Mike Hughes talks to one of the star performers of the Darlington Hippodrome Theatre - Programming & Development Director Heather Tarran-Jones

 

AFTER a marathon show now lasting more than 114 years, Darlington’s beloved theatre is starting the fourth act.

Act I was as the Hippodrome and Palace Theatre of Varieties, which opened on September 2, 1907.

After it became the Civic, Act II took it back to being the Hippodrome, as part of a spectacular £13million revamp to give a brand look befitting one of the country’s top regional venues.

In Act III the villain made an appearance, as Covid tore through the leisure and entertainment sector, closing the doors on what should have been the start of an era in the spotlight.

But the Hippodrome staff simply refused to accept defeat, and worked tirelessly behind the scenes and in front of them to make sure that whenever it was safe they would be ready to welcome back adoring supporters from all over the region.

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Heather Tarran-Jones is at the head of this cast of stars and heroes who are now well into Act IV - the comeback.

Her role means she selects the shows that are coming to town, scouring West End listings and keeping her little black book of contacts wide open to find out who might be thinking of touring or which dates might be available for theatre companies all over the country.

The Hippodrome doesn’t produce its own shows, so the whole year’s schedule has to be negotiated - and they have to have wide appeal to cater for those who favour drama, musicals, comedy, stand-up or ‘an evening with...’

“So I curate the shows you would see on the schedule, but also, in the development part of my role I look after our engagement with local people, such as workshops, classes and development of an audience for particular genres,” she tells me from her office at the bottom of her garden in Yarm.

“That’s a wonderful part of my job because this place is part of the fabric of Darlington. It’s one of the highlights of the town and when people think of Darlington and what there is here, it will often crop up at the top of conversations.

“It’s a true privilege to work here and try to bring new things to the town, sometimes from around the world because I see it as a tremendous opportunity to open people’s minds up to new things, to creativity, and to push people’s zone of what is comfortable and what is not.

“It’s quite a responsibility to have at times.”

So Heather was really centre-stage when the pandemic hit - what does a theatre do when it can’t present shows?She admits that at first no one saw how long-term the impact was going to be. It started with a “slow trickle of panic” and then grew from there.

“The difficulty was that I’ve often got the programme set for the next 18 months and so all of that had to be picked up and and potentially - if we could - move it to a year and a half later.

“We had everything planned. We could see what was ahead of us. We could see that we had some fantastic shows that we’re going to come and visit us. And all of a sudden you had to unpick that. Then our worry was less about a programme that can always be fixed, but more about the 70 people we employ here.

“How are people going to continue to be paid when their wages come from the revenue that the theatre makes?”

Like an understudy called in just before the curtain rises, it was the Government that stepped up, firstly with short-term furlough money and then funding from the Arts Council and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport which offset the losses the Hippodrome was making because there were no shows.

“It meant that money could continue to pay salaries, to pay the overheads at the theatre and just to maintain us, to keeps us ticking along until we could start back up again,” she says.

Now the buzz is back, plans are being made, careers have been reignited and the town has culture at its heart once again - and feedback has been powerful.

“There’s a real desire for people to come back and do the things that they love doing and feel comfortable doing it,” says Heather.

“It certainly feels as though people are comfortable to come back, so all we can do is maintain our standards and hope that eventually when the virus is less of a risk and less of a danger we will be able to lessen the Covid procedures we have in place.

“As far as the programme is concerned, the theatre is really on the map now for shows, and the increased capacity makes a huge difference to that.

“We have a good standing in the industry and didn’t lose any of that during the coronavirus. If anything, the way we have performed with the restart of our season has only proven to the industry and those larger producers that are visiting us from the West End that we can do it and that we are selling seats.”

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Her gratitude to the people of the town who stood by the theatre just as it had stood by them for a century, is palpable. The bond has always been powerful, but for people to return, under fire, to rescue a fallen friend is life-affirming, and she and her team are reinvigorated by it and more determined than ever to repay it by continuing to grow.

That help has been in the form of tickets, of course, but also donations that have strengthened the theatre’s A Place For Everyone fund, an inclusion initiative to open it up and make sure no one misses out.

Even at this early stage of the return, growth is on the agenda.

Heather tells me: “There a financial growth plan in that we would like to increase audience sizes and make sure that we’re at full capacity more regularly, but there’s a balance we have to keep as well.

“A theatre like ours caters for all genres and at the moment things like drama don’t have the largest audiences. - but we can’t just stop offering it.

“So it’s an opportunity to try and grow an audience there if we bring the right theatre to town. We’re really working hard to bring the best possible. two-hour shows so that the people of Darlington don’t have to travel to the West End all the time.”

The Hippdrome’s place at the centre of the town is even more literal now, with work on a £105million transformation of the railway station bringing even more focus to that side of Darlington, renewing a link back to the days when shows used to arrive by train, from cast to scenery. Now the work there will make it easier and more comfortable for an audience to get here from places like Yorkshire and Cumbria.

And then there is the local audience, boosted by the arrival of culture-hungry Government staff.

“People don’t want to move to an area where there is no cultural offer,” says Heather.

“Museums, arts, galleries or whatever it is, people value that in their life however small a part it plays.

“We saw that when we moved online during the pandemic- people were just craving it.

"They were trying to access dance classes online or watch theatre, you could book in and watch speakers like Dawn French talk about their latest novel and we started to move our Youth Theatre dance online and we introduced some adult dance classes.

“Without that some people would think ‘well, what is life about then - is it just about work?”

It’s a good challenge - work is central to a lot of our lives, but Heather, the Hippdrome team and thousands of visitors who scour the programme brochure are proving that it isn’t all about the office, sometimes it’s about the Box Office too.

 

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