Sam Hodges, Creative and Executive Director at Nuffield, contemplates his career so far.
Creative and Executive Director, Nuffield (2013 – Present)
I have been in post for just over six months and am hugely excited to be in a city which feels on the verge of a cultural revolution. Artistically, the first thing I did was to appoint a team of talented associates who form, with me, the artistic core of the company. Their work as directors and designers is at the heart of my first season – I’ll direct in the second, when I have time to draw breath. But my job as CEO is also to lead the company across the broad spectrum of management – developing a long-term strategy, engaging with the city’s political sphere, ensuring the 30-strong staff are working efficiently and happily, and finding new and innovative ways to become more resilient at a difficult time for the arts sector. I am hugely ambitious for the company, going into its 50th year, and want it to become nationally recognised as a maker of great work, and locally loved as a company which understands and speaks to its community.
Producer, Criterion Theatre (2011 – 2013)
This was a unique role as West End theatres rarely have in-house producing management. My brief was to create an identity for a commercial theatre by producing and directing a programme of ancillary work around the ongoing ‘39 Steps’. The work ranged from late night productions, including radio plays performed complete with Live Foley, to a summer-long festival of new work, comedy, and platforms with leading cultural and sporting figures. It was the only West End theatre to be part of the Cultural Olympiad and commissioning two emerging playwrights to write for such a space was a rare privilege. I was lucky to have the unswerving support of Chairman Stephen Fry and feel that my understanding of the business side of what we do developed enormously.
Founder and Artistic Director, HighTide Festival Theatre (2006 – 2011)
When I founded HighTide, in a town not far from where I grew up, I had no idea that it would develop like it did, and looking back at the writers and directors I worked with in the first couple of years, I feel hugely blessed – the likes of Nick Payne, Tom Basden, Sam Holcroft, Adam Brace, Polly Findlay, Mike Longhurst, amongst others. It started small, from a sense that giving writers actual productions with living audiences was the most useful thing for their development. Over the five years I ran the company, it grew into an internationally recognised organisation, co-producing with the likes of the National Theatre, the Old Vic Theatre, and the Bush Theatre, exchanging work and artists with Australia and the USA, and ultimately, becoming a National Portfolio Organisation. The learning curve was steep and fast; from fundraising (a huge part of the job) to dramaturgy, from accounting to charity law, and, of course, the relationship between programming and audience, risk and ambition. I’m very proud that, somehow, it caught the zeitgeist and that it continues to flourish. I was most proud of ‘Stovepipe’ – which The Sunday Times described as one of the decade’s best plays, but I had the most fun on the hip-hop political musical ‘Nicked’, where I played a rapping David Cameron.
Director, Back to Back Productions (2003 – 2005)
In my second year at university, I did what all precocious aspiring theatre-makers do and set up a theatre company. We produced a few shows, most notably Stephen Berkoff’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’, which got rave reviews from the student rags, and was then promptly taken down a peg or two in its ‘London transfer’ to the Etcetera Theatre, where it competed bravely with whatever was on Sky downstairs. But it gave me the taste for it…
Sam Hodges is Creative and Executive Director at Nuffield.