Blanche Marvin 1925 – 2026
A message from David Byrne:
When I was formally offered the job of Artistic Director at the Royal Court I immediately went to seek advice from Blanche Marvin.
I know I’m not the only artistic director to regularly seek her counsel and, over three hours in her glorious flat, filled with memorabilia from her incredible theatrical life and adventures, among Emmy statues, theatre posters, plays and art, she sparkled as she shared her insight, forthright views and brilliant opinions. She was particularly pleased as she had predicted I would take over the Royal Court ten years previously – and I had been pretty dismissive. I thought she would have forgotten this, she absolutely had not. Soon after our conversation, an email arrived that summarised her advice across several pages of analysis of the state of new writing in the UK and beyond – including what I should do and how I should use my experience and rip it all up. Blanche, who was in her late 90s at this point, wrote an assessment of the state of play across London theatre and what our ambitions for it should now be that was so fresh and radical it felt like it was written by a direct contemporary. I was not surprised, despite her advanced age she always grasped new trends and ideas immediately – using her experience of what had been to see what could come next. She was the best co-conspirator.
I had met Blanche more than a decade earlier, when New Diorama first opened. She left a message to bluntly inform me that our new theatre ‘wasn’t close enough to Kings Cross’. I went back, with all the confidence of a 20-something, to ask whether I should, brick by brick, move the theatre up the Euston Road or whether I should call St Pancras and ask them to move their terminal closer to me. Immediately she came back and said: “we must meet”.
Like many young artistic directors across the last 40 years, Blanche fast became one of my earliest supporters…