Nicholas Hytner, Director of the National Theatre

talks to Anthony Gardner

'The great thing about it is its night-by-night energy, and its sense of fun and adventure,' says Nicholas Hytner of Watch This Space, the National Theatre's festival of street performance (co-sponsored by the EC Representation in Britain). 'It really does engage anyone who's walking by. Apart from the weather, it seems to have gone very, very well this year.'

Hytner has to admit that he has never directed a street production himself ('It's a very particular skill'); but perhaps this is forgivable, since he has directed practically everything else - from plays and musicals to films and operas. So which is his preferred format?

'I'm a theatre director,' he says emphatically, pointing out that although he has four films to his name, two of them - The Madness of King George and The History Boys - were based on Alan Bennett plays which started life at the National Theatre. 'We made The History Boys with the same team as made the play, and it felt like something that we were simply able to go out and do spontaneously and quickly. The Madness of King George was a much bigger and harder job for me, since I'd never directed a film before.'

It is now four years since Hytner took over the biggest directorship of all, that of the National Theatre, and he certainly looks at home in his office overlooking the Thames. His appearance is casual (open-neck shirt, jeans and gym shoes), his manner friendly, and his conversation so enthusiastically expository that one could easily imagine him as a teacher firing the imaginations of a real-life class of history boys.

'What's marvellous,' he says of Watch This Space, 'is that it restores this stretch of the Thames to what it must have been 400 years ago, when you came to the South Bank for everything that involved a good time. The authorities in the City of London violently disapproved of organised entertainment, so this was where people came for theatre, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, drinking, whoring. We've not got the whoring any more, but there is the idea that this is somewhere you can visit when you finish work and find adventurous entertainment.'

It is this heritage, he argues, which puts English theatre outside the European mainstream. 'The English theatre has always essentially been a popular theatre, in which the state has taken a benevolent interest. An unbelievable number of people came to the theatre in London at the end of the sixteenth century. There were three theatres here on the South Bank, each of which held 3,000, and London had a population of 200,000 - so it didn't take very long for the whole of London to see a play. And the theatres were box-office driven: they depended on a degree of state patronage, but Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are written to appeal to the whole community.

'Now, if you look at the great Continental traditions, they are esoteric. In the French golden age, there is a degree of connection with a popular touring theatre through Molière - but essentially the French theatre is a court theatre. And the German tradition is about rival court theatres, which were an expression of princely or ducal prestige.

'The advantage of the highly subsidised Continental theatres is that they're extraordinarily hospitable to the avant-garde; the disadvantage is that they are dependent on the taste of the sponsor, or the prince, or the minister. They're much less driven by the need to connect to the widest possible public. So to a lot of my French, German, Belgian, Scandinavian counterparts, what we do would seem to be unhealthily driven by the desire to please a large crowd; but I think that's our strength. I don't want to be part of a performing-arts ghetto which scorns the general public - I want to educate people in what we think is exciting and worth saying.

'What that means is that we're still much more hooked on narrative and psychological realism than a lot of the Continental theatres are: so there is an aesthetic divide. They would say that the way we stage things is uninteresting and retro; I think the way we stage things connects us as widely as possible.'

There are also, he explains, practical reasons as to why English theatre continues to plough its own furrow. Whereas on the Continent theatres tend to close in the summer and send their companies off to participate in festivals where ideas are exchanged, most English theatres play to their home audiences 52 weeks of the year. Nor - apart from the Royal Shakespeare Company - do they have permanent companies, since actors will always be lured away by the more attractive money in television. But in any case, Hytner is unsure that he would want one, given the cosmopolitan nature of modern Britain:

'To be a national theatre in this country requires a commitment to pull in all sorts of different cultural expressions, and create the kind of events which are not focussed at an established audience. If we had a permanent company, we simply wouldn't be able to do as great a variety of things.

'For all these reasons, we find it hard to stay in constant touch with the great continental theatres. It would also be a justifiable criticism that we're easily seduced by the vastness of the English-language repertoire: we rarely do translations of the plays currently being written in French, German, Dutch, Norwegian. It adds up to, I have to say, a great regret.'

Ironically, he says that the hardest aspect of his job now is getting the new wave of writers and directors to embrace their populist heritage - a problem he blames on the under-funding of the arts in the Eighties and Nineties. 'What happened was that everything shrank, with the pace being made in small studio theatres playing only to a few people. We now need the writers who grew up during that time to learn to communicate more widely. We have the most extraordinary generation of British playwrights in their sixties and seventies who developed their playwriting muscles when the template was the large-scale play, and it's my great fortune that so many of them have found a second wind and are writing more vigorously than ever. But to persuade the playwrights in their twenties, thirties and forties to write as confidently as people like Tom Stoppard and David Hare - that's tough.'

He is less worried about these writers being seduced by television. 'As soon as a playwright starts to write screenplays, he's writing to order, and he's pretty low down the food chain. It's lucrative but frustrating. Writers always like to write for the stage, and they always will do - because it's only on the stage that a playwright's voice can be heard unadulterated.'

© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.