OVO Celebrates 10 Years at The Maltings Theatre in St Albans

OVO took over the running of The Maltings Theatre from St Albans District Council on 1st September 2011. At the time, the venue had been dark for 18 months and its future looked bleak. It had been losing a six figure sum annually and changes to the Arts Council funding regime made its small scale receiving model untenable.

Since then OVO has returned The Maltings to its former 20th century prominence and established it as one of the country's leading small scale producing venues. A commercially sustainable model has been developed with no public subsidy, reversing the previous financial losses and saving local taxpayers over £1m.

Since 2011 The Maltings Theatre has presented 828 performances of 421 shows attended by over 50,000 people. The programme has included opera, drama, dance and live music. OVO's own productions, which focus bold, imaginative and surprising new versions of classic plays and stories - including Shakespeare, Ibsen, and even filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock - have received critical acclaim and won a number of awards including, for OVO Artistic Director Adam Nichols, a place on The Stage 100 List (2020).

Under OVO's leadership, the venue has become a vital engine for the local creative economy; 128 companies have performed their own work and, in the last 12 months, 112 freelance creatives - a third of whom are based locally - have found work at The Maltings. The theatre continued to produce work throughout the pandemic - online, onstage and outdoors.

OVO Artistic Director, Adam Nichols (left), says:
"We initially took over the management of The Maltings for a six month trial, never imagining that ten years later we'd be running a full time year-round producing theatre with a national profile. I'm immensely proud of the amazing staff, volunteers and creatives who've worked with us to build this fantastic home for creativity and storytelling over the past decade, and hugely grateful to the community of St Albans who've taken this little theatre to their hearts and supported us in so many ways, especially through the challenges of the past 18 months. We have some really exciting plans for the next ten years, and we are looking forward to working with people across the district to make St Albans one of the country's top cities for creativity and culture."