[00:03] ROSE O’DONOVAN: So good afternoon, I'm Rose O'Donovan. It's the 25th of March 2025, and I'm sitting here in Riverside Studios with our guest today, Sarah Wedderburn. Welcome Sarah.
Thank you.
[00:19] SARAH WEDDERBURN: I wonder if we could start by you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your relationship to Riverside.
SW: I'm Sarah Wedderburn, and I've kept my maiden name through two marriages. I went to work in my last vacation after being at Oxford University for Richard DeMarco in Edinburgh, and there I met various people who had links to this place already or the beginnings of it. And, although it hadn't started then, there were a couple of years in between. I went to live in Hammersmith and when I was looking for a new job, I was very, very shy, I saw that they were advertising for a program coordinator and a secretary to the director and I knew a couple of the people working here because of Dead Class and various things in Edinburgh that had been linked with Ricky DeMarco down here.
So, I came for an interview and I was very demure and I had a little shirt and a pinafore dress. And I came in and I asked for Mr. Gill, which everybody thought was hilarious because, you know, it was theatre. And he was lying on a desk surrounded by people, and I stood, you know, like ‘when did you last see your father’ being interviewed for this job, and in fact, I think my future husband was in the room, but, definitely David Gothard was and Peter Gill and a number of other acolytes. Anyway, I can't type or I couldn't then, I can now a bit better, I'm a hopeless organizer, but I got the job.
So that's how I came to be here and it was one of those strange things, it was an alien world to me in a way, because I’d kind of worked in a library and done all that sort of stuff. It was incredibly high octane. It wasn't terribly good for one's mental health, I don't think, because it was, it was so charged and everything was so urgent and there was a kind of aspiration and a perfectionism about it that meant that nothing but the absolute best was good enough, which is a kind of paradox in the sense that everybody who romanticizes it now, thinks it was all terribly eccentric and done on a shoestring and- but actually it was that, but it was also this, incredible ambition.
So that's how I came in and it practically became my home. I used to stay ‘til long after midnight, catching up with letters. I was doing the job of four people, it was ridiculous. And in the end they did give it to four people. I remember Peter Gill asking me one day, when can I have my letters typed, and I think this was February, and I said, probably in April, Peter.
[03:50.16] RO’D: Gosh, that certainly gives us some sense of the atmosphere and what it was like at that time. So tell us a little bit more about when you came into the building in terms of what did you see, hear, smell, what was the atmosphere like?
SW: It wasn't really like a workplace, it was like a kind of very febrile family. There was a good canteen, so there was often a nice smell of coffee and food but when you went upstairs to the offices, there were people rushing around with papers, on phones, roneoing stuff because it was all done like that in those days, and it was very charged, the atmosphere. There was never much silence and there were people arguing, you know, there was always a great argument between management and the art direction.
I think what's very important to know is that there were two geniuses in the building. I think literally, actually, Peter Gill who I think is the most brilliant person I've ever met, he had such a nuanced understanding of how theatre works and an ability to see who a person is. I mean, he was just uncanny, but, but very difficult because well, as I say, there was this sort of febrile thing. He used to walk around with a pencil going like this. (motions)
[05:45.12] And then there was David Gothard who, you know, he was the kind of 1970s version of Diaghilev without the money and the fur coat. He was able to, he has a huge brain, he was able to bring people together and spot young talent in all the arts and bring them in and start them off. So you had Michael Clarke, the young choreographer, you had Hanif Kureshi who he discovered. He was working with Tarkovsky. He knew everybody in Central Europe who was in the arts, so you've got amazing poets coming from Poland and Hungary and places. He had little scraps of press cuttings everywhere. He knew everybody who was important in the arts in Europe and beyond. And that was why this place was so extraordinary. It was a combination of Peter with his writing and particularly his directing, but there were those four key productions that he did here: The Cherry Orchard, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and,a Webster, I can't remember which one, the Duchess of Malfi or something. Changling, thank you. And those productions are timeless. The Cherry Orchard is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, and it opened the theatre here, post the first Kantor visit.
