Steve Whitaker, Features Writer
Review: Leeds Playhouse - A Tale Of Two Theatres By Dave Stannard
And admirable, too, that another theatre aficionado, Dave Stannard, should spend the best part of a decade assembling a remarkable palimpsest of the same struggle, in his travail d’amour - Leeds Playhouse - A Tale of Two Theatres. What Stannard’s study loses in general market accessibility – it’s specificity will limit its audience – it regains, immeasurably, in a virtuosic commitment to research, for here, in a long textual history, we have the fullest index, bibliography and addendum of programme notes, and a concise headed summary for each ‘scene’. The fulsome ‘glossary’ works to good effect, bolstering Stannard’s unsolicited claim to being a superlative archivist and historian, and lending the weight of gravitas and uniqueness to an examination that will undoubtedly be the first (and probably last) definitive account in its field.
The subsequent mixed fortunes of the Leeds Playhouse, whose building finally came to fruition on the city’s Calverley Street, may be measured against the Newlyns’ campaign mandate, for the creation ‘of a new theatre, architecturally exciting, administered on a non-profit distributing basis, with a residential professional company of the highest quality, and a first-class director’. Tested against ‘indictment’ in the ‘courtroom’ of public opinion at a bursting Leeds Town Hall in May, 1968, the campaign reached its apogee, as a persuasive ‘defence’ of renowned Leeds speakers – among them, Peter O’Toole, Richard Hoggart and Keith Waterhouse – proved to be the catalyst, along with a titanic lobbying effort and much fundraising, for the new development.
And if the inventive disposition of the new theatre, with vast open spaces and a thrust stage jutting into the auditorium, reflected a restoration of communion between players and audience, then the artistic approach sometimes followed suit. Artistic Director, John Harrison’s production of Brecht’s demanding play The Caucasian Chalk Circle a year after the theatre opened, included the now recognisable conceit, especially amongst Northern Broadsides audiences, of positioning actors amongst the seats prior to the performance to chat to audience members, mirroring the storytelling theme of the play.
Stannard’s comprehensive guide to a long history remains necessarily mindful of the errors of judgment, inconsistencies and needless aesthetic profligacies of the Leeds Playhouses almost by default. In an examination that runs to nearly 500 pages, the author is obliged to engage with miscalculations, with audience ennui, and most pressingly, with the spiralling costs that beset the theatrical landscape. The repertory ideal proposed by the Newlyns in 1964, though designed to present several plays on a fast turnaround basis each performed by the same group of actors, paradoxically exacts a toll on audience motivation as it also confers choice. The establishment of a close relationship with audiences is dependent upon many variables, not least amongst them, accessibility, engagement with local or regional themes and anticipation of taste. The spectre of elitism would inevitably undermine a relationship of perceived ‘unequals’, especially in a social universe increasingly dominated by television and cinema. For early Associate Director Michael Attenborough, the mere proximity of Leeds University was a sufficient disincentive for many potential theatregoers:
‘The closeness of the academic world can often discourage townsfolk from coming.’
Attenborough is firefighting here. If Stannard’s history is more or less devoid of cant or judgment, there is perspicacity in his very inclusion of every salient historical detail, for it is in the detail that we may infer a weakness of strategic thinking in the trial-and-error approach of production planning. And we must give him credit for outlining the failures amongst the hits whilst mostly refusing to take a diagnostic line on cause and effect. From Plater, to Shakespeare, to Wilde, to Miller, to local writer Barry Collins, the new playhouse covered the gamut in a wide-ranging attempt at diversity, and it is significant that Stannard should include a cautionary note from André Van Gyseghem, the first artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse, whose defence of the theatre Arts against the sole quality criteria of box office receipts reminds of poet Geoffrey Hill’s refusal, in his work, to make concessions to perceived ignorance, and yields a corrective to Attenborough’s pragmatic realism.
