WHEN THE West End theatre producer Thelma Holt was running the
radical London venue, the Roundhouse, in the 1970s, she once interrupted
board member Robert Maxwell. "Don't you dare interrupt me," he
thundered. "And don't you dare shout at me, you Czech spiv," she
retorted and walked out.
Maxwell was flabbergasted. He sent a message through an aide,
"I know I come from Czechoslovakia, but why do you call me a spiv?"
She sent a message back: "Because of your plastic shoes."
For the rest of his life whenever he met Miss Holt he would first
show her how his footwear taste had improved. He would also hand
over an annual cheque for pounds 50,000. One of the lesser known
facts about Maxwell was his private sponsorship of West End theatre.
Thelma Holt could be described as the West End's most daring producer
and is certainly the only female producer there following the
collapse of Biddy Hayward's operation earlier this year. She is
now restaging at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, Deborah Warner's RSC production of Electra starring Fiona Shawl After that she takes Ninagawa's Tango at the End of Winter to Japan. In that country, where doing business with women is
not the norm, she has been awarded an unofficial and not wholly
welcome title. "They call me an honorary man," she says, "I thought,
gee, thanks a bunch, what a treat. It's like John Osborne, when
he sneers at me in his latest book, calling me Ms Holt. I am never,
never Ms Holt."
For 58-year-old Miss Holt, being an honorary man is a long journey
from the Sixties, when she appeared as a naked Lady Macbeth ("We
were all naked in the Sixties") at the Open Space Theatre which
she founded with Charles Marowitz. Before that she had studied
at RADA alongside Joan Collins and Joe Orton.
At the Roundhouse she brought the best of regional theatre, including
Alan Ayckbourn's company, to London. In the Eighties she brought
theatre from Japan, Russia, Germany and Sweden to the National,
Dustin Hoffman to London to play Shylock for Peter Hall, and last
year brought over the Georgian director Robert Sturua to direct
her friend Vanessa Redgrave in Three Sisters.
Along the way she has, she claims, discovered talents like the
designers Bill Dudley and Bob Crowley and the actress Maria Miles,
and she still takes a dominant role in casting. In between she
has been to Romania to help Aids babies, and, with Vanessa Redgrave,
made a film for UNICEF on the plight of Iraqi mothers and children.
She has also been married three times, the last to American actor
David Pressman, whom she "married for his legs". That lasted three
weeks.
"I love the actual ceremony, actually getting married. It doesn't
work so well after that." The ceremonies certainly linger in her
mind more vividly than the marriages. After her last, a friend
recalls watching a film on television at her home and seeing her
frowning. "I'm sure I recognise that actor," she mused. "Of course,
you do," he replied, "you were married to him."
Holt's disarmingly full frontal approach - allied to vividly coloured
outfits and ostrich feather hats which look as if they have been
culled from thrift shops, as indeed they are--clearly entranced
Maxwell. "When I met him," she recalls, "he warned me 'I don't
drink, I don't gamble and I don't sleep with women'. I replied
that at least we had the third thing in common."
She was certainly the tycoon's most curious foible. His picture
adorns her office wall, which in itself is a multimedia event.
Epigrams mix with odd juxtapositions of pictures and captions
- one photograph, of the actors Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman
and Sean Mathias is captioned after the Brontes, Charlotte, Emily
and Anne.
"I was at a reception recently," she said, "and Maxwell's sons
came up to me and said 'We have been longing to meet you. We want
to know what is the secret of the hold you had over our dad.'
"Holt herself cannot explain it, but is seriously worried at the
effect his family's financial problems might have on her operations.
Already she is cutting down on extravagances. In her office her
assistant Sweetpea (Holt nicknamed her after a character in Popeye
and she obediently changed her name by deed poll) was sticking
together graphics to make posters for Electra.
The play, her first collaboration with Warner and Shaw, opened
last night. Every time a play opens, she performs the same ritual--lighting
a candle at Brompton Oratory and praying to St Anthony of Padua.
(When she was running the Roundhouse, with typical perspicacity
about that institution, she made it St Jude, patron of lost causes.)
It may also be a good time to light a candle for the continued
interest of troubled multi-national companies in theatre.
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