Jude Kelly

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My Castaway this week is a theatre director. Her love of the arts, she admits, stopped her being a delinquent. She can thank her Liverpool headmaster for that. He let her do drama whenever she wanted. Thirteen years ago, her success in regional theatre and at the Battersea Arts Centre in London led to her appointment as the artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse. She's attracted top talent from Ben Elton to Ian McKellen, produced crowd-pulling musicals including Singing in the Rain, and perhaps most importantly demonstrated a unique ability to make theatre thrive at the heart of a community.

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She's now moving on to new things, but her experience will live with her for a long time yet. Building a theatre from scratch and making it mean more to a community than it thought it would mean is, she says, thrilling. She is Jude Kelly. I wonder you can bear to move on, Jude, and leave somebody else to sort of go on bringing up this baby you creative.

Jude Kelly1:21

Yeah.

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I think when you've built something from the beginning, you are very aware that what's made it work is passion and drive and a sort of sense that risk was everything because there wasn't a history to preserve, so everything was about the future. And that's why it's been so successful, because you were building a future. If you ever feel that you're resting in the present tense, then you're not going to be giving the same energy. And you can't be about artistic bravery and then stay somewhere forever. Give me a picture of it, though, as it is at the moment, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, because it's more than just a theatre, isn't it? In fact, it's two theatres to start with, isn't it? It's two theatres, and we also run a nightclub and restaurant across the road, and we have a six-week festival in the streets in the summer. And we've just bought a church where we're going to do some big sacred work as well. I can't stand the idea that a publicly funded space isn't full of people day and night. So you've got crocodiles as school children, you've got OAPs, you've got office work, you've got a cyber cafe, haven't you? Yeah, we've got a big cyber cafe and we produce CD-ROMs about all the different work that the Playhouse does. So it's inclusive, it's democratic. You've said that there are lots of people making up, this is your phrase, lots of people making up for lost artistic time. What do you mean by that?

Jude Kelly2:19

Yeah.

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I think everybody's imagination would drive them eventually into a creative act of some sort. And I mean, that can be anything from.

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creating their own personal garden.

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through to dress design or whatever. And there are many people who come into the playhouse and say, I always wanted to and they go dot, dot, dot, it could be anything. And I think our job is to make that possible alongside

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great art happening. I mean watching

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Really terrific work.

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Top quality.

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Demonstrates to people in the community that it is a fine act to do art, but it's also something which everybody is allowed to do. And it was, of course, the excitement of drama, as I indicated in the introduction, that possibly prevented you from a life of crime. Or certainly from, well, not perhaps a life of crime, but certainly of becoming a juvenile delinquent. We shall talk about that in a minute, but tell me about your first record. This is Good Vibrations, which I heard when I was about 12 or 13. The way that these young lads from, you know, some backwater in America turned themselves into international superstars because they had a father who was

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diligent and rather frightening actually, but committed to them as musicians. And the sophistication of this piece of work, I think it it's an example of how from an unlikely background people can do astonishing things and it just makes you feel great.

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It's my love, she's somehow closer now.

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Softly smile, I know she must be calm.

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I look in her eyes She goes with me to a floss moon

Jude Kelly4:23

I'm picking up good vibrations good shit

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With Vibrations and the Beach Boys. So, um tell me about being a near delinquent Juke.

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What did you do that was sort of beyond normal teenage rebellion? Well, I think between the ages of 14 and 18, I was near to going off the rails a number of times. Actually, just between 14 and 17, really, because you can see that life is for living, you have all this energy, the world seems so vivid to me. And then in school, I was doing a lot of things without anybody explaining why that knowledge would be useful to me in the future. It's just it was there and it had to be done. It was done, it had to be done. And so, you know, I went and sought other pleasures, really. You played truant. Yeah, played truant.

Jude Kelly5:00

Do we know how

Jude Kelly5:04

You played true.

