AMID the current boom in celluloid Shakespeare, Sir Richard Eyre must be hoping no-one has a new King Lear on the stocks. When he demits office as director of the Royal National Theatre in October one of the first projects of his new freelance life will be a studio movie of his current production in the Cottesloe with Ian Holm as Lear. It would be an appropriate show on which to bow out, but Sir Richard is instead having one of the busiest few months of his 10-year tenure and will open new plays by David Hare - the living writer with whom he has been most closely associated - and Tom Stoppard before he goes.

The Lear has some interesting links with the wider world of Eyre, however. Kent is played by David Burke, who was a memorable John Proctor in the young Richard Eyre's production of The Crucible at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum almost 30 years ago. The definitive cinema version of that play has just been produced by Nicholas Hytner, a director who was given a platform by Sir Richard at the National and, crucially, introduced to a very fruitful relationship with writer Alan Bennett. Such connections are commonplace throughout his career, but there are others which he himself has not recognised.

''A few years ago, when I first met Tony Blair, he said that we'd met before. I said I didn't think we had and he told me: 'You came to my school to talk to the sixth form and we came to see your production of The Crucible.'''

It is odd that the theatre director had forgotten, because he is fascinated by politicians, peppers his conversation with references to them, directs new plays about them (notably Hare's Absense of War), and counts some of them among his friends.

''I'm very interested in the public and private face. Theatre does that relationship between the individual and the state peculiarly well. That's what is at the heart of most of Shakespeare and that imprint is very powerful. One of the things I love about Lear is that it is a family dispute round the dinner table that breaks apart the whole state.''

His fascination with that tension between the public and private persona evidently excludes himself. A man apparently devoid of any such contradictions, he followed Sir Peter Hall into the job, showing very little tendency to leap on top of coffee tables and shout.

''I found it difficult to occupy this space. There were expectations of a figure that was much larger than I felt able to deliver. It took 18 months before I could recognise that I was doing the job and stopped looking over my shoulder. Until then I felt barely adequate. It was a real toss up whether I would have the courage to continue. It was the fear of shame that drove me on.

''It was only having decided that I would endure it that I started to feel confident in myself and the people I was working with. It was like setting a gyroscope. I remember running into Maggie Smith shortly after I'd reached this accommodation and her saying to me: 'You look as if you are living in your own skin now.' That was exactly how it felt.

''I have talked to other people who have had similar experiences. I talked to John Major about it seven years ago. He was here for dinner and I asked him what it was like following Thatcher. We found we had similar experiences. I suspect it is a common sensation, but rarely spoken of because we don't talk about fear and vulnerability in the macho world of chief executives.''

The joke, of course, is that anyone less like a macho chief executive is hard to imagine. ''Of course I'm only able to talk about it now from the perspective of leaving and having had happy and successful years.'' he adds.

Sir Richard is now 54, an attractive man dressed in soft fabrics, and offers me my choice of seat in his office amid the South Bank building site. I elected not to sit at his desk, but that was an option. He is disarming without trying. That desk is untidy, random pictures dot the bookshelves, and he drinks coffee from a polystyrene cup. If he does not look like a man running a large national institution that is because it is not how he sees the job.

HE SAYS: ''All theatres resemble each other, and the National Theatre, which is three theatres within one building, has to be run along the principles on which all theatres are run, and essentially all theatres are run like an extended family. The epicentre of all theatres is the stage and theatres exist - and this is an absurd truism - to put plays on a stage and you can only justify yourself, publicly and privately, by the qualities of that work.

''So as long as you keep the dynamic of the organisation, the whole direction of the organisation flowing towards the work on the stages, then it's not an institution. It's a place that puts on an awful lot of shows.''

He says the pressure for things to go wrong on the South Bank is a constant threat. ''You have a building that is unusual as a theatre building in two respects: it has three stages and you can't sit in this office and say where the epicentre of the building is. There are long corridors with lots of offices and there are 750 people who work here. It is a big organisation which exists for a specific function, but the danger that it becomes self justifying and develops an alienated bureaucracy is always there. I took that on board and I've tried to subvert memo-culture - infuriatingly to some people.

''I'd say to people: if you want to communicate ring me on an internal line, but preferably come to my office and say it to my face. I understand the necessity for people putting something on the record. It is a wise precaution, but it is not theatre practice. This place may have peculiar problems because of its size but we must always resolve those problems in theatre terms, not apply a sort of spurious management thinking. I hate this virus of new management, the assumption that you can apply some sort of abstract notion of management to all organisations, regardless of the function of the organisation. Theatres are essentially pyramid structures and in my view it is an advantage if the director, the chief executive, is also involved in the manufacturing process. It is a unique advantage to run a large organisation and have a perspective from the top of it but at five to twelve I'll go

downstairs to rehearse. That is literally the shop floor and I'm with the people who are engaged in the work that justifies the whole of the rest of the building.

