Next week Darlington’s Civic Theatre takes a break... but will return refreshed and renamed in autumn next year after an £11m refit. Chris Lloyd reports how one man transformed its fortunes 44 years ago

BY the late 1960s, Darlington’s Civic Theatre looked doomed. Its Edwardian finery had been neglected by its owner, Darlington council, which was pursuing plans to cover the town centre with concrete-and-glass civic amenities, and the standards of its shows had fallen so low that there were more dead pigeons in the balcony than there were paying customers in the stalls.

But as the decade turned, so the Civic’s fortunes changed. Planning inquiries saved the town centre and forced the council to reconsider its neglect of the managerless theatre.

The council bravely appointed Peter Tod, a 24-year-old administrative assistant from a theatre in Hull, and gave him the task of reviving the theatre.

Through hard work, Biggins and strawberry juice, he succeeded, launching Darlington Civic onto its trajectory to be the country’s most successful provincial theatre. Next week, Mr Tod will return and join the audience for a gala evening to mark the Civic’s closure.

Not, of course, that the theatre is closing permanently. It is merely shutting until next autumn for an exciting £11m refit.

But when Mr Tod turned up in January 1972, the Civic was on the verge of going dark forever. “When I arrived, we were doing Jack and the Beanstalk with Linda Barron and Arthur English,” he says. “It was a shock – it wasn’t my concept of panto.

“Then there was a miners’ strike, and the electricity was off some nights. Bookings were poor, so we cancelled some shows and blamed it on there being no electricity.”

On one day, ticket sales amounted to only £5.95; for one show, just 121 made up the audience, and earnings were a paltry £15.45.

But he began putting on a series of plays, encouraging people to buy season tickets. He redecorated the front of house – “my flock wallpaper is still on the staircase walls,” he says, “some people thought I had no taste because it was very popular in Chinese restaurants at the time”. He teamed up with London managers to get big names; he teamed up with Dressers so that the theatre stars also did literary lunches. The Friends of the Theatre grew – “we held strawberry fairs at Raventhorpe prep school, and I remember de-stalking hundreds of punnets of strawberries and ended up covered in strawberry red”.

He integrated the theatre into the town – in 1973, he judged the Darlington Miss Chrysanthemum Queen – and then took it up the dales, through his talks and visits. In fact, it was impossible to escape the theatre: it was advertised on bread bags in the market; it featured on postmarks at Christmas.

And he put a modern, lavish panto production as the cornerstone revenue-earner of the theatre’s year. In 1974, for Mother Goose, he persuaded Christopher Biggins, fresh from his success alongside Ronnie Barker in Porridge, to take the lead role.

“I had seen Biggins when I had started my career in Salisbury,” says Mr Tod. “I had clocked him – and I was the first person to give him the panto dame part and he’s been doing it for 40 years.”

Biggins is to compere Tuesday’s gala evening (MAY 31), and in his biography, he tells how he was initially offended by Mr Tod’s approach.

“I took great umbrage,” he said. “All the Dames I’d seen were ancient. I was offended right up until the point they mentioned the money. Panto is a lucrative business but this was incredible – I was being offered £1,000 a week in 1974. Then there was the role itself. Mother Goose is on stage all the time. She may have been a fat old bird, but I couldn’t say no to this golden egg.”

The Northern Echo:
Peter Tod dancing with Dame Margot Fonteyn in 1976

Perhaps the crowning glory of Mr Tod’s reign was January 30, 1976, when Dame Margot Fonteyn came for a gala performance. “It was a coup for the theatre,” he says. “It happened a week after panto and someone had dropped a stageweight in the middle of the stage and so it had to be resanded because we couldn’t have her dancing with a big dent in the stage.”

Mr Tod left the Civic in 1979 after seven years, in which time seat occupancy rate had risen from 20 per cent to 83 per cent, and a theatre that had been struggling to fill even a quarter of its 601 seats was launching an enlargement campaign called “800 for the 80s”.

He has since run theatres in Bristol and Birmingham, but has always kept an eye on the fortunes of the Civic. The new plans will bring more seats, better circulation areas and bars, bigger back stage facilities and a name change – it will reopen under its original 1907 name as the Darlington Hippodrome.

“I can see the word ‘civic’ isn’t very trendy, but it was the local authority over the last 50 years that has ensured that the theatre is where it is today,” he says, “and I am in admiration of the plans. They are absolutely right, and we are fortunate that the Lottery can help us.

“In my talks to WIs up the dales, I finished with the line “optimus petamus” – it was the council’s motto and it meant “let us seek the best”, and I’m glad that the Civic/Hippodrome is going into a new era still doing just that.”

Live at the Hippodrome on Tuesday, May 31, is compered by Christopher Biggins and is billed as a “glittering evening of live music, comedy, magic, dance and entertainment”. It stars singer Mari Wilson, comedy magician Matt Edwards Darlington Operatic Society, The Vocal Soul Community Choir, ArtsSpark, and singer Beth Stobbart, plus Chris Lloyd will present the story of the theatre’s founder, Signor Rino Pepi. Tickets are £18 and £20. Phone 01325 486555 or darlingtoncivic.co.uk