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Found myself in trouble more often than I should have done and um the great thing that my head teacher said to me, which is flattery really, he said, Well, you must be an existentialist.

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And I had no idea what he was talking about. It's it sounded so good because instead of telling me off, he said, Well, the trouble is your creativity is out of kilter with what you're doing. So

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Why don't you think of interpreting it a different way? And he arranged that

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Myself and some of my other friends could do drama every lunchtime instead of going out to play, instead of being forced to go into the playground to hang about, he made us.

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Have free access to the hall to. But did you know you wanted to do drama and how did you know? I knew from when I was very young. I made up plays in the back garden. I read plays when I was 11 or 12 for English. And instead of seeing them as books, I saw them as patterns and sounds and three-dimensional objects. I saw them as people moving in space. You visualized it. I could see it, yeah. And I think that it was a salvation for me being taken seriously as an artist at an early age. What did you look like during this time? I want a picture of you.

Jude Kelly6:06

I could see it, yeah.

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Um well, I think I dressed quite outrageously. I had very long blonde hair'cause I'm one of four blonde sisters. I wore a lot of sort of goth eye makeup. Uh I used to like wearing white PVC Macs and um fish neck tights. So I was sort of outlandish, you know. And Hey Jude came out about this time. I mean you were Judith and became cool Jude. Yes, um it was

Jude Kelly6:36

Yeah.

Jude Kelly6:38

You would

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The Beatles had a huge influence, obviously. In fact, the whole of the Liverpool scene had a massive influence. I mean, I used to hang out with Roger McGough and Adrian Henry, they were all way too old for me, and they were very kind. I used to sing in a folk club underneath the Liverpool Everyman when I was fifteen. And then I was witnessing at first hand the fact that these Liverpool artists were very irreverent about things that were a little bit humourless, but they were very committed to the idea of being artists. And I found that inspiring, and it enabled me to carry on being a good schoolgirl eventually and passing my exams and you know, and so on.

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Tell me about record number two.

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Joni Mitchell's Blue. This idea, she says in it, you know, that everybody thinks that hell's the hippest place to go. Well, I don't think so, but I'm going to take a look around me.

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idea that if you don't re-emerge from somewhere, then you'll get trapped. I I found that a really important line for me.

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Everybody's saying that hell's the hippest way to go, well I don't think so, but I'm gonna take a look around it though.

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Joni Mitchell and Blue. Everyone says hell is the way to go. I don't think so, but I'll take a look around. Do you think that's what you did, do you?

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I I think I'd be too dramatic compared to other people's stories if I said that, but I I certainly sniffed around a little bit. I'm glad I didn't stay there. And the backdrop to this was, as you said, you were one of four sisters and you and your father was toiling away as a civil servant trying to get promotion so he could do better by the family.

Jude Kelly8:25

Hmm.

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My family came from very ordinary and quite impoverished backgrounds in terms of my father. And I did watch him determine that his life was going to be one where he tried to fulfil all his capacity. And so every night more or less, I remember him when I was young going into the dining room after we'd had tea and sitting down and studying, and then he'd pass another exam, and then he'd get promoted. And I watched our financial circumstances change. We were the first generation from his family for the girls to all go to university. And it it's meant a great deal to me.

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Your problem was when you got to university uh to do drama at Birmingham, wasn't it, that they weren't best encouraging, weren't they? For you, because you were saying you wanted to be a a theatre director, or a director, generally speaking. I have some really vivid memories of university. Of course, there are some exceptions to this rule, there were good people there, but then I also remember in year one saying, Well, I want to be a director, and this chap saying to me, Well, there are three female directors that Britain's famous for. One of them is a lesbian, one of them's Joan Littlewood, and she's retired, and one of them's Buzz Goodbody, and she's committed suicide. Which of the three do you fancy being then?

