大象传媒

As the Artistic Director of a theatre like the Watford Palace, how would you describe your role?

Brigid: My role is to give the theatre its creative identity and leadership and set the artistic standard. I also try and help everybody in the team organise the organisation in such a way that we can produce the best work possible for the widest possible audience.

Technically I'm also the Chief Executive so in business terms I'm the CEO but that isn't always the case with an Artistic Director, sometimes there's someone who is a management expert in that role, but in this instance I've been asked to be Artistic Director and Chief Executive so ultimately in a word, I'm the boss! I think it's great that the Board of this theatre have decided that it should be the artistic leader who is the Chief Executive of the building.

I work very closely with the Executive Director Anne Gallagher who is a very brilliant person who runs the administration of the organisation and I run the artistic side of it. But of course these things work incredibly closely together so we work in partnership.

An English Tragedy (Photo: Manuel Harin)

So you pick the plays. Do you do it by yourself or is there a team?

Brigid: I always discuss all sorts of aspects of it with members of the team, such as is this the right time of year for this play or do you think a lot of people will like this play? Or how many people do you think will like this play? Because it might be a play that I think we should do which, while it won't appeal to a huge number of people, I think it's important that it should be done, as long as there are other plays in the year which will bring in enough people to make that viable. I discuss these things with all the members of the senior management team, but ultimately the responsibility for the programme is mine.

So, you've got a blank sheet and a season - where on earth do you start?

Brigid: I don't know that you really ever have a blank sheet! There are always some landmarks, for example Christmas, where you know that you have to do something for a family audience, and in this theatre there is a very strong tradition of pantomime. You also know that in the February or March of the year, you can get an audience which includes a schools' audience, and then you know that in May and June most people would rather be drinking wine in their garden if the weather's nice. Therefore you know that you need to have something really entertaining, probably a comedy.

So - that's from an audience point of view, but then from an artistic point of view you need to be doing plays that you believe have meaning and that will speak to people, that aren't simply entertainment but have something to offer artistically. Also, for this theatre it's important to have a balance between living writers and established plays. So I think the best way of talking about how I programme it, is to think about what I have programmed.

The first play I programmed was a play by Alan Bennett called Enjoy which hadn't been seen in the south of England for over a decade. I thought was a completely brilliant play, with a huge cast, which was a big risk. It was originally premiered in the West End and wasn't very unsuccessful because the critics thought that the premise of it was completely absurd, which was that working class housing would be turned into museums - which of course we know has happened! So I thought maybe it was time for this play.

It has very dark themes and I thought some people might find it disturbing, but at the same time the theatre does partly exist to disturb and provoke and challenge us. Of course the audience adored it because Bennett's a brilliant writer and he was asking important questions and was also being hugely entertaining.听听听听听听听听听听听听听听

Enjoy: Howard Gossington

Then we did a play by George Bernard Shaw - another of our great writers - called Heartbreak House which is another major play that's very rarely seen and I wanted to show that that's what we in Watford can do - we can bring plays back into the repertoire that other companies haven't had the courage to address.

Then, we've just done Ronald Harwood's new play, An English Tragedy, which is about an anti-Semitic propagandist in the Second World War. It's very much to do with themes of identity and assimilation and loyalty and what kind of duty do we owe the state and what kind of duty do you owe your own ideals. It's obvious that these are contemporary issues and it's good to come out of the theatre thinking about those issues. But why people came to the play is because Harwood is a brilliant writer and it was a fantastic story - moving, funny and gripping - and it was beautifully acted, directed and staged.

But, all of these things, all of these kind of worthy ideals are nothing if you're not entertaining. People can read a newspaper if they want to get depressed, or they can listen to the radio or watch television. What the theatre can do is bring us together in a room, passionately engage with the fate of the actors on the stage and go through an experience with them.

And it's not all worthy stuff either because there's absolutely no reason to programme a play like Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit except that it is a completely dazzlingly brilliantly entertaining comedy about how dead relationships are never dead.

So, the theatre can be so many things to so many people at different times.

And it's not just the professional theatre that matters is it?

Brigid: No, we're just about to open a production by the Herts County Youth Theatre, a new play called Vampire Story with a group of young people from all over Hertfordshire. We're also in the process of developing a fantastic new community project called Milestones which is celebrating all the diverse communities of Watford and bringing people into our building who have never been here before. There will then be a big community play later in the year to celebrate our centenary. And all the time we're working with young people and in schools so all of these things are all part of the tapestry really.听听听听听听听听

It seems to be all about getting a really good mix for a theatre that is at the centre of the community?

Brigid: Yes - I think that's what the theatre is for. It's to be a place at the heart of the community where people can come and be entertained and stimulated and feel a sense of community and be challenged and be uplifted and sometimes even perform!

As You Like It (pic: Tristram Kenton)

We have the Herts County Youth Theatre and our own Youth Theatre and we also have very good relationships with local amateur companies, so there are all sorts of ways in which the theatre can matter to people.

