The Stage: Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds: how Suffolk’s historic theatre got its mojo back

MAR 14, 2023

ARTICLE BY GIVERNY MASSO, The Stage

Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds has been revitalised thanks to its renewed NPO status and a vibrant team that’s part of a wider shake-up of theatre in the East of England. Its creative leaders tell Giverny Masso what’s in store

In the picturesque Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds is England’s sole surviving Regency playhouse. Stepping inside the charming Theatre Royal, with its ceiling painted to mirror a tranquil sky and seating in intimate pink boxes in a horseshoe around the stage, feels like being transported back to the early 19th century.

Designed and built in 1819 by William Wilkins – the architect behind London’s National Gallery – the grade I-listed theatre is now owned by local brewery Greene King, leased by the National Trust and run by Bury St Edmunds Theatre Management Ltd. It has historically undergone periods of closure due to financial difficulties, including from 1925 to the early 1960s, when it was used as a barrel store. Local legend has it that a young Peter Hall, who was growing up in the town, broke into the building and saw that elements of the original theatre remained beautifully preserved. This led to a successful community fundraising campaign to reopen the building as a theatre.

“One of the things that makes Theatre Royal really special is how much ownership our community has over the building. They’ve put their hand in their pocket to fund it back into being a theatre – several times,” says artistic director and chief executive Owen Calvert-Lyons. This community support has been replicated again more recently, when everyone, from affluent donors to the child of a local supermarket worker, who smashed her piggy bank to donate the pennies she had saved, pitched in to raise ￡70,000 to help reopen the theatre after the lockdowns.

Now, the Suffolk organisation is preparing to rejoin Arts Council England’s national portfolio for the first time in eight years, and will receive annual funding of ￡220,000 from ACE until 2026. Theatre Royal last had national portfolio funding in 2015, but this was lost when the theatre fell into financial difficulty having “over-focused on its history – Georgian plays – which didn’t really pull in the audiences”, says Calvert-Lyons.

’We’ve got some really dynamic people in the region. It’s full of new energy and new ideas’ – artistic director Owen Calvert-Lyons

Most of the NPO money will be used to grow the theatre’s already vast creative learning department, which works with 9,000 participants each year and 56 schools in the region. The funding will also allow the theatre to create a new stand-alone executive director role, to work alongside Calvert-Lyons, who joined Theatre Royal in June 2020, following the death of former artistic director and chief executive Karen Simpson. He was previously head of theatre and artist development at Ovalhouse – now Brixton House – in London.

“For two years, we’ve grown this organisation. We’ve grown it off the back of the pandemic and our closure, which decimated everything,” Calvert-Lyons says.

Another role created by Calvert-Lyons is that of producer, which Zoe Fox took up in August 2021. Theatre Royal typically produces three in-house plays a year: a spring show aimed at more of a “drama audience”, a summer community production and an annual pantomime. The rest of the programme is made up of visiting work.

This year’s spring production will be Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 play The Children, starring Imogen Stubbs. “We want to bring work to our audiences in Bury and Suffolk that they don’t have to travel to London to see. The best work from the past 10 years, here,” Fox says.

The theatre is also increasing the scale of its summer production, which this year is a new adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Vital to funding the summer show is a commissioning circle, introduced by Calvert-Lyons in 2021, in which five members of the community each put in ￡2,000 to support the creation of a new play. Their money covers the cost of a commission, and the donors are included in every step of the play’s journey, from reading drafts to being given backstage access.

The annual pantomime – this year it is Snow White – is taken “really seriously”, says Fox, and Calvert-Lyons explains that it presents the opportunity to talk to the biggest and most diverse audience at the theatre about “things such as body positivity, diversity and representation”.

Fox adds: “This year, someone didn’t like the fact that Robin Hood was camp, and wrote that ‘he’s not a gay character’. That sort of spurs you on when you’re creating a pantomime, to think: ‘We’ll do more of that next year then.’ ”

On the new-writing front, the theatre has two new plays planned for the next two years, including one about the Bury St Edmunds witch trials, written by Suffolk-born playwright Tallulah Brown. “We’ve commissioned six new plays in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been here,” Calvert-Lyons says. “We’re really proud of that – it feels as if we suddenly became a new-writing theatre without meaning to.”

As the theatre’s creative ambitions grow – and increasing energy costs make external rehearsal spaces less affordable – it is looking into building its own on-site rehearsal facility. Fox has overseen the creation of an artists’ network for local theatremakers, which already has 78 members. It all points to a clear strategy of nurturing theatremaking talent in the region.

“Something we’re really passionate about is building an ecology here so that Suffolk is a great place to live and work as an artist,” Calvert-Lyons explains. He says that at least 50% of the actors the theatre has employed under his tenure have hailed from the East of England, adding: “There’s some extraordinary talent in this region. It’s just very spread out because it’s rural. People can feel isolated and disconnected from the theatre community.”

‘Someone didn’t like that our pantomime’s Robin Hood was portrayed as gay. That spurs you on’ – head of producing Zoe Fox

Calvert-Lyons and Fox are part of a wave of new faces in theatre leadership in the East of England in the past few years – former Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch artistic director Douglas Rintoul took over the reins at the New Wolsey in Ipswich last year, Ryan McBryde joined Colchester’s Mercury Theatre as creative director in 2019 and Clare Slater was named artistic director of Suffolk-based company HighTide, also in 2022.

And the network between the region’s theatres is growing. Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds has set up an East Anglian producing consortium with the New Wolsey, the Mercury and HighTide, as well as with Selladoor, which runs Peterborough’s New Theatre, and is partnering with Ipswich-based theatre company Eastern Angles and Norwich Theatre Royal for the initiative. The consortium plans to co-produce work about the region and tour it locally.

Running alongside the theatre’s producing programme is its participation work, which is led by head of creative learning David Whitney. This is far-reaching, with more than 90 young people taking part in weekly groups, including a youth theatre and a SENsory youth group for children who are learning disabled or neurodivergent, as well as a community company, a company for over-55s and multiple initiatives in schools.

“One thing we focus on is depth of engagement, so one of our aims is to have life-changing opportunities. We often say: ‘Is this going to change somebody’s life? And if it’s not, why are we doing it?’ ” says Calvert-Lyons.

Whitney adds: “Participation is at the heart of everything we do, so I think that’s why our offers are so wide and varied – and I think that’s part of our success.”

Calvert-Lyons says it’s important for the work to be as wide-reaching as possible to inspire young people growing up in a rural environment that a career in theatre is a possibility. “We’ve spent two years really growing the organisation, pushing right at the seams of what is possible, so in a way, the NPO money allows us to sustain that, [otherwise] all of that great work will not continue.”

Despite the challenges of making theatre and running a significant engagement programme in the current economic climate, Calvert-Lyons is excited about the present and is resolutely positive about the future of theatre in the area. “I think we’ve got some really dynamic people in the region, it’s full of new energy, it’s full of new ideas, it’s got some great venues.”

“What it’s been lacking is a bit of joined-up thinking, and we’ve got that now – we’ve got this spirit of collaboration and this spirit of generosity. There’s a lot of connected thinking about how we support artists – it can all go further, it can all get better, but it feels as if it’s a really good time for the east.”

Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds profile

Permanent staff: 24

Volunteers: 146

Capacity of theatre: 350

Landmark productions:

? A Christmas Carol (2020)

? Around the World in Eighty Days (2021)

? Home, I’m Darling (2022)

? The Secret Garden (2022)

? The Legend of Robin Hood (2022)

The Children is at Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds until March 25