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Anyway, I

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I did go and form my own theatre company separate from the university, which I wasn't supposed to do, but I did. You came out of university, you stuck at your ambition, but you did in fact spend a year acting, didn't you? Why did you do that? I wanted to find out what it was like to be directed by a professional director. I went specifically to join Michael Bogdanov and spend a year in Leicester because in theatre, on one level, you're all working colleagues, but the director is seen to be the intellectual centre. And I think it's crucial that the director understands a great deal about the language with which one needs to talk to other artists. Because at some point, of course, the director has to let go. Having talked to the actor or actress about the nature of the part, the shape of the part, and so on, then you've got to let go and let that actor communicate directly with the audience, haven't you? Yes, it's a really interesting balance, the tension.

Jude Kelly10:36

Yeah.

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Between the vision you might have for the piece and the fact that when other creative people come around you, not just the actors but also the designer and so on, you have got to have a shared commitment. And then finally, the vehicle through which the whole story will be imparted will be the actor. And you mustn't interfere with that too grossly because it's not going to work finally. I mean, the relationship between an actor and an audience is the reason why theatre finally exists.

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Record number three.

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This is Janet Baker singing from Elgar's Sea Pictures.

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I sang with Janet Baker, or at least I sang to her back. I was in choirs um when I was at university and she came and did The Dream of Gerontius and

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I'd never been that near to a voice of that scale. And the combination of poetry and the the the musicality that Elgar's weaved around the images, in particular this piece about um death.

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I found

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Comforting.

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Because if you're on a desert island you

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You know that you're alone.

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But then

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You're always alone, really.

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To leave me, leave me, left me all sin a land where corals lie.

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Dame Janet Baker singing Where Corals Lie from Elgar's Sea Pictures with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbarolly. You've um just been doing Wizard of Oz, Jude Kelly, and Singing in the Rain is on tour. It's been a great hit for you, Singing in the Rain, in Leeds and then at the National Theatre, and it won an Olivier Award.

Jude Kelly13:07

One of the

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Were they the films and shows that inspired your childhood?

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Yes, I grew up on three films when I was little, Singing in the Rain, High Noon and Wizard of Oz. They're all films I think that my parents loved and we watched them all the time and I realized that they'd become part of my emotional

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Paving stones, you know, I think it's a good idea. Thinking of a millennium project, wasn't it? Well, yes, you came up with Singing in the Rain. Singing in the Rain is about the time when the movies go from silent to talkies and everybody was terrified of the technology change. And it was the millennium, we were choosing a Christmas show. Everybody was talking about the fact that the planes were going to crash at the millennium, the computers were all going to go down.

Jude Kelly13:29

Yeah.

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Yeah, you can

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And I also had been working with them.

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A water artist, a water sculptor, who I knew could create this incredible rainstorm and it would be like indoor magic. But how did you do it? It was magic. I mean, buckets and buckets of the stuff. And you couldn't do singing in the rain if you couldn't achieve that because we all know the film too well. Yeah, well, it was an irrigation system and a sort of.

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But how did you do it?

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And we could

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An amazing design, which is now out on tour. A trade secret, I have to say, but nevertheless, I knew I could do it, or he could do it. And I also wanted to make films as part of the telling of the story of Singing in the Rain, because I wanted to use technology, modern technology, to reflect the theme. And this theme of moving from the silent movies to the talk is. Yeah. Is that what Gene Kelly is singing about then when he's Singing in the Rain?

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Yeah, and Uh

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I think what Gene Kelly is singing about is the liberation of saying this is who I am, because in the story, he was playing a sort of, he had been a hoofer, a song and dance man, a great song and dance man, who'd had to pretend he was actually a proper actor and gone into sign-up movies and been in fancy dress and you know, playing sort of Edward and Elizabethan heroes. When the talkies came along, he realised that suddenly he could do the thing he'd been hiding. He could be a song and dance man on screen. And realising that, and realising it through somebody he'd met and fallen in love with, he suddenly goes, I'm free, I'm naked, I'm in the rain and I'm wet and I can be who I am. Number four.

