A Day in My Life

Arbeit am Theater bedeutet lange Nächte und viel Engagement und Leidenschaft. JULIE COLLINS im Gespräch mit einer Produktionsleiterin am Old Vic Theater in Bristol.

Meet executive theatre producer Chloé Naldrett Elwood

My name is Chloé Naldrett Elwood. I’m the executive producer at Bristol Old Vic. This is my second stint working at the theatre. I first worked here just after university, doing front-of-house shifts in the evenings, ushering people into the theatre and working at the bar. In fact, my relationship with this theatre goes back even further than that. Growing up in Bristol, I would come and watch plays here with my family, so the opportunity to come back here was irresistible.

My day starts at about 7 a.m. My boys are seven and ten, so I spend the mornings packing their lunches, getting them dressed, preparing breakfast and making sure the kids get to school. Then, I jump on my bike and cycle to work. The day often starts with what we call a “team quickie”, which is an organization-wide meeting to explain in very short form what everyone is engaged in.

After that, I get to my desk and check through e-mails that have come in overnight. These are usually a collection of show reports and sales figures from the shows we’ve got running. When that’s finished, I go into the first of a series of meetings. Today’s meeting is about The Little Mermaid, which is our Christmas production. It’s going to be a particularly interesting one for us because the director and designer’s ambition is for that project to carry a very strong ecological theme. They’d like to make the piece carbon-neutral, which is a massive challenge. Lots of exciting ideas are emerging about how we might be able to do that.

One of the lovely things about my job is that I get to do lots

of creative stuff as well. I’m really engaged in a new version of The Great Gatsby, called simply Gatsby. It’s a complicated co-production that we’re doing this autumn. I’m working on the budget, and that’s a lot of staring at spreadsheets. So, during the afternoons, I’ll try to get some working time at my desk.

We’re in the pre-production stages of a major new play that’s been developed with actor Mark Rylance. For us as a small, regional producing theatre, the opportunity to work with an artist of Mark’s stature and reputation and general brilliance is incredibly exciting. What I’ve got coming up today is a reading of the latest draft of the script. It’s exciting for everybody working on the project to have Mark in a room with a group of other brilliant actors, and hearing the words that are going to make their way on to the stage.

My day tends to wrap up at about 6 p.m. If it’s an evening when I go home, I’ll leave a little bit earlier so that I can make tea and begin the kids’ bedtime routine. But about two evenings a week, I stay on at the theatre to see what’s happening around Bristol and in London. It’s to make sure I’m fully up to speed with artists we might be interested in working with, new writing and design ideas, and to get a sense of where theatre as an art form is evolving.

I also see everything that’s programmed here at Bristol Old Vic. That might be dance one night, comedy the next, a piece of work from our young company or a contemporary drama brought in by visiting companies. I’m really proud of the pro gramme we have, and I love watching the various audiences in the city come in and seeing how they respond to different things. After watching a show, I make sure that I see the company in the bar afterwards. Then I cycle back home and kiss my sleeping children’s sweaty heads and fall into bed myself.