November 2007 Interview: Colin Marr

The New Eden

COLIN MARR tells Northings what the new Eden Court has to offer

THE REFURBISHMENT of Eden Court Theatre has been a massive undertaking, taking over two years to complete and attracting more than its fair share of criticism – much of it simply silly – over the project and its costs.

Now, though, those arguments can be set aside, and we can all celebrate the return to action of the major theatre in the Highlands & Islands in its new shape as one of the best equipped venues in the country.

We asked Colin Marr, the director of Eden Court, to talk us through the facilities in the new building, and the likely consequences for programming.

Colin Marr at his desk (photo - Kenny Mathieson).

NORTHINGS: Colin, I’m sure most readers already have an idea of what has been going on at Eden Court since you closed in June 2005, but perhaps you could take us through each of the elements, starting with the most familiar bit of the theatre, the main auditorium, which will be officially known as the Empire Theatre.

COLIN MARR: What we now have is the 800 seat theatre that has always been there, but with an additional 30 seats at the back of the second circle, where we cleared away some old lighting and projection boxes that we no longer needed, and a handful more elsewhere due to reorganising some of the space.

Beyond that the main theatre hasn’t really changed, but it has been completely re-wired, which is good news for our technicians. The state of the wiring was appalling, which was one of the things that took us by surprise, and contributed to the increase in costs.

N: And then we come to the new second theatre, which has been named the OneTouch Theatre to acknowledge the funding contribution made by LifeScan.

CM: I think it will certainly be one of the finest studio theatres in Britain. It has 264 seats, each with an unimpeded view, and the balcony level extends down either side, but only as a single row with ten seats each. It is very intimate – for the performer it will give the space a really human scale.

We can take all the seats out of the floor space, leaving roughly 70 seats in the balcony area, and standing room for around 350, so it would work as a good rock and pop venue for smaller bands, or we can fill the space with tables and chairs and do it cabaret-style. So it is very flexible, very well-equipped state-of-the-art venue of a size we desperately needed.

N: And you now have two cinemas, which, like the Empire Theatre, have been named for famous Inverness venues of old the La Scala and the Playhouse.

CM: That’s right. Both are brand new. The smaller one, the Playhouse, seats 80, and the other, the La Scala, seats 140. Both are fully equipped, and all have perfect view seats – no cricked necks in the front row!

It is a difficult time for building cinemas in terms of changing technologies and the growing film versus digital dilemma. We opted to put 35 mm in both cinemas, and we have digital in the second cinema as well.

Hopefully a proper, fully agreed on digital format will emerge in the next couple of years, and we can add full digital facilities to both cinemas. In any case, 35mm is never going to go away for us – a lot of the films we show will never be put on digital.

N: Which brings us to the two new studio spaces, one of which has also been given a name.

CM: That’s right – we have named one of them the Jim Love Studio, in memory of the late Jim Love, who was a great supporter of the theatre.

The lower studio and outside of the OneTouch Theatre (photo - Kenny Mathieson).

N: What are they for exactly?

CM: They will finally give our education work a proper home. Again, they are beautiful and well-equipped spaces, and are multi-purpose for dance, drama and education work. There is one on the first floor with an outdoor roof terrace, and one above that on the second floor. What they will really allow us to expand is our education work with adults.

N: And there has been a general re-jigging of the layout of the building as well?

CM: Yes, on top of all that, the box office, foyer, bars, restaurant, toilets – and we have greatly expanded the number of cubicles in the ladies toilets – and all the public spaces have completely changed from what they were, and the entrance has moved to the front of the building facing the river.

We hope the bars and restaurant will feel more integrated now. All of the office and administrative space is in the Bishop’s Palace, which has been fully restored as well, including the lovely wooden staircase that basically wasn’t safe to use before. We have spaces in that building that can be booked for meetings and so on. We also suspect that the restored Chapel may be in demand as a wedding venue.

N: And the long list of complaints about the theatre’s inadequate dressing room facilities has also been addressed?

CM: Absolutely. That has been a real bone of contention with performers coming here for years now, and desperately needed doing. We have a completely new dressing room block, which has been built on behind the main theatre – it’s the bit with the yellow wall at the rear of the building.

We have 15 rooms there that can take 95 people at any one time, which should take care of just about everything we do – maybe for an opera we would still need to use band rooms beneath the stage as well. So instead of the dressing rooms being in the Bishop’s Palace in a dilapidated state with the water in the showers taking ten minutes to heat up, we now have properly equipped dressing rooms right behind the main stage and just beside the second theatre.

N: And these new performance spaces will open on a rolling programme through November?

CM: That’s right. We open the Empire Theatre with Phil & Aly – which sold out almost as soon as we announced it – on 3 November. The cinemas come on stream with the Film Festival starting on 15 November, and the OneTouch Theatre will open with a run of The Sundowe, the winner of the Highland Quest, at the end of the month.

N: What are the programming implications of all these massive changes, starting with the Empire Theatre?

CM: The real difference it makes to the Empire is what can now come out of there and go into the OneTouch Theatre. We had to put on a lot of shows in there that were really too small for the auditorium.

It seems much better to sell out a 250 seat theatre than have a similar number of people in an 800 seat auditorium. The new space will be ideal for a whole range of shows that wouldn’t fill the big theatre, including lots of Scottish touring drama, dance groups, and of course a lot of music.

