Nick Ahad: Godber, a matter of principle and how Newton’s third law played its part

Yet, for the past few years, he has had a softer edge. His accent remains that of a son of an Upton miner, but in the recent past there was, to be blunt, much corporate speak involved when chatting with the playwright and director.

It was excusable. Son of a miner though he may be, he then was also leading a theatre through a move from a church hall to a £15m purpose-built venue. Hull Truck had garnered a reputation of international standing thanks to the playwright’s work, and was finally moving into a “premier league venue” – a phrase Godber repeated each of the several times he showed me around the building.

A certain amount of management jargon was bound to make its way into his vocabulary when he spent every day giving tours of the new theatre to investors. When not directing he was dealing with councillors and being a spokesman for a significant cultural development in the city. The Hull Truck company completed its move a couple of years ago and is now in a very different place compared to its former home, the ramshackle hut Godber took over in 1984.

However, today we’re not in the Truck’s plush new home, but back in a church hall and the airs and graces have disappeared. Instead they have been replaced by the straightest of straight talking from a Yorkshireman who looks like he’d as soon start belly dancing as he would allow corporate flannel into his speech.

“Clearly, there’s an issue that needs to be addressed, let’s get it out of the way,” says Godber as we sit down at a table in the rehearsal room-come church hall in Wakefield, where the new John Godber company has set up home.

The elephant in the room to which Godber refers is a series of events that go like this: as the move into the new £15m Hull Truck Theatre came to a completion in 2009, the board, led by chairman Michael Oughtred, began to look for a new chief executive.

Andrew Smaje, who formerly was in charge of the Ustinov Theatre at Theatre Royal Bath, and an associate director of the main theatre, was appointed to the post in July the following year, joining the theatre in October.

When Smaje arrived he set about sorting out the new season. He said at the time it was programmed alongside Hull Truck’s then artistic director Gareth Tudor Price, but it did not feature a single play directed by the artistic director of the theatre.

Earlier this year Tudor Price was made redundant, leaving the theatre without an artistic director – a position which has not since been filled. The move saw vocal criticism from the union Equity and in support of his friend and colleague, Godber, who had been officially the theatre’s artist in residence, left Hull Truck.

Even with the corporate talk, Godber always remained the sort to call a spade a spade. Still, his forthrightness today on the issue of the recent interesting times at Hull Truck is surprising. He has been promising to speak on the subject, but wanted to wait for the right time to say everything. Now that he is finally talking, he is holding little back.

Bits and pieces of the story of what happened at Hull Truck have leaked out – some of it true, some of it not quite so – but Godber is finally up for telling the full story.

“Clearly, I wouldn’t be doing this had Gareth not been made redundant. That’s a dead cert,” says Godber.

He’s referring to the fact he is directing his latest script, the first play from the newly formed John Godber theatre company. The Debt Collectors is the debut from the company, which is working in partnership with Wakefield Theatre Royal. It’s Godber’s 60th play.

“This would have – probably should have been – a Hull Truck production and I’ve reconciled myself with the fact that it’s not. Look, I didn’t have an alternative. I couldn’t stay at Hull Truck once the artistic director had been made redundant. I talked to a lot of people in the business who gave me lots of advice, but the one thing I was very clear about was that there was simply no option to stay at Truck.”

Back when he was starting out, this mountain of a man was, so I have heard said, something of a gruff character. Not mean, simply bold, forthright and a pretty confident type. He took his first play, Bouncers, to the Edinburgh Festival with a set that would fit in the back of his car. It went on to be recognised as one of the last century’s most important pieces of theatre and has held the interest of Hollywood on several occasions.

That spirit appears to have returned to Godber, now that the company is his own.

“This is what I’m good at. I don’t want to be deciding what the soup should be this week, or what colour the chairs should be and all that stuff when I was still at Truck. I want to be making work to be put on in theatres,” he says.

Despite all the confidence he shows, it does seem like a big step to have left a theatre that he is so intrinsically associated with. After all, when the post of artistic director was made redundant, it was made clear that the door remained open to Godber.

“Aye, they made it clear that they wanted me to stay,” says Godber. So, leaving the theatre, I suggest, was a big statement.

“Oh aye – bigger statement than not having an artistic director? There’s no bigger statement. If they did it at the National Theatre, everybody would walk out.

“If they did it to Ian Brown (the artistic director at West Yorkshire Playhouse), everyone in Leeds would have said, ‘What’s going on?’, but because they did it in Hull, everybody went, ‘Oh, right’.

“I’ll tell you what, it’s as simple as this – it’s Newton’s Third Law – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – and this is my reaction.

“It’s about standing up and being counted. This is a theatre that I helped design, my work helped put it on the map and it has generated millions for the company, but I couldn’t stay. When Gareth told me what happened, I was gob-smacked. My decision to leave was about loyalty – and that’s something that works both ways.”

It is loyalty that has brought Godber to the Wakefield church hall today. His father and sister live close by, he was trained at the nearby Bretton Hall – it was a natural choice of place to set up a new home.

Before deciding what to do Godber took lots of advice from people in the industry – including his friend and something of a mentor, Alan Ayckbourn. They encouraged him to strike out on his own.

So, earlier this summer, a group of friends and colleagues gathered at Wakefield Theatre Royal to hear Godber announce the news that, along with wife and fellow playwright Jane Thornton, they would become directors of a company that would have a home in Wakefield, and tour nationally. The company is in partnership with Wakefield Theatre Royal, which shares the costs of touring work into theatres.

It appears to have given the 55-year-old a new lease of life and he is certainly excited to be working on the first play to be presented by the John Godber company.

“There’s no doubt that when you put your own money into a project, it focuses your mind. I can tell from the response of colleagues who have read this, that it’s a cracking script. Not a surprise really, I have written 50-odd now,” he says. “It had to be, I needed to start with something strong.”

Something, one suspects, that would make a bit of a statement.