Kate Pakenham: ‘It feels almost criminal not to share work as widely as possible’

Kate Pakenham is showing me round the Donmar Warehouse’s new hub on Dryden Street – a converted warehouse five minutes from the theatre.

The space was originally due to have a bachelor-pad vibe, she tells me – all exposed metal and sleek fittings – but by the time it was done, she and artistic director Josie Rourke had taken over the Donmar: the first all-female team to lead a top London theatre.

Eclectic furniture splashes the place with colour. Retro lightbulbs soften the public spaces. The centrepiece is a staircase – not plain as planned, but bright red and carved up by block-colour shapes, like a macaw with dazzling camouflage.

It’s five years since the pair took over the Covent Garden theatre and in that time they have quietly overhauled the entire organisation – not that you would know it at a glance.

Superficially, the Donmar’s work seems much the same as ever. Rourke is still serving up sought-after stars in sleek, chic stagings; the same mix of classy revivals and distinctive new plays. It’s certainly a more daring Donmar – a home, these days, to improbable oddities like James Graham’s election special The Vote and next year’s verbatim musical based on select committee transcripts. The hallmark remains one of sheer quality, just as it was under her predecessors Michael Grandage and Sam Mendes.

Yet, while the shows seem broadly familiar, the structures around them are almost unrecognisable. The Donmar has developed its social conscience. Though the two women work in tandem, the changes behind that technically fall under Pakenham’s remit. One of her mantras is this: context matters – every bit as much as the work itself.

Tall, blonde and never less than well-dressed, Pakenham is surprisingly tentative in person. In photographs, she always looks resolutely together – glossy and beaming – as she poses with artists and luminaries, yet she says she rarely feels it. “Very, very shy” as a child, she starts our interview almost by excusing herself: “I don’t normally do this,” she demurs, “but you caught me at a moment of leaping off cliffs.”

We’re in Rourke’s office at the Dryden Street HQ – me on an orange sofa that won’t stop squeaking, Pakenham folded into a low-slung armchair. The lights are on an energy-saving timer, and Pakenham apologises every time they cut out, reaching awkwardly behind her head to reset them. She often checks herself when speaking, and one gets the sense she’s far more at ease with Rourke by her side. “Josie is much clearer and stronger than me. I question everything endlessly. I’m all about questions.” It is, she says, “quite a good balance”.

In 2012, Pakenham and Rourke inherited a puzzle – a small, successful theatre that seemed continually sold out. Built in a former banana-ripening warehouse in Covent Garden, the Donmar Warehouse seats only 252, and it regularly sells all its tickets in advance.

Not surprising: it is one of the most brilliant playing spaces in the country. Opened in 1977, it was originally the late Howard Davies’ baby, before being rebuilt by Roger Wingate and passed on to Mendes. Its squat thrust stage is overhung by a balcony and backed by a brick wall that rockets upwards.

The intimacy, Pakenham stresses, is very precious: “Its ancient magic is its great height. The height gives it an epic quality and that crucible is very special. I believe you can do anything in that room.”

Anything except get a ticket, apparently. In fact, only two of the previous regime’s shows sold out, but when it comes to accessibility, perception is a problem. If you’re seen as a closed shop, you might as well be a closed shop – and, by 2011, the Donmar was. Its membership scheme had outgrown the space.

“It was very challenging,” Pakenham sighs. “There was a sense of the Donmar as an exclusive members’ club, and it felt really fundamental to us that the audience was mixed. An open theatre is not a theatre with a homogeneous audience. If you look at New York’s not-for-profit theatres, they’ve increasingly become members’ subscription houses. That isn’t healthy. It was a real fear for us.”

Continues…

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Q&A: Kate Pakenham

What was your first non-theatre job? Trainee script supervisor on the film Braveheart.

What was your first professional theatre job? Old Vic New Voices at London’s Old Vic.

What is your next job? The Power Season at the Donmar Warehouse.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? There’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Just do exciting work that you believe in.

Who or what was your biggest influence? My two grandmothers. Two very loving and wise women from very different backgrounds, who both instilled in me a care for people and a belief that anything is possible.

If you hadn’t been a producer, what would you have done? Worked in education.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? No

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Fast-forward five years and the Donmar’s reach is wider than ever when one takes into account its digital audience. Phyllida Lloyd’s revolutionary all-female Shakespeare is winding up in King’s Cross, with a quarter of tickets going free to under-25s. Rourke’s lavish Les Liaisons Dangereuses is still running on Broadway, as well as being available online as an audio performance, and this month, Gemma Arterton’s Saint Joan will be broadcast via NT Live – the latest in the Donmar’s digital output. A theatre that can seat 100,000 a year is reaching many times that.

