IN PROFILE: TIMOTHY SHEADER

The artistic director of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre on getting through Covid, appealing to wider audiences, and the ephemeral, unrepeatable experience of an outdoor performance

Interview: Clare Finney / Images: David Jensen, Feast Creative

“We haven’t really talked about Regent’s Park,” Timothy Sheader observes, at minute 54 of our hour-long interview. He’s right. I panic.

We’ve covered inclusivity, the cost-of-living crisis, the ephemerality of theatre, anti-racism, the pandemic – everything, in fact, but the defining feature of the theatre in which we’re sitting. Were he a less generous interviewee, a less passionate person, a less articulate ambassador for live performance, he might have suggested I fire some questions over by email, which he may or may not have found time to answer – this being a mere three days before the season opens. Timothy, however, is none of these things, and in the five minutes we have left launches into one of the most poetic, powerful tributes to Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre you’ll ever read.

Let us start, however, at the beginning – or rather, the new beginning, which is the first season that the Open Air Theatre will see ‘post pandemic’. The pandemic continues, of course, but it is no longer wreaking quite so much havoc on an industry that, more than any other, depends on a lot of people being together in a confined space. In this respect, the Open Air Theatre self-evidently had an advantage, and between lockdowns was one of the first theatres to be able to open and stage socially distanced productions. “We lost the first show entirely and had to close for 10 days during the second, which was socially distanced, because of the team getting Covid,” Timothy recalls, but they did lead the charge, and – with Jesus Christ Superstar in the late summer of 2020, and Carousel and Romeo and Juliet in 2021 – paved the way for London’s other theatres to turn the lights back on.

Now, two years and two months after the world as we knew it ended, they are back to whatever ‘normal’ you believe this is. The bar is open. People are sitting side by side, craning excitedly in to hear the performers. Next week Timothy will start rehearsals for 101 Dalmatians, the puppet-lead (think more War Horse than Punch and Judy) performance of which has been in the pipeline since 2019. “This new world is tough – for all sectors, but for ours especially,” he sighs, “and the audience numbers are not back to where they were by any stretch of the imagination.” A lot has happened since Timothy sent his staff home and locked the heavy iron gates of the theatre in March 2020: a pandemic, but also seismic shifts in everything from gender and race politics to our attitudes towards office work. When it comes to making art for this new age, it’s not just Covid that theatres have to contend with. “When I see a performance here or at other theatres, I think, I know what it cost you. This has been created under really difficult conditions – and the fact that so much of it is still so great gives me hope.” >

Q: This season, Legally Blonde, 101 Dalmatians and Antigone take to the stage at the Open Air Theatre. How has the pandemic shaped your programme?

A: Firstly, joy. People want joy. Legally Blonde is there to make people smile. 101 Dalmatians is full of fun and joy. Antigone isn’t joyful, to say the least – but it is a response to another seismic shift in society, which is the murder of George Floyd, and all that has come of that. The politics of it have become very relevant to the world we are experiencing now. It’s been commissioned for years, but it became very clear last year that we have to get that play and its playwright, Inua Ellams, on stage.

Q: How challenging has it been keeping a play in production for two years longer than planned?

A: We’re not used to it. We’re not painters. We make something, then it’s gone and we move onto the next thing. That’s why I don’t really like digital theatre; I want theatre to be made for the time, not for film. I don’t want to see it in 10 years’ time, because it was made for now. Since the pandemic, we’ve changed and the world has changed, which has made it difficult to keep working on the same project – particularly when, in the case of 101 Dalmatians, we didn’t know when it would be staged. People say to us: “Oh, it must be brilliant now because you worked on it for so long” – but we put it on the backburner. We didn’t work on it for large swathes of time because we were creatively stifled. We’re excited to be returning to it again.

Q: Why do you think audience numbers still aren’t what they were pre-pandemic?

A: It’s not Covid fear anymore. Firstly, people have got out of the habit of booking and going to the theatre. Secondly, there is the issue of money. There’s the reality of that utility bill hitting your doorstep, as mine did last week, and having literally doubled. Thirdly, our audiences aren’t really tourists or people who come in from out of town at the weekend. They’re office workers who come here after work – and people aren’t in the office five days a week anymore. They come in for two days, and sometimes they don’t know what those days will be, so everything is last minute and groups can’t get together so easily. We will hopefully pick up with last-minute sales but booking in advance isn’t what it used to be.

Q: Some people reported being incredibly creative during the lockdowns, while others found quite the reverse. Which camp were you in?

