Stephen Crocker

These past few months have seen the loss of several genuinely unique performers - game-changing and pioneering artists whose brilliance has broken down barriers and shaped cultural and societal change.

The recent sad news of Tina Turner's death is another example of an artist whose true greatness has left an abiding legacy.

For lots of us, when an artist’s name is mentioned, an association will immediately pop into our head and for me, that’s always a character they’ve played, a film they’ve been in or a song they’ve performed.

When I heard the news about Tina Turner, it was the song Proud Mary that immediately came to me, and that surprised me, so I listened to it again and Googled the lyrics.

It is such an energetic song and absolutely packed with meaning.

For me, it’s about making tough decisions and getting through challenges and how hard that is.

It’s about how busy life can be with so much stuff, but you need to see through this and realise when you’ve come through those challenges and are now doing what you always wanted to do and are ‘rolling on the river’.

This struck a chord with me as the week before hearing the sad news about Tina Turner; I’d learned the amazing news that at Norwich Theatre, we have now re-attained (and exceeded) pre-Covid levels in almost every area we measure.

On paper, at least, we’ve got back to where we were – there is no more ‘worrying bout the way that things might have been’ which the song talks about.

In that one week in May alone, I realised we had welcomed more than 15,000 people to our venues seeing musical theatre, drama, dance, comedy, circus and music, featuring artists from Hethersett and Havana and from Thetford and Tallinn!

Two major shows during the week had been created with us in Norwich, including SIX, which we gave its world premiere at Playhouse back in 2018 and Acosta Danza: Up Close, an evening of dance specially curated by Carlos Acosta for Norwich audiences and produced by our brilliant teams.

I realised that performances across the week had been Audio Described, Captioned, British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted, and we’d had a touch tour, reaching many people for whom these access interventions are vital.

Around 1,000 people attended a show with us for less than £15, something really important to us right now.

We’d seen people from 0-80 years of age take part in creative engagement activities created or curated by us with visits from primary, secondary and university students to our buildings.

We’d run a five-day long programme of health and wellbeing activities for our staff and volunteer teams and a series of shows and activities as part of our Creative Matters: Climate Stories season.

The great joy of any form of artistic expression is that the artist puts their work out there for people to find their own meaning.

Sometimes the artist gives a glimpse of what was in their mind when they created something, as John Fogerty (who actually wrote Proud Mary a few years before Ike & Tina Turner covered it) has done.

What the songwriter has said is that he’d imagined ‘a mythical riverboat, cruising on a mythical river, in a mythical time’, and this isn’t too far away from where I landed with Norwich Theatre, the organisation that I am proud to run, being the ‘Proud Mary’.

As well as having figures and data, it has been profound to stop and look at a snapshot of a week in the life of our venues and reflect on how we are reaching people and what has come from all the difficulties in making sure our ‘big wheel keep on turning’.

The challenges for the whole theatre sector were very well publicised during the pandemic, and now, on the other side of the crisis, I often get asked, ‘How is the theatre doing’?

I’d like to say thank you to John Fogerty, who wrote the song, and Tina Turner who made it iconic, for giving me my new response: ‘We’re rolling on the river’.

Stephen Crocker is chief executive and creative director of Norwich Theatre