Oral Histories

When I started doing the administration it was looking after the tour and then also looking after the sort of management of the, of the Capital project that was going on. That lasted up until the point where we opened the theatre in 1979 so there were, sort of two years of, erm, having no building to worry about and then with the opening it suddenly became a whole new ball game really, question of getting the staffing in place and planning the programmes and looking after the finances and in essence that leads to, look after the finances and keep the show on the road is what my job was for the rest of the time I was there. The complexity and the size of the organization grew over the years, its spread over 41 years so its gradual evolution. When it started out it was very small scale, it was a husband and wife team had created the, the company and then it became more professionalised. The ultimate authority for the company is the board of trustees because it’s a registered charity and they became much more of a force within the company. When I got involved, so Richard was the Artistic Director and he had the, the byline if you like, was the children’s theatre with actors and puppets and Richard and Liz, his wife who was the design, the design element of the partnership had a puppet background and were very influenced by a lot of sort of eastern European examples. So puppetry was, was a major part of what Polka was about and people often would call it Polka Puppets. That gradually changed, as I say, particularly when, when Vicky came in and her background was very, was in, actually in TIE, Theatre in Education, and then children’s theatre and plays with actors essentially. And puppetry and manipulation and physical theatre, mime, dance to an extent was all, there was always elements within Polka shows but puppetry didn’t have the sort of centre stage role that it had under Richard. So I worked very closely with her to develop and extend really the range of artistic collaborators that the company was involved with. And other ways in which the programming changed was, erm, you would get themed seasons or themed slots within the year and one of the things that Vicky did was a series of productions looking at inspiring people like Anne Frank, Evelyn Glennie, they were very much sort of biographical studies and the idea was that these would be inspirational roles models for children. And then there were sort of classical myths and legends that would have a particular slot. The other strand of work that developed over the years and became much more emphasized under Jonathan Lloyd who took over from Annie was sort of outreach work, and education work, creative learning and access work, er relaxed performances, BSL interpreted performances and thats, thats become really at the heart of the company as well now alongside the theatre productions. I think we’re proud of what we’ve achieved through those sorts of schemes, particularly I think of our Freefalling which is working with children who are at risk or are excluded from school. They have a year long workshop as a group which culminates in a performance at the end of the year er, and that’s had fantastic results for children who’ve got all sorts of challenges in their lives and often have this energy that they can’t direct and it’s a way of structuring that, and again learning to work with other people and see the importance of team work. There’s a show we did based on the poems of Allan Ahlberg called “Three cheers for Mrs Butler” and it was my daughter Becky who erm, suggested to Vicky that those poems would be great to adapt and as a result of that she actually got a part in the production. So there was a mix of adult actors and there were two child actors, child performers and they all got mixed up so sometimes the adults were playing children, sometimes the children were playing adults and Becky played the school nurse at one point but that was a really lovely production and I, partly because of her involvement but also, well as a show it was lovely and that, in artistic terms. And the other show I remember reflects the nature of theatre and how sometimes it works brilliantly and sometimes it’s a complete shambles was a show we did with David Glass who is a sort of possible genius, who did the show based on various works of art in the Tate, in Tate, Tate Britain. And he just explored different ways in which you could represent these on stage and sometimes it was a sort of narrative to a piece but sometimes it was completely abstract and that was fantastic. It was really technically very challenging but when it all came together it was brilliant. I always thought my role as being a facilitator rather than somebody just said no you can’t afford that, or you can’t do that it’s impossible from a practical point of view. Most of the time it was saying ok yes lets try and make this work and, and part of the ethos that one liked to engender in the ethos of the company as a whole was, yeah let’s, lets go for it. Often our problem was saying yes too much. Trying to do slightly more than we could afford on the resources we had erm, but on the other hand, from that came a lot of really good stuff. Financially it was always an effort and er, you know, we’re a subsidized theatre we were always having to reapply for funding from the Art’s Council, from the local authority from the GLC, when it used to exist, and there were various points where those grants were threatened. There’s this challenge of keeping the thing going and not really knowing where the money’s going to come from. You sit down at the beginning of each year and look at the budget and work out the business plan and you’re always sort of a hundred thousand short of what you need and that process it wears you down a bit but er, you know we hung in there and we came through. It gave me huge opportunities to learn and to have an insight into how the theatre runs and, I mean, I love the fact that I was surrounded by all these creative people because I didn’t think of myself as creative, you know, I was sort of just trying to keep the whole thing together, erm, but they were just amazing these people who can come in. You go along to erm, a script reading and you read it off the page and it’s nothing and suddenly these actors can bring the whole thing to life so I mean that, that’s been wonderful so to give them it gave me that appreciation of the power of creativity and the creative person. I think people just retain, you know, the vast majority of people, retain the huge affection for the place. The fact that it’s for children and everybody’s passionate about making it work for the children gives a sort of common endeavour that people all share. And lots of people who’ve been through Polka feed into other companies, other venues and so it’s had quite an impact over the years.