Simon Mellor, executive director at the Lyric Hammersmith, is to leave the west London theatre in January next year. He's off to Manchester to take up the post of producing director at the city's new international festival, planned for 2007, writes Susan Smillie.
The move hasn't come as a major surprise to many, following artistic director Neil Bartlett's departure in November last year. The two have enjoyed a long collaboration, stretching beyond the 10 or so years together at the Lyric, to earlier days when they formed a theatre company called Gloria.
The pair saw the theatre through some troubled times - when Bartlett joined the Lyric in 1994 it was said to be in financial crisis and was just weeks away from closure.
Before announcing his intention to quit, Mellor was instrumental in appointing writer/director David Farr, who replaced Bartlett as artistic director last month. Farr came to take up the London post from the Bristol Old Vic, saying he wouldn't have left "for anything other than the Lyric", and his past credits include the UN Inspector at the Olivier in June.
Farr's debut season at the Lyric kicks off with a restaging of his RSC production of Julius Caesar, retold as a large-scale political thriller set in an emerging east European democracy. And Kneehigh theatre and Shared Experience have been invited to create new shows for the season, in a programme of events which is said to typify Farr's approach - namely the production of innovative storytelling with broad appeal.
