Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1997 and the presenter was Sue Lawley

My cast away this week is a theatre producer

As a child in Lancashire she wanted to be a priest

They had the prettiest frocks and all the best lines she says

But opted instead for becoming an actress

She admits to being bloody awful and caused a sensation by playing Lady Macbeth without any clothes on

In the late 70s she ran the roundhouse in London, cleaned it up and made it solvent

From there she went to the national theatre where she revitalised its overseas tours

and brought some highly acclaimed foreign productions

For the past seven years she's run her own company enjoying such successes as the three sisters with the three red graves

and a doll's house with Janet McTear

Next year she becomes the Cameron Macintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford

Her job she says requires a skin as thick as a rhinoceros and the morals of an alley cat

She is Thelma Holt

That's to say the job of a theatre producer, not the Oxford Professorship

I can understand the thick skin, where do the feline morals come in Thelma?

Well I'm afraid like any other profession

As does have its rather quaint members

and you have to be able to go out of the market place

and fight a battle that you wouldn't perhaps wish to

...