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Interviews
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Queen of All She Surveys Philip Fisher interviews Nica Burns, President of SOLT and co-owner of production company Nimax and five West End Theatres. Nica Burns is an effervescent personality who exudes enthusiasm as she talks fluently about her life and career in her office attached to the Vaudeville Theatre. From the humblest of beginnings, she has risen to the top of her profession but is still willing to take time out to talk about her love affair with show business. Miss Burns is, with her Nimax business partner Max Weitzenhoffer, co-owner of five West End theatres (Apollo, Lyric, Vaudeville, Garrick and Duchess) and a very active producer. That would be enough for most people but this feisty lady is also president of the Society of London Theatre and remains the moving force behind the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, which have gone from strength to strength since she founded them over 25 years ago. While one might expect plays and playwrights, directors and actors to be the main topics of conversation, the bubbly producer with dark, curly hair can be charmingly unpredictable. She is almost as likely to go into paroxysms of delight about toilets fit for a Duchess at the theatre of that name, rather than the play going on near to them, or present a birthday cake to a national newspaper critic during an interval during a brief impromptu surprise celebration. The junior version had wanted to appear on the other side of the curtain from childhood. "I always wanted to be in theatre. I thought I was going to be a ballet dancer." After completing a law degree and a drama course, she became an actress particularly specialising in Sandy Wilson's The Boyfriend "because I could dance". It was at Crewe Rep, impolitely dubbed Colditz, that she met Dillie Keane and Marilyn Cutts and, when they formed Fascinating Aida, became their director and choreographer. The next major development was when she wrote an adaptation of an H E Bates novella called Dulcima and recklessly decided to take it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe "with my total savings, £600 I had saved up in rep - every penny I had in the world at that time". She was unflustered by the massive risk and literally had to go and live at home with her family to fund the show. Astonishingly "we made a profit of £38 and it is the thing I am still to this day prouder of than anything else I've done - that whole adventure". It became an Edinburgh Festival dream. "You go off to Edinburgh, you get great reviews, get noticed, get tour dates, everything happens as you would have written it for yourself". If only it were the same for every tyro Edinburgh producer/performer! As she says, "My career has been characterised by taking huge risks and that was my first huge risk, backing what I wanted to do, my dream, with every single penny I could lay my hands on and it changed my life". Soon afterwards, still in the early 1980s, she was instrumental in what became the start of the alternative comedy scene, using the Finborough Theatre and promoting such future stars as Paul Merton, Jenny Eclair and Chris Barrie. "Very soon afterwards, I became Artistic Director at the Donmar from 1983 to 1989". From there, after a spell as an independent producer she took over on the creative side of West End giant Stoll Moss Theatres, even though "I thought that I was a little more cutting-edge than that" and remained with them after Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group bought the business. At the same time, she continued to run the comedy awards in Edinburgh and produce plays on her own account. Time and again, we come back to her willingness to back projects, whatever the possible downsides. "Taking risks has very much categorised my success, as has following my own instinct. For me - and it's very, very personal - my first response to a play, materially, is the right one. I can't produce a play without being completely in love with it". The corollary also applies. "There's many a time when I have not taken projects that have gone on to be very successful because I did not have a vision as to what I thought it should look like at the end". Miss Burns believes that her art is a mystery to the public. "I think that people don't understand what producers do any more. With the emergence of the subsidised sector, they don't understand the difference between a producer and an artistic director. In the commercial world the producer is an artistic director. They decide whether they are going to do the play, they select the director and the creative team and they have a very big influence into the casting but they also raise the money and they often take the risks themselves on it". She describes the job with relish. "There's a real pleasure in starting with that blank page and actually helming everything all the way through; and now," she chuckles, "I own these five uneconomical playhouses which I love." The company is currently in the process of restoring them to their former grandeur which gives her great pleasure, especially when boasting about the revivified Apollo or "the best loos in London at the Duchess. "I always feel I am privileged to be doing something that for me is a complete vocation, a way of life. What a privilege to be working right at the top of the British theatre, which is the best theatre in the world". Being "the best" is based on an alliance between the subsidised and commercial sectors, so she is really concerned with her SOLT hat on that impending funding cuts could damage that position. "What I worry about most of all is how does the left-field genius come through, a company like Complicite? The independent voices who need to plough their own furrow to do their art?" It is this kind of cutting-edge work that she fears might not emerge in tough economic times. "Everybody's being as smart as they can be. There are no more cuts to be made. I find it's very concerning and I think the Government is very short-sighted because I don't really see it as a subsidy, it's an investment because the theatre gives back much more than it is loaned in subsidy". The Government may be reluctant to invest in the arts but individuals like Nica Burns have no such qualms. Decisions that producers take to support their judgement are of a kind that normal people would shun without a second thought. "The first time I mortgaged my flat was for a play which I produced at the Royal Court Theatre directed by a very close friend, Garry Hynes and it was A Whistle in the Dark by Tom Murphy. One of my main investors disappeared just before it. I didn't really have a choice!" The risk only hit home after the project was a success. "I still remember the day the reviews came out ... and they were all brilliant, turning to my newly married husband and saying, 'Oh thank goodness, I won't have to sell the flat!' to be met with a look of absolute horror". Astonishingly, despite her husband's natural aversion to risk, the marriage survived on the basis of his request "don't tell me what you do because I don't have the nerve to keep up with it". Eighteen years later, she tested him even more boldly when she wanted to buy a group of West End theatres. The proposition was as follows: "You have to give me your half of the house and everything you've ever earned and I will never refer to it again if you say no." Bucking her expectations, "he didn't hesitate, he just said take it." Across her career, coincidentally the two producing highlights both appeared in 2001. The first was Alistair Beaton's "great original political satire", Feelgood, which she nursed from little more than a bare idea expressed in six lines through to Hampstead and then the West End with help from Max Stafford Clark. The play so much caught the moment that apparently "Tony Blair sent an e-mail round telling everybody that they were not to go and see the play before the election. What a compliment!" The other was Deborah Warner's "very contemporary and, in my view, brilliant production of Medea" starring Fiona Shaw. Unusually for a sharp nosed businesswoman, this plucky producer is literally able to laugh off the fact that Medea lost a substantial amount of money following two years touring the globe and bringing pleasure to so many. 2001 is unlikely to be repeated in terms of success, since Nica Burns' productions took the majority of prizes at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards as Kiss Me Kate joined her two favourites in the limelight. Looking forward, she shows her customary excitement both when discussing existing productions such as When We Are Married at the Garrick and Design for Living at the Old Vic and also her latest baby, the new Neil Labute play, intriguingly entitled In a Forest, Dark and Deep, starring Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams, which has its world premiere at the Vaudeville next year. Beyond that, she is looking forward to the final year of her presidency of SOLT, having finally accepted that despite her love of the fringe, she is now very much West End and establishment and in the mainstream to stay.
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