Microsoft has not made price cuts in those regions

Microsoft has not made price cuts in those regions.Retailers and analysts welcomed the move, saying it should stoke sales for the Xbox just as demand was waning.. Five years ago, Richard Eyre relinquished the reins as artistic director of the National Theatre. Now he’s back in his old paddock, rehearsingVincent in Brixton, a new play by Nicholas Wright about Van Gogh’s little-known but formative experiences in London. Eyre meets me at the stage door, and we are taken to do this interview in the PR office.

The head of press saysshe is popping off to do other jobs, but she’ll be back We are not to think that we’ve been abandoned. We are not to think that we’ve been abandoned.
This reassurance strikes a slightly ironic note, since Eyre must know his way round these corridors blindfold, having run the place for a decade – 1988 to 1997, generally regarded as one of the institution’s golden eras. In those years, he launched landmark new plays that helped to define the times (Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the David Hare Trilogy). With his hat on as (in Frank Rich’s phrase) “the most successful and versatile producer in the English-speaking theatre”, he provided a flock of brilliant young directors (Deborah Warner, Declan Donnellan, the National’s current artistic director designate, Nicholas Hytner et al) with an environment in which they could soar. And he established rich creative relationships with the type of theatrical auteur previously under-represented at the National (Simon McBurney of Theatre de Complicite and the Canadian Robert Lepage). But what’s it like, I wondered, for Eyre to return as a mere employee? Is itakin to returning to a former family home now under an alien owner-occupier?”Yes, it is a bit like that,” he agrees, with a wry laugh.

“The place looks more or less the same, but it’s papered with, on the whole, different faces All theatres change rapidly. Theatre isunsentimental, for all that it’s supposed to be a pool of wishy-washy emotion, with people swimming in nostalgia In fact, it’s terribly hard-nosed Show finishes; show’s out One set is cleared; the next one’s in. And I rather like that.”Is there, I ask, an agreed protocol about the polite point at which the preceding artistic director is permitted to do a production within the next regime? His own predecessor, Peter Hall, reappeared towards the end of Eyre’s tenure with a production of the Oedipus plays. Now Eyre pops back in the penultimate year of the Trevor Nunn dispensation “I think there should be continuity,” he argues. “People with an interest in these things long with envious schadenfreude for myself or Peter to jump up and say that we want nothing to do with Trevor Nunn. But it just doesn’t work like that.”Eyre, a “radical anarchist” son of the upper-middle classes, is an attractive mix of diffidence and drive, of a strong sense of duty and a tendency towards melancholy. He touches and inspires you with an image of troubled integrity.