The Arts (of Necessity)

It is 30 years since Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests were performed in London. Now they have returned to an Old Vic that has been dramatically reshaped so the plays can be staged, as they originally were, “in-the-round”. Earlier this month at the theatre, actor/director Kevin Spacey, the Old Vic’s artistic director since 2004, and Michael Hintze, who heads hedge fund CQS and whose money has helped finance the project, spoke to the FT’s arts writer Peter Aspden.

Peter Aspden: Michael, this is an era of great wealth, a lot of it quite ostentatious wealth. You’ve gone on record as saying it’s important to give something back. Where does that imperative come from? What is the justification for cultural philanthropy?

Michael Hintze: Well, it’s something that feels right – and it’s fun initially. And, philosophically, it’s very, very important that people grab hold of their own lives. Whether that is in a political sense or in a society sense, I think it’s important. It’s important to support your hospitals, to support your cultural heritage, to support the theatre and museums. It’s something that’s crucial, I think, to the health of our society.

PA: Kevin, this kind of thinking is quite common in the US I think, and the received wisdom is that in Britain we’re a little bit behind. Did you notice that at all?

Kevin Spacey: There is without question a great deal of philanthropy in the United States but they also face a different tax situation to British citizens ... though I doubt that is a leading motivation. I also think it’s important that those who are in a position to do so – corporations or individuals, foundations or charitable trusts – should not look at giving as empty philanthropy. It is actually good for business. This is not an argument you hear a lot but I personally don’t want to see another regeneration plan that doesn’t have some kind of cultural centre at its heart. Human beings need shared experience and there is nowhere greater to have a shared experience than when you actually bring people together. A concert hall, a ballet, a music festival, a theatre, a jazz club, a comedy store. People come together. And, from a business point of view, if you regenerate Peckham, if you regenerate Elephant and Castle and you don’t have places where people can gather, it doesn’t help business.

The difference between the Old Vic and other theatres is that we don’t get any public subsidy. We get no subsidy from the government ... So we could not do what we’re doing unless there were corporations, individuals and donors stepping up and saying we believe in what you’re doing as a company, in your ethos. We want to be supportive.

PA: Your new production is Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, which, thanks to a donation from Michael’s company and his foundation, is going to be performed “in-the-round”. Tell me about that.

KS: When I started [at the Old Vic] one of the first plays I put on my list was The Norman Conquests. And Alan Ayckbourn had never given the rights in 30-something years. So I began a process of trying to convince Alan that they should be brought back to London. They are, in many ways I think, his crown jewels and I can understand why he’d been reluctant to give them but, finally, after a lot of cajoling and a lot of e-mails, he allowed us to do these plays. He gave them to us without knowing, because we didn’t know at the time, that we’d end up honouring the way they were originally done [in the round]. What happened is that about eight years ago, when I was on the board of the Old Vic, I said that we as a theatre have to think about what we can do to make this theatre elastic, not on a permanent basis but on a temporary basis. So we hired architects and designers and we did a big model, literally a model you can stick your head in and sort of move seats about, and came up with four or five different ideas of what we could possibly do to make this space just stretch and move.

Eventually that went into a closet until last October, when Matthew Warchus, the director, said, “The more I spend time with the players, the more I’m thinking, gosh, I just wish we could do these plays in the round, the way they were originally done because when you remove the wallpaper, when you remove the setting, they suddenly become very modern. It’s just about people and space and their relationships, but not only that, it’s the relationship that the audience has with each other while they’re watching the play.” And I said, “Matthew, I love you. We can do it.” And then I went to Michael and essentially laid out this idea and he thought it was a terrific idea.

PA: You’d had contact with each other already?

MH: Yes, we’d been supporters of the Old Vic and we’d been having fun together for a long while. When we first started talking, one of the things he showed me was this idea [to reconfigure the theatre] and I thought it was a cockamamie thing. But to see it today, it’s great. It works.

KS: It does work. Obviously, the most important thing is not just the space but what’s going to happen to the space. And watching this company develop these plays and seeing the way Matthew has directed them is the most thrilling thing for me because the players are being served. And by doing the plays in the round, it also allows our audience an entirely new perspective on the Old Vic.

PA: OK, it’s a lovely story, but we are in an uncertain economic climate and a lot of people might think that philanthropy is the first thing that people look to save on. Do you think that is true?

KS: What I’m experiencing personally, with how I raise money for the Old Vic, is that the opposite is happening. We have had places like Bank of America stepping up. They’re going to be one of the major funders of The Bridge Project – which is the Sam Mendes project over the next three seasons where Sam’s directing a transatlantic company of actors who are 50 per cent Americans, 50 per cent Europeans – and that’s a major thing for a bank to do in these times, to say, “We are confident enough that we are going to get through this and as a bank we’re going to be better off at the end of this. We believe it’s important to show that this kind of support is valuable. We’re not afraid of it, we’re not pulling back, we’re saying this is important for our social lives.” It’s the same with American Airlines, who have stepped up to be our airline and to support The Bridge Project, which is incredibly important because we’re going to be flying actors back and forth and that’s a major thing for us.

So I look at these as indications that even in this moment, when everyone’s being a bit cautious, corporations and individuals are stepping forward and saying we still believe this is important. And that to me is a sign that people are not looking at the future bleakly. They believe, as I think we all do, that we will get through this but that at the same time let’s not make our culture suffer.

