Inteview with Off-Westend
Mangaging Director – Denholm Spurr
Celebrating 20 years of the Offies

Interview by Louise Cannon

I recently had the privilege to interview the Off-West-End Managing Director – Denholm Spurr, thanks to Gingerbread Agency. He is celebrating 20 years of this prestigious organisation, championing independent theatre on London’s Off-The-Westend stages. He has gone on from being an Executive Producer to Managing Director. He discusses grassroots theatre, award nominees and what it means to be nominated or win an award and the impact that may have, increasing accessibility and more… What emerged was some fascinating insights that the public do not see and may not be aware of and more…
Please welcome Denholm Spurr to Bookmarks and Stages and discover our Q&A as you scroll down this page.

Denholm Spurr, as Off-West-End Executive Producer, what is it like to now be celebrating 20 years of the organisation, championing independent theatre in London’s Off-West-End scene?

It feels quite extraordinary, because very few grassroots cultural institutions survive this long, let alone stay relevant while the landscape around them keeps changing. OffWestEnd was founded in 2006 and set out to create a unified banner for the incredible independent theatre being made across London. Today, the phrase Off-West End is ubiquitous in describing our sector, and leading the organisation that helped define that is a huge honour.

And talking of survival, it’s also hugely significant for me personally. Ten years ago, I was only just emerging from years of homelessness. Going from street urchin to Managing Director is about as dramatic a glow-up as I could have imagined. I am deeply grateful to the people who believed in me when I had very little reason to believe in myself, but I am proud too. What I survived in my early twenties was brutal, and I could never have imagined that I would end up here: leading an organisation that has helped define the very sector in which I rebuilt my life.

What or who inspired you to take over OffWestEnd, an organisation you’ve been part of for at least 12 years now, and what have you brought to the role of Managing Director since Geoffrey Brown stepped down almost two years ago?

I was lucky enough to be selected for the Olivier Awards judging panel at a very young age, and that was one of the first times I really encountered the breadth of Off-West-End theatre properly. I served specifically on their Affiliate panel, covering some of our best-known venues, and I realised almost immediately that this was the theatre I loved most: up close, alive, risky, sometimes rough around the edges, but in the best possible way, and far less beholden to mainstream conventions.

Then there were the people. Sofie Mason, our founder, was a huge influence. She had that rare ability to make you fall in love with both her and her vision: to believe that a scrappy, under-resourced organisation could stand shoulder to shoulder with major arts institutions and still be worth fighting for. She also gave me opportunities to flex my own creative vision at a time when very few other gatekeepers were doing that — including trusting me to devise the world’s first cyber ceremony on Twitter in 2015. Geoffrey, in a different way, was equally inspiring through the sheer graft of what he built: developing the community, accessibility and scope of the organisation, often from his home office, for no pay, simply because he believed the sector deserved a champion. OffWestEnd has always relied on its leaders and core volunteers giving far more than they ever should have had to, frankly, because they believed independent theatre deserved better.

What I have wanted to bring to the role is a mix of lived experience and structural ambition. I spent more than a decade making theatre Off-West-End myself, so I know first-hand how broad, exciting and precarious this sector is. I did not want OffWestEnd just to be a yearly pat on the back. I wanted it to be more rigorous, more useful, more future-facing, and more honest about the fact that independent theatre does not need admiration alone. It needs infrastructure. And my geekier self came with a bunch of tech skills that made me feel I was the right person to lead the organisation through a serious phase of modernisation.

The goal is to honour the last twenty years and the people who gave so much to this organisation, while also being radical about what comes next: building something finally self-sustaining. A regular, reliable income stream would allow OffWestEnd to respond to the next twenty years in a way the last twenty rarely made possible. That is my vision for OffWestEnd 2.0, and I am excited by the progress we are already making.

This year’s nominees bring together emerging grassroots talent and well-known performers from stage and screen who consistently return to independent venues to create new work. There are a lot of shows to watch and choose from – how are nominees chosen as you increase fair recognition?

One of the things I love about OffWestEnd and the Offies is that they practise a kind of open gatekeeping. It is one of the few parts of the industry where genuinely emerging artists and very established names can still meet on common ground, often in small rooms, taking real creative risks. That feels healthy to me. It is one ecology that is both grassroots and a destination in its own right. I often say Off-West End is not just a decorative fringe of the industry, but unique, purpose-made couture. The Offies ceremony is the sector’s annual catwalk to show that off.