A: I didn’t feel creative at all – but I did feel very privileged to be in a job, running a company, so my energies were put into lobbying, keeping the company alive and financially solvent, trying to support freelance artists, trying to navigate how we might get back to being open, being part of a bigger conversation with governments and stakeholders about the rules that would entail. There were peaks and troughs. There were days when we felt really successful and energetic, and there were days when we didn’t know how we could ever come out the other side, and then we felt slothful. We are social gatherers by nature, yet there were times when it was hard to imagine how we could ever get back to that.

Q: How have the broader movements in society – culture wars, identity politics, anti-racism and so on – influenced the theatre scene?

A: I think we are on a precipice. There is a lot changing for theatre, and I think we are starting to question the way we do things in a more robust way. It will take time, but the sands are shifting. There are more voices being heard, different people making and leading work, and that will change the narrative. It is challenging to affect that change, because you’re trying to shift something that has been how it’s been for many years, but the change is happening. The light is coming through, and it’s more than a crack; it’s an entire window, and it’s changing the way we look, who is allowed to look, and what we see in the reflection. I’d say it is shifting fast – but then, I am saying that as a privileged white man.

Q: How do you balance those changes, and the need to appeal to wider audiences, with the demands of more traditional theatre goers?

A: We have to be inclusive. We want to tell a plethora of stories through lived experience. It’s not about pushing anyone aside, it’s about making room. I feel responsible for making space for other people’s voices, so they can go to the theatre and see themselves and the specifics of their experiences. Maybe those traditionalists can go to the theatre and not see themselves reflected back but still have a great time experiencing the universality of the story, rather than the specifics they’re used to.

Theatre is a living artform and its practitioners are interpretative artists. That is why Shakespeare survived – because of interpretation – and that is what I’m trying to do. If you want to see the thing you have seen before, and have always seen, just as it was, that’s fine. It’s not what we’re doing, but there’s no value judgment. If you don’t like the cover version of a song, you can always go back to the original record. Those people who want something more traditional will always be able to find it easily enough.

Q: Why has it taken so long for this shift to come about?

A: There has always been a quest to make art as accessible as possible, because we know it’s a beneficial thing for society. Why now? Well, we know it was the murder of George Floyd, but there were many other people before him, so it has to be the pandemic in part. Many of us have come out of it looking to interact with each other in a more progressive way. It isn’t about being passive and asking people to watch art. It is about inviting people to make and participate and ask robust questions. The dictate of the Arts Council has changed too: if you are a funded organisation, it can’t just be rhetoric; you have to prove inclusivity is happening.

Q: One genre that seems to be particularly divisive is musical theatre. Why do you think that binary continues to exist between people who love musicals and those who profess to not like them at all?

A: Those people have always been there. Even people who work in musicals will say: “I don’t want it to feel like a musical.” But there are as many types of musical as there are plays, operas and poems, and it’s just about finding one that’s suitable for you. if that’s Mamma Mia on a Friday night, good for you. If that’s a radical, provocative revival of Oklahoma at the Young Vic, good for you. They are two very different things that both happen to have music in them. When this year’s Tonys were announced, the different styles and content of the new musicals nominated was wild and exciting. I think the binary between people who love musicals and people who ‘hate’ them continues to exist because the bigger, louder, more expensive productions – productions that are very skilled and contribute toward the ecology of London as a tourist destination, let’s not forget – take the oxygen, so people think that’s all that musical theatre is. But I think that’s changing. The sector, which has traditionally been snotty about musical theatre, is giving it a bit more credit, and other people are choosing to validate the form.

Q: What has struck you most upon returning to Regent’s Park?

A: The audience. The fact that they came back shows we need theatre and shows the resilience of theatre despite those existential challenges. Netflix, subscription TV, films – they were the artforms that got us through the lockdowns. But what we have got here is the flipside of that on-demand, multi-channel screening service: you have to make an effort to come. You have to get here, you have to pay for it, and you have to be present. The commitment is so much bigger, yet when you’re here you see that human need to gather and experience something together, with – and I am going to say something unfashionable now – some rules.

Those rules don’t need to be restrictive. They do absolutely need to be inclusive; but there is a social contract which there perhaps isn’t at home, around choosing to see and hear the same story together. That we continue to want to honour that in a world that is fracturing all over the place and being lived through tablets and phones shows a sense of human connection that I don’t ever want to go away.

I think being in a park outside only adds to that sense of connection, because we can see each other; because it is utterly live, tonight, and the weather will only be that weather tonight. Even tomorrow, when your friends experience this same story at this same time, it will be different because they may be colder or hotter or damper and the quality of light will be different because the season will have shifted a single day. Last night has gone. It was ephemeral. It’s not a carbon copy, and tomorrow won’t be either. Each night is unique, and those who are present are present and live in it together. It reminds us we are social beings, and that we joined a social contract long ago that we are mercifully still a part of.

REGENT’S PARK OPEN AIR THEATRE Regent’s Park, NW1 4NU openairtheatre.com