The theatre director and lantern-maker Hilary Hughes, my friend and colleague, who has died aged 72, shortly after contracting Covid-19, made an international impact on the world of outdoor and carnival arts, while remaining fully involved in her adopted hometown of Stoke-on-Trent.
Hilary’s career, which spanned more than 50 years, started while she was studying art and drama at Bingley College in West Yorkshire. A college production was being looked at by the National Youth Theatre assessor Peter Sykes. Hilary became lighting designer and stage manager for his Edinburgh fringe shows, and was soon a key member of Sykes’ Ritual and Tribal theatre, one of the radical, experimental companies to come out of the University of Keele. She met her life companion, Gill Gill, in 1973, while with the company.
The company’s female members, Gill, Hilary and Yvon Appleby, became disillusioned with the male focus of the work, and in 1985 formed the UK’s first female-led outdoor arts company, Beavers, “specifically to work together as women … at women’s festivals, in women’s centres, community centres, schools, refuges – anywhere that women meet”.
Hilary performed in Beavers’ first show, Cloudwalking, in 1985, which told the story of the “Ladies’ Expedition to the High Sierra Mountains”, and the intense relationship the three female climbers Vera Aspinall, Elizabeth Paterson and Kit Anderson formed on their climb.
Alongside this, Beavers were commissioned to create original street theatre for the Stoke garden festival. I joined the company in 1985 to create The Weird Sisters of Char – a family of roving tea ladies. After Yvon left, Gill, Hilary and I became co-directors, as well as lifelong friends. We toured outdoor arts festivals (Glastonbury, Hat Fair), and ran workshops at summer play schemes across the UK.
Beavers was renamed B arts in the mid-1990s. Hilary trained hundreds of artists, writers, musicians and community members in making participatory outdoor theatre, street performance and celebratory arts.
Outside Beavers, Hilary was a key team member for Cumbria-based Welfare State International, and worked as a lantern-maker, production and project manager, and pyrotechnician with Theatre of Fire and Emergency Exit Arts in the UK, Europe and the US.
Hilary toured work internationally for B arts, most notably making a lantern parade in Mostar in 1995, just after the Bosnian war had ended. She brought this international experience back to Stoke, working with refugees dispersed to the city.
In 2013, she was made an honorary doctor of Staffordshire University, and the citation recognised her work with refugees and migrant communities in North Staffordshire and in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Born in Bromborough, Cheshire, to John, a teacher, who had been a Spitfire pilot during the second world war, and Audrey, a nurse, Hilary had a brother, Peter, who predeceased her.
B arts is still going strong. Gill died in 2006; Hilary and I continued to give consideration to how she would have thought about new work.