That process started with a restructure of its membership scheme. “We had to take our members on a journey,” says Pakenham. The Donmar couldn’t afford to lose them or their advance sales, but opening up access necessitated change.

“We’ve delicately changed the tier structure,” she continues – and by delicately, Pakenham means drastically. Perks that started at £30 – priority booking on two seats per show – now cost more than £75. Those at £60 are now £350. A further tier starts at £1,000. It’s canny: a merger of membership and philanthropy. “The whole business relies on people going up the giving ladder.”

Given a theatre more or less at capacity, and arts funding on the wane, fundraising now accounts for 54% of the Donmar’s income – some £3.4 million a year. Of that, the majority (60%) comes from individuals, and the Donmar has found that by drawing a more direct line from giving to access, the amount it can raise increases.

That’s behind its new ticket scheme, Young+Free – a novel approach to bringing in new audiences to see Lloyd’s Shakespeare trilogy. Of the 105 free tickets available at each performance, 70% went to first-time audiences – far higher than its existing Front Row scheme had managed. Using a ‘pay it forward’ model based on individual donations directly funding tickets, the scheme will continue into the next year and on. The Donmar’s Jiminy Cricket is chirruping.

Though Pakenham has long admitted to being “a massive romantic about theatre”, the Shakespeare trilogy seems to have changed her as a producer. Lloyd’s all-female productions, set in a women’s prison, have proved one of the most important interventions in British theatre in decades. They have changed perceptions and possibilities alike.

Pakenham begins: “It was the first time that I had done something, almost in my life, that I had done something…” She tails off, suddenly teary-eyed, and changes tack. “When we did Julius Caesar in 2012, it felt incredibly risky. It’s easy to forget now, in a season with a female King Lear and a Henry V, just how risky that seemed.”

 Some of the reviews bore that out – viciously so. The Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker called it “a load of old tosh” that “would assuredly have had its writer feeling every bit as betrayed as Brutus”, while his colleague at the Daily Telegraph Charles Spencer pinched Dr Johnson’s line likening a woman preaching to a “dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all”.

That, so I’m told, spurred Pakenham to push the project much further than anyone anticipated. Originally planned as a single show, the whole trilogy – including its three New York transfers – was born off the back of those words. “They became the propulsion,” she admits. “I thought, I’m not going to let that stop us. I knew I wanted to get it to New York, and the trilogy has grown and grown out of that. A project that started off about women in crisis has become about diversity in a much wider sense.”

This is the creative producer in Pakenham. Unlike some executive directors, she remains hands-on with individual productions and programmes seasons in partnership with Rourke. That’s partly historic – Caro Newling invented the job in the Mendes era – and partly a conscious choice. “I love bringing people together: creating a culture and a community that faces in the same direction,” she says. “You’re curating a group of people into a conversation that you think is important.”

Producing at the Donmar is a particular thrill. Given that the space can hold all manner of work, each project has its own particular path. “What really excites me is where you go beyond that. We can be very specific about the route of any particular project – whether it’s the West End or Broadway or something else. That’s where the skill of a producer comes in – finding the right context for a piece of work to fit in.”

In her time, the Donmar has taken many paths: conventional routes to Broadway and the West End, but also to New York’s not-for-profit theatres and its own pop-up space. Graham’s The Vote – a unique experiment – was broadcast on More4 on election night. It was seen live by 650,000 people and downloaded by another 100,000. NT Live bumps up its digital output, as do inspired social media campaigns such as #Charadespeare and #OneTakeShakespeare.

“As a producer, my feeling is that anything is possible. If an idea’s good enough and important enough, and your mission is strong enough, it’s my job to make it possible.” Pakenham is open to all sorts of paths to make that happen – be they theatrical transfers or other digital platforms: “It feels almost criminal not to share work as widely as possible, if we can do that without compromising the artistic integrity.”

That, of course, means taking risks – but that’s what producers do. “It’s best when it feels like you’re jumping off a cliff, holding the hands of really great people and trusting that someone’s got a parachute on.” For all her drive to do good, Pakenham still has the thrillseeker’s instinct: “I kind of love the high-wire.”

Continues…

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Kate Pakenham on…

… the Donmar Warehouse There’s a great freedom at the Donmar to do this huge variety of work – from classics to new work to whatever else. I see the space as an incubator for ideas. It’s not for me to direct that creative process, but I love being able to go off in so many different directions.

