Art and soul

LIZ WILSON tells of going over to “the other side” and her “wilderness years”. She talks of weighing up the risk every time she makes a decision.

And she delivers her verdict on this year’s pantomime from long-running dame Berwick Kaler at York Theatre Royal.

That last bit is the clue to what she does for a living. She was among the 50,000 or more people who will have seen Humpty Dumpty by the time the show ends its run on Saturday.

Her first visit to this long-running, nationally- applauded Christmas show coincided with her first week as the theatre’s new chief executive, making her anxious about what she would think of the production.

She says: “I had to like it because it is such an important part of what we do here. It was one of those things that did niggle a little – oh my God, this is something I’m going to have to walk into and say ‘I get it too’. And thank God, I do.”

She arrived in York after six years as executive director at the Oldham Coliseum Theatre.

She had been to the Theatre Royal before she was given the job – as a speaker at a new technology and the arts conference, Shift Happens.

She had worked on a project for the Arts Council – that’s the “other side” –looking at how to keep up-to-date, including with new technology, in the theatre.

What she will not lose sight of is the theatregoers. “We are live and immediate, putting something in front of people and sharing that experience. It can be different every time, but that’s the excitement,” she says.

“There’s a feeling in a lot of people that we could lose that, somehow we could take away from the experience by using technology. I don’t think it will. There are different ways in which you distribute theatre, which means you can get a wider audience. But I understand those misgivings very definitely. I’m in it because I love that live experience.

“One of my mantras was that just because you can doesn’t mean to say you should. It had to be right for who we are and what we do.

There was a sense of people beginning to panic – we’ve got to do this, we must be doing that, we ought to do that. If it serves what you are doing, don’t be closed to it.”

Five years at the Arts Council was followed by her “wilderness year” as an executive director of a regional cultural consortium. “Do you know what that is?,” she asks, anticipating my answer will be in the negative.

Ten of them were set up by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) with the aim of bringing together the whole of the DCMS portfolio, including the arts, heritage, sport and musuems, to make “a bigger noise in the regions”. It appears to have been a thankless and mostly hopeless task to unite these different factions.

ONE of the attractions of York was the chance to work with two theatre spaces, the main house and the 100-seat studio theatre. She also admires the wealth of work with young people happening in and around the Theatre Royal. It doesn’t stop with the flourishing youth theatre. Last year’s Takeover event featured young people programming and running the theatre for three weeks with considerable success.

Ms Wilson says: “Young people get such a bad press. What’s clear from Takeaway is that there are some really committed, bright, creative young people out there who want to do something more than the run-of-the-mill. They want to learn, take risks and really threw themselves into that. They’re a credit to their peers.”

There’s no shortage of ideas and ambition within the theatre building, she says. She and artistic director Damian Cruden work as a partnership with different skills and strengths.

“And I know we’re going to get on well together.

I could see straight away he was someone with whom I’d want to work,” she says.

As ever, the main challenge is balancing the books. Funding is fixed for the moment, but no one can predict box office income. “Calculating risk is the challenge,” she says.

“You are taking a risk all the time on the combination of things – people in the cast, the play, the venue. Every time you programme something, you take a risk on that combination, and sometimes you get it wrong and it doesn’t appeal when you thought it would.”

She has little time for theatres doing the same thing year-in year-out, being on a treadmill of moving from one show to the next without challenging or changing themselves.

Not that she adopts a head-in-the-sand attitude to the problems to be faced. “We’re not naive and can’t ignore the fact that we have some difficult years ahead. The country has some difficult years ahead, there’s going to be a squeeze on public sector funding.”

She credits the ten years working outside the theatre after she left university, where she studied English and drama, for shaping her views.

“While at university, I started doing the costumes and wardrobe for productions. I did evening classes in pattern cutting and taught myself that side of it. Then I went into fashion and ended up with a young fashion designer working on promotions and fashion shows.

Then I realised clothes weren’t that important”

She “dabbled” in various things. She worked in advertising, leaving at 29 when offered voluntary redundancy. “I thought I needed to restart. I have no regrets about that. All those experiences made me how I am.”

Her first theatre job was with small-scale touring company Eastern Angles, where she did everything from sell tickets and serve drinks to welcoming audiences and rigging lights. “It was a fabulous way to get started and when people come to me to talk about careers, I always recommend it,” she says.

“With Eastern Angles, you could be turning someone’s village hall or town hall into a theatre for the night. You think, this is where someone plays badminton or bridge and I want them to come in and go ‘wow’.”

She was responsible for “a grand night out”

– and today, even though the venue is different, the aim is the same.