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This is Yehudi Menuin playing the first movement of Berg's violin concerto. It's a piece that was written in the mid thirties, but I used it for a play that I did about the Holocaust and about the memories of the Holocaust. There's so much fragmentation.

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in the piece. And I as soon as I heard it

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I knew it it spoke of.

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pain and disintegration and a sort of

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need to find solace somehow. And then when I looked at at the um the reason why Burke had written it, I found he'd written it in response to a young person's death.

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Yehudi Menuin playing the opening of Berg's violin concerto with the B B C Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez.

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Just to trace the path of your career briefly, Jude Kelly, you you got your first directing job when you were twenty-two as artistic director of the Solent People's Theatre, which you set up from scratch. I mean, fearless stuff. There was no building as such, it wasn't a theatre, it was a travelling company. Where did you perform? What sort of things did you do and where? The brief was to take theatre to unexpected places. Pubs, special schools, youth clubs, old people's homes, main theatre stages. We did

Jude Kelly17:16

No.

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Huge outdoor pageants. It was a a vast range. But how would you get into a pub? I mean, wouldn't they look at you and say, you know, um we don't want you in here, we just want to drink our beer? Absolutely, they would.

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Well, I used to go to sell the idea to different publicans and say, look, you know, it'll be one night, you'll never had it before. It will come in, we'll set up at 5.30, the locals come come in, if they don't like it, perhaps they can go into the other bar, but j give it a go, you know. And people were very game. They, in the main, they thought they would try it. And yes, you'd get the locals coming in at 7.30 and then we'd be starting a show. And the big thing was, could you capture their interest? Could you fire them up? Could you c make it sustained through an entire evening? Would they then say to the publican, book them again? They're great.

Jude Kelly18:20

Great.

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Well, we kept going, you know, it was obviously a big success. Were there any particular moments when you felt you really were communicating, when some you know, you were getting across in the way that you wanted to? Well, there were many moments when, for example, in special schools we would perform big visual pieces and often children would speak, call out, stand up and say, No, no, he mustn't do that, you know, the way they do it in theatre gets so involved. And teachers would say afterwards, I've never heard that child speak. Again and again you saw the effect, and I still see it on a daily basis, of how art strikes a chord in somebody and they feel more fearless.

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They feel more soulful. They find parts of themselves. It ignites parts of themselves. Then you went on to Battersea Arts Centre, which again you created from scratch, didn't you? And there you championed, you directed Fascinating Aida and the National Theatre of Brent. I mean, what did you do with them? Because they were doing Wagner's Ring, Lawrence of Reggie. I mean, this two-man company doing the law. I did a a piece of work called The Messiah that we did quite a lot actually at the Edinburgh Festival and we then filmed it for television. I did History of Sex, which was nothing about sex really, but it was great fun. Battersea existed as an arts centre created by a local the local authority Wandsworth, but then it was closed down and I reopened it and spread its intention so it's still

Jude Kelly19:22

The Lord

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It had a cinema, it had theatres, it had a fantastic cafe. It still exists, as you know, it's thriving. Next piece of music.

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When I was nineteen I wanted to find out a little bit more about Irish rural community drama and I wanted to explore a little bit more about my Irish origins just to find out whether it meant anything to me. And I went to the Gaeltuck areas in Ireland and found an extraordinary wealth of activity that had been activated mainly through the inspiration.

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of Shaunerada.

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revitalizing the Shalachi tradition, which is a storytelling tradition, revitalizing the song. And when you hear Shado Reida singing this song, the love of being an artist springs out. Also he you can hear the audience responding to him and really they feel that he's singing on their behalf.

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I serve and grown though I am no

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And my days are up.

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Sean O'Reida and Carrick Fergus. Not only did you create the West Yorkshire Playhouse from scratch, it sounds as if you practically built the thing, Jude, because you were appointed before the first brick, I think, had gone in place and you were there for the topping out ceremony, hmm? Yes, of course what really happened was that 25 years prior, a small group of people had sat round in a room in Leeds and written a white paper saying that they really, really wanted a theatre to be built.

