Foyer, auditorium, main stage, smaller stage, workshop, wardrobe, rehearsal room, green room: just three months into her job as executive director of the Court Theatre, Gretchen La Roche cuts a confident path through what will be the new $56 million playhouse when it opens next year.
It will be the theatre’s first permanent home since the 2011 earthquake uprooted it from the city’s Arts Centre, but it’s as if La Roche has known this place all her life.
Which, in a way, she has. As musician (she played principal clarinet for the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra for nine years), administrator (her most recent role was senior manager at Creative New Zealand), and concert goer, La Roche has built a career backstage, on stage and front of house.
“It’s very difficult to work in performing arts if you don’t have some experience of the performing arts,” she says back in the converted granary that has been home to the Court for the past 13 years. “Understanding the pressures, understanding where people are coming from and a deeper understanding of what people are trying to communicate and why, that is important. Just looking at numbers on a page doesn’t give that full, nuanced picture.”
La Roche’s immersion in the arts began in Tairāwhiti Gisborne. Her mother, Margaret Dunsmore, was a trained pianist. Her father, Ian Dunsmore, founder of the Gisborne International Music Competition, ran a sports and music shop. “Records, guitars, clarinets – it had the full range of that time.”
It was a childhood steeped in classical music, contemporary music and, thanks to the family background in the Salvation Army, brass bands (she left the church in her early teens). Her father also worked with the central region branch of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, “so he had a real interest in the arts, meeting the artists, understanding what they needed to help create their work”.
For a determined young musician – she started learning the clarinet aged 8 – Tairāwhiti provided a supportive grounding. “People make assumptions about opportunities in big cities but they don’t understand just how special the opportunities are in smaller cities.”
After studying music at the University of Auckland, she left for London on a two-year scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where she immersed herself in “everything that was free or that I could afford to do – dance, theatre, galleries, orchestras, weird things happening in strange little rooms”.
Returning home, she followed a circuitous route through performance, production and arts administration. “I always knew I would likely have a broad career. What do they call it now? A portfolio career? I just thought of it as eclectic.” She played for the Auckland Philharmonia, was a founding member of contemporary music ensemble 175 East, performed with Chamber Music New Zealand and collaborated in the fateful New Zealand Actors Company gender-switching production of Leah.
The position of principal clarinet with the CSO took her to Christchurch. Her husband-to-be, Mark La Roche, was principal timpanist. “We were known as the Aucklanders.” She also worked as the Creative New Zealand programme adviser for Te Wai Pounamu and, in 2009, took on a part-time role in sponsorship at the Court Theatre.
After the 2011 earthquake, as chief executive of the CSO, she oversaw the orchestra’s move into its new $9.5m facility. From here, after a brief leadership role for Chamber Music NZ, she took on a Wellington-based senior management role at Creative New Zealand for the planned overhaul of the contestable funding structure.
When CNZ chief executive Stephen Wainwright announced his decision to step down late last year, La Roche seemed an obvious choice. “I did consider it but this opportunity arose and the timing was right. And I missed Christchurch – there is incredible energy in the city right now – and it all tied in with the move into the new building, coming out of challenging circumstances.”
Remarkable survival
Growing competition for funding, the offerings of at-home entertainment, Covid lockdowns and the economic downturn have all eroded audience numbers and pushed up costs. “And investment in the arts has not grown commensurately with that,” says La Roche.
Which has made the survival of the Court, with its extensive programme of school visits, drama classes, education programmes, improv events and mainstream productions, all the more remarkable. It is now New Zealand’s largest professional theatre company and the only one in the South Island.
Ross Gumbley, former artistic director and now artistic adviser for the new theatre, first came to the Court as a student actor in 1985 under a Project Employment Programme scheme. He says part of the theatre’s success was due to its physical size. Housed within the inflexible and somewhat patrician atmosphere of the neo-Gothic Arts Centre, the proximity of the stage to the audience demanded high standards.
“You were a metre away from the audience, so you have to be good. Your production standards have to be good, your costumes have to be outstanding.”
He also points to “the cast-iron bond” that existed between himself as artistic director and former chief executive Philip Aldridge. “For a successful theatre, whoever is responsible for the finances and whoever is responsible for art must have a complete understanding and respect for what the other is trying to do.” Skewing that balance – being overambitious artistically and not being responsible or being too cautious and trying to safeguard your way to success – will tip any theatre “out of whack”, says Gumbley.
The Court also stages a reliably balanced programme: a mix of classic, contemporary and New Zealand plays (although Playmarket statistics from 2023 show that, of the four main producing houses – Auckland Theatre Company, Palmerston North’s Centrepoint Theatre, Wellington’s Circa Theatre and the Court Theatre – the Court staged the lowest proportion of New Zealand work).
And it is not afraid to occupy the middle ground in terms of scale. As Gumbley explains, just as movie theatres have splintered into huge multi-screen venues and intimate boutique cinemas, so theatres are polarising between large-scale theatrical events, such as Wicked and The Phantom of the Opera, and much smaller plays written in the hope they will be affordable enough to produce. The Court “has never been afraid to occupy that middle territory”.
Rocky period
But after the earthquake, there was no territory, literally. The Arts Centre, encased in wrap-around fencing, embarked on a $290m strengthening and restoration project; most of the inner city was behind a cordon. Within just 10 months, helped by the star power of fundraising campaign patron Dame Maggie Smith, the Court had raised the curtain on a $4.6m conversion of an old grain store next to the railway in historic Addington, opening with Sir Roger Hall’s appropriately titled A Shortcut to Happiness.