I also think that, particularly in a world where we don't all go to worship in the same places, if we go to worship at all, and a worls where we spend a lot of time at home
watching film and TV, there's something very special about live performance.

Here in Watford we have a very lively music scene as well and I know a lot of young people in Watford really value that so we've also done some work to bring some of that work in here, so I really hope we'll be offering something for everybody.

What attracted you to come to Watford?

Brigid: I thought it would be an exciting way of bringing together lots of different aspects of the work I've done in the past. I trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company so I've always loved Shakespeare and I've always had a passionate interest in new writing and helping writers write new plays and producing those. I spent five years with the National Theatre Education Department so I've also got a big interest in education which is an important part of this theatre.

Then, for the previous decade I was a producer in the West End so I've got a very practical pragmatic commercial outlook to things as well, not in the sense that I would do something purely because it would make money because that's not the job of a subsidised theatre, but nevertheless a theatre is only a theatre when there are people in it.

One of the ways that you get people in it is how you programme and the other is how you communicate with people and how you market and how we analyse what's going on with the pattern of booking and those sorts of things. Other Artistic Directors and organisations possibly feel that those kind of conversations are not pure art and they shouldn't be involved with them, whereas I feel that they are a way of understanding how we're communicating with our audience and a theatre is nothing without an audience.听听

So this theatre gives you the opportunity to combine all these roles?

Brigid: Yes. It's a huge challenge of course and that's what makes it exciting.

Is being close to London a help or a hindrance?

Brigid: It's both actually. In terms of the talent pool that we're able to work with it means we have access to the place where most people congregate. Of course there are talented writers, directors and actors all over the UK but the fact is that there is a tendency to gravitate towards the metropolis. So the fact that we are a 17 minute train ride away from the capital is very helpful in artistic terms.

Heartbreak House: Suzan Sylvester & Teresa Banham

However it's a mixed blessing in terms of getting the national critics to come and see us because sometimes they can think of us as a regional theatre or they can think of us as a听 London theatre and as sure as eggs are eggs they'll think of you the wrong way round from the point you are trying to get across.

But the most important thing I think, is that this theatre is very well supported by its
local community. It's supported not just by the Arts Council but by the Borough Council and there's a great pride I think in Watford, about this theatre and a sense of ownership of it.

This is actually the most important thing because the best work, whether it's done by the Glasgow Citizens Theatre or the Theatre Royal Stratford East or Alan Ayckbourn's Theatre in Scarborough, the best work happens because it's engaged with a community who cares about it.

So we have both things, we have a local community that cares about us and we can also remind, particularly north London, that we are local to it as well.

I think that being in an independent town within the M25 is indeed a paradox and it's a really helpful paradox for us because it allows us to be two things at once.

There's a community feel then, but also the benefits of being close to London?

Brigid: Yes - We're local and national! And that's why we've done things that are quite bold in a sense like doing these big productions like the Bennett and the Shaw and Ronnie's play which other people didn't want to do, so I think there are great advantages for us.听听听听听听

Have you got an overall vision that you're working towards or do you feel that what you're doing now is what you wanted to achieve?

Brigid: What I'm doing now is exactly what I feel we should be doing. What I intend to happen in the future is for us to do more plays by completely unknown writers once we've developed an audience for new writing, for us to be doing bigger productions, and large scale plays with more actors in them. I'm also collaborating more with some of my colleagues in the West End on getting commercial afterlife for some of our work and I'd like to see us touring our work internationally as well as going into the West End. So it's not that the nature of the work is going to change, it's just that the amount of risk attached to each project might be greater!

What's the most difficult part about this job then?

Brigid: I think the most difficult part is being in about 41 places at the same time! But it's a fantastic job - I wouldn't change it!听听听

How do manage to fit directing in with everything else?

Brigid: The great thing about directing is that it's understood that once you go through the door of the rehearsal room everything else stops!听

So directing is something that you will always do?

Brigid: Yes - it's the driving force of the whole thing and also it's the engine room of the building. And I'm working with my team here in a completely different way because I'm working with all of the production departments on a production, which is quite different from just being the boss. I work very closely with the management team and those departments every week of the year because that's the nature of office life, but the purpose of a theatre company is to produce theatre and [when I'm directing] I'm actually at the getting your hands dirty part of that with my brilliant production team here who are incredibly talented and incredibly hardworking and it's really great to be working hands on with them.

Do you pick the directors as well?

Brigid: Yes - I pick everything! All of the artistic side of it, what plays we do, who the directors are, who the designers are, who the actors are, all of that, I have ultimate approval over.

But obviously when you employ a director, one of the reasons you employ them is because you're interested in what their judgement is about who the actors should be, so it's not that I'm a control freak in that sense but that's my job! George Devine who was the great director of the Royal Court Theatre in London said "policy is who you work with" and ultimately those decisions are the key decisions.