As for how our recognition process actually works… well, it is a gargantuan undertaking, I can tell you. The Offies are one of a kind: a rigorous three-stage peer review in which the people making the decisions are not only of the community — industry professionals and experts in the field — but have all seen the work first-hand. Doing that at the scale we do, when the turnover of productions is so high and run lengths are so short, is nothing short of Herculean.

That said, there were some leaky pipes in the process when I took over. Early on, I spent months talking to venue leads, creatives, critics, assessors and others across the sector, because I did not want to redesign the model based purely on my own instincts. Two things came up again and again: too many categories, and a creeping sense that everyone seemed to be nominated. So the key challenge was to make the process broader in what it could see, but more exacting in what recognition actually meant. Because if recognition means everything, it starts to mean nothing.

So we rebuilt the framework. We moved away from a rigid category system into broader Areas, supported by specialisms — elevating artforms that are often marginalised, like theatre for young audiences and experimental work — and by stronger expert oversight, including the return and expansion of our critics’ panel of national theatre critics. We also carried out a diversity and equality overhaul of our large assessor cohort, making sure we had the broadest possible range of perspectives assessing work across the sector, so that work is not just watched, but properly understood in context.

The aim is not simply to spread recognition around like confetti. It is to make sure that when work is recognised, it feels fair, meaningful and genuinely valuable: the kind of recognition that can help sustain careers rather than just decorate a poster.

What is the overall impact for those involved in the industry to be nominated in an Area and, if lucky, win?

The impact depends on where you are in your career, but it can be huge. For an emerging artist or company, recognition can be the difference between momentum and disappearance. It can change confidence, visibility and the seriousness with which people take your work at exactly the point where that work is still vulnerable, while significantly increasing chances of re-runs and transfers. For a venue, it drives audience awareness, helps demonstrate impact and reinforces that what they are platforming matters beyond the room. For more established artists, it is often about peer recognition in the part of the industry where the real risk is still being taken.

But I think the deeper point is this: by the time something is obviously a success, it often no longer needs the same kind of advocacy. The recent Olivier Awards were fabulous, and rightly back on prime-time television, but they are celebrating work that has already arrived. The Offies do something rarer and, I would argue, more vital: they recognise work while it is still building, still scrappy, still trying to find its audience. One of the things the Offies have done consistently is spot quality early, before consensus catches up, while also giving creatives in an often thankless profession a moment to feel genuinely valued and seen.

And that matters politically as much as culturally, because the ecology loop in this country is broken. We have far too few mechanisms that genuinely support grassroots theatre, sustain it over time, and feed value back into the part of the industry where so much of the risk, innovation and talent development actually happens. The Offies are one of the few structures doing that. So for me, they are not just an awards ceremony. They are part of the infrastructure trying to stop the grassroots being treated as unpaid research and development for the rest of the industry.

You have been working to raise the bar on nominations and increase ceremony accessibility. How have you achieved this?

Those two things are connected, actually. I have already touched on this above, but when I took over we were issuing roughly one nomination per show — around 500 a year. While that was, on one level, a great publicity tool for us, it was undermining our core purpose. If almost everyone is nominated, nomination stops carrying real weight. We have brought that right down to fewer than 200 this year, which means we now have much clearer and more universal standards for what nomination actually signifies.

Crucially, that also allowed us to get rid of the slightly confusing finalist stage, where nominees were later whittled down again simply because the ceremony could not accommodate them all. Instead, if you are nominated, that should mean something in and of itself — and it should mean you can actually be in the room at the end of the year. For me, that is both clearer and fairer. It raises the bar on recognition while also making the ceremony more accessible to the people whose work we are there to celebrate.

Increasing ceremony accessibility has been both practical and philosophical. Practical, in the sense that we have thought much more carefully about format, communication, reach and how the ceremony functions as a showcase for the sector. Philosophical, because I do not think the Offies should feel like a closed room full of insiders congratulating each other. It should feel like a genuine meritocracy, where being nominated is a win in and of itself.

This year’s ceremony was probably the clearest expression yet of where we want to go. Divina De Campo brought so much wit, warmth and proper occasion to the room, but what mattered most was that the ceremony felt expansive enough to reflect the breadth of the sector itself. We switched from nominee videos to winner videos so we could spend longer actually showing the work, we packed the night with live performance, and for the first time the full ceremony was broadcast live. That was a major step forward, because the future of the Offies cannot just belong to whoever happened to be in the room that night. It has to be about showing the sector off to the wider world, so people can see just how incredible and important it really is.

