Big Interview with Cheryl Martin, the new artistic director of Red Ladder theatre company

“As soon as I saw the post advertised, I wanted to apply because it seemed like Red Ladder is doing all the things I love doing,” she says. “I started out with Pit Prop, a community theatre company in Leigh, Lancashire. It was sort of politically engaged and I was their writer-in-residence – that was my very first professional theatre job. Then I did some work with Contact theatre in Manchester and that was a really formative period in my directing from 2010-2018.”

Her recent work includes several large-scale community plays devised with and featuring mostly women refugees and asylum seekers. “What I found working with those groups is that some of them didn’t know a lot about theatre and it meant that we could do anything – they weren’t afraid to try things and experiment. I love that kind of engaged theatre. I like making work that has to do with real people, especially in the times we are living in.”

The job at Red Ladder came along at exactly the right point in her career. “It’s brilliant because everything I had already done was moving in that direction,” she says. “But in some ways that is also the challenge. There are so many elements to the company – the national touring and the free workshops and the commitment to the artists they work with. A lot of the people who work here are people who have been here a long time – it is a company that inspires that kind of loyalty and that is part of why I am so excited to be here.”

Born in Washington DC and raised in Maryland, Martin’s early interest in theatre was initiated and facilitated by a close relative. “I had an aunt Frances who was an usher at a really good theatre in DC called the Arena and she would get me free tickets,” she says. “I saw some amazing things there – I saw Morgan Freeman before he was Morgan Freeman playing a Pentecostal preacher in The Gospel at Colonus it was the Oedipus story set in a traditional black church. It was so powerful – I can still remember it. I saw Japanese Kabuki theatre; the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. I saw all this fabulous stuff that at the time I didn’t know was so amazing. When I went to university, I was in a student play and that was when I started writing.”

After graduating from university at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, she won a scholarship to Emmanuel College Cambridge in the early 1980s. She says that although she did “a little bit of theatre” during her three years there, it was at home “in DC that I really got the bug.” That is also where she saw her first Shakespeare plays. “We had colour blind casting in the United States already back in the 1970s, so I had role models. I never thought that this was not something for me.”

Having settled in the UK, she got her first writing commission through a workshop at Contact Theatre in Manchester, which became her adopted home city, and then went to work at Pit Prop. “That is really where I learnt to write for theatre,” she says. “It was a really good grounding and because they were so open to new things, I could do anything. I did a kid’s show where the main character was a little girl and she was represented by a dress on a hanger. The kids bought into it. If you do anything well enough, you bring people with you.”

Her directing career began at Contact. “It was a really key place for me – I was part of a group of emerging black and Asian theatre directors. And I was writing plays for Radio 4. John McGrath who was the artistic director at Contact and is now AD and chief executive at Manchester International Festival, said to me ‘you would make a good director’ and he hired me. That is when I started doing my solo directing.”

What she is most looking forward to in her new role is continuing and expanding the company’s commitment to new writing, its work with and in the community, as well as developing audiences and encouraging those who wouldn’t normally get the chance to become participants in theatre. “A lot of people don’t have the money to go to acting classes or writing classes. I would like to find a way of systemising the opportunities we already offer and also find ways of training people across the board, not just writers and actors but also stage managers, technicians and designers. I would like to help sustain artists’ careers too – freelancers are finding it hard right now. Red Ladder has a brilliant connection to their communities – I love the fact that they use a lot of non-theatre venues – but there are still new audiences to reach.”

It is a fine balancing act of respecting the company’s tradition and past while finding fresh ways of growing and developing it. “It is thinking about how to bring something new,” she says. “I love that Red Ladder doesn’t have a house style – every play is its own universe. I like experimenting and I have found that people who are not traditional theatre audiences are more open to experimentation. If you bring something new to an audience, they just love it. That is what is so rewarding about it but it’s also the challenge.” Like all arts leaders she is aware that with the cost-of-living crisis, people might have to make difficult choices when it comes to what may be considered by some to be extras or luxuries. “Because times are so hard at the moment, if you are going to ask audiences to spend money to come out and see your show, you better make sure it’s worth seeing.”

Martin describes her new role at Red Ladder as “a dream job” and she clearly can’t wait to immerse herself in the company. “I feel incredibly lucky,” she says. “I get to develop artists, look for new audiences and the people and shows that will appeal to them. I get to direct every now and then – and work with a team who are passionate about what they believe in.”