CityLife

Interview: Fiona Gasper (Royal Exchange)

Fiona Gasper

Fiona Gasper is less than a month into her post as the new executive director of the Royal Exchange Theatre, but I’m pretty sure I won’t have been the first person to politely suggest that this might not be the ideal time to be taking up such a position.

A pall is palpably hanging over the artistic world as inevitable government-ordained cuts loom and, in a potential double-whammy, sponsorship goes into recession-driven hiding.

On the other hand, Fiona was, for a very successful five years, the executive producer for Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture Programme 2008 – a huge project that was pre-ordained to disastrous failure, at least according to many nay-sayers.

But Fiona, whose career in the arts has spanned 25 years, including a stint as executive producer for Contact, was responsible for the development of a new city model for events of this type, working with cultural partners across the city, commissioning over 40 events and establishing the largest programme of street theatre seen in the UK.

Last year, she was awarded an MBE for her services to arts.

“It’s a time of fundamental change in how the arts are funded,” she acknowledges.

“Yes, there are the cuts that are happening right across everything, and not just related to arts and culture.

“That has happened to coincide with a time when the Arts Council are reviewing how they fund their clients in the longer term.

“The idea of a regularly funded organisation is not going to exist any more. Even though we’re not 100 per cent clear at this moment in time what the circumstances will be, there are a number of key things along the journey and we will be much clearer by next March.

“Times of change are always hard, but they always hold opportunity of some sort,” she believes.

“So, no, I don’t feel ‘oh no, I’ve come into this at the wrong time!’. I sort of feel ‘OK, I wonder how we come out of this better and stronger than before’?”

But how on earth do you manage any forward planning in such an uncertain environment?

“You just have to have different scenarios as you go forward and understand what different levels of cuts and different levels of income might mean for the work you do and the operation that you run,” Fiona believes.

“While things are looking not so positive on the funding side, in that I think everyone knows that there will be some level of cuts, just not the degree and the time-period that they’re spread over, which is the other important thing, that’s no reason for us to be gloomy on the income side and there’s potential there.

“The Royal Exchange has had a fantastic couple of years where actual capacities have been, on the whole, greater than budgeted capacities.

“The work has mostly had critical acclaim, good public feedback and very good audiences, which is good for income.

“Sponsorship has taken a bit of a dip, as it has everywhere over the last couple of years, but we’re reviewing that situation, in terms of individuals, corporate membership and trusts and foundations. In fact, we’ve just won a major award from the Truth About Youth project.

“The Cooperative’s Community Foundation are really focusing over the next couple of years at looking at and starting to change the negative perception there is around young people.

“That will be the main element of our education work over the next couple of years and, although it’s not a new partnership, it’s a much bigger and deeper partnership than before which is going to support a whole strand of our work.

“That’s the sort of thing we have to look to do really – to find new partners and new ways of working, to look at what we’ve got and use it in the best way that we can.”

After her work in Liverpool, Fiona spent a year working as a freelance on a number of projects. When Paul Clay’s departure was announced and his Royal Exchange job was advertised, she found herself – slightly unexpectedly from the sound of it – thinking that was what she wanted to do.

“I hadn’t really expected it to come up and then I had to sort of unpick why I was so enthusiastic about it,” she admits.

“I’d spent five years working in Liverpool and being at the heart of what was happening culturally in that city.

“But Manchester is the city I live in, the Royal Exchange is right at the heart of the cultural offer of the city here and I’d like to be a part of that.

“The thing about the Exchange is that it’s collegiate working in many ways.

“What I’m good at, I feel, is that I always look for opportunities to be collaborative and I’m interested to see how the Royal Exchange develops its leadership role within the city in terms of theatre and how it goes forward.

“We’ve all got to look at various new ways of working and what does that mean for the theatre ecology, or other organisations in the arts as well as the theatres here? How can we work together to make sure that we are, where we can, sharing resources and maximising the way that we use money?

“I feel that there’s a real feel of ‘let’s get together and look at where and how we can do that’.

“What everybody wants to do is to free up as much money as possible on the art.

“I’m just about old enough to have come through a time of austerity under the last Tory government and to have come into real management roles just at a time when spending by the Government on culture, and opportunities to earn more income, really started to rise.

“So I have really seen the benefits of what additional money coming into the sector in the last fifteen years has done in terms of the quality and range of work that’s on offer.

“The work that education teams and community teams, whether it’s in a major gallery or in The Lowry or in Contact or wherever, have done with older people or whatever group they’re working with in the area, has been the most fantastic thing and we don’t want that to go.

“The other fantastic thing has been the number of smaller companies and different types of work, across different art forms or more site-specific, that have been coming through.

“There’s been a whole generation shift in the type of work that’s out there now. People in the arts recognise that and value it.

“The more variety, the better the critical mass and, ultimately, the bigger audience and the more participants you have. It doesn’t work the other way around.

“If we all split off and people go back to working in their silos, you don’t protect your audience, you start limiting audiences for art and culture as a whole.

“It would be terrible if that happened.”

The first production of the new Royal Exchange season is Doctor Faustus, previewing from September 8, 2010.