One day in the late 1970s, Jude Kelly went to meet the leader of Portsmouth city council. A year or two out of university and armed with a drama degree, she was the new artistic director of Solent People’s Theatre, and she wanted cash.
“I wore a red skirt” – she indicates a wide arc across her legs, suggesting the garment was of the circular type popular in those days – “and a red headscarf, and I think I had little red boots on as well.” She found out later that when she left the meeting the leader turned to colleagues and said: “She’s obviously a communist. No one dresses like that unless they want to make a point.”
Kelly was horrified. She wasn’t a communist, though she had been a feminist since the age of 19 thanks to Germaine Greer, and the awful-sounding Birmingham lecturers who told her, in a line “burnt into my brain”, that “there are three women directors: there’s Joan Knight, who’s a lesbian, Joan Littlewood, who’s retired, and Buzz Goodbody, who’s just killed herself. So which would you like to be?” She stopped attending classes in protest and set up a women’s theatre group.
We meet on International Women’s Day. Kelly is celebrating the launch of her flagship feminist festival, Women of the World (known as Wow), and a decade as artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre. We are in a dressing room behind the Royal Festival Hall, where Kelly has just interviewed Sarah Brown, campaigner and wife of former prime minister Gordon Brown, in front of 1,000 teenage girls.
She may have learned early on the perils of being mistaken for a revolutionary, but Kelly has not given up on politics. Instead, she has channelled her activism through the arts. As a strategy this is not risk-free, and people have not always been polite about her. When she got the Southbank job, her classical music credentials were questioned, as was her vision of a less hierarchical and more holistic cultural space in which art forms, artists and audiences would come together in new ways.
It is true that her answers can be lengthy, and her thoughts do not always find the neatest form of words. But 10 years on, Kelly is in a commanding position. Partly this is because she is still (still!) virtually the only woman running a major national arts organisation (the National Gallery, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Opera and all the South Kensington museums are headed by white males). But it is also because her lifelong commitment to access and inclusion (the Southbank Centre holds annual festivals aimed at the African diaspora and British-Asian community, as well as children, men and other groups) looks to have been right – perhaps now more than ever, in light of recent controversies over diversity and discrimination at the Oscars, the Brits, the BBC and in British cultural life in general.
Does she feel vindicated?
“Yes, I do. Not triumphalist, because I’m not saying we have finished that journey or succeeded in total. But it’s a big part of what we’re trying to do and I think we’ve made people take responsibility for diversity in cultural situations as a starting point, not a nice-to-have add-on. Diversity is such a” – she pauses – “worn word, sometimes it feels as though it is meant to activate reality. But you have to do a lot of work, and have a lot of conversations. It’s not about standing in the middle and saying, ‘I’d like to include you’ – you have to stand in a different place.”
She thinks the lack of women as leaders in the arts remains “a tense question”, and that “the whole territory of unconscious bias is huge” – as is women’s tendency to self-exclude because they dread the scrutiny that goes with big jobs. She says it is a serious problem that most taxpayer-funded work in the arts “is really done by and for white, solvent, educated people – you’ve got to examine the purpose of public subsidy”.
The point, she thinks, is that culture, like literacy, should belong to everyone, and “when you end up with most discussion [of the arts] being along the lines of ‘Is that a wonderful rendition of Brahms?’, it recycles all the time the idea that the most important thing is virtuosity. And while virtuosity is a hugely important thing, there is another thing that is equally important.”
That other thing is the human instinct for creative expression – one of Kelly’s most deeply held beliefs. “All my life I’ve been intrigued by the realisation we take from cave paintings – that humans don’t need to reach any level of sophistication before they feel the compulsion to express who they are through making art,” she says, “but then, for a variety of reasons, we have arrived at societies that place the arts in an area where you achieve once you’ve moved up through class, education and entitlement systems. That disadvantages billions of people for whom art is a natural pursuit, but who are made to feel that it isn’t.”
Kelly knows firsthand, and from experience, how creativity can be squashed. Her grandmother left school at 12, and had 10 children. One of the youngest was Kelly’s father, who won a scholarship, and was acutely aware of having had chances his siblings didn’t. Kelly, who grew up in Liverpool, says that, even as a student, “I was very aware that in two generations my family had gone from that to [me being] at university doing the thing I most wanted. That doesn’t come because of your talent but because other people organise the world so you get opportunities.”
Her biggest job before the Southbank was at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, where she attracted stars including Ian McKellen, and pioneered her vigorous style of community engagement. But while her belief in widening participation predated her arrival in London, what she found on the Southbank was a template, in the form of the 1951 Festival of Britain, for her visions of a cross-disciplinary and uplifting showcase.
Rolled up in her open-plan, riverfront office, from where she can watch punters arriving across the Golden Jubilee footbridges, are four huge diagrams she made soon after her arrival, which show her staking her claim to half a century of heritage. On the far left are the dark clouds, bombs and explosions of the second world war – the Battle of Britain fought over central London, the unimaginable destruction of the Holocaust and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
Across the pages unfurl the hopes and dreams encapsulated by the festival and the postwar period – the times of crisis and stagnation, the arrival of concrete in the 1960s (the National Theatre, Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall), and Kelly’s vision of a 21st-century rebirth. The architect Cedric Price was a mentor, and “roared with laughter” when she told him she had been approached about the job: “He said: ‘It’s a basket case, you’ll be perfect.’”
