Oxford Playhouse’s Louise Chantal: ‘Support from our audiences showed how important it was for us to survive’

What are you most proud of from the past 19 months?

I’m proud of surviving. I’m also proud that regional theatres have proved how central they are to their communities. We worked out who the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people would be and linked up with organisations such as Age UK and the Oxfordshire Association for the Blind to create programmes for people whose support mechanisms had stopped during lockdown. Our Tea Talks project with Age UK was a way to check in with elderly people initially, but we ended up capturing their stories for a radio play. The oldest person who contributed was a 94-year-old who hadn’t been to the Playhouse for 20 years. Those barriers of access and transport have been broken down through our digital work.

What government assistance did you receive and how has it helped?

We were very lucky to be successful in the first two rounds of the Culture Recovery Fund. We furloughed all our permanent staff for the first four months on 100% of pay and our casual staff artists on 80%. Some of them had been part of the Playhouse family for 20 years, so we wanted to give them enough time to plan. We hired out the theatre to the University of Oxford for socially distanced lectures, so the technical and front-of-house teams could keep working. We also used the emergency funding to invest in digital, so we now have a state-of the-art audio-visual studio and retrained our staff to operate cameras. We’ve accelerated that digital development by about a decade.

What has been the impact on staff?

The team was extraordinary. When we announced that we’d have to make voluntary redundancies – we lost seven posts in the end – everyone was so supportive and utterly aware of the situation and the necessity of it. My joint chief executive, Vanessa Lefrancois, joined us as we went into lockdown and led on a lot of those difficult decisions. That process was tortuous, but I think we’re in a good place with the team now. I’m astonished daily by how upbeat, positive and flexible they are, and by their loyalty and commitment to the theatre.

What was your approach to reopening and how are how feeling about the future?

We reopened at the end of August with the musical Six, which was a complete sell-out. It was having the theatre full of people having such a great time that made us start to think that we’d be okay. For our panto, Robin Hood, we’d forecast much lower attendance, but we’re already at nearly 75% of what we projected and you couldn’t get a seat for love nor money for Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell last week. So we can sell comedy and the lighter stuff. The big test will be for the more serious dramas, for which audiences might take a while to come back. But for the lighter, mass audience shows, we’re looking fine.

What lessons will you take from the past year and a half?

Based on how much love and support we’ve had from audiences, the biggest lesson was realising how important it was to them for us to survive. We raised more than £300,000 with our Playhouse Plays On campaign, with donations from about 6,700 people. I received a handwritten note with £100 in cash from a lady who first visited the Playhouse as a teenager in 1952. Stuff like that has kept us all going. You’re only really a caretaker for a theatre like ours that has been open for 83 years. It’s an extraordinary privilege to keep it going.

See Oxford Playhouse website for further details: oxfordplayhouse.com