MH: What I will say, Kevin, is that you were very cautious and careful with the money you got us to spend.

KS: Well, we’re in this weird hybrid because we’re not a subsidised theatre but everybody thinks we are. So we had to come up with an economic model that works for us in terms of what we put into our productions and what we put into the work that we want to do around the community with young people. This is in some ways the stuff that people do to get subsidy to prove that they’re worth their subsidy. But we’re doing it because it’s our ethos as a company because, for me, I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for the opportunities and experiences that I had as a young kid when I was at school. Right up until the end of my high school years in southern California I was exposed to professional productions, workshops with professional actors, going to see things, going to festivals, doing Shakespeare festivals, doing this incredible amount of stuff as a young kid and I can tell you what it meant to me at 13 to be in a workshop with Jack Lemmon and do a little scene and have him walk up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and say, “That was terrific kid, you ought to be an actor.”

The confidence that gave me has stayed with me my entire life, you know. Jack always had this philosophy that I have adopted, which is that if you’ve done well in the business you wanted to do well at, then it is your obligation to send the elevator back down, and that’s what we’re doing. It’s the most satisfying experience because you see these kids come in who are unsure of themselves, who are shy, who have never been on stage before. If a kid wants to go into the arts, they will because there’ll be nothing that can stop that passion. But it’s also about what happens to somebody who’s young, who stands on the stage in front of their peers, or colleagues, or friends, or teachers, or parents, and what they walk away having learnt; and that leads right to how people deal with each other in society, in any business, in any job.

PA: It’s often said that in the arts it’s important to have the freedom to fail. And the arts world was once considered quite radical and very unlike the corporate world, which was safe and conservative. Could too much corporate involvement mean that people go for soft options and keep things quite secure?

KS: Well, I think that companies that do have subsidy are given the ability to fail. They can risk failure and it won’t hurt them. They’ll be able to go on. If we have a failure, it can hurt us. But I still want to take risks and perhaps not having subsidy allows me to take risks that I might not otherwise take because there’s a lot of hoops that you’ve got to jump through, a lot of boxes you have to tick and I’m not interested in having to, you know, satisfy targets.

To me, if the government believes in supporting culture and the arts, then they should trust the practitioners. I believe that most people who are in positions of artistic leadership in London love the fact that London is one of the most diverse cities in the world. We want our audience to be broad. We want to reach out to as many people as possible. We want different cultures to come. That’s our desire. So trust that. Don’t make us have to count heads.

MH: In fact, corporates can be a little more daring. I think that frankly the corporate money can take risks because it’s a broader church. They have to answer in a very different way.

PA: Contemporary art is one of the great buzz areas right now. Do you think there’s any synergy between theatre and art?

KS: That’s why I’m doing Drama Queens [where famous works of art come to life] because you’ve started to see over the past couple of years, sometimes there’ll be a performance in an art gallery or something happening where these worlds are beginning to kind of collide. And people are beginning to realise that, in fact, we’re not separate, we have lots of interlocking things and ideas.

What’s interesting is you bring someone from that world together with a director and you start talking about how you can create something that is different and exciting. And I just think that there are a whole lot of people in the art world who don’t go to theatre. And there are a whole lot of people in theatres who don’t go to galleries; and let’s see whether we can bring these audiences together and realise that in fact they have a lot more in common than they may have ever thought.

PA: Are you interested in contemporary art, Michael?

MH: Well, I’m a trustee at the National Gallery and I’m definitely interested in art. For me, though, contemporary art is interesting but it’s a huge conceit. Personally I would rather give to the V&A or the Old Vic.

PA: Kevin, quite apart from having ambitious artistic programmes, there’s a lot of hustle involved in your job. Do you enjoy that?

KS: Well, I like to call it the song and dance. Occasionally it’s the hustle. I mean, it’s true sometimes you can take somebody to dinner and you can do your whole song and dance and you give them a tour of the theatre and they don’t write a cheque at all.

The best fundraiser I ever saw was Nelson Mandela because nobody sees him coming. I was in South Africa, with President Clinton on this trip for his Aids foundation, and he leaned over as Mandela was talking to two or three potential donors and said, “Watch him, he’s so good.”

And he was because they looked at him as a kind of saint. And he was saying, “No, you must write the cheque now, you cannot leave the room until I get a cheque.” There was something kind of inspiring about that and, perhaps because I’m an American, I’m not shy about asking for money because it’s not for me, it’s for what I know it will do for this community because I believe very strongly that as world famous as the Old Vic is, it also needs to be a community theatre. So that’s an exciting thing to be able to try to convince people of.

PA: I was going to ask what your next big project might be Michael, but also how you decide. I mean, there’s a huge array of things you could give money to and I’m sure you get a lot of approaches.

MH: And obviously there’s an enormous amount of money to give, you know, to various other good things. But how do I decide? I decide, frankly, to make sure it’s not wasted and to make sure that it somehow connects with me in one way or another. What’s my next big one? (Laughs) I need to make some more money...

‘The Norman Conquests’ is in preview at the Old Vic and runs until December 20, box office tel: +44 (0)870-060 6628; www.oldvictheatre.com