It might not have dominated the headlines quite like Indhu Rubasingham’s appointment at the National Theatre but Cheryl Martin was this month announced as the new artistic director of Red Ladder. Both are women from the global majority taking over high-profile theatre organisations. While Martin won’t run a building, like Rubasingham on London’s South Bank, she will lead a 55-year-old radical company that has deep roots in the city of Leeds. That’s in part due to Red Ladder’s work with community casts, performing in working men’s clubs and community buildings, alongside its national touring work.
“I wanted to apply for the job as soon as I saw it,” says Martin. “You get an idea when something is going to be a perfect fit. A lot of my friends have worked for the company, I know Kully (Thiarai, creative director of Leeds 2023 and former artistic director of Red Ladder) and the more I read about Red Ladder, the more excited about it I became. My first professional job was for an agitprop company called Pit Prop theatre, so Red Ladder shares a lot of my DNA; working class, left-leaning, looking at stories that don’t always get told.”
Red Ladder was born out of the 1960s British radical socialist theatre movement, taking its name from the stepladder the founders used to take to protests to stand atop to amplify their voices. Today it continues to make work telling stories that often start on its doorstep. Chumbawamba’s Boff Whalley is a frequent collaborator, his musical Homebaked was a hit at Liverpool’s Royal Court a couple of years ago, and the company produced my own play, Glory, set in a northern wrestling gym, in 2019.
The last decade has been a sometimes turbulent period for Red Ladder, with the loss of all its Arts Council England funding in 2015, and a reintroduction into the Arts Council’s National Portfolio three years later. It was led through it all by outgoing artistic director, firebrand Rod Dixon, and the executive producer Chris Lloyd.
Martin says: “Rod is very much beloved. When I got the job we spoke and he talked about how he reshaped Red Ladder when he came on board and a lot of what I like about the company is what he has created. My challenge is to look at what we’ve got and what we can grow. I want to preserve much of what is here already while growing what the company does.”
Her challenge includes one of the most precarious periods for British theatre in decades. “Of course we don’t have a building and associated costs to worry about and while audiences are slow to come back, we have a non-traditional audience who are very supportive of our work,” she says.
Martin’s early plans for the company include a “massive immersive experience” that will tour to “gigantic, currently empty spaces across the country using students, trainees, community and professional actors”. She also hopes to do a Christmas show with the community.
Martin began her career as writer-in-residence for Pit Prop theatre in Leigh, Lancashire, and wrote a musical, Heart and Soul, set in Oldham’s Tommyfield Market, which won a Manchester Evening News theatre award.
Her directing breakthrough came with Contact theatre in Manchester where she took part in a scheme for emerging Black and Asian theatre directors, before landing an associate role taking charge of new writing and new work at the venue. In 2015, she founded LGBTQ+ global majority arts company Black Gold Arts with choreographer Darren Pritchard and producer Jayne Compton.
While she is an outlier in the theatre industry as a Black, queer woman, there is one aspect to her CV that makes Martin akin to the establishment. “I grew up in Washington DC and went to Notre Dame, then I won a scholarship to go to Cambridge,” she says, almost embarrassed at the acknowledgment that it means yet another Oxbridge graduate in a senior position in British theatre.
“I was there between 1983 and 1986 and I don’t remember meeting any other black people. I had come from a background where my grandmother, who partially raised me, was a cook and a cleaner and my grandfather was a miner. So while I did go to Cambridge, I think if you’re enough of an outsider, you don’t get ‘insider syndrome’.”
Martin starts her new role in January. “I feel very lucky that this job opened up at just the right time for me to feel able to do it,” she says. “I feel like everything I’ve done has been preparation for it. I just want to live up to it.”
