‘There’s still the feeling that all these bloody northerners should just shut up’
Barrie Rutter, founder of Northern Broadsides, has had enough of poor funding, NT Live and southern bias.
Barrie Rutter is the last of the great northern theatrical chieftains. A decade ago, Alan Ayckbourn reigned in Scarborough, John Godber ran Hull Truck, and Rutter was ensconced at Halifax, with his touring company, Northern Broadsides. The first two have stepped down; only Rutter remains in post.
As it approaches its 25th anniversary year, though, how much longer will Northern Broadsides, based in the atmospheric Viaduct Theatre, in the bowels of a vast former mill building, continue? It was founded in a spirit of geographical and social defiance: a two-fingered salute to the Oxbridge hegemony. Back in 1992, the Hull-born actor demanded “northern voices, doing classical work in non-velvet spaces… I don’t care if somebody hates it – they’ll get both barrels.”
I meet Rutter at the Theatre Royal, York, where he is preparing a revival of When We Are Married, JB Priestley’s 1938 Yorkshire comedy about three couples who discover – as they gather to celebrate their silver wedding anniversaries – that perhaps they were never officially married. At 69, the sense of passion and purpose still blazes from Rutter. But this time, there is a new sense of indignation mingled with weary resignation. Within minutes, he drops a bombshell.
“We need more money,” he says. “We need to pay the actors more. I’m running out of their goodwill. I’m running out of my own goodwill.”
He has planned up to spring 2018. If there is no boost in subsidy for the four-year period after that, “I will leave Broadsides,” he says. “I will phone my agent, go freelance. The company might not exist.” Is he bitter and angry, then? “No,” he counters, genially. “I will just say: ‘You don’t want us? Fine! Kiss my a--- and goodnight Vienna!’ ”
Since its launch, Broadsides has shifted away from some of its more eye-catching early venues – a Hull boatshed, Skipton cattle auction mart, the Tower of London – but its use of more conventional sites has gone hand in hand with the consolidation of the company’s reputation. The act of reclaiming the Bard for the regional voice still feels radical, especially in an age when the Cumberbatches and Redmaynes of this world hold sway.
There have been high-profile successes, too. When Rutter coaxed Lenny Henry up to make his debut as Othello in 2009, the result was a triumph, giving the comedian a new lease of artistic life, and reasserting the company’s value.
Is Rutter playing to the gallery in his threat to quit? He always had “a big gob”; that was the phrase his English teacher at his grammar school used when he suggested he take up acting. Yet you can see the vexation. The company has never gone into the red. It makes a virtue of large casts. The £255,000 it gets is dwarfed by the £1.5 million awarded to the West Yorkshire Playhouse and far eclipsed by the £679,000 handed to comparable touring company Headlong.
The fierce personal protectiveness that Rutter feels towards Broadsides might have something to do with his upbringing – his father was a worker on the Hull fish docks, his mother was mainly absent (she had three other sons by different men).
Rutter describes theatre as his “salvation”. “It was a way of filling my life with lovely things,” he tells me. “And when I first walked on stage I was happier than I’d ever been.” Broadsides provides the family life he lacked (his own marriage ended in divorce), a fact underlined by the way he often stands outside the auditorium to greet his audience in Halifax. It’s “home”, he says.
But if there’s a particular animus to his gripe, there’s also a general truth. Rutter says there remains a North/South divide. “There’s still the feeling that there are all these bloody northerners shouting their heads off – and they should just shut up.” He continues: “I can’t prove it but the year after I started Broadsides with Richard
III and it looked like we had a future, what started up? English Touring Theatre, which promised to do classics with traditional costumes in RP. Based in Crewe. Immediate funding! You’ll get a denial about it but I f------ know for a fact that they couldn’t bear the idea of Richard the maverick with his bunch of hairy-arsed northerners!”
He doesn’t think someone could start Broadsides today. “You wouldn’t be allowed to. They don’t like the artist making waves.” He worries at the fixation with digital technology too. “You can see the diminution of regional theatre provision, staff being let go, more cinema in theatres, more NT Live. I’m a dinosaur. In a few years’ time all these elite flagships will just beam out all their work.”
He’s suddenly aware that it must sound as if he’s just complaining, and starts worrying that there isn’t a positive story in all this. But there is. When he takes to the stage next weekend at the Shaftesbury Theatre, joining a cast of fellow alumni and current students in a gala marking the 60th anniversary of the National Youth Theatre, where he learnt the ropes in the Sixties, he can hold his head up high. He may not have gained the same fame as some contemporaries – among them David Suchet and Helen
Mirren – but in ploughing his own furrow, he set an inspiring example.
He had his own breaks, too. He briefly rubbed shoulders with the Beatles in 1966 when George Harrison turned up at the Royal Court to watch Little Malcolm and His Struggle
Against the Eunuchs, in which he appeared along with Dalton (the play, optioned by Harrison, became the first film he produced). “It was at the time Paul was going out with Jane Asher. The height of Beatle-mania. It was a wonderful week – heady stuff. I suppose I got a bit big-headed. Who wouldn’t have done at that age?” Mind you, living with his aunt, he wasn’t able to enjoy much of the Swinging Sixties. “I only got that collarless Beatles jacket the year they went out of style because that was the only time I could afford one.”
He was later likened by one critic to the young Albert Finney. He got 12 telegrams from agents offering to sign him up overnight. “Only one agreed with my desire to do theatre – he was terrific, so I signed with him and went to the Nottingham Playhouse.”
He joined the RSC in the Seventies; the parts ranged in size. “There was always that niggle that you could never play the king because you had an accent.” He went to the National in the Eighties, where he made his mark in Animal Farm, Guys and Dolls and Tony Harrison’s The Mysteries. “Tony said: ‘I’ve spent 10 years translating The Oresteia for voices like yours.’ ” I point out to this unacknowledged national treasure that the part he’s playing in When We Are Married, the photographer Ormonroyd, gets the last word. A good omen for his battle for more money? He chuckles and gives me a “give o’er” look. “I just want them to pay attention.” How would he like to be remembered? He pauses. “I always say to my girls (he has three daughters): ‘If I have a headstone just put on it: They heard me at the back.’ ” By ’eck, they did.