Richard Eyre on why he’s not a grumpy old man

There’s something suitably retro about the church hall in a Pimlico council estate that is the rehearsal space for the cast of Betty Blue Eyes, the new musical of Alan Bennett’s well-loved film A Private Function. While I wait for Richard Eyre, the director, to finish his morning session I am handed the script to read at a large wooden table in the middle of the kitchen. There’s an Aga, the brick walls are painted cream and the cupboards are a sort of pistachio wartime green. Lorna, the company manager, offers a mug of tea and a slice of carrot cake. When I comment on how cosy it all seems, she says: “Yes, it’s very Betty.”

Betty is the pig at the heart of the show, which, like the film, is set in Britain soon after the end of the Second World War. The parallels with today are knowingly drawn in the posters and adverts, which feature a pink porker with rather disturbing Doris Day eyes, which seem to be everywhere one looks: “Belts are being tightened … shares for all … Austerity Britain and A Royal Wedding … It is, of course, 1947!”

For those who have not seen the original, Betty is the top-secret sow who is being illegally reared so that the local pillars of the small-town Yorkshire community can enjoy a splendid banquet in honour of the “heppy couple” Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip on their wedding day. Hoi polloi, meanwhile, have to make do with Spam and rationed cuts of inferior meat.

It’s almost ten years since I last interviewed Eyre, at the time of his moving film about Iris Murdoch and her descent into Alzheimer’s, from which his mother had also suffered. He looks in good shape (he runs regularly) in his turned-up jeans, striped T-shirt and hoody, wearing fashionable specs with amber frames. Though, as I discover later, he is not all that easy about the idea of ageing. The time of our meeting is during the last weeks of his Feydeau farce, A Flea in Her Ear. The performance of its star, the gifted actor Tom Hollander, has drawn universal plaudits but the play itself has had mixed reviews.

“I find it very funny but for some people farce is like a day out at the undertaker’s,” Eyre says, deftly manoeuvring his chopsticks around his supermarket sushi. “There are those [such as our own Libby Purves] who say, ‘Well, it doesn’t work because it’s set in 1906 and all the sexual taboos have changed’, and I say, ‘But everybody can make that sort of shift. We make it effortlessly when we watch Restoration plays or Shakespeare plays’. To me it’s like saying, ‘Why does Othello make such a fuss about a handkerchief?’ So, it works for me and it works for a substantial number of people, because it’s done very good business.”

Eyre was approached by Cameron Mackintosh to direct Betty Blue Eyes, the producer’s first original musical in a decade, a year ago when Richard had just completed his stint as director of Carmen at the Met in New York.

How long did Eyre have to think about it before accepting the offer? “Oh, two nanoseconds.” Of course, he loved the original film: “Partly because I love all Alan’s work [they worked together when Eyre was artistic director of the National Theatre] but it also had a marvellous cast and it is just a very droll situation.”

I also love the film and feel the slight anxiety of a protective fan who cannot quite imagine the story recast or the characters inhabited by a different roll call of actors. The original, after all, featured the late Denholm Elliott, Michael Palin, Alison Steadman, Richard Griffiths, Maggie Smith, Bill Forsyth and Liz Smith. But the musical is a completely different porcine affair, hamming up (sorry, the porky puns of the creators are catching) the love of two grown men — Allardyce, the fleshy accountant, and Gilbert, the chiropodist — for their pig, so that Betty almost becomes the love interest, with many a swooning serenade to her “perfect pig-mentation”.

Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman (the American writing duo who adapted Queer as Folk for US television and bought the rights to A Private Function) have kept the most memorable lines from the original. So Joyce, Gilbert’s socially ambitious wife, still rewards his efforts to mobilise the couple socially upwards with her promise that “sexual intercourse will be in order” and the hideous Swaby verbally swats Gilbert for being “a festering, bunion-scraping little pillock”. As Eyre says: “It’s surprisingly Bennett-like, Bennettesque, Bennettian — whatever the adjective is, and I would say that it absolutely has his droll tone and they’re very much still his characters.”

