Profile - Brian Bouttell: Spotlight on theatre chairman proving a hard act to follow

THE hunt is on for a new chairman of West Yorkshire Playhouse, in Leeds.

Three candidates have been shortlisted and the nominations committee is due to meet in the next few weeks to decide if there is a clear front-runner to replace Brian Bouttell, who steps down next March.

Mr Bouttell, 66, has been chairman of the Leeds-based theatre since 2007 and has sat on the board since moving to Leeds in 1985.

“I’d always been interested in the theatre and I was looking for a way to get to know more people in the community. I thought if I could join the board of the theatre, that would kill two birds with one stone,” he says.

Not to mention the free tickets? I suggest.

“The tickets are free but come at a great cost,” Mr Bouttell smiles.

In those days, the theatre was known as the Leeds Playhouse and its home was a sports hall at Leeds University.

Mr Bouttell was a managing partner at accountancy firm Peat Marwick Mitchell, which later became KPMG.

He says: “I think it is a benefit to come from a business background into an artistic or cultural or sporting organisation. In some ways, I think the last people who should be on the board are those who are closely connected to the product because they lose something of their independence.”

Last year, Mr Bouttell decided to complete a major restructuring of the Playhouse’s board of directors, whittling down 25 to 12. The new board comprises a mix of business and arts professionals, including five members of the original team, five new faces and two representatives from Leeds City Council.

“I think that everybody should be on the board for only a limited period – six, seven or eight years. When it gets beyond that, they lose some of their energy and their input,” he says.

He had planned to step down himself as part of the shake-up but was persuaded to stay for another two years.

“Since I had been on the board for a long time, I decided that I was part of the problem and not part of the solution, but the board persuaded me to stay on for two years to see through the process.”

The Playhouse’s current turnover is £6m with ticket sales contributing around £2.5m, according to figures for 2009/10.

Theatres are currently facing huge challenges with reductions in public funding from the Arts Council England and local authorities.

Mr Bouttell believes the Playhouse, along with other theatres, will have to look to businesses and individuals to top up future funding.

“I think there probably has been too much reliance on public funding for arts and culture as a whole,” he says. “We really need to get the corporates and the individuals more concerned with it.”

One of the other challenges for the new chairman will be to attract a wider audience to the theatre.

“We do put on a huge amount of community work but the theatre is still mainly attended by middle-aged middle England,” he says.

Mr Bouttell watches every production that is produced by the theatre. He is particularly keen on Alan Bennett plays but confesses he is “not a great Shakespeare fan, although Lenny Henry in Othello was great”.

Audiences for 2009/2010 were up by one per cent on the previous year following two years of a downward trend.

“I think people are finding that, compared to going to a football match, the theatre is still relatively cheap, particularly mid-week. I don’t think the price of a ticket would put people off,” he says.

The Playhouse has caused controversy in recent weeks after the Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds wrote to ask for the posters for its forthcoming production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore to be removed

The Playhouse relented to a point, taking down a 20ft banner featuring a statue of the Virgin Mary next to the word “whore” – but 500 posters with the same image and words stayed on display around the theatre and Leeds.

Mr Bouttell insists that the Playhouse has to stretch boundaries. “We are not meant to be a populist theatre,” he says. “I appreciate the concerns people have but I think it’s a good thing from a theatre point of view that those concerns are aired and talked about.”

Mr Bouttell, the son of a steelworks labourer and a nursing assistant, was born in the “slums of Middlesbrough”, towards the end of the Second World War.

He was the second person on his street of 150 terraced houses to go to grammar school.

He left school at 16 for an apprenticeship in a small chartered accountancy firm in Middlesbrough. He moved to Peat Marwick Mitchell in Darlington in 1966, becoming a partner in 1977.

In 1985, he transferred to the Leeds office. As part of the corporate finance department he specialised in management buyouts, and particularly the privatisation of bus companies in the late 1980s.

However, life took a rather dramatic turn during six weeks in 1990 – Mr Bouttell was promoted to oversee KPMG’s North-East region and West Yorkshire Playhouse also moved from Leeds University into a new £13m building at Quarry Hill.

“It was everything we had ever dreamed of, like moving from a two-up-two-down house into a mansion,” says Mr Bouttell.

However, at the same time, his 24-year-old son, Gary, was killed in a motorbike accident near Ascot.

The devastating event, he says, had a profound effect on the family, which included his wife, Glenda, and two daughters, Laura and Janet, drawing them closer together.

But Mr Bouttell also threw himself into his work.

The move for the Playhouse was a huge operation. “We had to start from scratch because everything we had at Leeds University sports hall fitted into one little corner of the new building, but it was tremendously exciting,” he says.

Although he planned to retire at 55, Mr Bouttell was presented with an offer he couldn’t refuse when he turned 54 – a two-year posting to China to reorganise the Shanghai office.

Following the experience, Mr and Mrs Bouttell returned to Yorkshire to retire.

As well as being on the board of directors at the Playhouse, Mr Bouttell also joined a number of other organisations, including Yorkshire County Cricket in 2002, from which he retired last year.

The club was on the brink of collapse, in massive debt to its bank and chaos threatened.

However, along with fellow ‘Gang of Four’ members Colin Graves, Robin Smith and Geoff Cope, he steadied the ship and made Yorkshire a viable business once more.

Mr Bouttell says he would consider further board opportunities but he is also looking forward to being with his family.

He says: “It will give me more time to do things at home.

“My wife tells me ‘I married you for love not for lunch’.”

Brian Bouttell

Title: Chairman of West Yorkshire Playhouse

Date of birth: May 12, 1944

Education: Middlesbrough High School

First job: I was an articled clerk to a small firm of chartered accountants in Middlesbrough

Favourite song: It Doesn’t Matter Any More, by Buddy Holly

Favourite film: The Great Escape

Favourite holiday destination: Florence

Last book read: Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

What achievement are you most proud of: My family