Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a theatre director, Her love of the arts, she admits, stopped her being a delinquent.

She can thank her Liverpool headmaster for that. He let her do drama whenever she wanted.

Thirteen years ago, her success in regional theatre and at the Battersie Arts Center in

London led to her appointment as the artistic director of the West Yorkshire

Playhouse. She's attracted top talent from Ben Elton to Ian McKellen, produced crowd-pooling musicals including

Singing in the Rain, and perhaps most importantly demonstrated a unique ability to make

theatre thrive at the heart of a community.

She's now moving on to new things,

but her experience will live with her for a long time yet.

Building a theatre from scratch

and making it mean more to a community

than it thought it would mean is she

says thrilling she is Jude Kelly I wonder you can bear to move on Jude and leave

somebody else to sort of go on bringing up this baby in creative.

I think when you've built something from the beginning, you are very aware that what's

made it work is passion and drive and a sort of sense that risk was everything because there wasn't a history to

preserve so everything was about the future and that's why it's been so

successful because you were building a future.

If you ever feel that you're resting in the present tense, then you're not going to be giving

the same energy and you can't be about artistic bravery and then stay somewhere forever.

...