''I can understand the desire to have organisations rationalised and run better but it is a singular activity making theatre and the practice of it has not substantially changed in 400 years. When the National moved out of the Old Vic, which is a perfectly coherent structure, into a building which appeared to be a different planet, there was no model. It took years to rationalise the operation of the National. The staff did expand exponentially in all directions when the theatre was created here. Over the years it has gone back to a model that is, I think, closer to the Old Vic.''

Such a journey was not one that Sir Richard deliberately embarked upon. That would not be his style. ''I defied the pressure to produce an artistic manifesto because that has the danger of all manifestos that you're trying to second-guess your public. I don't think a theatre should ever try to second-guess its public and I don't think you should ever say I'm going to do X Y & Z because X Y & Z should be allowed to develop organically within certain parameters that are to do with your values and to do with your artistic ambitions.

''The targets I had were artistic targets. I wanted to work with a number of directors whose work I thought was interesting. I wanted to do a large number of new plays, and I wanted to make the National Theatre more national in the sense of broadening the education work and the touring. I don't think I've gone nearly far enough in that.

''This might sound slightly post hoc, but I think it is true that I intended to make the argument for theatre through the work itself. We live in a culture where theatre is like Morris dancing to a lot of people: it's not relevant, it's old-fashioned. I have seen myself as an evangelist or polemicist for the medium, to advocate, in my somewhat hokey phrase, the theatreness of theatre. But why is it acceptable to talk of the filmic or cinematic qualities of a film and say that it is a great virtue, but when people say something is theatrical it is a disparaging term?

''I want theatre to be as singular an experience and what defines that singularity is that it is live and it always argues the scale of the human figure and the scale of the human voice. It is always about relationships between people, both the actors and the audience and the characters on stage. It is always a human medium, it is always frail, it is soft. It is not hard-disk.''

Although he is far from immume to criticism of his productions (''I try to appear gracious, but inwardly you rage''), Sir Richard is unperturbed by the luvvie tag, and offers a muscular analysis of its root, while conceding that his profession offers plenty of hostages to fortune.

''Theatre does wear its heart on its sleeve and people find that embarrassing. Theatre doesn't have that reflex of cynicism that the movie world is mired in.

''If there is a luvvie thing that has grown up it is because of journalism, a profession that is notoriously self-hating. A profession where people describe themselves as hacks. If you think of yourself in that way and you see people going around behaving innocently you find them despicable. It doesn't really bother me, even if it is uncomfortable to be jeered at.

''Show me anyone who reacts well to criticism and I'll show you someone who has had a lobotomy. But sometimes criticism is perfectly sound. As a director you've worked for maybe three months with a group of people on a project you are in love with, you offer it up, and when you are tired, your nerves are frayed, and you've probably got a hangover, you read that this thing that you have cherished is rubbish and that you have been wading through shit.

''Of course you feel violently protective to the play at the time, but six months later, when you remember your response, you wonder why you were so upset.''

The outgoing director remains optimistic, however, that the new Government will be good news for his profession. ''New Labour's arts policy document was absolutely unimpeachable, but my anxiety was who would be appointed and whether they would be able to deliver. Chris Smith is a first-rate appointment and really likes the arts and no-one has worked harded than Mark Fisher. It is reasonable that the arts and broadcasting looks forward with great optimism - but the corollary is that there is the danger of a real disappointment.

''I would like to see them ring-fencing the Treasury grant at the level it was at when Mellor got that increase and then index-linking it. The National Theatre has suffered standstill grants and we've lost #1.4m in revenue support over the past four years. If that were restored and things were brought back to par and the lottery money was divided between capital grants and additional revenue support, you'd go a long way to transforming the arts in this country.

''It is not as if you need 200% more to spend, it is probably more like 30%, and it would be pointless if it was not in partnership with educational initiatives to change class attitudes. I particularly don't like the proposal that access is achieved through television and a lottery channel. What is the point? The point about theatre is that you have to be there to experience it. Show it on television and it is no longer theatre, it is just bad television.''

Producing some quality TV is in Sir Richard's plans beyond his final fling at the National. A Robert Hughes-style review of twentieth-century British theatre for the BBC is at the planning stage, as are two movie projects, both under wraps at the moment, but one brought to him by two prominent American actors, the other dependent on him securing the rights to one of the publishing sensations of the past year.

He can look back on a period of stability and considerable success at the National, and one that has been free of rancour thanks to the character of the man himself. ''The principle of acting in good faith is very important to me. Your reasons for doing something may be wrong but if you believe yourself to be acting in good faith you can recover. If you do things cynically or opportunistically and things go wrong you've got no safety net. Perhaps it is a negative virtue. People wonder if you have made no enemies because you are evasive or defensive. I have been as assertive as I can be and have needed to be. I am not happy in conflict. But then who is? I've had a few enemies, but I've kept the disputes quiet.''

More tellingly, so have they.