Morris' airs and spaces

It's been just two months since Tom Morris left Battersea Arts Centre and already he is nostalgic for it.

'I could reminisce about it forever,' says the centre's former artistic director, who spent more than eight years at the helm. 'I'm immensely proud of the atmosphere we created there: the fact that artists and audiences could hang out together in the bar and chat.'

Morris's way of working - which emphasises workshop and development, encourages debate and experiment and embraces unconventional theatre practices - had its greatest success with Jerry Springer: The Opera. The obscene musical started life as a BAC Scratch performance and ended as the smash-hit production of last summer.

On the back of his impressive track record, Morris has been appointed by Nicholas Hytner as associate artistic director to the National Theatre. But before his departure from BAC is complete, there's a spot of unfinished business: The Wooden Frock, a co-production with Kneehigh Theatre, co-written by Morris, finishes its UK tour at BAC next week.

It's a timely swansong production, since The Wooden Frock is precisely the kind of work Morris wants to develop at the National.

'Kneehigh are unique in Britain because they're good at telling stories but they don't start with the written text,' he says. 'Once they know what story they want to tell, they work out how best to tell it during rehearsal. Dialogue, movement and music are added as they go along.'

Morris has spent his tenure at BAC encouraging precisely this kind of work, so it's not surprising Hytner wants to bring his vision to a newly invigorated National. Hytner has been artistic director for a year.

He hit the ground running with a string of successes and innovations, transforming it from an institution that had lost its way to one that is again setting a theatrical agenda.

'Nick is open to suggestions,' says Morris. 'He gives permission. My job, as I understand it, is to put together and develop projects that will start as experiments but have a realistic chance of ending up on one of the National's stages.'

The problem for Morris is that the National Theatre is no BAC. Part of the experience of seeing plays at Battersea is defined by the building: a welcoming, buzzing place, with its bars, studios and staggered performance schedules, unlike the monolithic National.

Morris, however, intends to change some of that. 'I'm keen to open up the foyer,' he says. 'Take a play like The Permanent Way [David Hare's angry docudrama about the railways].

It's a live political event. You can feel the charge coming off the actors and audience. At the moment, there's nowhere for that energy to go, so we're hoping to introduce a post-show drink after some performances so that actors and audiences can talk. I want to break down that separation between performance and viewer.'