Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre: Ten years and a million cheap tickets

‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh to direct the musical Miss Saigon. ‘It just felt like a huge lark,’ he said at the time. The show ran for ten years in the West End and on Broadway and the royalties enabled him ‘to do what I wanted to do thereafter. It was a massive stroke of good fortune.’ Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship of the National Theatre. Hytner grew up in a prosperous south Manchester family and his fascination with music and drama asserted itself in early boyhood. Aged nine, he had a season ticket to the local concert hall. And he kept a model theatre in his bedroom where he moved a toy figure of Laurence Olivier around the stage.