If you missed the ceremony, go and watch it on The Theatre Channel, then share it with your friends, colleagues and anyone who still underestimates what independent theatre is capable of. The more people who see us properly, the stronger our sector becomes.

You are trying to encourage risk, experimentation and innovation. What does it take to get this across to both the general public and those in the industry so it carries forward in people’s work, viewing habits and in the way the OFFIE Awards operates?

Part of it is language. We have to stop talking about independent theatre as though it is simply smaller, cheaper or somehow less finished than commercial work. Very often, it is where the most original thinking is happening. It is where new theatrical languages emerge before the rest of the industry has worked out how to package them, and shifting that mindset starts with the words we choose to describe it. It is easy to take the term for granted now, but Off-West End was barely used before our organisation was established twenty years ago. We have helped lead the charge in making sure independent theatre in this country is seen not just as patchwork fringe, but as a unified identity of exceptional work.

Part of it is model. If you want to encourage risk, you have to build systems that can actually recognise it. That is one reason breadth matters so much to the Offies. If your awards only reward the kinds of work that already resemble mainstream plays and musicals, then you are not encouraging innovation at all; you are rewarding proximity to existing power. Our new Innovation and Industry Areas are about responding to that, and the flexibility of the broader Areas allows us to recognise new artforms, new practices and new kinds of practitioners as soon as they emerge.

And part of it is culture. Audiences, critics and industry figures all have to get more comfortable with the idea that some of the most exciting work will be messy, hybrid, hard to categorise, and sometimes even unsuccessful. That is not a flaw in the ecology. That is how artforms move forward. OffWestEnd can absolutely be a pipeline to commercial success, but it is also a destination in its own right. For twenty years our slogan was “All Theatre Starts Here”, but as we mark this anniversary we have moved beyond that, because it does not just start here — it lives, breathes and thrives here. Our new slogan, “Let’s Show Off”, is about making sure people sit up and take notice.

What are the challenges of staying relevant and future-proofing the awards for both everyone within the industry and the general public?

The biggest challenge is that you cannot future-proof an awards body just by making the ceremony shinier. Plenty of people can throw a glamorous night out. That is not the hard bit. The hard bit is making sure the structure still reflects the sector it claims to represent.

Independent theatre is changing all the time. Rising costs are changing what is viable. Audience habits are changing. Reaching people is getting harder. Certain forms are more vulnerable than others. So relevance comes from usefulness. Are we recognising the right work? Are we helping people understand why it matters? Are we building pathways rather than just moments? Are we creating visibility that lasts beyond a single press cycle?

That is really what OffWestEnd 2.0 means to me. It is not just a rebrand or a shinier website. It is shorthand for the next twenty years: taking an organisation that has already helped define and champion the sector, and building it into something more robust, more digitally effective and more infrastructural. I do not want OffWestEnd to be mistaken for an awards brand with a side hustle in advocacy. I want it understood as a representative body that uses awards as one of several tools to build leverage for the sector. That representative impulse has always been there at the heart of what we do, but for too long we lacked the financial stability to do it consistently, ambitiously or at the scale the sector deserves.

OffWestEnd 2.0 is about changing that. It is about harnessing data more intelligently, strengthening our platform, and earning a bigger seat at the table in conversations about theatre’s future, so that independent theatre is not merely celebrated once a year but properly advocated for all year round. If the last twenty years helped prove the value of this sector, the next twenty have to be about converting that value into visibility, leverage and long-term sustainability.

That also means being clear-eyed about technology. Automation and AI are going to reshape every part of cultural life, including ours. I do not think the answer is to pretend those tools are not coming, or to leave them entirely to the biggest institutions and commercial players to exploit first. We need to harness them conscientiously, in ways that create more public good: freeing up capacity, improving access, making our systems smarter, and helping a small organisation do more for the sector it serves. But we also have to stand up for the little guys, because if AI only ends up benefiting those already at the top, it will simply deepen the same inequalities independent theatre has always been fighting against.

And frankly, the stakes are bigger than an awards ceremony. If we get this right, OffWestEnd will not just keep pace with the next twenty years of change — it will help shape them. My ambition is simple: that the sector we have spent two decades defining becomes one we can finally sustain, strengthen and show off to the world with the confidence it deserves.