Addicted to danger

10 April 2012

West End theatre producers are gamblers who live dangerously. They have to. It's the crucial part of their business. For each production they risk at least £200,000 from financial investors who hope for profits and, at worst, want their outlay returned. But when it comes to risk-takers in the ranks of West-End producers there is no one quite as extreme as Thelma Holt.

In partnership with Bill Kenwright, she has just presented Strindberg's sex-war game Miss Julie for a limited season at the Hay-market. The play is an enthralling 19th century classic of erotic desire in defiance of class barriers. But in today's frivolous West-End scene its seriousness seems out of place. When did you last hear of Strindberg in the West End, let alone in a largish theatre, with a full cast of 17 and a spectacular set that would not disgrace the National Theatre?

"Some of us are addicted to danger. And I admit I am," Miss Holt says cheerfully. "I can't budget for failure. I'm human and therefore I fail. But I believe in the nobility of failure. It's very dangerous to accept the idea that less-accessible art is not worth doing."

These are the sort of words to come from the mouth of a Royal Court artistic director, not a West-End producer. Most of them, after all, want to make money. Miss Holt only wants to make sufficient money to go on taking theatrical risks. She is not interested in becoming rich. She does not hanker to entice big star names into easy-on-the-mind new comedies. Instead, she insists on trying her luck with classic revivals and using bright rising stars. She says with pride that her Miss Julie cost £200,000, but that at the National, where she was once employed to bring in foreign productions, it would have been £400,000.

Unlike most West End theatre producers, she has been a two-time girl. That is to say, she has spent her career in both the commercial and subsidised theatres, but more in the upholstered world of subsidy. Having started off as an ingenue in the West End, Miss Holt jumped ship into the avant-garde Open Space theatre run by the American Charles Marowitz in the late Sixties and through the first half of the Seventies. She was most famous for her nude Lady Macbeth, in one of Marowitz's remarkable cut-up reworkings of Shakespeare, but she was not principally a fringe actress at all.

She ran the Open Space for Marowitz on a shoestring, being the most ingenious of administrators and stretchers of tiny budgets. So successful was she that she was recruited to clean up and reinvigorate the ailing Roundhouse. She did this to great effect, bringing in the best of regional productions - Edward Fox in Michael Elliott's famous revival of The Family Reunion, Vanessa Redgrave as the Lady from the Sea, splashing into view in real water. From there she briefly moved to run the Theatre of Comedy, where her production of Loot with Leonard Rossiter was only interrupted by the actor's sudden death.

Her career as an importer of work by international directors of the stature of Peter Stein and Yukio Ninagawa won her a special Olivier Award. It was at the National Theatre, as the producer of international shows, that her reputation was consolidated and she learned how hard it was to rely on subsidy alone to bring in productions from abroad. She was appointed Chairman of the Drama Panel of the Arts Council in 1994 where her reputation as an outspoken fighter for theatre and cost-cutting and for trying to stem the drift of arts power to the regions won her enemies as well as friends. She resigned in a blaze of publicity over Arts Council plans to castrate the power of the Drama Panel.

Miss Holt insists, rightly, that it is important for the commercial West-End theatre not to give itself over entirely to the profit principle, to musicals and candyfloss: there should be some commercial producers who do serious, worthwhile productions of classics new and old, and help the West End look varied and vital. It is, of course, the soft option to keep The Mousetrap running for Japanese and American tourists. It takes little for David Pugh to treat Art at the Wyndham's as a potential museum piece, with a new cast every year or so, rather than ploughing money into new productions.

"We have the RSC and the National doing classic work. But they can't easily do long seasons and it is expensive for them to transfer their work," Miss Holt says. So, in recent times, she has dared to put Shakespeare back in Shaftesbury Avenue: Much Ado About Nothing with Mark Rylance and Janet McTeer. Then there was Miss McTeer and Owen Teale in Ibsen's A Doll's House - a production that looked so uncommercial to the Stoll Moss group of theatres they wouldn't give it houseroom. But it turned out a smash hit and won Tonys when Kenwright moved it on to Broadway.

Miss Holt also discovered a group of most generous Japanese investors who financed Nigel Hawthorne's King Lear, which made a small fortune for the RSC, but not for Miss Holt's production company.

She arranged the deal that way. Now, however, she looks upon the London theatre scene with anxiety and some foreboding. "The theatre world is under threat." She deplores and opposes the shamelessly philistine drift of the recent Boyden report, commissioned by the Arts Council.

"It identifies alternative forms of theatre that have a much wider appeal than traditional, classical theatre - light shows, video and acrobatic work - as vehicles for subsidy." She has a warning criticism for theatre critics too.

"It's becoming more and more difficult for commercial producers to do high-quality classic productions." Yet did even one critic mention how daring she and Bill Kenwright were to put on Strind-berg in the West End? No.

We are all guilty.

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