Live Theatre: A cultural jewel

Aug 21 2009 By Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

THE name suits it. Live Theatre in Newcastle is an energetic centre of creativity. It’s lively and active and doesn’t sit silent between productions.

Actors of the calibre of Robson Green, Val McLane and Tim Healy and writers such as Lee Hall, Sean O’Brien, the late Tom Hadaway and Julia Darling rehearsed their careers at Live.

The £5.5m development completed earlier this year has meant the theatre and its impressive facilities have expanded into the historic former Trinity House Maritime Museum next door, turning one of the last at-risk buildings on Newcastle’s Quayside into a cultural jewel for the region.

When Jim Beirne took over in 2000, the theatre was insolvent, but he fully realised the potential, focused his vision and got on with the job. He is now Live Theatre’s executive director.

“It was a pretty serious financial situation,” he says, “but Live always had a creative heart. The annual turnover then was £400,000 but we had Cooking With Elvis by Lee Hall. Three years later turnover was more than £1m.”

The development work was funded from a range of sources – £1.9m from Tyne & Wear Partnership, the European Regional Development Fund (£700,000), the Heritage Lottery Fund (£550,000), Arts Council England (£450,000) and the Northern Rock Foundation (£350,000).

“To bring the building into the 21st Century took five years, five years of my life,” says Jim. “Now we have rehearsal rooms and writers’ rooms where we make plays and films. Everywhere you go here, films will be being discussed, rehearsals will be taking place, and plays being written for the under-sixes. It’s amazing, it’s three times the size it used to be and we filled the space immediately. And we’ve just had one of the most successful years of its 35 years. Pitmen Painters, to name just one production, has set all sorts of records.”

The theatre was a massive civil engineering job with huge load-bearing beams being inserted across the delicate struc-ture and the auditorium floor lowered by a metre.

“Everybody advised us not to do it,” says Jim. People have always referred to Live Theatre as “little”, as in “a great little theatre”. Intimate it certainly was, but the real trick in all this refurbishment and extension was to retain that sense of closeness that audiences liked; of being part of the action. Five floors above the auditorium, ancient iron winches and hoists fixed into the eaves would have once lugged goods from Baltic ports off and on to horse-drawn carts. They have been retained, not just for charm’s sake, but to serve as appropriate focal points in rooms set aside for creative writing. Their new role has given them a sense of purpose again.

“We joined four buildings together round the courtyard,” says Jim. “One was once part of Trinity House which Henry VIII granted a royal charter. There were two main things to consider from the start – to look after the public through access, restaurants, toilets and comfortable seating and to create more art-making space. We’re a content-producer. Pitmen Painters was a great piece of work by Lee Hall which started life here, as did Cooking With Elvis and Dance which became Billy Elliot.”

Jim Beirne mentions once more that he was confident everything would work because Live Theatre still had a creative heart – lose that and it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the fabric of a theatre.

He says: “Usually with this sort of thing it takes 10 years to negotiate leases, to wrap up the design, to fund-raise and to build. We did it in five. I’m quite good at buildings and funding. I must have shown 3,000 to 4,000 people round over five or six years but you have to get everybody onside. It was a very difficult project, we couldn’t have knocked any walls down and when you think about the building, there was nowhere else for the lift shaft to go, for example. You’d think the buildings themselves were helping you design it.

“I’ve spent most of my life supporting and nurturing new work and creating the next generation. Lots of people go on to high-profile jobs in the industry and they get the opportunity to do that here. We have 25 staff, but 300 people will work for us in one year – set designers, lighting designers, costume designers and so on. As an employer in the culture industry we’re quite significant.

“The South Bank Show is coming to film us in September and when Alan Yentob did a piece on us for his Imagine series we had six writing and education programmes running at the one time, it was very impressive.

“We’re a creative hub, a powerhouse. Live Theatre is a crucible for wonderful ideas. Most recently we had You Really Couldn’t Make It Up by Michael and Tom Chaplin (a play that chronicled a dramatic six months of Newcastle United’s last season). It brought a whole new audience in. We filmed it so we can download it for the fans.

“The money will go to youth programmes in the west end of Newcastle or to help an up-and-coming young writer. We’re always looking for new talent in all sorts of areas.

“We have a free script-reading service where you’ll get a report within six weeks. We found an original voice that way. One of my associates rang the number on a script and asked if he could speak to Joe. The reply was ‘he’s not back from school yet’. Since then he’s done two or three pieces in the studio.” A scheme called Shortcuts gets through 15 plays in one evening, all written by young people but acted by professionals. A scriptwriters’ course is being trialled online as part of a distance learning module. One-to-one sessions with writers are also popular.

“We now have a £1.5m turnover and spend a third of that on education and participation,” says Jim. “We have 300 kids a week on theatre workshops and film-writing projects; we involve youth groups, refugees and the health service in sexual health projects for 13-14 year-olds, a massive priority in the east and west of Newcastle. We see it as part of a constructive programme, part of the heart of the organisation.

“Six new plays called First Draft were by nine-year-olds from Scotswood where the children picked the six best stories they had written and each had a director and two professional actors which we produced for a week in front of paying audiences. Some of the stories were hilarious, some were heartbreaking. It was educational and aspirational, they gained new skills and opened up new worlds.”

Jim Beirne started his career as a composer then diversed into arts programming before moving on to be a funder in the arts sector. “So I’ve seen it from all sides,” he says. Plus he has helped open up new worlds.