The artistic director leaving Yorkshire to help set up off-grid community in Scotland

Championing new writing and committed to taking theatre to non-traditional venues and audiences, it has been led for the past 17 years by artistic director Rod Dixon, who it was announced in May will be stepping down at the end of this year.

He is moving on to help set up an arts-led, off-grid intentional community in Scotland. It’s an interesting new adventure to which Dixon will no doubt bring his characteristic passion, energy and commitment.

“I never intended to be artistic director of Red Ladder for 17 years but I’m really grateful for the way it’s worked out,” he says. “With a company like Red Ladder, which is now more than 50 years old, there is a responsibility to keep it going and also to respect those who have gone before, so there is that sense of stewardship; I’ve always had that feeling.”

During his time at Red Ladder, since arriving in 2006, Dixon has raised the company’s profile nationally, widening its reach from small-scale touring to the main stages of theatres such as Liverpool Royal Court, Leeds Playhouse, York Theatre Royal and the Lowry.

He has also steered it through some choppy waters. In 2014 they lost their Arts Council NPO funding and had a couple of tough years campaigning and fundraising, both of which Dixon did tirelessly.

A corner was turned when Yorkshire-born author David Peace, a longtime supporter of the company whose work he first saw as a teenager, gifted them the stage rights to his best-selling book The Damned United, about Brian Clough’s ill-fated 44 days as manager of Leeds United.

The play they created went on to become one of their most popular productions and certainly brought them new audiences.

“It was great to see so many Leeds fans at the theatre,” says Dixon, recalling that one audience member made her feelings about Clough known in no uncertain terms when the actor playing him said his first line.

Red Ladder’s 50th anniversary in 2018 was something of a milestone for the company and for Dixon personally who directed their acclaimed production of Bertolt Brecht’s renowned anti-war classic Mother Courage and Her Children with Pauline McLynn, probably best known as Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, in the lead role.

It was an innovative promenade performance, staged in a disused warehouse in Leeds, that tackled the timely issues of the trauma of war and forced migration.

For an unapologetically radical theatre company with agitprop roots, Red Ladder’s creative team couldn’t have chosen a better play to mark their half century. And for Dixon it was a high point.

“Mother Courage was the best piece of theatre I had ever made,” he says. “And I can remember thinking even back then ‘this would be a good time to go’ – not because I was unhappy but I had that feeling of not wanting to stay too long.” In the event, he decided to continue and as artistic director oversaw further successes including plays about men’s mental health, wrestling, teenage pregnancy, feminist dystopias and the closure of the last deep seam coalmine in England.

Then in March 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic struck and theatres closed.

Dixon had just started a tour of Andrea Heaton’s one woman show Smile Club which had been garnering very positive reviews.

“It was a strange time during lockdown and, like a lot of people, it made me question what my role in life was,” he says. “Then I started to talk to Tessa Gordziejko who used to be chair of the board of Red Ladder and she said that there was this piece of land in Dumfries where a few of them were looking to create an arts-led off-grid intentional community.

"My partner and I had been thinking about living off-grid, so we thought ‘let’s see if we can live according to our principles’. The political system has just fallen apart; it doesn’t have any connection to ordinary people anymore – and no-one in the ruling class seems to be doing anything about the climate crisis.

"I don’t want to sound self-righteous but I really believe that the future will be about living in small communities.”

Dixon is looking forward to heading up to Scotland in December to begin working on the project in earnest. “We want it to be a community that local people value and a resource they will feel is their own,” he says.

They have already planted trees and will be growing their own food, running writers’ retreats and workshops ranging from acting, to foraging and stargazing and there will be space to research and develop plays.

“Ultimately I would like to make outdoor, land-based theatre,” he says. “I think those kinds of events on the land remind us that we live with a planet not on a planet.”

In the meantime, he is working on what will be his final production for Red Ladder as artistic director. Taxi, by Andrea Heaton based on an original concept from Douglas Thorpe, is a co-production with mad dogs dance theatre and opens next month.

A fusion of dance, drama and physical theatre it will take audiences on a journey through the nighttime streets of Leeds, seen through the eyes of a taxi driver.

“It is pure drama,” says Dixon. “As a taxi driver you are right at the front line of humanity, you see people behave in beautiful and awful ways.”

He says that he and Thorpe, who is founder of mad dogs dance theatre and whose real-life experiences as a taxi driver inspired the show, had been wanting to work together for a while.

“With this we are both trying to work outside our comfort zone – that is risky but exciting. We want to make something that will be very different from anything we have made before, a spectacle that will surprise and intrigue people.”

What Dixon will take with him when he moves North of the border are some very special memories.

“There have been many memorable moments, mostly in community venues with audiences who wouldn’t normally come to the theatre,” he says.

In particular he cites a performance of We’re Not Going Back, Boff Whalley’s play about the miners’ strike. “It was at Durham Miners’ hall in front of an audience of ex-miners’ and union leaders – we got a standing ovation.”

Looking back over his tenure there is much for him to take pride in.

In addition to directing many outstanding productions he has discovered and nurtured new talent, having trained hundreds of new actors through the company’s Red Grit workshops, which he initiated and ran, and offered support to early career creatives – writers, directors, set designers, lighting and sound designers and stage managers, giving them a route into the industry.

“In a way it is the artists we work with that I’m most proud of,” he says with typical generosity. “I feel really lucky to have worked alongside some truly remarkable people.”

Red Ladder’s production of Taxi runs at the Old Woollen, Sunnybank Mills, Farsley, August 10-20. Details and tickets via redladder.co.uk