Erica Whyman has won the Peter Brook Special Achievement Award in the Empty Space… Peter Brook Awards 2016 for her “astounding achievement of work as Chief Executive of Northern Stage, first woman artistic director of The Swan, deputy artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and for the re-opening of The Other Place Theatre.”
Whyman, who received the OBE in the 2012 New Year’s Honours list, joined the RSC in January 2013 after spending seven years as Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Newcastle’s Northern Stage.
Her final production in Newcastle was The Borrowers (December 2012) but probably her greatest triumph was the immensely powerful and critically acclaimed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 2011. She returned to Northern Stage in March this year with the RSC's A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation.