Paul Robinson reveals those that inspire his work, and why he might just be in love with Shami Chakrabarti.
Tim Arthur
Tim was my first real mentor. He was five years older than me and ran the local youth theatre where I became his number two. He had a very different view of the world than most people I’d met so far in my life. Part of this was that he had been brought up by artists (by which I mean his parents, not like in a commune or by wolves). He is irreverent, gregarious and truly polymathic. He has the most infectious laugh of anyone I know and he oozes creativity. We worked together on various participation projects and main stage shows at Trinity Arts Centre and he taught me to have belief in people’s natural creativity and how everything you do is ultimately personality led. Also that if you’re going to fail then fail spectacularly, not averagely.
Marianne Elliott
In 2000 I won the (now perished) Arts Council bursary to the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Having just left the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School this would be my first experience of working with professional actors. The person who first took me under their wing was one of the four (!) Artistic Directors, Marianne Elliott. Marianne was simply the best director I’d ever met and this remains true to this day. She is sympathetic, generous and disarmingly incisive. And actors love her. Encountering her was vital for me at this stage in my career when I was increasingly convinced that my lack of Oxbridge background excluded me from my dream job. Marianne is a visionary but she’s also bloody hard working and I’ll never forget her specifically instructing the actors to “never forget the cheap seats – they’re your future audience”.
Sarah Frankcom
I can’t mention the Royal Exchange without also mentioning Sarah Frankcom. I met her back when she was Literary Manager. Now sole Artistic Director, Sarah is still one of the best dramaturgs in the country, but she is also creating a sea change in Manchester. She is patient and considered and has that thing which our profession sometimes lacks in spades: integrity. It was Sarah who convinced me that new writing is the lifeblood of the theatre and she also made me aware of important questions to do with diversity, new audiences and why we create work.
Erica Whyman
Erica is my Chair at Theatre503, a position I basically tricked her into accepting. She is also Deputy Artistic Director of the RSC. We met back in 2001 when she was running The Gate and she is the reason why I went on to run a fringe theatre. Under Erica The Gate was experimental, ambitious and vital. At its peak you couldn’t see the European repertoire done more dynamically anywhere in the country and yet it had a very special relationship with its local audience. I run 503 on that same principle – the aim is to be a local theatre of national profile. Erica is one of the best artistic directors in the country and crucially doesn’t see making great art and balancing the books as in some kind of ugly contention.
Shami Chakrabarti
My partner thinks I actually love Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, a little bit. She might be right. Those that know me very well know how much I care about human rights and how this feeds into the work I do. My parallel life sees me as a human rights lawyer heroically freeing people from squalid prisons across the globe. I wasn’t blessed with such a lawyer’s instinct in this life. Shami is partly the product of her background – an ethnic minority, highly intelligent and very high functioning. That said, she’s also a prophet. She’s condemned to be outspoken, to put her life at risk and to speak truth to power. In fits of ego or artistic puritanism, or both, cultural practitioners can lose sight of why we make work in the first place. At our peril we lose sight of the need to reflect the world we live in and to celebrate our humanity. Shami reminds us that in a free society our responsibility to act against injustice is doubled. So it would appear I am in love with her.
Mr Shepherd
For so many of us a career in the arts can be traced back to a moment when someone valued our self-expression, and this commonly arrives in the form of an inspirational teacher. Mr Shepherd was my history teacher when I was 14, but more importantly to me he was an actor manqué. He spoke with an actor’s voice and moved like an actor, a poise you certainly didn’t see anywhere else in my school.
I’m grateful to my classmates for their infinite patience as I tried and failed to hold my own in conversations with Mr Shepherd (I actually don’t know his first name) about Sheridan, Olivier and Peter Hall. I’ve never thanked him for showing an interest – for the books he lent me, for the plays he recommended reading and for just encouraging a nascent passion in me that was starting to find a voice.
Paul Robinson is Artistic Director of Theatre503.
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