14-05-2025
The old Etonian who is British culture's best-kept secret
Rupert Gavin is the grandest of arts grandees. The Old Etonian has, over the past five decades or so, produced or financed many of the West End's biggest plays, such as Jerusalem starring Mark Rylance, Tom Stoppard 's Leopoldstadt and A Streetcar Named Desire starring Paul Mescal. He has run both the BBC's commercial arm and Odeon Cinemas, and chaired Historic Royal Palaces and English National Ballet.
To all of which he can now add, aged 70, amateur philologist.
Gavin has set out to explore how the English language, a tongue originating on a rainy island in northwestern Europe, developed into the most-spoken in the world. Today, against the odds, English is the global lingua franca and has 1.6 billion speakers, about 500 million ahead of Mandarin.
To that end, he has written a book, Amorous or Loving? The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English, to chart the reasons for the language's success.
'The Chinese think that Shakespeare is the greatest non-Chinese person who ever lived'
Why did he decide to embark on such a project as he enters his eighth decade? 'Out of everything I've done, one thing that has been a constant strand within what I do is the English language,' he says. 'Whether that is theatrical production, whether that is writing, songwriting, or whether it is travelling the world, selling Teletubbies programmes and having to explain in 116 different countries what the meaning of the expression 'Eh-Oh' means.'
He recalls meeting the Chinese minister for propaganda during his time as BBC Worldwide chief executive. They spent the entire time talking about Shakespeare, 'who the Chinese think is not just the greatest Englishman to have ever lived, but probably think is the greatest non-Chinese person to have ever lived'. The encounter stayed with him, and made him realise that there is 'something very, very special and unique about the language' that cannot be explained solely by British imperialism.
One of his theses is that British climatic conditions are key to understanding the formation of the modern English language. The stable supply of food and mineral wealth helped to support a stratified class structure, he writes, while the richness of the land made it attractive to successive invaders. So plentiful was the bounty on offer that, from the Romans to the Normans, the invaders chose to settle for the long term and, by doing so, changed the language too.
Such a melting pot inevitably affected the development of the English language into one that has become much simpler than others, Gavin says. 'We lost our genders, we lost our complex suffixes, and we moved to a very straightforward subject-verb-object structure.'
English also does not 'use complicated sounds to define meaning' as the likes of Mandarin and Arabic do, and which can be seen as a barrier to learning the language.
Gavin's interest in the arts started 'because I wasn't very good at sport'. His father was a businessman who dabbled in film finance for a short time, meaning Gavin was able to badger the 'proper film producers wandering through' the family home. After Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he found work adapting books into film scripts, then made his own fortune in advertising at Sharps and Saatchi & Saatchi. Stints in retail (at Dixons) and telecoms (at BT) followed, but all the while he was producing and financing theatrical shows. He was an early backer of the likes of Arthur Smith and Jez Butterworth, and a frequent collaborator with the West End super-producer Sonia Friedman.
'One positive outcome of Western expansion was the expansion of the English language'
Gavin is physically towering with a slightly rumpled bearing and is always easy to spot across the lobby of a theatre on opening night. Connected with almost everybody across the arts (his book, for instance, has supportive blurbs from Alan Yentob, Antonia Fraser, Floella Benjamin and Simon Callow) Gavin was, until 2022, chairman of the arts and media honours committee; after seven years in the post, he stepped down.
Knighted himself the following year, he now splits much of his time producing theatre, chairing English National Ballet and on the advisory council of the Women's Prize for Playwriting, as well as writing himself. It must keep him terribly busy, I say. 'How does one split one's time? Just cope with it all,' he says. 'If you're choosing only to do the things that really excite you then it's quite easy.' The recreations listed on his Who's Who profile are similarly phlegmatic in tone: they simply read 'theatre producing, writing, gardening'.
With the modern penchant for hand-wringing about the ills of the British Empire, Gavin says that an unambiguous good that came from it is the widespread adoption of English globally. 'Everybody argues about what the positives and detriments are of Western expansion and things like that, but I hope that one thing that people can say was a worthwhile contribution was the language.'
'I love the fact that the French now officially sanction 'le wokisme''
A betting man 500 years ago may have been well-advised to back French, not English, to become the dominant language as Latin fell into abeyance – not least because France was a much larger and richer country at that point. Unlike English, however, French is much less flexible a tongue and to this day remains governed by the strictures of the Académie Française, which publishes the language's definitive dictionaries.
The ninth edition of the French dictionary was completed last November, some four decades after the previous one, with the addition of 20,000 new entries. 'A big expansion of the French language was heralded and includes these wonderful French terms like 'le wokisme',' Gavin laughs. 'I particularly enjoyed that the French now officially sanction 'le wokisme', but it's only 53,000 words.' By comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 500,000 words.
Are the French arrogant about their language? 'I would hesitate to comment,' he says, before taking an uncharacteristically long pause. 'But they do have a belief in their cultural exceptionality. And they have that because they don't want the French culture to be trampled on or marginalised or removed. I totally applaud that. It's up to you whether you would describe that as arrogant.'
Ironically, we meet over lunch in Theatreland at L'Escargot, London's oldest French restaurant in which Gavin owns a 'very small' shareholding. Situated in a grand townhouse on Soho's Greek Street, it is around the corner from the West End theatres where he has produced, co-produced or co-financed more than 200 shows. Some of his most recent hits include the Benjamin Button musical, Annie Ernaux's The Years and Mark Strong and Lesley Manville starring in Oedipus. This year Gavin set a personal record of netting a haul of 12 Oliviers.
'Theatre is huge for the British. We do more of it than anyone else in the world'
Writing his book has allowed Gavin to explore the ways in which oral culture and theatre – from Chaucer to Shakespeare and Dickens – has helped to both shape and spread the English language. That tradition continues today, according to Gavin. 'Look at the impact of our writers, whether it's Jez [Butterworth], whether it's James Graham,' he says. 'Our playwrights are at the heart of our strongest creative pursuits. Now it's not so much people coming to watch a play – it's still hugely important, we still do more of it than any other country in the world per capita – but it's feeding out into our strength in television and film.'
One reason that, critics say, there isn't more theatre-going is that ticket prices are too high for many. Gavin gives this short shrift. 'In the West End, our average ticket price is £55… Twenty five per cent of our tickets are sold at £30 or less,' he says. 'There are five per cent of tickets that are sold at £150 or more, but those always go fastest. And we only manage to do the cheaper tickets because some people, for whatever reason, are willing to pay a very high price. What are they getting for a high price? They're getting the day they really wanted, and they're sitting in a seat that they really want… This is a free market. Lots of commentators seem to think that we're a public service market, as opposed to a commercial market.'
Gavin adds that unlike, say, an expensive restaurant, a theatre is full of people who are paying vastly different prices for the same experience. 'The odd thing is that for the person paying £300 to be sitting in row E, there'll be somebody sitting in row H who's paying £75. And what the person in row E probably doesn't understand is the person in row H is getting exactly the same show. It is identical.'
Are there any actors with whom he had such a torrid time that he swore not to hire them again? 'It would be invidious to mention too many people,' he says, perhaps mindful of needing to cast future shows. There is, however, one dear-departed performer whom he would prefer not to name but was a complete nightmare to produce. 'The fact that he's dead is only partly why I would not want to work with him again.'