“Celebrating humanity was so needed after the world had practically annihilated itself,” she says. “I felt it was a world site that had slightly forgotten what it was there for.”
Her answer was “the Festival model”, as it is called in the annual reports: a programme built around festivals, which Kelly believes are more stimulating than regular arts events because people are more likely to dip in and out, to feel more like participants and less like spectators, to be bolder and more, well, festive.
But if the Grade I-listed Royal Festival Hall, filled as it is every day by all sorts of people and free events – from early-evening concerts on Fridays to Boxing Day tango shows and kids’ film screenings – is the pinnacle of Kelly’s achievements, the rest of the 21-acre site has proved more resistant, with artist Antony Gormley arguing in 2013 that it should be bulldozed.
Around the same time, a sponsorship deal with oil giant Shell was ended by mutual agreement, after a series of protests by environmentalists, including one by a pop-up choir. This week Tate, the campaigners’ principal target, announced its 26-year relationship with BP is to end. Kelly says organisations like hers need corporate sponsorship, but debates around the ethics of these arrangements are “entirely legitimate”.
In 2014 the Southbank Centre abandoned plans for extravagant redevelopment, following a bruising fight with skateboarders who did not want to leave the graffiti-covered Undercroft, and the National Theatre, which claimed the plans would lead to a loss of light.
The result was that the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall closed last year for more conservative refurbishments, but Kelly says with a laugh that she “hasn’t really given up. The starting all over again has begun. I think we got it wrong. We’ve done lots of really great things, but that wasn’t one of them.”
A slight, spry figure with dramatic black-and-white hair, Kelly is drinking green tea when I meet her, and wearing a beige leather jacket with platform trainers. She may have learned young that she would be judged on her appearance, but she doesn’t power-dress, believing “there are moments when putting on a suit might be the right strategy, but in the main you have to be the person you are”. She is going for lunch at Downing Street.
Her ease comes partly from her age: she is nearly 62. “All my life I’ve seen people say, ‘Gender equality is very important, once we’ve sorted out whatever it is, we will get back to it’,” she says when I ask about her membership of the Women’s Equality party, which celebrates its first birthday in the Royal Festival Hall this weekend. “Well, it hasn’t been got back to – and I’m probably old enough and have a long enough track record to know.”
Though much that Kelly says – and indeed her whole sense of the Southbank Centre, dating back as it does to Clement Atlee’s postwar Labour government (it was Churchill who, when re-elected, ordered the iconic Skylon’s demolition) – makes it sound as though she is a left-of-centre person, she says the Women’s Equality party “is not of the left or the right or the centre; it is about putting a voice in the arena to say there are about six things we want looked at by whoever is in power. I think that is totally legitimate and a good place to do politics from.”
But Kelly won’t say whether the party’s candidate, Sophie Walker, will get her first-choice vote as London mayor, nor which way she plans to vote in the EU referendum. Asked which of the two London mayors and many culture secretaries she has worked with are her favourites, she mentions one Labour (Chris Smith), one Tory (David Mellor), and says “arts doesn’t belong to the left. It’s a silly idea that it does.” Alliances can be unexpected. The current culture minister, Ed Vaizey, knows a lot about the arts; his mother, art historian Marina Vaizey, used to be a Southbank Centre trustee.
She blames successive governments for failing to see the value of arts education: “Creativity has had a real battering, from different political persuasions, and I would say the backlash against a more expressive education is really frightening, because the creative industries – everything Britain is famous for now – aren’t the product of the last 10-15 years, but of what went before.” This year’s Wow features a new set of creative industries awards.
If she were to ask policymakers for one thing, apart from more money to fly international artists to the UK, it would be to put arts funding by local authorities on a statutory footing: “I would like to see health, education and arts as sacrosanct.” She has strong regional links and is planning a roadshow at which she will ask what the Southbank Centre, with its almost £1m-a-week budget, can do to help.
As for journalists, she would like us to pay less attention to the brilliant (and lucky) few, and more to the grassroots: “We can all admire Tony Harrison the great classical poet, but there’s not enough effort going towards ensuring that new Tony Harrisons are allowed to spring up. It’s the activism of cultural journalism that I question,” she says. Not, she quickly adds, that cultural journalism is her “big beef”.
Next year the Southbank Centre hosts an investigation of Nordic culture; Kelly would love Björk to direct the Meltdown music festival. In the meantime, day to day, and even with most venues shuttered, she feels “completely compelled” by her job, which she thinks of as one continuous piece of work: “It’s like being in love with somebody – you’re not looking for anybody else. If you start falling out of love, then you look around. So I’m not looking around.”
• The Women of the World festival is at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, until Sunday. Details: wow.southbankcentre.co.uk
