In this exclusive interview StageTalk’s Graham Wyles talks with Christabel Holmes about her career in the theatre and connection with the play Sorry, You’re Not A Winner
The Roman poet Martial when asked by a friend why he’d gone to the Coliseum to watch Christians being torn to pieces by lions replied, ‘These are my times and I must know them’. Notwithstanding that original grisly context, it’s an epigram that could well serve as a guiding principle for writers and, as with my present guest, producers. The quote came to mind discussing the news that after some twelve years at the helm, Tom Morris is leaving the Bristol Old Vic. The suggestion that this in some sense echoed a turning of the page, a changing of the guard ‘theatre-wide’, was suggested by Christabel Holmes as we settled into an informal Zoom chat prior to the arrival of the Paines Plough/Theatre Royal Plymouth production of, Sorry, you’re not a winner, which comes to the Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio on the 29th March.
I’m writing this on what will be her last day as a producer with Paines Plough before taking up a position as general manager at the Young Vic in London. I wondered how someone gets such a position with one of the country’s leading subsidized theatres; ‘I wrote them a letter’, she laughs. The beneficiary of an ‘inclusive’ policy at the Young Vic – something of a de rigueur approach where public money is involved – she acknowledges that she would not have been ready without her formative three and a bit years at Paines Plough. Scarce resources and the disciplines of constantly touring have balanced any notions she may have picked up in an earlier brush with commercial theatre. Beyond that, perhaps unsurprisingly, it has helped form a commitment to the cause of new writing.
Sorry: you’re not a winner is a play about the personal pitfalls of social mobility, she tells me, and more generally the sense that many people have of ‘imposter syndrome’, that feeling of waiting to be, ‘found out’, arising from a lack of confidence or uncertainty about one’s position in the scheme of things.
Now, Ms Holmes, a Bristolian, is no stranger to the Old Vic, and it’s just possible some theatergoers would recognize her from a spell working front of house after university where, it so happens, she met the writer of Sorry: you’re not a winner, Samuel Bailey – a winner of the prestigious Papatango prize for new writing – who was working in the Bristol Old Vic box office. The fortuitous connection led her to suggest Sam Bailey to Paines Plough as a potential commissionee. Again Jesse Jones, the director of Sorry: you’re not a winner, and founding member of Bristol’s Wardrobe Theatre, was, like Christabel, involved with the Old Vic’s Young Company as a teenager and is a friend and collaborator of Mr Bailey. All in all, Sorry: your’e not a winner, stacks up as very much a South West affair. Indeed the Old Vic, with no small justification, could claim it as being one of their own. This early lesson in networking will no doubt serve Ms Holmes well in the unforgiving crucible of London theatre.
Our conversation is peppered with insights, both practical and creative, into the thinking of a young producer. Some comments she makes about theatre such as ‘Interrogating who it is for’, and seeing it as a ‘civic space’, jump out as indicative of someone who is thinking seriously about theatre’s role more widely.
Producing for a successful company is a job with various challenges she explains: reading scripts, people management, worrying about the finance and of course ‘serving the creative vision of writer and director’. In fact generally acting as an artistic midwife to, as she put it to, ‘bring home the production.’
At the Young Vic she anticipates her role will be challenging and full of variety; involvement in one-off productions, studio development, managing the various outreach projects and perhaps getting involved in the forthcoming production of Oklahoma!, as well as future programming. In any event life is likely to be full-on. With Ms Holmes in mind and indeed all the new generation of producers on whom the health of the theatre will depend another quote from Martial comes to mind as they face the new challenges, ‘May the earth rest lightly on you.’
Text: Graham Wyles, StageTalk Magazine
Photo credit: Steve Tanner
