John Godber on Spring Street and Ferensway
February 4, 2009
“I never really expected it to come alive,” John Godber admits. “It’s been an idea in the ether for 30 years and now it’s actually built. We can’t wait to get into it. Using a sporting simile, we’ve been playing in an old tin hut and winning 2-0 against the rain for 30-odd years. Now we have the opportunity to get into a purpose-built theatre that won’t leak and will have all the things that most other renowned theatre companies don’t even think about, like proper rehearsal facilities and showers that don’t give you salmonella poisoning.”
Godber, by far the longest serving of Hull Truck’s two artistic directors, is explaining the excitement and satisfaction that its imminent move from Spring Street to a new, £15m, purpose-built home on Ferensway has stirred. The company has compared the transition, which it will make soon after performances of Godber’s classic Bouncers end on 14 February, to Hull City’s move from Boothferry Park to the KC Stadium in 2002. However, Godber notes that the comparison is not wholly consistent; City’s move has been accredited with kick-starting the club’s progression to English football’s top tier, but Truck has an established national reputation that was recently underlined when Daily Telegraph theatre critic Charles Spencer named it the country’s ninth best in 2008 (and second outside London). “Don’t forget that, while we work out of a tin hut in Hull, we’ve tended to play places like The Crucible and The Lyceum in Sheffield – huge theatres,” he says. “It’s not that we’re unfamiliar with large spaces, it’s just that we’ve never had one as our home theatre.”
This reasoning is really the pivot of Godber’s argument that Spring Street’s atmosphere and fare, and the company’s ethos, will be carried safely into Ferensway. When I ask him what changes the new performance space will benefit from, he replies “None”, before qualifying this slightly. “It’s higher – the current height to the rig is 11’. In the new space it’s 24’ to the rig, so we’ll be able sculpt the light better, ‘cause we’ve got the height. There are limited flying facilities and no hydraulics – we’ve gone for a stage design that’s entirely based on what works. We’ve got state of the art acoustic levels and sound systems, but we were told right from the off that, when you’re building a new theatre, you shouldn’t change the policy. If you look at what happened at the Hampstead, although Tony Clark is a great director, they’re only finding their feet just now.” He contrasts this with an example of the opposite strategy. “In Scarborough, when they moved from the Westwood to the Stephen Joseph, Alan (Ayckbourn) tried to maintain the sanctity, if you like, of the performance space, and that’s what we’ve done.”
Beyond the stage itself, however, Godber and co-artistic director Gareth Tudor Price have not been so insistent on continuity. “I’m a big fella and I can’t get into the (Spring Street) seats,” Godber says. “Joking apart, one of the reasons (early) plays only lasted 45 minutes was that you couldn’t sit in those seats for any longer. We’d have had the NHS on our backs because of deep vein thrombosis. Now the seats have gone from EasyJet to British Airways first class.”
As well as the replacement of Spring Street’s 294 parsimonious seats by Ferensway’s more accommodating 440, Truck will also gain its first studio theatre. This will provide a platform for shows “that won’t necessarily find a big audience” and scope for Truck to expand its policy of supporting and showcasing new writing, but Godber’s emphasis on its versatility indicates that he is probably open-minded about how else it will be used. “In the first instance there’ll be one man shows and youth theatre. We’re opening with 12 new plays by young writers performed by the youth theatre – there’s a very strong commitment to youth and education. The space will also be used for jazz and dance and probably corporate events and salsa evenings – in a way, it’s got a multipurpose facility built into it. The main space is a theatre, whereas the studio has retractable seats and is a blank box.”
While Truck’s policies of encouraging and backing local writers and undertaking various forms of community work are well publicised, Godber expects its relationship with the city as a whole to be enhanced more dramatically. “We’re hoping that people will feel that they have ownership of the building and come in and have a cup of coffee and a panini on a stick, or whatever the hell we’re going to serve, and feel that they’ve got somewhere to dwell for a while,” he explains, “so the building gives a real sense of place for the company within the city. As a reputation, that’s one thing, but this is now an edifice that you can see, and it’s right smack bang in the city centre. If you’re from Hull and didn’t know about Hull Truck before, I don’t know where you’ve been for the last 35 years, but now you won’t be able to miss it.”
-John Godber was talking to Simon Walker
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