DAVID GILMORE
Artistic Director from 1976 – 1978

I first saw The Watermill on a spring day in 1975.  Anyone visiting The Watermill for the first time is likely to be enchanted; but on that crisp, sunny, spring day, well before the start of the season, it seemed to exert an extraordinary charm. 

Although the overall structure is little changed, the theatre was a much more primitive affair in those days.  The present car park was a grassy field (unfortunately liable to resemble a quagmire before the end of a busy season), there was no running water in the theatre (except through the roof), so no washbasins or loos for the actors; bowls of water had to be carried up to the dressing rooms above the auditorium and an elsan chemical loo would provide unrehearsed sound effects if anyone was absent-minded enough or desperate enough to use it during a performance. 

The auditorium and roof were un-insulated so in cold weather it was freezing and in summer, baking. I particularly remember Basil Lord trying to apply his make-up for Sleuth with a thermometer reading 110 degrees in his dressing room!  The lack of insulation also rendered the auditorium a much noisier place than it is today; after heavy rain the roar of the mill-race provided considerable competition for the actors. 

But none of this impinged as David Gollins showed me around and then took me to lunch in a nearby pub where the landlord pulled the spring onions and lettuce for our lunch from his garden and where I was introduced to bar billiards, a recreation that for me will always be associated with summers at The Watermill. 

I returned later that summer to direct Candida, and then the following year when David Gollins decided to go into the world of opera and accepted a post at the English National Opera, I was invited to become Artistic Director and in fact stayed for the next three years.  His last season was a hard act to follow, enormously successful and played during a beautiful summer.  How could anything improve on it?  Well, the climate lent a helping hand and an even better summer followed.

I don’t think any member of the 1976 company was seen in anything but shorts and T-shirt throughout the entire season.  The river dried up – we carried floundering trout and stranded crayfish from the nearly dry river bed to the refuge of the albeit severely depleted mill pool – the lawn turned brown and cracked and we tried not to flush the loos.  Which reminds me that was the season we installed the loo and the washbasins for the actors.

In my first ever position as an Artistic Director life was made infinitely easier and more enjoyable by the then General Manager, Paul Iles, who sadly left us at the end of the season for a prestigious job in Australia.

The problems of running The Watermill were then much as they are now, and much as they are in any theatre however large or small.  Selecting a balanced programme of plays which cater for the tastes of as many of the potential audience as possible while at the same time being of intrinsic artistic merit and stageable within the physical and financial constraints of the company. 

Then, as now, The Watermill struggled, and for the most part succeeded, in reconciling these sometimes conflicting demands, in maximising its earned income, in attempting to persuade sometimes reluctant funding bodies to make a realistic contribution to any shortfall and in persuading local and national businesses to help with sponsorship; all this and putting on entertaining and stimulating plays too!  And every year, then as now, the struggle starts all over again!

Three years passed in a flash, productions that stand out in one’s memory include: Uncle Vanya, Loot, the Life and Crimes of Al Capone, The Great British Musical, Kennedy’s Children, Butley, Chez Nous, The Odd Couple and The Philanthropist. Unforgetable personalities too spring to mind, most notably Judy Gollins, Humphrey Davey, Mrs ‘B’, Ben Pendred and Michael and Joan de Steiger.

As my last season drew to a close it was borne in upon me as I arrived at work each day how unlikely it was that one would ever again be employed so idyllically.  As a ‘city boy’ I had for the first time watched crops grow, ripen and be harvested; sat at my desk and watched a heron take a trout from the river only a few feet away and shared my workplace with voles, kingfishers, tawny owls, yellow-hammers, flycatchers and most magically of all, on a few evenings each year, in the silent dusk after the audience had all gone home, a solitary nightingale singing fit to bust on a post outside my office.

Long may The Watermill continue to thrive!

David Gilmore left The Watermill to take up the post of Artistic Director at the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton.  He is now a highly respected freelance director, responsible for such hits as Daisy Pulls it Off, The Hired Man and Jeffrey Archer’s play Beyond Reasonable Doubt

David Gilmore looking back in 1988

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