Ivan Cutting steps down as Artistic Director

I always intended to hand in my badge once the company secured its new NPO award for the next three years and was settled in its new home, the Eastern Angles Centre.

The arrival of the pandemic both stretched and focused my thinking about the future of the company and my own work. I will welcome the chance to travel round the country and see more work, put some energies into furthering the increasing reputations of Ipswich and Peterborough as exciting places with a fantastic heritage and finally write some of those things I’ve had on my to-do list for a long, long time.

The company is stable after the sturm und drang of the last three years, which has seen our turnover halved, then doubled, and now under assault from energy prices and inflation. Initially the company was able to put plans on hold, tighten belts and re-schedule, at the same time as expanding our online activities. As soon as we could open again, we were able, with the new building, to install livestream facilities, improve our community offer locally, and increase projects to employ freelancers. In 2021-22 we employed 75 freelancers, tripled our output and had a show either in rehearsal or out on tour for every week of the year. We got hit by Covid and inevitably this put great pressure on our finances and ability to weather the storm. However, I am proud that I am able to hand over a company that has strong reserves, has an experienced staff, and looks to the future with great anticipation.

I don’t like picking out highlights, but landmark moments tend to linger in the brain for all sorts of reasons: such as The Wuffings in 1997 at the Notcutts’ dispatch centre, “the largest potting shed in Europe” simply for the outrageous scale of the enterprise; Palm Wine and Stout as one of those shows that feature a different culture that parallels our own in the divide between town and country; David Copperfield (design Fred Meller) and We didn’t Mean to Go To Sea (design Rosie Alabaster) for the design that was a joy to work on; both John Clare and Maria Marten shows because for various reasons I’d always said I would never do shows about either subject; all of the plays I did with Alastair Cording and Tony Ramsay; and Parkway Dreams for the sheer cheek of doing a play about the Peterborough Development Corporation and getting the response we did which was usually “We didn’t think we were going to like a play about town planning but we loved it”. But then I have always said I wanted to take people on the journey they didn’t know they wanted to go on.

We started out with musical documentaries, whose style I freely admit I nicked from Peter Cheeseman at Stoke, having seen The Knotty there while at university. I did have the chance to thank him and he encouraged me further. However, I did start to integrate them with fictional stories and started writing myself about the unacknowledged experience within the dying skills of fishing, farming and other ways of life in the region. People used to say “Won’t you run out of subjects?” they don’t say that anymore. 

Of my own writing I was particularly proud of The Reapers Year, Days of Plenty, Inheritance, Private Resistance, and most recently Red Skies about a putative meeting between Arthur Ransome and his wife and George Orwell.

Above all I have had the chance to work with a vast array of people, including creative, administrative and producing, who have helped make the company the success it is and on whose shoulders I have depended so often. It has been a privilege to work with them and serve the communities of this vast and varied region.

Ivan Cutting

It’s hard to summarise the extraordinary contribution Ivan has made to our company, the region’s theatre scene and to national touring, He’s been an outstanding artistic leader, writer, director and producer of theatre experiences which have inspired, touched and entertained so many people.  I know his colleagues, our trustees and our audiences will miss him enormously, but we all wish him much luck for whatever is coming next.

Alison Stewart MBE, Chair of the Eastern Angles Board of Trustees