AI ProfileBrigid Larmour, artistic director, Watford Palace Theatre
There’s a fine line in the alchemy of running a provincial theatre between it being wonderfully exhilarating to utterly heartbreaking, and modern demands for high quality facilities, product and diverse audiences make the extremes even greater.
Watford Palace Theatre is a quintessential case in point. Serving a local community of around 800,000, it’s an Edwardian building which opened in 1908 as the Watford Palace of Varieties. An extension was added in 1983 and in 2004 it reopened after a two year closure for a £9m refurbishment.
That was when the alchemy started to curdle. The audience had to be wooed back, but the adventurous and even risky programming of Laurence Till – he opened with a modern Tanika Gupta reworking of Wycherley’s A Country Wife - failed to bring them back. The Watford Palace found itself deep in an unexpected crisis. Two years later, the “refurbishment of the audience” as Till put it still not properly under way, a TV career beckoned and Brigid Larmour was brought in to replace him.
What had happened was that with the reopening the staff had expanded from a seasonal operation to a year round one, the audience did not respond as it was hoped they would, and the business model went out of kilter with the subsidy spent paying off overheads rather than the product.
“So I came in to bring a different energy into the organisation, and to try and build the work and build the audiences” Larmour says. But first she had to go through the painful process of redundancy, not many, but in a small team like this the axing of even three or four leaves a scar.
Brigid Larmour, who celebrated the launch of her 2010 season at the end of last month with her 50th birthday, came to the WPT from a career that had had a steadily upward trajectory. After a peripatetic childhood and Cambridge, she went to the RSC, to Contact in Manchester, to Granada TV, to the National Theatre’s education department, to the BBC and then to Act Productions, the West End group for which she was artistic director.
One of her roles with Act was to find and nurture new writing, something that she did with conspicuous success and which is part of the WPT’s ethos now. Producing Lee Hall’s first hit, Spoonface Steinberg, brought from Newcastle to the West End, and workedwith the likes of Kathryn Hunter, Annie Castledine, Peter Gill and Anne Reid. She also set up Act Partnerships with regional theatres, notably with the Gate in Dublin.
She arrived at Watford three years ago with a pedigree, and a plan. “I came with the idea that participation is as important as producing” she says. “Increasingly, people (meaning potential audiences) want to have a stake in the work - it doesn’t mean they want to be an actor. When I arrived there was a successful established programme of curriculum work in schools, but we didn’t do anything for adults. Community shows were not fully integrated into the organisation”. One of the standout triumphs was the Opera Group production of Weill’s opera Street Scene in which members of the community provided the crowds.
It was part of her “Four Ps” strategy – producing, participating, presenting and partnership – which could become a paradigm for other theatres of the WPT’s size and constitution. Producing is enabling other companies to develop work initially for the WPT stage; participating is involving the community to grow audiences; presenting is a holistic attitude to what happens on stage, so that Larmour talks about “events” and “entertainments” now because they are as likely to be dance theatre, opera and even stand-up as drama on her stage; partnership is links with other houses and producers to make work which can have a life beyond the stage of the initial producer.
There’s a production workshop which means the WPT can provide sets for commercial clients, and for its associated companies at less cost than on the open market. “So we’re making the subsidy work harder”.
