ONE man, no guvnors is the best description for award-winning National Theatre boss Sir Nicholas Hytner, who is taking his hugely successful comedy One Man, Two Govnors back out on tour to Newcastle, Sunderland and York before stepping down as artistic director.

His run of success as director of well-known productions like The Madness Of George III, Carousel, The Lady In The Van, Sweet Smell Of Success, His Dark Materials (based on the Philip Pullman book), The History Boys, The Habit Of Art and One Man, Two Guvnors, is all the more remarkable because Hytner banked enough money not to have to work again back in 1989 thanks to Miss Saigon. The show grossed more than £150m in London alone and Hytner was on a percentage for both the West End and Broadway musicals.

“I don’t know about not needing to work. Financially, well yeah, intermittently up and down. I’m not sure I think of it that way (not to have to worry about the size of his salary). I live off what I earn and you find most people in the arts, however they are doing financially, it’s not why they are doing it. Certainly not in the theatre. Most of the actors subsidise their theatre work with other stuff,” he says.

Richard Bean, who turned Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni’s 1743 commedia dell’arte play into One Man, Two Guvnors, gives all the credit to Hytner for selecting Brighton 1963 as the setting for the revived farce.

“Yes, well that’s very nice of him, but the idea was can we make the 18th century masters in the spirit of British end-of-the-pier farce and lets do this with James Corden as the initial central character. Then it became apparent it would work with anyone as long as they were gifted, which is what we’ve got with Gavin Spokes, who does it at the moment and is completely brilliant,” says Hytner, who had the benefit of knowing Corden from The History Boys stageplay and movie.

“The play has so out-lived James and it now it exists as a modern comedy classic and that’s all down to Richard Bean,” he explains.

Bean, however, was worried that a comedy about a man driven by hunger to take jobs with two shady employers who he must keep apart, was more suited to the 1920s than 1963. Hytner jokes that it helps if the guy playing Francis Henshall looks like he needs several pork pies a day to get by on.

On ending his tenure as director of The National Theatre in March next year, Hytner muses over how he’s managed to regularly find commercial winners in theatre and film, as well as 30 years of directing opera.

“You never know where the winners are going to come from. You really don’t. For every good idea that works, there are ten ideas that don’t. The scale of One Man, Two Guvnors' appeal did take us by surprise, but we were thrilled,” he says.

The farce of Henshall becoming minder to Roscoe Crabbe, who is really twin sister Rachel disguised as Roscoe because her brother has been murdered by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers, hardly sounds like the vehicle for a trouser-dropping comedy. But Hytner feels that it turned out to be the kind of humour which was once in the bones of every repertory theatre cast.

“Maybe audiences lost their appetite for it. Maybe, the best farces need the action to bump up against very strict and clear social rules. It’s no accident that the great icon of farce is a man losing his trousers and you must be in a world where it is a disaster to lose your trousers. That world disappeared some time ago and I’m not sure it would work if it was today,” he says.

So, what are Hytner’s thoughts on leaving One Man when he moves on to new theatre projects outside the National Theatre with Nick Starr, the NT’s executive director?

“I’m not sure it will outlive me... maybe it will,” he says.

  • Monday, July 28 to Saturday, August 2, Newcastle Theatre Royal. Box Office: 08448-112-121 theatreroyal.co.uk
  • January 19 to 24, Sunderland Empire. 0844-871-3022 ATGtickets.com/Sunderland
  • March 9 to 14, York Opera House, 0844-871-3024, ATGtickets.com/york