eRICA wHYMAN
Erica Whyman is a theatre maker and artistic leader. Most recently she directed Ben and Imo by Mark Ravenhill which she will revive at the Orange Tree in 2025, and Hamnet by Lolita Chakrabarti from the novel by Maggie O’Farrell. She has had a long career leading theatres, first as Artistic Director of Southwark Playhouse 1998-2000, Artistic Director of The Gate Theatre Notting Hill 2000-2004, Chief Executive of Northern Stage 2005-2013, and Deputy and later Acting Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She was Chair of Theatre503 for a decade and is now Chair of multi-award-winning theatre company Improbable. She was one of the first fellows on the Clore Leadership programme and was awarded the OBE for services to British Theatre.
Her work on stage has included collaborations with writers such as Alice Birch, Tom Morton-Smith, and Hannah Khalil, a musical of the life of Joan Littlewood by Sam Kenyon, and ground-breaking Shakespeare productions including Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream; A Play For The Nation created with 14 amateur companies across the UK and a professional cast. In 2021 she co-created a two-day theatrical event with the Faith communities of Coventry. She led the RSC out of the pandemic and her programme included the Olivier award-winning My Neighbour Totoro, and Cowbois by Charlie Josephine. She is now freelance, and amongst other projects she is co-creating a summer festival with the community in The Leys, Oxford.
Erica’s Visiting Fellowship is an opportunity to look at the role of the artist in our society and in a University, and to investigate what we mean by cultural democracy. She will be meeting academics from a range of disciplines beyond the arts to explore these ideas and will hold an event in Hilary term inviting the city and the University to come together and explore how we might empower our artists to make real change. She is also taking this opportunity to consider her own life as a storyteller and will share some of those reflections later in the year.
College affiliation: Wadham College
About Fellowship
Erica is reflecting on how theatre and the arts can play a transformative role in strengthening our communities and reimagining democracy. Throughout her fellowship, Erica is collaborating with community leaders in Blackbird Leys and Greater Leys to create an annual festival, part of the University of Oxford’s work to positively impact the city.
Erica is exploring the provocation below:
Humanity is facing some pretty stiff challenges right now, from frightening conflicts, to climate change, to a lot of people losing faith in those in power or in the democratic systems that put them there. These challenges all touch a city such as Oxford pretty closely, given the diversity of its population, its global reach, and the very real hardship in many of the city’s communities. Erica believes one tool for rising to these challenges is our creativity – the capacity to listen, to reflect, to make a case for change and to imagine other stories for ourselves.
Erica’s fellowship centres on a vital and thought-provoking question: Should we take the radical curiosity of artists more seriously? And if so, how could a university go about doing that?