The songs, which are full of playful lyrics, are by George Stiles (music) and Anthony Drewe (words), who have been called “the brightest hopes for the future of the British musical” and have worked, most recently, on creating the new songs for Mary Poppins, directed by Eyre, which has been a huge hit in the UK and on Broadway and is now on tour in the US.

Eyre is a bit of a cultural polymath, having directed for televison (The Ploughman’s Lunch, written by his friend Ian McEwan; the Bafta award-winning Tumbledown), film (Iris and Notes on a Scandal), theatre, opera and musicals. He was director of the National Theatre from 1987 to 1997 and has nurtured the careers of playwrights from Trevor Griffiths to Howard Brenton and David Hare. He has written a number of books, including a beautifully crafted and surprisingly revealing memoir, Utopia and Other Places, in which he examines “in a voice marked by the accent of self-doubt” his painful relationship with his late parents.

In the preface to that book he wrote: “I admire the talent of the writers I like, but I admire as much the courage of those who earn a living from it — the solitary ordeal of facing a blank sheet of paper that stares implacably back at you . . .”

I ask him how his own novel is going and his voice trails away. Have you written any of it? “I’ve … just notes.” Would you still like to do it? “Ohhhh,” he says, with a big sigh. “I don’t know … I’ve got so many friends who are novelists … Ian [McEwan] and Will Boyd and Julian Barnes. I see them all and . . .” It’s a bit of a lonely struggle? “Yes and … I’ll see.”

Part of the problem (quite an enviable one) is that Eyre is tied up with work commitments for the next two years. After Betty Blue Eyes he is preparing for the films of Henry IV, Parts I and II, for Sam Mendes’ BBC Shakespeare season in 2012. Then he’s off to Canada and the US to put on Private Lives. This will be followed by a play in northwest London, The Last of the Duchess, based on the book by Caroline Blackwood about the final days of the Duchess of Windsor. Eyre commissioned Nick Wright to write the play, having directed his previous work, Vincent in Brixton and The Reporter. And then it’s straight into filming the history plays for the Mendes season.

Eyre feels the need to say that with this sort of workload: “I love working but it’s not that I feel desperate in the sense that I have to fill the silence with, you know, occupying myself. It’s not that I’m terrified of reflection. I don’t think, actually, I seriously don’t think that I am.”

Why the need to emphasise this? “Because I recognise the characteristic of the syndrome, if you like, of people who cram their lives with activity in order not to face themselves and in order not to examine their lives. Particularly people in our world who just occupy themselves every minute of the day and there’s no time for reflection. On the contrary, I like reflecting. That’s why I’ve started to write … because it’s a reflective activity.”

Before we move on to areas of his life beyond work — his marriage and his family — I ask him about musicals. His production of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre at one time held the record for being seen by more people than any other production there.

He was less successful with High Society, some years ago. Does he know why that didn’t take off? “I don’t think my version was good enough,” he says. “I don’t think I had the right cast to make it work as a musical, although I had some really wonderful actors.” One of these was the late Natasha Richardson, who played the Grace Kelly part: “Natasha was fabulous.” Do you miss her? “I do. She was a really good friend. Tash was always the first person I’d ring for gossip on the way from the airport when I got to New York. I miss her a lot.”

When I check his age — 68 this April, is that right? — his face falls. Sorry, is that not correct? “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

I remember Denis Healey saying to me that your memory starts to go in your sixties. “Nonsense.” Really? “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t feel intellectually or physically diminished. I’m shocked. If you say to me that I will be 68, I recoil and I don’t really believe it.” You take offence? “I don’t take offence. I don’t feel precious about it. I’m just astonished because I don’t feel it and I really hate the thing when people give up and start to be old and I know it’s not a choice for a lot of people but for a lot of people it seems to be a choice — they’ve decided that they’re going to function like an old person.”

