Rose Theatre: Next Stage

Currently blowing out the candles on its fourth birthday cake, the Rose has become, in a relatively short period, a vibrantly successful beacon in the local - and national - cultural landscape.

This month, Robert O’Dowd takes up his position as Chief Executive. All eyes, including ours, are on him, so I caught up with him to find out what’s on his mind for the future of our most brilliant local theatre.

But first, a prologue. When it opened in January 2008, the Rose’s Founder/Director Sir Peter Hall’s plan was to bring new and original, top drawer ‘home grown’ productions to a wide audience - this with funding from Kingston University, Kingston Council and Friends of the Rose Theatre. Just nine months later, in September of that year, a delighted Stephen Unwin, the Rose’s Artistic Director, told Time & Leisure: ‘What we have learnt, and what is very gratifying, is that audiences have an appetite for high quality theatre.’

Sticking to its original agenda, the Rose has continued to present excellent in-house productions, attracting great critical acclaim and large audiences, going down in history with Dame Judi Dench’s unforgettable performance as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Visiting shows - (Northern Broadsides’ productions including Othello starring Lenny Henry and The Canterbury Tales) plus a great programme for children (David Walliams’ Mr Stink, The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom) - contribute to the Rose’s success. The new season for 2012 brings Joely Richardson back to the stage in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, directed by Stephen, plus Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Henry V. And the Rose has also taken its responsibilities seriously as a cultural centrepiece for the wide Kingston community as its funding brief demanded.

So where will Robert O’Dowd take the Rose in this next stage of the adventure? Born and brought up locally, Robert is clearly a man with vision and ability. He’s a fast talker, energetic and, one suspects, a little impatient with those not as quick off the mark as he. He was educated at St Paul’s and the University of London; his work portfolio is impressive with senior posts held in fields of technology, retailing, design and entertainment.

He has also, he tells me, rather intriguingly, ‘almost farmed shrimps in Ecuador’, but it is his former job as the Enterprise Director at Classic FM which interests me most. As he says: ‘I knew nothing about classical music and nothing about radio; I just simply believed that classical music is beautiful and more people should listen to it. We wanted presenters who loved music, like Henry Kelly, not always necessarily experts, to widen the audience. We played short pieces in the morning so people could listen while they were busy in the bathroom or getting breakfast, and full works in the evening when they had more time.’

Will Robert’s successful lead at Classic FM, which, incidentally, revolutionised the way we listen to classical music, work at the Rose? I believe it might chime exactly with Unwin’s own vision, which he shared with T&L on the eve of Rose’s second birthday: ‘This is what drives me. To provide work of quality, integrity, intelligence and imagination and to show that this work is not elitist or difficult but is what the audience deserves and what the audience wants. I want to open the doors as wide as possible.’

Robert tells me that his own role as Chief Exec will allow Stephen to focus on Rose Theatre productions. ‘This is absolutely at the heart of what the Rose is about. I’d like to see more Rose Theatre productions, but - even if we do four or five of our own productions a year - they will fill the theatre for only 25 weeks, so that leaves a lot of weeks to fill. We have a great theatre, it’s a great building. We do an awful lot at the moment, and we have a fantastic link with the university and with Kingston itself. But we can do more; we can be a centre for the arts. We have received great critical acclaim and we have proved that we can also achieve commercial success. We will do more of our own productions and I will bring a commercial diversification with other genres.’ He’s clearly more than a money man, strategically fireproofing the Rose against hard times. Robert’s broad love of the arts includes film, theatre, contemporary drama and the visual arts - both digital installations and traditional - ‘you can’t beat a good impressionist’. And, of course, he loves music - not just early and classical music, by the way, he’s produced over 150 records himself and his tastes cover rap, dance and hip hop. With Robert at the helm and Stephen as artistic driver, we can expect even more bright adventures aboard the Rose!

Forthcoming highlights at The Rose: Joely Richardson in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea; Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good; Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Henry V. Tickets on sale at www.rosetheatrekingston.org