Rod Dixon, artistic director of Red Ladder Theatre Company, steps down after 17 years in post

After 17 years in charge of Red Ladder, Dixon has decided the time has come to hand the company on and head off on the next adventure, one which it transpires couldn’t be more Dixon. He’s off to Scotland to live off-grid and helping to establish an arts-led community in Dumfries.

“Even as I describe it, I can hear how it will sound to some people, but it’s not meant to be worthy or anything like that. We’re going to be using permaculture and hopefully providing food boxes to local people, become a retreat for artists to use, we’ll have a borehole where we’ll draw our water, set up a campsite for people to use,” says Dixon.

In some ways, if you know Rod Dixon, it seems inevitable.

“Seventeen years is a long time which is one reason for leaving, but also I am feeling the urgency to respond to the way things are. Things are really bleak and at the moment making theatre feels like a real privilege, but I just can’t really square the idea of making and touring theatre with the way things are.

"The opportunity to start a community that will be artist-led and will live on the land in as low an impact way as possible, living off-grid, trying to use absolutely no fossil fuels; I know it sounds self-righteous, but it’s really not. It’s about living the way that I feel I have to.”

I caught up with Dixon during a break from another workshop he was running for young people on the day of the announcement that he is to step down.

Red Ladder is a 55-year-old radical theatre company, founded in 1968 with roots in the radical socialist theatre movement known in Britain as agitprop.

Dixon says: “There are companies who become the personality of the artistic director, but I don’t think Red Ladder has ever done that.

“I’ve only ever been a steward and now my stewardship is over, it needs to be taken on by someone else and I’m looking forward to seeing how it moves into a new direction. It wouldn’t have been right if I’d still been here when the company entered its sixtieth year.”

Dixon credits the company’s producer Chris Lloyd with just as much sway on Red Ladder as he has had, but it’s hard to think of Red Ladder without thinking of the fiery Liverpudlian who has spent almost two decades as artistic director.

Following that first workshop where I saw Dixon in full flow, I had the privilege of seeing him even closer when I was cast in the community musical Promised Land in 2012, a production that would go on to be enormously significant to the couple of dozen community cast members and then later when Red Ladder became one of the producers of my play Glory, which Dixon directed in 2019.

“There have been a lot of highlights over the years; it’s amazing that some of the Promised Land cast are still in touch, the Mother Courage cast still have a WhatsApp group (a 2018 production starring Pauline McLynn),” says Dixon.

“But the highlight for me has always been the audiences. Seeing the members of the Shed Crew (adapted from Bernard Hare’s novel Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew) come to see their story being told on stage, or seeing the former miners come see We’re Not Going Back (about the miners’ strikes) give a standing ovation in the middle of the show because we were telling a story about them, those have been the special moments for me.

“One year we opened a show in London, at a fairly swanky theatre, the following night we had a one man show in a working men’s club in South Leeds and that was by far the more enjoyable of the two.”

Whether he cares to admit it or not, Dixon has been inextricably linked to the company – which will continue its long history, for sure – but he can be assured that while he moves off grid to lessen his impact on the planet, his impact on the performing arts will resonate for some t ime to come .