Can you imagine

😂I obviously need to catch up with the lingo. Sorry! 

Touring is a lagging indicator though, with War Horse, Curious Incident and now This House from the Hytner era making up much of that. 

I very much agree on the strategy regarding the greater regional commitment, which is something I hoped to see (especially now that I've returned north). The way that big hits lead to years of touring is what is currently not being fed into that, though. A History Boys, War Horse and Curious Incident is going go make the balance sheet look healthier and takes some pressure off elsewhere, especially with 3% cut from the Arts Council grant over the next few years. I don't know the arrangement with Bristol Old Vic but they originated the production of Jane Eyre.

Great a touring policy and hard to reach places. But what they are touring isn't that marvellous is it? Well, we may agree to differ there. What the NT should be about is the highest quality drama and shows with the highest quality production values and our very best actors. Actors should be begging to play there. Directors queuing up and writers dreaming...with some good studio workouts.

It's a shame, because the NT Studio is doing great work and writers are falling over themselves to be there. At any time the Studio has something like 60+ plays in development. The problem is so few of them make it to one of the main spaces, and almost everyone wants to be in the Dorfman.

The Olivier and to a lesser extent the Lyttleton are fiendish spaces to write for, and one major problem is the lack of training and development opportunities for emerging or early-mid career writers to write for such large spaces. Emerging writers are under pressure to write to the two-person studio model. And yet the industry expects them to be able to make the leap from writing for the Dorfman or Court Upstairs, to writing for the Olivier, by themselves. Most writers struggle do it because all of the training and development has been within the black box hegemony, and when they're given the chance and fail, they fail so publicly and are criticised so harshly it puts others off. So we've ended up with two of the main auditoriums in London actively scaring off writers, which means they end up being programmed with an endless cycle of classics and revivals.

The tide is starting to turn. There is more of a push to encourage emerging writers to write big. But things won't change until there is more investment and more willingness to take risks.

On the other hand the NT are planning a big push to tour more and do more with regional partners and hopefully open up the NT to regional talent.

Yes HG and samw I 'get' all that. How did we get here? So stick to new stuff in Dorfman with small casts, old stuff in Lyttleton and big stuff, like the odd musical and Shakespeare in the Olivier. Simples 

That won't work because then you only get the most bland and familiar old stuff and Shakespeares because interesting and unfamiliar old stuff can only fill the Dorfmann. Hence we get Macbeth again instead of Henry VIII.

As I've said before, surely the NT could house successful regional productions, many of which are already co-productions by theatres quite distant from each other geographically? (Eg Lancaster/Stoke/Watford). This includes both revivals and new work. I know some of those well-received productions might work better in smaller spaces and from comments above, the Dorfman is already over-subscribed (shame it's the worst of the 3 NT spaces for many audience members), but some of them must surely be suitable for the Lyttelton and Olivier?

I've lost count of all the brilliant plays or shows I've read about, even in the last year, in places like Bath, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield etc, which I had no hope of seeing at the original venue but would have loved to catch if only they toured or transferred. Why cannot the NT step in here?

The NT SouthBank has programmed Jane Eyre and Peter Pan from Bristol Old Vic, the Young Chekhov trilogy from Chichester Festival Theatre, wonder.land from Manchester International Festival, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour from National Theatre of Scotland and Live Theatre, and numerous smaller scale shows coming into the Temporary Theatre. And it has also co-produced Husbands & Sons with the Royal Exchange, LOVE with Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Barber Shop Chronicles with West Yorkshire Playhouse.

In the old NT production it wasn't so much the volume as the duration, it just wouldn't stop. In the Simon Stone production there was a clear perspex box on stage filled with water - at one point they put the duck in this thing and it went absolutely mad, you could see its little legs paddling away beneath the surface - I don't remember anything about the actual play. 

I am quite envious but agree that would have made all human interaction redundant.