Nunn exits, handing his successor a sacred trust

When the curtain rose last night at the Olivier Theatre for the first night of Love's Labour's Lost, it was signalling not just the beginning of the National Theatre's latest Shakespeare production, but the final act in the tenure of the company's director, Sir Trevor Nunn.

At the end of next month Nunn will be succeeded by Nicholas Hytner as the company's chief creative force, bringing with him a change of style and of programming.

Hytner will introduce some radical statements, a batch of new, politicised plays, a black actor playing Henry V in a production serving as a commentary on the likely Iraqi conflict, cheap seats for a season at the NT's biggest auditorium, and an end to the annual classic musical revival.

Those classic musicals, Oklahoma, South Pacific, My Fair Lady and Anything Goes, have been an identifying badge of Nunn's five-year reign, which began in October 1997. His flair for directing musicals has led to sell-out runs, replenished the box office and delighted audiences, even if some critics have been a little curmudgeonly, questioning whether they were too commercial for the NT.

But Nunn's productions have covered a range of genres, from last night's Shakespeare to a thrilling world premiere of a never-before-performed Tennessee Williams play, Not About Nightingales. Theatrical history is likely to judge Nunn in a much kinder light than he has been judged at times during his directorship. The institution has won 32 Olivier awards and 112 awards overall, the balance sheet is showing a surplus and he has staged 61 new plays. One or two of the latter have been execrable, particularly at the start of his reign; but his commitment to new writing has been exemplary.

He has also pre-empted Hytner in attempting to bring in a new audience. The Transformations season at the National saw Nunn change the shape of the Lyttelton auditorium to try to make it more intimate and youth-friendly, reduce prices, and inaugurate a Loft theatre, a small space for new plays, with an attached "late lounge" for eating, drinking and even dancing. In addition, Watch This Space, the annual 10-week summer festival of free live street theatre and music in the Theatre Square outside the building, was inaugurated in 1998 and will celebrate its sixth anniversary in 2003.

These were all notable achievements. But Nunn attracted criticism for taking too much upon himself and not appointing associate directors.

Hytner is having a range of associates – from fellow directors to writers and also performers such as Helen Mirren and Zoë Wanamaker.

Such associates might have advised Nunn against the occasional flops among the new writing, such as the novelist Hanif Kureishi'sSleep With Me and the appalling version of Antony and Cleopatra directed by Sean Mathias. But these were only occasional blemishes.

Nunn, who is a former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has handed Hytner a sacred trust. Writing in the most recent annual report, Nunn said the National "must never depart from its responsibility to celebrate the great language theatre of the past, flowing from and through Shakespeare, and to create vivid and demanding language theatre for the future".