… New York The Donmar’s always had a relationship with New York. It’s part of who we are, but it’s important to our artists as well. There’s a lot of crossover between two capitals of theatre, but Josie and I get a lot of inspiration from its sense that anything’s possible. We learn a lot from it.

… digital reach

You want to protect, fiercely, the magic space of the theatre, but I think if you are specific and smart in your use of digital, you can do great things in crossing over to new audiences and drawing them back in. It feels almost criminal not to share work as widely as possible, if we can do that without compromising the artistic integrity.

… subsidy

It’s the bedrock of our funding. You need it as the foundation stone to all your other funding partnerships. It’s very important to who we are, especially as we’ve grown our commitment to accessibility. 

… boards

A good board has diverse expertise that is being directed well, not a mish-mash. A board should be diverse in its skill set and focused on supporting specific areas of the business – a clarity of expertise.

… producing

It’s best when it feels like you’re jumping off a cliff, holding the hands of great people and trusting that someone’s got a parachute.

… the Donmar taking back its lease from the Ambassador Theatre Group in 2017

It’s quite a big moment for us. We have our own box office for the first time. We have control of the products that are served, how it looks, the pricing, all in a way that we’ve never had before.

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She is, in a way, an accidental producer. Her family is dominated by writers – her aunts include the historian Antonia Fraser and the author Rachel Billington – but she initially followed the other family profession: television. For four years after university, she worked in factual programming, even though she had “always wanted to work in theatre”, having acted and directed throughout her time at Cambridge. She and Rourke were contemporaries, but never met, though Pakenham auditioned for Rupert Goold and directed Olivia Colman. On graduating, however, she was too self-critical to chance her arm. “I didn’t think I had it in me.”

It took her until the age of 25 to do so – and even then she needed strong-arming by Sally Greene, who had just taken over at the Old Vic. They met at a Donmar press night. “I was banging on about how much I loved theatre and she said, ‘Give me six months and I’ll put you off.’ I stayed 11 years.”

She forged her own job there, founding Old Vic New Voices, a platform for emerging theatremakers, within six months.

“Old Vic New Voices was about collaboration,” Pakenham says. Previously, practitioners had been grouped by discipline – writers at the Royal Court, directors at the Young Vic and so on. Pakenham’s idea was to bring them together. “It was about saying to them, ‘I can’t tell you what your career should look like, but I will help you find a community.’ ” You could, quite legitimately, argue a link from that to the creative teams coming through on main stages today. A generation of theatre artists emerged in tandem.

“The Old Vic was an incredible context in which to say to young practitioners: ‘Come and meet each other, find your collaborators and then we’ll try to encourage conversation and find pathways.’ That’s what I am as a producer: a facilitator of other people’s ideas and collaborations.”

That, she insists, is what Dryden Street makes possible for the Donmar. Pakenham is clearly still in love with the place – as much for the practical gains as anything else. It has, she believes, fundamentally changed what the Donmar can do. The space is a huge step up. Once cramped into rented rooms, the administrative team has expanded to fill a sizeable open-plan office. There’s a supporters’ reception starting up downstairs, and, upstairs, a schools workshop winding down. “Our education work has gone up 40% since being here.”

One floor holds a mock-up of the Donmar’s auditorium, complete with a balcony, while another, right up top, is a flat for visiting artists. Kwame Kwei-Armah has just moved out after a directing gig. Associates have desk space or studios and, as we talk in Rourke’s office, a synth score seeps through the ceiling – Tom Deering is tinkering with his Charity Commission musical. “It’s a home for artists, but it’s also a place we can look after them.”

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CV: Kate Pakenham

Born: 1975, London
Training: University of Cambridge
Landmark productions: The 24 Hour Plays, Old Vic, London (2004-2011), The Norman Conquests, Old Vic (2008), Bridge Project, Old Vic (2009-2012), The Shakespeare Trilogy: Julius Caesar, the Donmar Warehouse (2012); Henry IV, Donmar (2014); The Tempest, King’s Cross Theatre (2016), Coriolanus, Donmar (2013), The Vote, Donmar (2015)
Awards: Olivier award for best musical revival for City of Angels (2015), The Longford Prize for the Donmar’s Shakespeare Trilogy (2016)

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The Donmar’s Shakespeare Trilogy runs at the King’s Cross Theatre, London, until December 17; Saint Joan will run at the Donmar from December 9 to February 19. For details see