If financial considerations are the primary arbiter, it is a miracle that the plan to build a new playhouse to replace the initial ‘temporary’ structure, ever came to fruition. Stannard is rightly mindful of the role of interested parties, not least of the council as the main potential facilitator, and major obstacle to change. The inherent inertia of Leeds City Council is neatly, and wittily, summed by Councillor Bernard Atha, whose description of the decision-making approach is Kafkaesque:
‘The process was designed to keep us busy without making any progress at all.’
Dave Stannard’s grasp of the development process is both intricate and illuminating. By the time of the building of the new integrated West Yorkshire Playhouse adjacent to the site of the bulldozered Quarry Hill Flats, and incorporating two theatres in one complex (the Quarry and the Courtyard), ambition, figuratively yielded in the regional and outward-facing nomenclature, had overwhelmed reservation. Reflecting on his own childhood love of theatre, the circumspect figure of Alan Bennett caught the general mood in roseate tones:
‘But I hope too there will be the same magic in the theatre that I found all those years ago and that somewhere in the audience there will be a boy or girl for whom it is a new world.’
The national media fanfare that greeted the opening of the new theatre in 1990 mostly reflected Bennett’s optimism, and it is a testament to Stannard’s insight that his mapping of the subsequent landscape should also describe the inevitable difficulties that beset an approach dedicated to an unwieldy inventory of needs. Some of the problems reside in elitist abstraction: the bringing of ‘high-end’ theatre to a regional audience by way of vernacular performance – Northern Broadsides’ severally; Tony Harrison with Trackers of Oxyrynchus - need not entice the traditional working classes to sign up to a performance. Quoting one London critic’s visit to Leeds for a rendering of The Seagull in 1998, Stannard points to a characteristic failure of the popular mandate, where the audience ‘gave every sign of being solidly and predictably bourgeois.’
The obverse, as Attenborough may have implied, is theatre that puts ‘bums on seats’ to stave off the kind of financial crisis that threatened the existence of the WYP in 1996 during the otherwise sterling curatorship of Artistic Director, Jude Kelly. Alongside season ticket offers and other incentives, the less intellectually taxing performances of musicals and Christmas shows were, and remain, guarantors of full houses. The occasional wild card – Northern Broadsides’ Othello featuring Lenny Henry was an unsurprising sell-out – produced financial relief. Stannard is right to discuss, at length and over several chapters, the theatre’s brave and open-minded decision to broaden its audience both by the inclusion of locally-themed plays, and the provision of outreach projects in schools, in order to yield ‘drama of relevance to its setting, rooting the theatre in its community.’
And the cityscape of the Arts must necessarily include the interests of the multi-ethnic community who make up a disparate West Yorkshire population, as Leeds-reared Caribbean write Caryl Phillips noted, in a paean to his adopted city that is a satisfyingly inclusive mirror to Alan Bennett’s own:
‘I want to be visibly and vocally a part of the city. Maybe some ten-year-old kid will see the story and see how I was able to grow up here and navigate my way through life and be proud to come from this place.’
The theatre went on to produce many plays by international artists, often including indigenous performers. Wole Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy in 1995 used Nigerian actors, and any political point was sharply reified by the coterminous execution of Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa who was hanged during the play’s run in Leeds, prompting cast members to hold a minute’s silence prior to the performance. Stannard’s acute awareness of the significance of the theatrical ‘moment’, of art mirroring life, is revisited in a later examination of the playhouse’s directorial decision to bring theatre to the people. The insinuation of Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues into the community centres of Leeds, voiced by Playhouse graduate actors, and a 2018 adaptation of The Damned United performed in social and sports clubs, gave the association between art and the landscape in which it is set, a uniquely resonant register.
There are formal weaknesses to Dave Stannard’s study – the chronology is a little jumbled in places and his use of tense is inconsistent - but these are surmountable cavils in a survey of such extraordinary breadth. Leeds Playhouse: A Tale of Two Theatres is, at its very best, and in a time of crisis in the Arts, a consummate expression of the value of continuity.
More information here.