#paulmiller

For a quick indication of how the Orange Tree has changed since Paul Miller became artistic director in 2014, look no further than Jess and Joe Forever, the first show in his new season. The difference isn’t in Zoe Cooper’s play itself, but the business behind-the-scenes: Jess and Joe Forever has been co-produced with Farnham Maltings, and when it finishes its run in Richmond, it heads out on a national tour to Newcastle, Norfolk, Colchester and more. There are some in the industry who question the merit of co-producing, as though it were somehow terrible that theatre should be made collaboratively, or seen by a few more people. Miller is not one of these people. As he puts it: “I want to get more of the world into the Orange Tree, and I want the Orange Tree to get out into the world.”

So far, it’s working: 2014’s surprise hit Pomona transferred to the Manchester Royal Exchange and the National in London; Miller’s own staging of French Without Tears is now travelling the country; and – something Miller is particularly proud of – the number of first-time ticket buyers at home base keeps on rising. He cheerfully quotes Pomona’s playwright, Alistair McDowall, appraising the Orange Tree audience as his “most diverse”, because it didn’t solely comprise new-writing aficionados. And while Miller is aware that there is a stereotype notion of the “core” Richmond audience – older, affluent and conservative, basically – he’s enjoyed discovering its broadness: “There’s a multiplicity of ages, backgrounds, opinions and experiences, and a much more inquisitive, robust theatrical sensibility than they’re sometimes given credit for.”

Responses to Pomona were enlightening in that respect. “It’s true it got up some people’s noses, but there were a whole lot of other people who said: this reminds us of the 60s, this is what we wanted, radical theatre shaking things up.” When people did react against it, he noted that often they were coming from “a liberal artistic background and sensibility, genuinely dismayed by the thought of a young playwright effectively saying you cannot be good in the modern world. That went against everything that a certain liberal cast of mind felt about theatre and about art: that art exists in order to promote goodness in the world.”

Miller has been finding a lot of inspiration in Richmond’s “strong liberal tradition – with both a capital and a small L”, and its “literary associations”, whether that’s a connection with Virginia Woolf and co’s Bloomsbury Group, or Horace Walpole writing the first Gothic novel in nearby Strawberry Hill. (“That’s what amused me about Pomona being here,” he says: “it was in its natural home.”) Liberalism translates in his programmes in part to an interest in “plays and voices and writers from our heritage, that tell us how we got here, both theatrically and anthropologically”. But the wastefulness of British theatre also bothers him. “There’s a whole load of living writers who had plays that were done once, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Let’s have a look at those: let’s see the work of Sharman Macdonald, Doris Lessing, Mustapha Matura.” Plus there’s a keen ear for contemporary voices: “Not necessarily completely fresh voices, but emerging writers whose voice is beginning to find itself.” The present season is typical, Zoe Cooper rubbing shoulders with Caryl Churchill, Somerset Maugham with Roland Schimmelpfennig.

This careful balance of old and new isn’t, Miller suggests, so very different from that struck by Sam Walters, the Orange Tree’s founder and sole artistic director for 43 years. “Inevitably the question arises of, is everything going to change? But there’s a thing about change and continuity – which is reflected in the kind of programme we do, that symbiotic relationship between looking to the past but heading towards the future. What we’ve been about in the past two years is thinking of Sam’s legacy as a baton that we’ve picked up and run with, rather than dropping it and haring off in our own direction.” What there has been is a shift in emphasis “towards the contemporary, so that the rediscoveries sit within that context, rather than new plays sitting in the context of a lot of rediscoveries”.

As a director himself, Miller’s jurisdiction is the heritage strand: as well as Rattigan’s French Without Tears he’s revived a DH Lawrence, the Lessing and a couple of Bernard Shaws. “I couldn’t in all honesty claim to be rediscovering these playwrights,” he concedes, but it does please him that there is a “whole generation of theatre-goers” coming to these works fresh. “There’s an excitement in being able to reintroduce rather than rediscover”, and especially in doing so with a work that doesn’t conform to type. A work like Sheppey, for instance, which he’s directing for the Christmas slot; there’s a gleeful, child-like simplicity to the way he says that: “People who think they know Somerset Maugham are about to be surprised.”

Sheppey is the only play he’s directing of the five main shows this season. He’s quite happy with that as a work rate: “My appetite for directing was never limitless. The best side of artistic directing is having pleasure in seeing other people do things. I enjoy making the opportunities for things to happen.”

In order to do that, first he has to make money. In the unlikely event that anyone missed this one, Miller in 2014 experienced what he calls “a nuclear fission moment”: his very first day in the job coincided with the announcement from Arts Council England that in the 2015-2018 period the Orange Tree would not receive funding as a National Portfolio Organisation. That was 25% of its overall income gone, with only eight month’s notice. “To some people it looks like a miracle that we’re still standing,” Miller admits. The truth is: “We are still in transition. We were in the fortunate situation that we do have a small amount of reserves, which we decided to use strategically for a couple of years while we changed the way we were doing things. That process is still continuing.”

Part of that process involved immediately streamlining the organisation to a smaller staff, “cutting our costs in a way that hopefully doesn’t affect people’s experience of coming to see work here”. He also initiated a fundraising drive – greatly boosted by the award, this summer, of Arts Council Catalyst: Evolve money, £75,000 spread over three years promised as “match funding for any new funds raised” through private giving. “We were really pleased to get that,” Miller says, “because competition for that programme was intense.” But it’s not enough to feel easy. “We need a certain amount of regular funding as a bedrock, in order that we’re not one production away from disaster. Because we had this tiny bit of reserves, we could take a risk like The Rolling Stone or Pomona. Without some regular funding, deciding to do that in the future will not be possible, because the risk would be too great.”

With this in mind, the challenge Miller has set himself is to ensure that the key characteristic of the Orange Tree isn’t just its auditorium’s architecture – “unlike any other theatre in London” – but its expansiveness: so that it’s not just a local theatre, or a London theatre, but a national theatre. “We’re trying to develop conversations between plays, between writers and between audiences,” he says – and looking well beyond his own doorstep to do it.

Maddy Costa writes about theatre and music. She contributes to Exeunt and the Guardian, blogs at Deliq, edits the blog New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood in association with Fuel, and co-curates Something Other with Mary Paterson. She is resident critic with Chris Goode & Company. @maddydeliqette