A GUIDING LIGHT IN FINAL BOW
End of an era as Barrie Rutter exits stage left...
WHEN THE curtain comes down on Saturday at the York Theatre Royal, it will close a 25-year run few producers would have forecast. Classical theatre with a Yorkshire accent had not been in anyone’s repertoire.
There was no mistaking its provenance when Barrie Rutter reviewed his stage odyssey before yesterday’s matinee.
The unpretentious tone, he said, was down to the delivery. “And the lack of Stanislavski and all that b ******* .”
Rutter is the actor-manager who in 1992 founded the Northern Broadsides company in Halifax, to harness northern voices to perform “classical work in non-velvet spaces”.
This week is his last performing with the company in his home county. A disagreement with the Arts Council over money forced him to quit as artistic director, and although his leaving party will not take place until March, when he has completed a co-production with Shakespeare’s Globe of The
Captive Queen in London, the significance of the moment has escaped no-one.
He will leave, he says, with “artistic cholesterol”, meaning that he is, at 70, still full of ideas. “I’m a freelance performer again. I’m hoping to be employed as a director or an actor. I’m happy to audition.”
Northern Broadsides, in the best theatrical tradition, will go on even without its guiding light. “It would be too easy to get depressed about walking away from my baby, but that’s not the point,” he said. “It’s in good hands –it will go forward and I must leave whoever wants to do it, to what they see as their mission.”
Founded with a council grant of £15,000 in Rutter’s home city of Hull, Northern Broadsides carved a niche for itself on the national stage with uncompromisingly regional slants on plays many would have written off as uncommercial.
The unconventional casting of the comedian Lenny Henry as Othello was one of a raft of Shakespearean productions, which, Rutter said, audiences sometimes assumed to have been rewritten in dialect.
“Every single year I get letters and emails from people about how well we’ve done to change the text and rewrite it into an English they can understand,” he said. “The truth is, we don’t touch a word. We edit but we don’t rewrite. It’s down to the delivery and the nuance and the lack of indulgence.” He despises what he calls the “dot dot dot” acting of pausing before operative words. “It’s nonsense – the author has already done the invention – it’s up to the actor to give it the impression of being a fresh minted language.” The current production, of which Rutter is director and star, is a case in point. For Love or Money is an adaptation of Turcaret, a satire on capitalist corruption by the 18th century French playwright Alain-René Lesage. It is one of seven works contributed by the Skiptonborn writer Blake Morrison over the years. It doesn’t sound like a smash but it has played to respectable houses in eight other theatres since September.
There will be no wrap party after the final performance on Saturday. “The set gets taken down and everybody goes home,” Rutter said. “That’s it.”