IN the re-shuffle of job titles at the Theatre Royal since the onset of the pandemic, you have upgraded from associate director to creative director. What is the significance of this change, Juliet?
“I’ve taken a shift in responsibilities. As associate director, I was part of the creative team overseeing all the programming, both in-house and touring, as well as heading up our creative work with young people.
“Now I’m focusing specifically on what we create ourselves. We’ve been looking at models of working that have been emerging in other theatres, since Damian [Cruden] left his post as artistic director in July 2019.
“The programme here used to be so much built around our own work with a bit of touring. Now, there are more co-productions and we spread out who’s directing the shows, like they do at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, for example.
“No longer having an artistic director, under chief executive Tom Bird, we now have a theatre maker as part of the bigger programming team, with producer Tom Freeth and associate artist John R Wilkinson, collaborating together, and I now lead our creative work and our community work.”