The dearth of entertainment venues, the theatre’s strong philanthropic base and patrons’ willingness to negotiate broken roads to get to “The Shed” kept the playhouse running. But shortcuts to anywhere are notoriously unreliable. In early 2023, the Court’s annual report recorded an operating loss of $1.5m. Over the next year, this grew to $1.8m, the result of increasing production costs, more staffing and a new collective agreement, which increased theat-rical salaries and wages by 38%.
Added to these were allegations of a toxic and bullying working culture. Staff left, others went on stress leave, a staff survey revealed a worrying lack of engagement. In November 2023, Court Theatre Trust Board chair Tony Feaver stepped down and chief executive Barbara George resigned.
“Our organisation was in crisis but we stood up, took a few hits on the chin and realised what needed to change and got on with doing that,” says new chair and then acting chief executive Steve Wakefield.
Runaway success
Ongoing surveys showed increasing staff satisfaction but doubts about the planned summer production, Something Rotten! were growing. The Tony-winning musical comedy by John O’Farrell, Karey Kirkpatrick and Wayne Kirkpatrick was expensive and not well known. “We decided to go ahead anyway,” says Wakefield.
It was a runaway success. By the end of the season, nearly 16,000 people had seen the show and in early July it staged a re-run.
That, and a $700,000 grant from the Court Foundation Board, established in 2012 after a $3.2m post-earthquake insurance payout, pulled the theatre out of financial straits.
Now, under the leadership of La Roche as executive director and Alison Walls, artistic director since late 2022, the countdown is on. This year’s summer musical, Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom the Musical, will be the last show at The Shed. The next performance, yet to be announced, will be in the much-anticipated new Court Theatre.
A new Court had been written into the government’s 2012 Christchurch Central Recovery Plan as part of the newly designated performing arts precinct. Under a settlement agreement with the Christ-church City Council, the crown provided the land and $3m towards the project. The council committed $46m towards the whole arts precinct, including the new theatre. The remainder was raised by the theatre.
London architecture firm Haworth Tompkins, widely recognised for its innovative theatre designs, was selected to work with Athfield Architects and a wider consultation group including the Matapopore Charitable Trust, tasked with ensuring Ngāi Tūāhuriri/Ngāi Tahu values and stories are represented in the city rebuild, and staff.
Although hopes for a neighbouring car park were dashed, the resulting three-storey timber, steel and concrete design represents a contemporary playhouse wishlist. It includes a 377-seat, Elizabethan-style courtyard auditorium with two seating mezzanines; a 135-seat studio theatre with moveable bench seating; a rehearsal space the same size as the main stage; education studios; community spaces and large working spaces to allow for all production requirements, including set-building and costume-making, to be undertaken under the same roof.
Unlike its previous homes, the new Court Theatre will be more open. Large windows will give a view into the workshops and education rooms, and the lit foyer will be visible from the streets.
“We want it to be an invitation for everybody in this city,” says Gumbley. “I do hope we can reduce this idea of elitism; we don’t want people to feel they don’t earn enough to be in this space.”
Sited close to the new Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre, the Isaac Theatre Royal and The Piano, it will also be part of a wider arts neighbourhood, an appropriate metaphor for theatre, says La Roche.
“It is critical we have community theatre, grassroots theatre, a theatre for young people – from the point of having people creating, performing, presenting but also seeing it.
“[As professional theatres], we can’t be islands on our own – we need to think about how we contribute to our communities, our towns and cities, how we support and champion what is happening at grassroots, at community level. Because we are all woven together, we are all driven by the same thing – a love of theatre.”
Saving Graces
Audience numbers are creeping up. A 2024 report by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage shows 31% of New Zealanders attended a musical, dance or theatre performance in the previous 12 months, up from 22% the year before and just topping 2017′s pre-Covid attendance figures. But ongoing pressure from big screen, small screen and tiny screen, competition for funding, escalating costs – including touring costs – as well as the pandemic have all taken a toll on our theatre houses.
“We are seeing some bounce-back in audiences from pre-Covid but with the current economic environment, it’s tough,” says Murray Lynch, director of theatre licensing agency Playmarket. “Over the past few years, some are producing fewer productions, concentrating on doing the best work they can without completely depleting their resources.
“It’s a given with the economic environment, everything has fallen behind in terms of support that companies get and in terms of the audience who can afford to come to them.”
Long before Covid, the tradition of large professional theatres with companies of paid actors and full production capabilities was declining. Auckland’s Mercury Theatre closed in 1992 (it later re-formed as the Auckland Theatre Company), the Four Seasons Theatre in Whanganui closed in 2000, Downstage Theatre in Wellington in 2013 and Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre in 2018.
Today, only four producing houses create in-house, year-round programmes – the Court, ATC, Circa in Wellington and Palmerston North’s Centrepoint, which is undergoing a $5.1 million refurbishment to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Alongside these are the receiving houses, venues that present the work of other companies and artists, such as BATS, Basement Theatre and Te Pou; independent companies without their own venues such as Massive Theatre Company, Silo Theatre and Tawata Productions; and community (previously amateur) theatres.
But as the new Court Theatre takes shape in Christchurch, its artistic adviser Ross Gumbley is optimistic. “As we all get bored to death with each other’s company in our living rooms, I think the exoticness of theatre will be our saviour. That sense of community, of coming together, of finding something you just can’t find anywhere else, of sharing danger – there is a tension in live theatre where anything can happen and I don’t think we are going to lose that.”