Interview: Paul Kerryson

By Jemma Crowston

With their latest gripping performance about to take centre stage and a host of comedians acting up for the city’s annual Comedy Festival, Leicester Theatre Trust’s Artistic Director – Paul Kerryson – is looking forward to another programme-packed year at Curve.

Kerryson’s portfolio includes years in the theatre business and his work at Leicester’s £61.5m Curve theatre includes The Pillowman, which saw crowds flocked to Leicester last spring for the sold-out show.

The Irish-born director is thrilled to be involved in yet another Martin McDonagh creation – The Lieutenant of Inishmore – and says the audience can expect to have a lot of laughs during this powerful, hard-hitting performance by a cast of brilliant Irish actors.

“Wee Thomas was a friendly cat, killed on a lonely road on the island of Inishmore. His owner, the unhinged and handsome Padraic, will want to know how this happened to his cat and who is responsible when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip-shop bombing. He loves the cat more than life itself.”

The production will run from Friday, February 5 till Saturday, February 27 at 7.45pm.

Speaking to Kerryson over a year after Curve opened its doors; I wanted to find out if it had lived up to his ideals.

“I’ve been with Curve since 2001 because I was here when the architects were brought in. So, it feels like it’s been more than just a year for me”, he says.

“I did a lot of work with the Haymarket and one thing we wanted to do with Curve was to make it completely different. Nobody knew the Haymarket made its own sets and the beauty about Curve is that we’re very much open. You can see our sets when the side panel is lifted and we’ve had a great response from people about this.”

“We’ve had a lot of young people wanting to talk to technicians and you can see actors wondering around during rehearsals. It’s an open theatre as much as it can possibly be.”

Kerryson’s first masterpiece at Curve was the theatre’s spectacular opening event – Lift Off. This used the whole of the space available in the glassed theatre and saw the audience take an unusual tour of the building.

The 54-year-old said, “I’d like to see Lift Off become an annual event for the theatre. It would be great if we could get other touring companies such as circus performers, who would be able to use the space to its full capacity which traditional touring companies might not be able to do.”

Some of Curve’s performances have been met with a barrage of criticism and I asked Kerryson how he deals with critics and he said, “The criticism we’ve received is two-fold. People have complained about the ambience and the theatre being too cold but we are a different kind of theatre. We’ve spent a lot on creating different atmospheres for different performances but if people expect to see carpeted floors and a chandelier then they’ll be disappointed because that will never happen at Curve.

“Some of the performances have been criticised because they are different. But we get grants from the Arts Council and such like to produce productions that are challenging. Maybe we took on too much in our first year but I’m sure with our new season programme which is due out soon, people will be pleasantly surprised.”

He added, “We’ll continue to do challenging performance or else nobody would ever see anything outside the mainstream productions. And just using The Pillowman as a parable you can see this was a sell-out. It’s all about getting the right balance.”

When I asked what audiences could expect for Christmas 2010 at Curve – Kerryson remained quiet and said all will be revealed shortly.

The much-anticipated next season programme of performances will be published once it has been approved by the board later this month.