So, you had that and then you had David bringing in, Red and Puppet from America who are an extraordinary sort of little theatre team, La Claca from Spain, anyway, from Barcelona, who had puppets designed by Miro. You had Tenjo Sajiki, who were led by the great rebel Japanese film director, Tere Shuji Terayana. All these things he brought in - people from Italy and Victoria Chaplin and Jean Baptiste Thierry with the Cirque Imaginaire from Paris. All these things came, Athol Fugard from South Africa. I can't even remember how many of those incredible productions there were, but they, they defined this place and they made it into a kind of magnet for people who are interested, not just in one art form, but in a combination of art forms, which is what this place was sort of famous for, it amalgamated so many different things.
So, it just was, it was incredible, who came. So many people interested in fine arts, in theatre, in music, in dance, everybody converged here, and they really did. You know, I remember seeing Laurence Olivier. I was introduced to Daniel Day Lewis, there was, I can't remember exactly whether they were all here at the same, you know, when I was or not. I remember seeing Beckett here and Lucinda Childs and John Cage, maybe not Cage, Philip Glass, I think. Then all the people who are now really famous who weren't then, were also here. So Hanif Qureshi, when I went to work in the bookshop for a bit, was my assistant there. And Rebecca O'Brien, I worked with, Simon Curtis never worked here actually, but he was always hanging out here, he used to sit on my desk. Lots of very good fine artists, so that was in that period. But the interesting thing, as I say, about it was that it drew anybody who was interested in international art together. So in any one time in the foyer when you'd be sitting having a cup of tea, there would be an incredible mix of people.
And there was something a bit, sometimes for me, a bit terrifying about it because it was so charged that you kind of, when I left, which I did a couple of times actually, and then came back because it was sort of too much. You always wondered whether there would ever be anything again like that, and I mean, I'm quite a creative person and I work, I've worked ever since as a writer and now I'm a poet and all this sort of stuff, but somehow being in such a rich mix was both absolutely the most amazing thing you could ever imagine and also quite a bit too much sometimes, you know, and I think I probably used to go home to my parents or to friends and say, God, you never, you'll never guess, you know, and they were all doing ordinary things, but here I was at this kind of pinnacle of culture.
I think now when I speak to people, a lot of people remember it as, you know, Doctor Who. And I was telling Daniel this strange story, I went to the hairdresser today and the hairdresser said to me, or the woman who ran the salon, she said, oh yeah, my dad was at Riverside, he was in Dead Class and I said no, he can't have been.
[12.28] RO’D: You worked on that, did you?
SW: Yeah, yeah, I did for years. I thought that's a bit weird. Anyway, she meant Z Cars. You know, most people don't know about this phenomenon. Most people are unaware now. A lot of, you know, wonderful people who lived locally who used to come. Monica Kinley, who was a fantastic champion of artists, really important. Julie Lawson, who was Roland Penrose's secretary and knew Picasso very well. She would come and help. There were all sorts of people converging because it was the place to be, but they're all dead. Peter Gill is in a home now and I gather that, you know, he's failing a little bit. David is not. David's physically not as well as he was, but he's sharp as a pin. There aren't, you know, there aren't going to be many years left where people actually remember how extraordinary it was, and I'm not painting the full picture.
The theatre design school came here. The dance that I saw, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, the poetry, the beat poets came. I mean, I imagine all this is recorded. But it was just one event after another, literally, and my job as program coordinator was to, you know, fit an opera around a poetry reading, around a performance, an art performance event around some crazy punk band with just two bass guitars from New York or something, you know, and you had to fit it all together and it operated every day. I think they had a rest on Mondays, but otherwise there were events day on, day and day and day. It was quite something.
[14:29.20] RO’D: Thank you Sarah. Really it’s painted such a vivid picture there in terms of the span of artists and your role in that, so is there such a thing as a typical day when you were here?
