OVER the past 12 months an increasingly familiar succession ritual has been performed at our leading subsidised theatres. Each announcement of a new artistic director at the National, Almeida, Donmar, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Hampstead and RSC has brought the inevitable promises from the chosen ones to “build on my predecessor’s outstanding achievements” and advice from the critics on how to do so, followed by a hiatus of at least four months in which the new brooms plan their opening seasons. For Ian Brown, Jude Kelly’s successor at West Yorkshire Playhouse, that time is now up.
Brown’s inaugural line-up began on September 19 with Gemma Bodinetz’s revival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and he is deep in rehearsal with Christopher Eccleston for Hamlet — a production that might appear to have been planned by Brown as a grand coronation for the new Playhouse king but which could easily have been his last show there, period.
At the start of 2002, having told the Playhouse board that she was stepping down after 13 years in charge, Kelly took a sabbatical. That left Brown, her associate artistic director for the previous 18 months, to programme shows for 2002-03, including Hamlet and Ben Brown’s Larkin With Women, while anxiously awaiting the outcome of his application for Kelly’s job. “In one sense, I was Jude’s heir apparent,” he says, “and maybe it was at the back of my mind that Hamlet would be a great play to do as my first in charge, but I never took anything for granted.” He remembers telling Eccleston that Hamlet might be their only Playhouse collaboration because, like all those defeated Tory leadership candidates, Brown had decided not to serve under another director. Once the board had signed him up to a five-year contract, he wasted little time in asserting his authority.
Already one of the few artistic directors to double as chief executive (a dual post he also held at the Traverse in Edinburgh from 1988-96), he strengthened his position in July, following Maggie Saxon’s decision to leave the Playhouse after five years as managing director. Instead of advertising for a replacement, Brown assumed much of Saxon’s role himself and restructured the lower management tiers “so that I could get my hands on all of the organisation, so that I was in control. It’s a big job, but if you know what you’re responsible for, it’s a lot easier than thinking, ‘Someone else has responsibility for this, so I don’t need to bother about it.’ ”
The same applies to what happens on stage, because he has not hired an associate director to provide the kind of support he gave Kelly. “This way,” he adds, “everybody knows where the buck stops.”
All of Britain’s artistic directors designate will have been considering this balance between creative and managerial responsibilities — the need, for example, to concentrate on choosing the right new play while a colleague worries about choosing a new bar manager — and Brown is the only one to have adopted an Atlas-like stance. When Michael Grandage succeeds Sam Mendes at the Donmar in December, he will be able to call on the experience of his executive producer Caro Newling and general manager Nick Frankfort. At Hampstead, the executive director James Williams is staying on to work alongside the incoming artistic boss Anthony Clark, who replaces Jenny Topper next July.
For Michael Attenborough, who took over from Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid at the Almeida in July, the twin task of scheduling the 2003-04 line-up and supervising the re-opening of the theatre’s Islington base would have been immeasurably harder without his executive director, Sarah Weir. She was recently headhunted to become the Arts Council’s regional executive director for London, but was determined to stay on until the £5 million redevelopment is completed next April. “Sarah has behaved very honourably,” says Attenborough. “Had she gone straight to the Arts Council, I would have been in a right mess. I hope I would have had enough brains to grasp all the planning that’s in Sarah’s head, but it would have been a hell of a slog and distraction at a time when I should be focusing on a 12-month season of plays (likely to include at least one British and two world premieres).”
Attenborough will advertise for a new executive director shortly and has already appointed an artistic associate: Maggie Lunn, currently the casting director at the National and before that a long-time Attenborough colleague at the RSC. “She’ll cast all our shows, but her contribution extends beyond that,” he explains. “She’ll effectively be my number two, involved fully in reading scripts and putting together the creative teams.”
One rung down the ladder will be Attenborough’s associate actors, probably four of them, whose identities should be revealed within weeks. “The idea is to get their commitment to appear at the Almeida at least once in an 18 to 24-month period and have regular meetings about our artistic policy. They would have complete freedom to question what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.”
While Attenborough and Brown clearly differ on the need for close associates, both agree that by taking charge of venues in good artistic and financial health, they are exposing themselves to greater pressure than they faced in previous directorships. “For my eight years at the Traverse we were always fighting for every penny in the budget,” says Brown. “At the Playhouse attendance has gone up in the past two years, and the extra Arts Council money from the Theatre Review means that we can think quite ambitiously for the future. It’s a great time to be taking over, but if I take my eye off the ball we’ll lose this opportunity.”
Similarly, when Attenborough took over the Palace Theatre, Watford, in 1980 “things couldn’t have got much worse. Shows had been playing to houses of less than 40 per cent and there was heavy lobbying within the local council to turn the Palace into a bus station. Five years later we’d averaged 92 per cent capacity.
“In a funny way that was easier than running the Almeida. People here are not accustomed to any defeats, let alone any draws. That’s why I wanted the job, but the challenge for me, really, is not to screw it up.”
- Hamlet previews from October 25 at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds (0113-213 7700)
