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Production Planning

Production Planning at the National

By Jonathan Croall

Simon McBurney, director of Complicite, stands pensively on the stage of the Lyttelton theatre. “We're going to need a stage within the stage, but we need to get the size of it right,” he announces. As a group of National production staff look on from the stalls, he starts to pace out the area his company will need to stage its forthcoming production, A Minute Too Late.

For the next hour intensive discussions take place on stage and in the auditorium about a raft of practical questions: what kind of floor cover might be needed; whether the stage could be built out beyond the safety curtain and still comply with the law; where the best place would be on the set to hide some speakers. This session has come at the end of a meeting at which members of Complicite and the National have for the first time talked together in detail about the practicalities of putting on the production.

Since Nicholas Hytner took over as director in April 2003, with Nick Starr working alongside him as executive director, there has been a big shift in the way the theatre works with the creative teams involved in the eighteen shows staged annually at the National. In part this has come about because of the increasingly varied nature of the theatre-makers the new regime is starting to attract to the National. “We want to present ourselves as a theatre with a good level of resources and a huge amount of commitment to a wide range of people, some of whom may have ideas beyond our current compass,” Nick Starr says. “We want them to be able to use their imaginations as much as they can, and not get into any kind of art-versus-money split.”

But there was also a clear case for reviewing a process which had become too standardised and inflexible. Until recently each show was given a standard budget, its size depending on the theatre in which it was to be staged. For a normal-sized Lyttelton production the figure is now around £120,000; for an Olivier show in the Travelex £10 season around £75,000; for the Cottesloe £33,000. Previously the figure was fixed well in advance, before details were known about such essential matters as the size of the company, the number of costumes, the special equipment needed, and much else. As a result, when a creative team – director, designer, lighting and sound designers – met the National's production people, the budget sometimes had to be radically re-thought at a relatively late stage.

The current process, which came out of the NT's experience on the 2002 'Transformation' season, seems infinitely more flexible, and more subtly geared to the particular needs of each production. “We've gone back and formalised the system, and brought the production manager in earlier,” says Mark Dakin, head of production. “We've also made it less time-specific: for example there's not a fixed date for the design, or for when the workshops have to be slotted in. We can now say to a creative team, Tell us how you're going to work, and we'll line up the people best suited to you.”

Once the decision has been made to stage a play or a project at the National, associate producer Pádraig Cusack works out how best to fit it into a repertoire, which currently consists of six new productions a year in each of the three theatres. Initially they will be fairly evenly spread across the year, but as the myriad elements of each production are assembled and juggled with, changes inevitably have to be made.

Some directors come to the National with a complete creative team, usually one they have worked with before. Others arrive with a wish list, and the National then follows up their suggestions. A few have no precise ideas of who they want on their team. The major problem always is people's availability, which in turn can have a knock-on effect on the scheduling: if two productions come too close to each other, this can cause headaches for the workshops, costumes, and other key departments.

Once a creative team is in place, Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr sit down with Mark Dakin, Paul Jozefowski from the planning department, and the show's production manager and stage management, to discuss what resources would be appropriate for the show. The next stage is the meeting with the creative team; only then, once the essential needs have been hammered out in detail, is the budget fixed.

The Complicite production offers a good example of this new flexibility. A Minute Too Late is a revival of a three-man show the company created twenty-one years ago. Originally it was planned to come in as a visiting production, for which the National would simply provide a theatre. But early discussions suggested that, since the company had asked to use one of the National's rehearsal rooms, it would seem perverse for it not to make use of the other facilities. As a result, the show has become more of a co-production. “It has totally changed its nature, the assumptions are now completely different,” Mark Dakin says.

Complicite has been allocated a budget of £20,000. At the other end of the scale is the extraordinarily ambitious two-play adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, directed by Nicholas Hytner. First staged in December 2003, it was revived in the Olivier exactly a year later. The cost for the original production was close to £1m.

“It was a huge show and a massive script in its original version,” Paul Jozefowski says. “As a result of changes in rehearsal, the design was changing all the time, and there wasn't enough time for things to be finished as finely as people would have wished. This time around, more time has been allocated for that.” There were also many items that, as a result of the show's 120 performances, had taken a battering and needed replacing.

With a new company in place, there was a determination to get the timing right and the work properly completed. A longer lead-in time allowed parts of the set to be taken out of the National to be re-built and re-decorated, and a lot of small changes to be made to the script, direction, costumes and lighting. “Things worked much more smoothly this time,” Nick Starr says. “Last year we built the prototype, this year it was the production model.”

In the production office there's a timeline which charts every stage of the production process, and the departments involved with each. One of its main headings is Risk Assessment. If a production involves for instance an actor having to be 'flown', or for fire to be used on stage, then all the possible hazards and control measures have to be identified. “With the need to comply with the ever-growing amount of health and safety and other regulations, risk assessment has become a whole discipline alongside the financial one,” Nick Starr says. “But it's not just about ticking boxes, it's about really thinking it through.”

The new production system offers flexibility not just to companies but to directors. One such is Katie Mitchell, currently working on Strindberg's A Dream Play. Since she prefers to work more intensively with the actors over a longer period than normal, including building in time for a workshop in the Studio, she is given seven or eight weeks' rehearsal time rather than the standard six. In addition, since she likes to develop her ideas about set and costumes during rehearsals, she's allowed some leeway over the delivery of a set model or final decisions about costumes.

According to Mark Dakin, these changes have brought about great improvements. “I think we're getting better at asking the right questions at the right time, and enabling people to work more collaboratively,” he says. Nick Starr is also pleased. “It seems to work well for us, laying down the basic ground rules, but putting many of the decisions into the creative team's court.”

But he has another cause for satisfaction: the new system has meant that the National has been able to hit the budgets it intends for the productions. “That's not easy to do, because when people are under pressure and trying to find the most creative solution, it's quite understandable if their first ideas overshoot the budget. Reining that in can be a painful process, and sometimes appears to be a destructive one. Happily it hasn't felt that way for quite a while.”


© Jonathan Croall, January 2005
Jonathan Croall is a freelance journalist and theatrical biographer, and author of three books in the series 'The National Theatre at Work': Hamlet Observed, Inside the Molly House and Peter Hall's 'Bacchai', all available in the NT Bookshop.