SW: Yeah, you'd rock up about 10 o'clock because you would have been there till 12 or 2 in the morning the night before, probably and there'd be some crisis, always, yeah and I'd sit down, I mean, the thing is I'm telling you, I had 3 different incarnations here. I'm telling you about the first one, really at the moment.
So, I would sit at my desk with these huge piles of paper and David would come in. I'd do a bit for Peter and then David would come in and say; “Have you answered so and so? Have you written to this? Look at this that I've got. Can you do that? And then when you've done that, can you do this?” So, I would be clattering away on my little typewriter, big typewriter actually, and people used to write letters, so there would be a lot of post every day. There were some extraordinarily persistent applicants to have gigs here. So, I remember there was one woman in particular who ran an ensemble, she was South American, an ensemble of kind of contemporary music. And she wrote letters endlessly and I used to have to write back saying very sorry we haven't got a space in our program, thank you very much for your interest, you know, and she'd write again and I'd do it again and eventually after about the 15th letter, I said to David, look, she's written again, he said, oh, for God's sake, give her a gig. So, we did.
But there was an awful lot of, you know, answering post and that sort of stuff quickly and then, also one of my jobs was to get on the phone when we had to get in touch with people overseas for everybody. I had to do this for everyone. Because yes, it's true, it was informal in the sense that we didn't have much money. But it was also, as I say, very, very rigorous in that we've had to have the best. So I would have to get through to the important producers, say, in Italy or China or not China probably, but South Africa or Japan and I was the only person who could dial so that I recognized when the tone changed from the British dialing noise to the next one and possibly to a third one, and then get through to the person because you had to go so slowly and dial things a little bit at a time. So you know, it wasn't just 0033 or whatever. So that was one of my jobs.
And another job was to try and work out where we would accommodate everybody. So, for example, I lived just up by Hammersmith Grove in the road called Overstone Road, and just off it was a hotel called Terry's which was for the navvies really, the labourers who'd probably come over from Ireland and needed a place to stay. We arranged for the whole, Tenjo Sajiki, Shuji Teriyama's crew and actors, it was a great big huge troupe, to stay there. That was part of my job and sometimes you'd have people staying on your floor if it was a single performer, because the budgets were very tight. Very, very tight in spite of the fact that people would say, God, have you seen that latest thing at Riverside, you know. It wasn't to do with Arts Council or sponsors, as we have now. I mean, we would get people to help with a bit of money, you know, you'd say, look, we're really short of 1000 quid to somebody rich and maybe they might, I don't know, they might help. But it was, it was done on a shoestring.
The people who were most important and were paid union rates were the technical people, they were absolutely key to everything, and they were the most highly respected people in the building. The electricians, the carpenters, all the crew. You never spoke roughly to them. You could have a bant, barney with somebody else but never because they were, they were the geniuses of keeping it all on the road, and they did it. They would do get ins, get outs on a daily basis. Lighting rigs, everything, they're incredible. So they were at the centre of it all and then otherwise we were all kind of friends.
There was a slight friction sometimes between whoever was an administrator and who was involved in the artistic side, because they would say, no, you can't do that. And then David and Peter would go to the Board and wrangle it and then we did do it, most things we did do that they wanted to do. I think it was before the great culture of arts admin. There was the management side, but we were really just workers, we were grafters, we hadn't been trained, we had no background in arts administration. We had enthusiasm and total grit, and I've seen this continue in the people who worked here, you know, like Rebecca O'Brien, who was a dear friend of mine who has become, a really, really good producer, a film producer. Or Erica Bolton and Jane Quinn, who still maintain the same ethos in their very, very classy arts PR agency. If something needs to be done, it gets done. You don't kind of work out how long it's gonna take you or, you know, you just roll your sleeves up and do it. There's no such thing as can't.
And I think that was also present in some of the people who influenced us like Percy Harris from the Theatre Design School who had a home here for a bit. You just saw these people had been doing their work since before the war. They weren't gonna say it's 5 o'clock I'm going home or you know, has that person got the correct academic credentials, you know. If they saw potential in somebody, they would take them on whether they, you know, whatever.