When we were talking about Richardson’s untimely death, I had asked him if he felt a similar compulsion to mine, as a parent, to phone one’s children and check they were OK. “Yes, immediately, of course,” he said, “but isn’t that true of everybody?” He is particularly close to his daughter, Lucy, his only child. When we last spoke, he said: “Lucy has the happiness gene and, as I said to my father, ‘It is a gift, like dancing’. I find it inexpressibly moving [that she is happy because] my condition tends to be faintly Eeyore-ish.”

It has surprised me in the past how people have made reference to Eyre’s condition being one of suppressed anger. I’ve spoken to him on many occasions over the years and he has always been gentle and courteous. If it didn’t sound like a bit of an insult, I would say that he comes across as supremely normal.

“The only person I’ve ever known who says that [he is angry] is David Hare. But I don’t know what that’s about. I don’t feel that I am,” he says. “I am quite placid. I don’t live in a constant bilious rage. I’m not a grumpy old . . .” — oh, definitely not old! — “… or middle-aged or young man.”

Eyre now has more reasons to feel content, as he has recently become a grandfather. He clicks on his mobile phone to show a photo of an adorable chubby blonde cherub: “I have a granddaughter who is absolutely ravishing, beautiful … she’s fabulous and she’s just had her first birthday. I love them both and Lucy’s got a wonderful husband, Ben, who works for international aid and development [DFID].”

I ask him what it was like when he and his wife, Sue Birtwistle (BBC producer, Pride and Prejudice, Wives and Daughters, Cranford) visited Lucy in Ethiopia, when Ben was posted to Addis Ababa for three years: “It was wonderful, although the first time we went out we felt absolutely heartbroken at leaving her. It just felt so far away and, you know, seeing her, feeling as strongly as both of us do about her, and knowing that we wouldn’t see her for several months — that was difficult.”

From a young age Lucy and her father would be travelling companions when Birtwistle was involved in productions. Eyre would sometimes be the beseechful one when his teenage daughter would go out and see her friends of an evening: “Must you go out?” I had the impression that it was a rewarding but quite an intense relationship; was this because she was an only child or partly because of his own tough upbringing?

“Well, both I think,” he says. “Certainly, I consciously wanted not to behave to her as my parents behaved to me — which amounted to indifference. So I’ve always been very, very involved with her and fascinated and of course, being an only child, you know, you do invest more than when you’re distributing among siblings.”

In the event, it is his daughter who has a published novel: “If Minds had Toes — a bit like Sophie’s World. It involves a teenage boy and a contest between Socrates and Wittgenstein about how you can interest a teenage boy in philosophy.”

He and his wife have been married for more than 30 years; have they had their ups and downs? “Of course we have but, I guess, we like each other a lot and admire each other and somehow, you know, it’s chance really, isn’t it? You certainly make the decision to stick in there but, on the other hand, no decision like that is consciously sustained if there isn’t the will and the desire to stay together.”

“I do feel incredibly lucky because the older you get, it’s so disruptive to be fractured … because how could you not feel a sense of failure. You know, your life becomes stained [by divorce], and it’s sort of a feeling of grief which just wraps around you so I’m very, very lucky in that sense and, on the whole, I’m very happy.”

It’s time to get back to work. Eyre has kindly allowed me to sit in on the rehearsal. The cast — in their unglamorous trackie bottoms and T-shirts (one has the word WILLS on it, in a nod to the forthcoming nuptials) — are doing the royal wedding number, waving their Union Jacks, all the steps repeated until they get it right. It’s a useful reminder of the graft and grind behind a show such as this and, just as I’m becoming a bit bored by the repetition, the 20 or so cast burst into song: “It’s another little victory for Little England and this time it really feels as if we’ve really won.” The sound is tremendous, a great soaring vocal swell, which is riveting — particularly as I’m so close to the action.

As Eyre says : “It’s highly demanding the thing of singing and dancing and acting and making all three look effortless and it’s, you know, quite special people who can pull that off.”

The Times