Even for a company like, say, Borderline Theatre, instead of coming once and getting 400 people in the main auditorium, they would have the possibility of doing two or three nights in the second theatre, where the more intimate space might suit them very well, and they will get benefit of word of mouth as well, which should never be underestimated but doesn’t apply if you only do one show.

So basically the big change for the main auditorium will be what will come out of that space, and what that will then leave room for is more large-scale shows. For us they will still be a bit of a knife-edge, just because of population numbers here.

We simply don’t have the potential audience numbers that exist in the central belt, and we have to plan accordingly. I know some people have argued that we should have enlarged the main auditorium, but it would have been hugely expensive, and we would only be able to use it a handful of times.

The dressing room block (photo - Eden Court).

The changes we have made will allow us to do a few more musicals in the year, for example, and there will be more space in the programme to fit them in, so there will be a few more week-long runs of shows than in the past.

N: And the OneTouch Theatre will take on the displaced drama and dance shows as well as music?

CM: Not only that, but there will be far more drama than we did before in there, and also more dance. It will also allow us expand our comedy programme, and to have a much better jazz programme, as well as opening up not only folk but also the world music area for us.

It will also be suitable for shows related to the education work we do, and also has possibilities for local organisations. The Inverness Opera and the Inverness Choral can be confident of selling the 500 or 600 tickets needed to make it work in the Empire Theatre, but there are lots of other community groups who could benefit from the OneTouch venue, which could be viable for them if they can sell 100 or 150 tickets.

N: Are any major changes in the cinema programming likely?

CM: The cinema programming will be similar in style to what we did before. Cinema distribution is a strange business, and is very much tied in to how long you are able to run the film. The classic example was the last Star Wars film – when it opened in the UK cinemas had to agree to show it for four weeks, and to show it 24 hours a day for the first weekend.

Vue quite rightly put it on, but it basically meant that everyone who wanted to see it saw it in the first weekend. That is okay for Vue, because they can then take it down to Cinema 7 and let it run for the four weeks, but when you only have one screen that kind of programming is just not feasible.

Not that we are looking to screen Star Wars or to go into competition with Vue, but on a smaller scale having the second screen will allow us a bit more flexibility in terms of runs of particular films, so we will be able to screen things that we couldn’t have done before.

N: And the studios will be focused on education work?

CM: The two studios will largely be used for classes, but we have also factored in slots in the course of the year for professional companies to develop work. We would give them the facilities free of charge for a week, say, and at the end of it they would do a performance of the piece they have been working on. It’s a model that Dance Base in Edinburgh have used quite a bit, and that might happen two or three times a year.

N: All in all it sounds like your work load at the theatre is going to increase substantially?

CM: No question about that – it will mean a lot more events. This first programme we have announced until the end of the year will probably be different to the model that will develop once everything is up and running.

The OneTouch Theatre will open with The Sundowe for three weeks, for example, which will be a very unusual run for that space, so it will only really come on stream in its more typical working format after the new year. We’re hoping to get the next programme out sometime around late November.

N: Presumably all this has major budget implications?

CM: All of this will cost more, of course, and the building will cost more to run, and we will have more staff, and our funding hasn’t really changed. We have had considerable extra funding from the Scottish Arts Council, but it is all committed to specific things like new posts and so on.

The real way that we will make it all add up is by having more conferences here. We are allowing six weeks a year in each of the theatres, but only two weeks where both can be used by, for example, a political party conference where for security reasons they want to take over the whole building. So it should actually reduce the time where there is no arts or cultural activity going on in the building.

The restored main staircase in the Bishop's Palace (photo - Kenny Mathieson).

N: You are appointing a liaison officer to work with external venues for the first time, presumably as a direct consequence of your In Exile programme while the theatre was closed. How will that work?

CM: It’ll largely be a case of suck it and see, to be honest. When we did the In Exile programme we built good relations with a number of venues, and in a number of cases we also helped them to build audiences, and some of them were definitely under-performing in audience terms.

Highland Council and the Scottish Arts Council were keen to keep those relationships going, and we will be working with the venues in a number of ways. That might include them taking a performance of a show that is coming to us, and we will then include them in our programme and sell tickets and so on.

Unlike the In Exile programme, though, it will not be a case of us promoting in their venues – we will help them do it themselves.

N: How important is the education work at the theatre?

CM: It is a huge part of what we do, and is seen throughout the country as best practice in education work. We already have by far the biggest arts education programme in the country.

In a normal year we already had between 90,000 and 100,000 attendances, most under 18s, although we will now be moving into adults as well. We have ten drama workers, two of whom specialise in Gaelic, a drama artist and a dance worker, as well as digital training and additional needs.

N: So, just to wrap up, why should we be excited at what we’ll find when we roll up on 3 November, or whenever it is that people get their first experience of the new theatre?

CM: It will be the biggest arts centre in Scotland, in terms of the number of spaces we have, and it will allow us to increase our programming enormously. When we closed we were at full capacity, putting on around 300 shows per year, and there was still demand for more.

The audience was still growing at around 7 or 8 per cent a year, having grown by 40 per cent in my time here. That demand was still there, the education work was growing at an enormous rate, and we had to satisfy that demand. The building itself is wonderful, but the really exciting thing is the programming we can now do, and to be honest, that will take us time to develop and really discover the full potential of what we have here.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2007

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The New Eden

COLIN MARR tells Northings what the new Eden Court has to offer

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