So, I think another detail is that I did change jobs. For a while I was part of the bookshop, and I think I was supposed to be running it, but I'm never good at running anything, so I probably didn't do much of that, but I'd certainly order the books and I had a friend called Diane who was also working there.
[22:40.21] RO’D: And you mentioned Hanif Kureshi was your assistant. So what was that like?
SW: I'm trying to be discreet. I love Hanif. I haven't seen him for years, but we're really fond of each other. But he used to sit reading Gramsci, which I'd put up on the bloody shelf as nicely as I could because I'm not very tidy. But he would bring the book down, open it, score the spine so you couldn't sell it, put his feet on the till. And I remember at one point I was pregnant and climbing the ladder to put the books back and Hanif, he was just mischievous. He'd be sitting there like, you know, with his feet up on the till saying, you know, you don't really deserve to be alive with your background, you know. He was so funny (laughs).
[23:32] RO’D: Amazing memory.
SW: I think he was there because David had thrown a typewriter at him (laughs).
[23:44.02] RO’D: You've mentioned so many other names, but, one of them was Samuel Beckett. Do you have any recollection?
SW: Well, I just remember him going in and out of Studio 2 because he was rehearsing something there and I think it's in some of the, you'd know what, what he was doing, and there was an amazing man called Chris Harris. Have you heard of Chris Harris who was a photographer? People were allowed to develop who they were. So I was allowed to write things and take photographs, which I did not do terribly well at that point because I needed glasses and I didn't realize it. But, Chris was obviously a a born photographer and he took the most wonderful images and that was his job, he just had a little room here. I don't know how much he got paid probably not very much, it was sort of part-time.
Then there were just so many interesting things like, we had an architecture theme. The first exhibition that was ever here was of the Pompidou Center. It was Richard Rogers, who was local to here, and he put up all his plans for the Pompidou Centre. And then later on, another great architect who's sadly dead also now but too young, Will Alsop designed the little bookshop, which has since been knocked down and he was resident here. There were lots of artists in residence, Rosemary Butcher from The Dance Company was resident here. There were all sorts of, and one of them later was my husband of then, Ian Caughlin. He was a painter who was resident here, and he and I got married in Hammersmith Church and all the team came along to the wedding on a very cold Thursday morning, I think it was, in Advent, so there was no decoration. It was just, my family and my husband's mum and dad and everybody from Riverside and my granny in mink, Peter Gill was always reminding me. She came down from the North with a salmon. And I think my mum and stepfather produced some champagne and so we had salmon and champagne, and then in the evening there was some kind of band of Kamal gypsies who were playing here at the moment. I can't remember who they were, but I do know that they had big boots because they came round in the evening to our flat in Overstone Road where we’d got a cake, which I think my granny or my mum had produced, which was a proper wedding cake thing. I mean, not a very big one, but it was a fruit cake. And they played their guitars and stamped their feet, and my husband and I spent our wedding night scraping wedding cake off the beige carpet in my little flat (laughs).
[26:38.20] RO’D: Wow.
SW: So, there were endless people coming through. There was a wonderful man called Richard Brooker. Have you heard of Richard? Aah, Richard Brooker was amazing. He was a trapeze catcher from Rhodesia, as they called it then, and he and Revel Fox, who was a film student, because we had film students Ian Knox and Revel Fox came and did the film programming, particularly Ian actually, but Revel got involved too, I can't remember how. And Rich, he was a trapeze flyer, and Richard Brooker was a trapeze catcher and Richard Brooker came and stayed in my flat for a bit. And he was extraordinary. He went on to be the Man in the Mask in Hollywood. He was a brilliant stunt man and he died a few years ago, quite young. But he and Revel made a trapeze catching net in the cinema and I think they did a bit of trapeze work, but I can't remember quite why, how and where. But Richard was a real character here and David Gothard was very, very fond of him. He had a big mullet and a briefcase with a combination lock, and shoes with little buckles. He was such a character, about 7 ft tall. So he stayed with me and then a wonderful artist called John Groom who is still a dear friend of mine, he shared my flat for a bit. I only had one bedroom. We all did, you know, about turns with the sofa and the bed. And Rebecca O'Brien, and then Claire Street, who's now Claire Adams. She lived in the flat, she bought the flat downstairs from me. So we were all kind of, it was family, really.
