy again. I'm laughing at clouds, so dark up for mars.

Speaker 427:51

The sun's in my heart, and I'm ready for love.

Richard Eyre27:57

Gene Kelly on the soundtrack of Singing in the Rain.

Richard Eyre28:00

Now you're a resourceful man, obviously, Richard. How resourceful are you going to be as a castaway? Could you

Presenter28:06

Look after yourself. I'm theoretically more resourceful than I am in practice. I'm a man who puts up shelves which have a way of collapsing several months later with disastrous consequences. I lost our ceiling by um putting up some bookshelves. In the middle of the night there was this volcanic eruption from underneath our bedroom. It went down and the bookshelves had all fallen down, the radiator had been torn off the wall, and a geyser of hot water was spurting towards the ceiling. That was a result of my carpentry.

Speaker 128:15

Maybe

Speaker 428:16

It looked as usual.

Speaker 128:35

Number one.

Presenter28:37

Done any fishing? I've done a bit of fishing, sea fishing.

Presenter28:41

On principle I'm rather averse to uh hunting animals.

Presenter28:46

That uh although I might uh quite enjoy the chase, I couldn't bear the prospect of having to kill them.

Richard Eyre28:52

Would you try to escape? Could you build some sort of craft?

Presenter28:55

Oh, I'd definitely try to escape, and I'd certainly force myself to build some sort of craft. I think probably I'm strongest on Will, and uh Will would eventually um command my rather feeble skills at carpentry. What's your last record? My last record is uh Pablo Casal's record. It's called The Song of the Birds, and it's a tune that he played at the end of every concert.

Richard Eyre29:09

What

Presenter29:20

And it's a a Catalan folk song. He was an exile from Catalonia. He left when Franco took over in Spain, and he never returned to Spain. He vowed never to return while Franco was in power. I'm haunted by this tune for several reasons, one of which is that when he died I saw a film of him playing the piece to a United Nations gathering of statesmen and the wives of statesmen. And I was struck by the fact that most of the wives had tears pouring down their faces and most of the men remained a kind of granite indifference. And it seemed to me a wonderful metaphor for the way in which world power is not susceptible to the finer feelings.

Richard Eyre31:09

Pablo Casals with a favourite Catalan folk tune, Song of the Birds. If you could take just one disc out of the eight, which would it be, Richard? I think it'd be the Casals. And one luxury to take with you any one object of no practical use that you care to choose.

Presenter31:25

Well, that would have to be a saxophone. A few years ago I bought a saxophone and I started to learn it and I got such vigorous protests from my family and the neighbours that after a fortnight I had to take the saxophone back to the shop and humiliatingly ask for my money back. So that I think on on a desert island no one except for the monkeys would complain and it might even attract a passing ship or two.

Speaker 131:34

Uh

Speaker 431:34

The neighbours.

Richard Eyre31:50

And one book you already have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Presenter31:54

Well, this is difficult, but I think I'd opt for Partridge's Dictionary of Slang, because apart from being an endlessly amusing read, it's also a mine of information about social history and derivation of language.

Richard Eyre32:00

Because

Richard Eyre32:10

Partridge's Dictionary of Slang. And thank you, Richard Eyre, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much.

Presenter32:17

It's been a great pleasure.

Richard Eyre32:18

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 132:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Speaker 432:57

Uh