Jude Kelly21:18

Yeah.

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And that resulted in a temporary space for sixteen years, which was the Leeds Playhouse, and then finally this magnificent building. I remember being at the topping out ceremony with the builders, and we were all standing around in hard hats, the topping out ceremony when they sort of finally say the wa the roof is watertight. And Albert Finney, who'd been an early patron,

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opened a bottle of champagne and everybody cheered and it was so exciting. And then the poultry said to me afterwards, well it'll be Asdra in two years, love.

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Because it was that sort of red brick supermarket architecture. Yes, it's it's what they called then the Leeds look. I think Leeds is a lot more adventurous than than it was even twelve years ago. Or was it because they didn't really think theatre would kind of catch on in Leeds? Were they being a lot of people were sceptical?

Jude Kelly22:07

Yeah.

Jude Kelly22:13

Or was it big?

Jude Kelly22:18

I see

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You know, it's a very big space. It's one of the largest, if not the largest, regional theatre.

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It laid itself out for being ridiculed, really. It was a long process, obviously, and I'm sure you made lots of mistakes along the way, but obviously you also

Jude Kelly22:30

It was a little

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It ultimately made a great success of it. What are the guiding principles, would you say, of doing that? Bringing.

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the theatre into the community and the community into the theatre.

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Well, first of all you have to believe that

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It's worth doing. It has to be a personal conviction on behalf of you and the people you work with. It's not something you can do because somebody else tells you you ought to do it.

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If you have a very large theatre, as we do, then you can afford to be diverse because you have many spaces to fill and lots of evenings to fill things with.

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And the ability to do it comes from the fact that you you know, I think you have to like people. You have to be interested in a huge range of people. And when I talk about the community, you know, I'm talking about everybody from the you know, the the the gentry in Richmond of Yorkshire to people living on the housing estates right beside the playhouse.

Jude Kelly23:19

You know

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Tell me in a couple of sentences what's the production you've put on that you're proudest of.

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The production that I'm proudest of achieving in total would be

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Wallo show ink was Beatification of Area Boy.

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Walashinkwa, Nobel Prize winner.

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Great Nigerian.

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international artist was a wanted man in Nigeria when I did this play. He wrote a modern musical theatre piece, Brechtian-like, about the streets of Nigeria and he sent it to me and said, try your hand at this. I was incredibly pleased that he'd asked me to do it. And I went to Nigeria, took the play with me in secret, auditioned Nigerian actors in secret, so they put themselves at great personal risk. And then when we were performing the play, Ken Sarawiwa and his colleagues were hung during that run. And Nigerians from all over Britain came to see the work and

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think about their country and about what it was suffering. And it was a privilege record number six. Well my first boyfriend introduced me to Bob Dylan. He also wore colourful PVC Macs and that's probably why I had one. And uh he had bright red hair and he was a bit of a poet. In fact he still is a poet.

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And he just used to play me Bob Dylan and say this is one of the greatest poets in the world.

Speaker 224:50

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship. My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip, my toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels to be wandering.

Jude Kelly25:06

Peel.

Speaker 225:08

Hey Mr. Tambourine, mine fly song for me. In the jingle jangle morning, I come following you.

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Tambourine Man. You didn't get the top job at the National Theatre, Jude. You were one of the favourites, but it went earlier this year to Nicholas Heitner.

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How disappointed were you?

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Must have hit quite hard. I think I was as disappointed as one ought to be if you put yourself up for a really big challenge like that. I mean, it would be inhuman for it not to have meant something that I didn't get it. It was great to have got to that position, though. The main charge against you seems to have been that some consider you, and I quote because it was much printed and you'll have read it many times, a better producer than director, and that at the National you have to be both. I mean, again, you could argue you had been both. You were as we know, the West Yorkshire Playhouse was called the National Theatre of the North. But is there something in that judgment? I mean, from everything we've talked about, about this creating of the bars, the bringing things into the community, yes, of course you've directed pieces along the way, but

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Is not your greatest talent in actually creating this great community spirit?