[28:37.16] RO’D: So take us on in your journey then Sarah, so you're now married, your husband...
SW: And I've got a child.
RO’D: You’re both working here.
SW: Yes, he had a studio. He was teaching English as a foreign language most of the time, but he had a studio here. So then I had at least one child, and so I had to kind of adapt how I worked and then I had an, whether I'd already had, when did Jenny Stein start? I can't remember. But she I knew very well because she had a gallery in North London in Regent's Park Road called House and my husband was associated with her and she was very well known. She'd run the Whitechapel for a bit. And actually, she'd given a big exhibition to my present husband, at the Whitechapel. So I kind of, and I already sort of vaguely knew him, everybody knew everybody. Anyway, she was appointed as director before David's new era as artistic director here, and I can't remember the exact dates. But she had a very short tenure, I think Peter, when he left to go to the National Theatre. He's a very complicated soul. I think he didn't want anybody who would replicate him in any way. So his choice, which the board agreed with, was that there should be a visual arts person leading it.
And so for a short while, Jenny, who sadly had a lot of mental health issues and eventually had to retire. She's still alive, but she's now in, she was sectioned actually eventually, and she's still in the home that they put her in age 90 something, like this tiny little lady. She was brilliant at what she did, absolutely amazing. There was a bit on Crisp Road, which is probably now part of the foyer, I don't know, where she created a gallery with bars on the window. Before that, we just had pictures up in the foyer. There she set about scheduling the most incredible exhibitions and I was her assistant. Which I was really thrilled to do because she was somebody of such knowledge and, again huge style and eccentricity, but real professionalism. She was able, because of her earlier experience to get government indemnity for that space. Through Nipper of the Yard, who was the man who'd caught the craze. He was the great person that the National Gallery used to make sure that everything was secure, and he came here and he explained exactly what we had to do to get government indemnity and it was all done. It was brilliant on Crisp Road.
[00:32:06.08] So we had Munch landscapes, we had Legge, wonderful Legge. We had David Hockney's opera designs, we had Humphrey Jennings. That was a big one, the wartime filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. His paintings and his films all at once, a kind of festival, which was incredible because she'd worked with him in the war on a film called Diary for Timothy. And she championed a lot of contemporary artists here. But the main thing was that she managed to get these really extraordinary, high profile, expensive things into the building. I enjoyed working for her, but it was a bit more, even more tense in some ways because she was a very strong character and I loved her very much, she was almost like a mother, but she was not, you could tell she was- She would either be low or going up. And I think she probably left in one of the periods when she was ill but it was very distressing, and I remember walking with Ian, my husband, around Brook Green saying, I don't know what to do, I feel I'm going nuts, and he was saying that actually, Jenny's not very well at the moment, I think that's why you feel that way. But she did a great job and without her, I don't think David would ever have understood what followed after I'd stopped being here and had to concentrate on my children and so on, and earning a bit more money. I don't think that the gallery here would have evolved in the way that it did and to the point where I think it, it got the Turner Prize, didn't it? Nominated for the Turner Prize.
[34:25.10] RO’D: So Jenny left and you were still here...
SW: No, I left then too.
[34:32.01] RO’D: And then you had a break, did you, before you, did you come back?
