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 Gavin Henderson: a hurricane of enthusiasm |
Get the audience back into the action
Gavin Henderson, the new principal of the Central School of Speech and Drama, tells Ruth Gorb how he wants to see participation returned to the very heart of theatre
Gavin Henderson, the newly installed as principal of the Central School of Speech and Drama – genial and dapper in immaculate bow tie and – leans back in his chair and contemplates the future. “The biggest challenge I face,” he says, “ is re-routing the gas main.”
He suspects that this is not going to please the worthies of Swiss Cottage. But the main at present goes under the School’s property. “We need the space. And it’s our land, our unfulfilled asset.
“Nobody has yet said no. It’s got to happen.”
One has a feeling that it will. He is the sort of man who makes things happen. We have here not so much a new broom as a hurricane of enthusiasm and energy and fresh ideas.
He comes to the Central School trailing a stream of honours and awards, including a CBE, and an impressive CV: among much else he has been chief executive of the New Philharmonia Orchestra, artistic director of the Brighton Festival, artistic director of the Dartington International Summer School (a post he still holds), and principal for more than 10 years of Trinity College of Music – it was he who was the mover and shaker behind the relocation of the college to the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich.
His appointment to Central School raised the odd eyebrow from those who associated him with a distinguished career in music.
But he was, he says, a theatre man before he was a man of music. Early on he worked backstage in weekly rep on the pier of his home town, Brighton; did pantomime in Wimbledon and summer stock in The States. By the time he was 23, he was directing the York Mystery Plays.
But he doesn’t like compartments. His education was in art – he studied sculpture at Kingston College, got a postgraduate scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art – and he feels passionately that theatre, art and music should come together in an experience which audiences share, rather than observe.
He sticks his neck out and says that the 20th-century anaesthetised the sense of participation which he sees as essential to the theatre.
“Think about the roots of theatre, the Mystery Plays with actors dancing through the streets, the Globe Theatre with the audience right in among the actors, the Victorian music hall where everyone joined in – even the design of our old theatres, with boxes where people could take part in the action. It was the social experience of coming together for a performance. The 20th century destroyed all that.”
The reason the Proms work, he says, is because they maintain discomfort; they are sticky, tactile.
Modern theatres, on the other hand, are tailored to the audience as customers who mustn’t be tainted by the reality of the performance.
He regrets, too, the loss of regional rep with its sense of an ensemble company. “No more weekly reps because of television, a Beethoven symphony at the flick of a switch instead of going to a concert,” he said. “The theatre and concert halls are now commodities.”
The good news, he says, is that the digital age is throwing up a massive range of opportunities for students. And at Central there is a large and internationally admired theatre design department.
Acting is rubbing shoulders with design, and vice versa.
“People are doing it, and making it. And audiences have to be alerted to the look of the thing,” he said.
The flourishing design department is what attracted him to Central. He is, he says, a multi-discipline sort of chap, and he was excited by the language of what is going on in the school.
He gets excited as we speak: the look of the school is important, he says; he wants to make it less forbidding, he wants to open the doors and let the public in; he wants more communication with Hampstead Theatre (“right opposite us, for goodness sake”) and the Roundhouse, and most of all with local people.
“I love the little market, I love the area, I foresee the gradual emergence of more of a cafe society, a community of performance and arts that we need to celebrate
a bit more,” he said.
And he celebrates the Central School as one of the greatest drama schools in the world. Its list of past students reads like a history of the theatre glittering with names such as
Laurence Olivier and
Peggy Ashcroft. Elsie Fogerty, the founder of the school, would introduce her favourite students as “another of our dear little Peggys or Larrys.”
Gavin Henderson’s office is in the old part of the building. Its windows look onto trees, on one side of the fireplace is a bust of Laurence Olivier and on the other, one of Sarah Bernhardt. And facing Gavin Henderson’s desk is Elsie Fogerty’s chair, large, polished and uncompromisingly upright.
Suddenly sentimental, Gavin Henderson, looks out of one of the windows.
“That used to be the vicarage of the Reverend Chitty. When I was very young I used to go out with his daughter, Alison (now a famous theatre designer) and I would look out of the Chittys’ windows and think how wonderful it would be to go to that school. And here I am.”
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