Barrie Rutter to step down after 25 years of running Northern Broadsides

"Having failed to lead the team in securing a long-overdue increase in Arts Council funding, I have decided that after 25 wonderful years it is the right time for me to stand down," said the 70-year-old actor-manager. "I leave the Supporters of Northern Broadsides in the hands of a robust and creative staff.”

Rutter founded Northern Broadsides in 1992, forming a noncomformist company to put the emphasis on the northern voice, and under his artistic leadership Broadsides have become one of Britain's leading touring theatre companies, producing more than 70 productions that started with Richard III.

Over the past 25 years, Hull-born Rutter has overseen many of Broadsides’ successes, such as casting Lenny Henry in the title role in Othello in 2009 and Mat Fraser, who has thalidomide-induced Phocomelia, as Richard in Richard III as part of Hull UK City of Culture 2017.

Barrie Rutter outside Northern Broadsides' headquarters at Dean Clough Mills, Halifax

Further triumphs were Broadsides' acclaimed production of Shakespeare's history plays, The Wars Of The Roses, at West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2006; a rediscovery of Githa Sowerby's long-neglected debut play, Rutherford And Son, directed by Sir Jonathan Miller in 2013, and the award-winning premiere of Deborah McAndrew's An August Bank Holiday Lark in 2014. The following year, Rutter was awarded the OBE for services to drama.

Rutter’s final productions for Broadsides will be For Love Or Money this autumn and The Captive Queen early next year. The world premiere of For Love Or Money, Blake Morrison’s new adaptation of Alain Rene Lesage’s French comedy Turcaret, will open in September at the Viaduct Theatre, in Broadsides' home town of Halifax, and then tour until December 2017.

Rutter will play Fuller, the bank manager, and the tour will take in West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, September 26 to 30; the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, November 14 to 18, and York Theatre Royal, November 28 to December 2.

From next January, in London, Rutter will direct the Shakespeare’s Globe and Northern Broadsides co-production of John Dryden's Restoration drama The Captive Queen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for a run from February 2 to March 4.

Born in 1946, the son of a Hull fish worker, Barrie Rutter grew up in a two-up two-down in the fish dock area of Hull. At school, an English teacher frogmarched him into the school play because he had “the gob for it”, and feeling at home on stage, Rutter chose his future direction. There followed many years in the National Youth Theatre culminating in Peter Terson's The Apprentices, a role specially written for him, a practice to be repeated later in his career.

Barrie Rutter as Lear in Northern Broadsides' King Lear

Seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, London and Europe completed the 1970s. In 1980, Rutter joined the National Theatre, a formative period when he met and worked closely with a poet who was to become his guru, the Leeds poet, translator and playwright Tony Harrison. Rutter performed in three of Harrison’s adaptations, all written for the Northern voice: The Mysteries, The Oresteia and The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus. In Trackers, the part of Silenus was written especially for Rutter.

It was this experience that germinated the idea for Northern Broadsides, a company subsequently characterised by theatrical inventiveness and robust performances from large ensemble casts of northern actors who all perform in their natural voices.

Summing up Rutter's contribution to Northern Broadsides, the theatre's board said: "We recognise the significant contribution Barrie Rutter has made to theatre, the arts in general and the lives of his colleagues over the years. In establishing Northern Broadsides 25 years ago, he created a vibrant and visionary organisation that is committed to ensuring that his legacy survives into the future.

"We are delighted to be continuing as an Arts Council England NPO organisation and are looking forward to working with an extremely talented creative team over the coming years. Barrie Rutter will be missed both on and off the Broadsides stage, but we wish him well in his next adventures."

Rutter's successor will be announced later.