SW: I didn't come back. I mean, we're now talking about 5 years in. But David, I remember when I had tiny children and there was something going on here and David sort of rang me up. I've always been in touch with him. I've never been out of touch with either but David particularly, but even with Peter for years I would phone up and things and we'd have chats, but, I remember him phoning me and saying “Why aren't you supporting me? Why aren't you here? Why aren't you...?” And I said, “David, I've got little tiny children, I'm absolutely up to my neck. I can't do it. I'm so sorry.” “Oh, you're so disloyal”, you know, because there was that kind of, there was that demand that you were loyal to the bottom of your feet, you know, and I felt it, but I couldn't really help at that time, yeah.
[35:36.17] RO’D: So when you see Riverside today, tell us about some of the changes.
SW: So it's completely other and I just hope that, with the help of this history project, none of that past will be lost and forgotten. Funnily enough, the last time I was here was for the memorial for a really dear friend of mine called Barbara Steveni and she and John Latham, the artist, had a space on the roof somewhere along here, where they ran their amazing project called APG, Artist Placement Group.
They were the first people to see that you could place an artist into an industrial government position and allow them to be artists without any agenda, in a way that informed and illuminated the work of whatever organization they were going in, maybe obliquely, maybe spiritually, maybe intellectually, but certainly not according to the direction of the organisation. They were in British Steel and all sorts of things. Anyway, they had these intense meetings on the roof and to get there, they had to go through my office so I got to know them very well but that's the last time I was here for her memorial, and she's now got a huge exhibition at Modern Art Oxford where I’ve just been.
[37:24.18] RO’D: So, you're not a regular visitor to...
SW: No, because I now live with my second husband in East Kent. My children are obviously middle aged, nearly, and no, I don't get up here very often, no.
[37:45.13] RO’D: What difference do you think that Riverside has made both in the local community and further afield?
SW: I think the local community were very much involved throughout the time I was here. There were people coming in and out and I'm sure Simon Curtis talked about Willie and all that lot, but there was, as I was saying before, people who lived locally, who were in the arts, would gravitate here a lot. Also, what all three, Jenny, Peter and David did was to go out into the community and find artists. So, I remember with Jenny, we went to visit all the local kind of artists who were at the end of their careers like Ruskin Spear and Julian Trevelyan, who lived on the river down here, and.... Oh gosh, there's a really famous ballet dancer who lived in Chiswick whose name I can't remember briefly cos I don't remember names anymore, and she came here. Because we were invited to go, and we were asked to go and meet them, and tell them and get them down here and people came out of the woodwork. So it was not just people as audiences and workers here, it was artists who lived around about who came in and they created the atmosphere.
[39:40.09] RO’D: You've talked about some of the key colleagues that you worked with. Are there any others, aside from David and Peter that really stand out in your mind?
SW: That's a really good question. There was a core of people, there were also people who drifted in and out. But the people who stood in my mind were Erica Bolton and Jane Quinn and before them Claire Adams and Rebecca O'Brien. And Chris Harris and all the people who would come in to do specific projects to do with, say, dance or music, who were really part of the fabric because the core team and the freelance artists who came in very much blended together. Yeah, those were the keys and but then you, you know, you loved lots of people. Lizzie, the lady who did the switchboard was wonderful. I imagine she's still living around here someplace. And they were great people. The box office people were fantastic. Everybody was really professional but in that way, as I say, that wasn't to do with necessarily having all the right rubric or qualifications, but just really on it, you know. So it was fun, but it was work.
[41:28.24] RO’D: So you mentioned right at the beginning that you didn't feel you had the skills for the job that you applied for, but what did they see in you that you...?
SW: They used to tease me for being posh, having a lisp, having gone to Oxford, um, being a bit naive (laughs) but they were really sweet as well. They were really lovely to me. And of course there were lots of romances. So I used to get teased about my romances with people who came in (laughs) and, no, it was great. I felt, I don't know what they saw in me, I think it was a seriousness and absolute willingness to throw myself into it and to do the work. Not to quibble about, you know, if I had a dinner date or something, you know, you actually never had one, yeah.
[42:34.24] RO’D: It was very remiss of me not to ask you at the beginning, why was your interviewer lying on the table?
