NOTTINGHAM is overwhelmed with great creative talent. Stephanie Sirr is chief executive of the Nottingham Playhouse and, as well as running an excellent theatre that has created a wealth of successful plays, she is a great supporter of Nottingham’s creative skills. Perhaps more than anyone she knows where the talent is and how to make the best of it. What’s more, the results are winning international acclaim.
What is The Nottingham Playhouse all about? Well, we are not just a presenter of theatre made by other people, we are a producing theatre that manufactures creative theatre. We employ more than 80 creative staff comprising scenic artists, actors, designers, carpenters, directors, copywriters and prop makers, and we commission writers (mostly Nottingham-based). We are also facilitators for other creative people in the region.
Which writers have you been working with? We have been working with local writers Steven Lowe, Mick Eaton, Michael Pinchbeck and Andy Barrett, and the set designer Helen Davis, as well as graphic designers for print and marketing. We have a welcome policy towards local talent and there is a wealth of talent in Nottingham. We have a long literary heritage and an excellent theatre design course at Nottingham Trent University, and graduates often stay in the city. We are overwhelmed with great creative talent in Nottingham.
Does your work reach a wider audience? Our productions are assessed by an international audience. We create work that has a life outside Nottingham - we’ve taken eight shows to the West End in the last decade!
We are taking On The Waterfront to the Hong Kong Festival this March, one of the world’s top 10 international arts festivals, which is a huge accolade. The play was produced by Steven Berkoff in 2008 at the Playhouse, it went to the Edinburgh Festival, and was then performed in the West End for three months.
How have you survived the recession? Sales are good, and the test of this is the more contemporary writing such as Day in the Life of Joe Egg and Mick Eaton’s Families of Lockerbie in the spring. They are both hard-hitting subjects, the former with some humour, but are thought-provoking and somewhat challenging rather than providing pure escapism. It’s a slightly risky approach for us to take.
Part of the reason we are doing well is because people want to support local endeavours when times are hard. People still need culture to feed their souls even in a recession. We have seen a massive surge in people buying season tickets, it’s been our biggest take up ever. I think its because people want to protect what they’re enjoying - we hope that continues this season.
We have a great new brochure and an excellent website which tell everyone what’s coming up and gives them something to look forward to. We publish our brochure on Issuu and use Animoto to preview our rehearsals so people want to buy tickets in advance. We are increasingly aware that people don’t want to pick up lots of printed material. People are using technology to follow what we are doing, and our Twitter and Facebook sites are very popular too.
Check out the Playhouse’s new brochure at http://issuu.com/ nottinghamplayhouse/docs/ np_spring_2010_brochure Creative thinking is serious business TOUGH economic times increase the competition in most market places.
Many businesses find it hard to survive, others manage to keep the boat afloat and, despite everything, some thrive and prosper.
The difference, in many cases, is creative thinking, and there is plenty of evidence that businesses that invest in effective brand, design and marketing communication do better than others.
I’m a Design Associate for the UK Design Council and we champion design solutions as a way to help all businesses to transform what they do. We have plenty of case studies which give hard evidence about the excellent returns an investment in design brings. One of these shows how Nottingham’s Castle Rock Brewery has doubled its growth rates to get the brewery running at full capacity, with demand outstripping supply, simply by using design to focus its portfolio of brands and strengthen its main corporate identity.
One of my roles is to help businesses to identify and create design projects that will improve business performance, and I get to see first-hand how much impact all types of creative thinking have on all sorts of businesses.
I can highly recommend the Design Council website to everyone wrestling with business challenges. You can find it on www.designcouncil.org.uk - I hope you find it inspiring.