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I haven't propelled myself into the industry as primarily a director. I've chosen to make a a big theatre out of London, work as a as a whole entity, and including in that included in that is my work as a director.

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I mean your question was specifically do I think I didn't get the job because I wasn't viewed as a top director? Possibly.

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But I'm not.

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sad about the fact that this mixture of things that I do is what's made the playhouse work. But you're leaving Leeds anyway and uh you're moving to London. What what are you what are you going to do? Will you take on a permanent post again? Or?

Jude Kelly26:54

What

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Do you just want to freelance and spread? The reason for coming to London was partly because.

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Our sons have gone to the Royal Ballet School. And partly because I have found a space in London called Metal, I've called it Metal, which was the old Westhampstead ticket office, which I've sort of excavated. And I'm developing as an arts lab for thinkers and artists to come together to research. There's no productions, it's all research, it's all experimental. I think it will produce productions, but not in that space.

Jude Kelly27:23

So,

Jude Kelly27:27

I think it'll produce

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Michael number seven.

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I was introduced to opera.

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By an actor who asked me to listen to a piece on the headphones. And it was in the back of a touring van when I was in Michael Bogdanov's company. And I just.

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went straight into this piece of music with John Sutherland singing

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The mad scene from Lucia, and I don't think I'd ever heard the human instrument used in such a an extraordinary way.

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Joan Sutherland in the mad scene, so called from Donnizette is Lucia de Lamamour, with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Richard Bonning. It's an amazing piece of colorator, isn't it? Will you go mad like that on this desert island?

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I was thinking I might just play it very loudly to passing ships and hope that they might rescue me. I I don't know if I go mad. I suspect on a desert island that you might

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become very tranquil with the

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Wi with the comfort you get around you visually. You've mentioned death quite a lot actually throughout the whole discussion here this morning. Um and and you're no stranger to it, are you? Because I think you've lost friends and a sister and a small baby.

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Does that mean that you find it um a a frightening business or or

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Are you a friend of death, as it were?

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I don't find it frightening. I

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Feel

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that you should prepare yourself all the time for for an inevitable extinguishing of yourself, and you must take

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joy in what you're able to have while you're here.

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And you must take joy in

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the people you meet for as long as they're there, because i it is totally arbitrary and ad hoc when someone suddenly uh disappears. So you've just got to be in readiness for it. And I think that's not a sombre thing to do. It is not a melancholy thing to do. I think it's um a curious and interesting thing to do to think about death.

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Last record.

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Well, that's probably why I've chosen this too, because

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In a Landscape is a piece by John Cage, and it never resolves musically.

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It keeps turning around and thinking about itself and coming back in on itself, like the sea.

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And it doesn't answer anything. There's no climax. There's no catharsis. It leaves you.

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to have to balance out all the imponderables.

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And

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That seems a good thing to do.

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Anthony DeMaire playing the opening of John Cage's Inner Landscape. Well, there you are, In Your Landscape, Jude, on this island. If you could only have one of those records with you, which one would you have?

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I think I'd probably have that one.

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And your book.

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Complete Shakespeare, of course, then. Well, I I asked if I could commission a book, and you said I could. So

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I'm going to commission David Hockney, who I like and admire and is a friend, to do the complete history of visual art.

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And

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then I'm going to ask a number of people to do little extracts in it, forwards. Um John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Jeanette Winterton, who I think is very interesting and various philosophers I haven't tapped the shoulder of yet, because it's not just what was created, but

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how other people view it and how history has viewed art that sometimes removes it from people or gives it back to them or allows them to suddenly see things in well a different way. What about a luxury? Sounds like a luxury actually. Um I I think I just need a a pencil and a book and a way of sharpening the pencil would be fine.

Presenter33:16

Jude Kelly, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

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You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.