SW: I don't know, I suppose he was tired after a rehearsal or something, and it was the end of the day, I don't know. I would love to know but it was a baptism of fire and I remember the first days I came in here. David was showing me works of art and things that he wanted to encourage and people he wanted to bring in, some of them were a bit shocking. You know that it was the days of feminism, but it wasn't the days when we were aware of, kind of, not exactly boundaries. But the language that people used, was, you just had to be robust and take it.
I think the other thing that's really, was really lovely about it actually was that there was nobody predatory on the staff at all, none of that. We were too busy and also the key people were probably not of a heterosexual persuasion, so I never ever felt that I was being predated on, but it was quite a sexy atmosphere. It was a bit like wartime (laughs).
[44:11.18] RO’D: And how was that experience, how did working here inform you in terms of future work experience and future life experience?
SW: It was incredibly important, I think. I felt a bit at times that I was going to have a breakdown because it was quite intense, but it's been so great. You know, I've always done my best to do my work to the best possible degree. In fact, Erica and Jane until very recently used me as their writer and passed me on to lots of other places. So I've worked for the Tate, I was Norman Foster's writer for a while. I did a lot of things that were challenging and demanding, but I'd learnt here, this was my school, this was my university in lots of ways, more than Oxford in terms of becoming me. I learned how to just put my head down and push and do it. Not for money, but for, cos I've never been very good at that. But for the satisfaction of having done a really good job, never cutting corners and that I learned here, absolutely no doubt. And also, you know, I have to keep refreshing myself, going back to it, a kind of standard for artistic enterprise which, I think, it was so high here that it's easy to sort of let it, it's easy to forget in a way, but sometimes when I revisit it, I think, yeah, that's what one's got to go for, you know. You can't be slack. What I would have loved to have done is to observe some of Peter's rehearsals, which I never did. But I don't think I've ever seen such beautiful theatre productions as he made, yeah.
[46:42.11] RO’D: Thank you, Sarah, some really wonderful memories there. Before we finish, is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your memories of Riverside?
I remember bringing friends here with great pride, friends from America. One of the things that happened was that I was going to America to see this particular friend. And I said to David and Peter, look, my airfare and expenses are going to be about 100 odd quid. Do you think you could chip in because I can recruit some stars for you, maybe there, you know, some people. So they gave me 50 quid. I had a pair of big flying trousers and some red and black baseball boots and an old shirt and, you know, I went. And I was in New York, and I happened to know a woman who'd been on the board of the Museum of Modern Art and various other things and I stayed with her, old lady who was a great friend, long, long dead. She introduced me to the key man who was called Porter, I think Porter McRae, I think was his name, and through him I met lots of people like Meredith Monk and Lucinda Childs and I don't think I actually met Philip Glass, but all that crowd, and I think I was instrumental in getting them here.
I'm trying to remember Laurie Anderson, various other people. I can't think, it's all a haze, but I know that I was instrumental in bringing them here, so that was a lovely kind of thing on the side that happened, really beautiful actually.
[48:41.14] RO’D: Really impactful.
Yes, and the thing I discovered was that New York had a very similar atmosphere to here which didn't exist in other places. This has been for a long time, I think, quite a bureaucratic country in terms of the arts, but you went to New York in your baseball boots, aged 25 or whatever it was, doors just opened, to everything. Big managers and people saying,” yeah, come in, how are you, great to meet you, what would you like, how can I, yeah, we can do that, why not? Hey, you know.” It was that same combination of friendship, slight eccentricity and utter professionalism, so that things happened. And I loved that about New York. Yeah, and the two cultures were very, you know, they had a lot of synchronicity.
[49:39.14] RO’D: Wonderful, wonderful. So I think we should end it on Riverside, so just give us three words, how you'd sum up your experience at Riverside.
SW: Exciting, agonizing and very fruitful because I met my husband, who I'm still great friends with, my first husband, got married here and I had the first Riverside child.
[50:09.09] RO’D: Thank you very much.
