If you’ve been to see a show recently in London or New York, there’s a fair chance it was produced by Sonia Friedman. The many productions she has up in lights include PADDINGTON The Musical, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Stranger Things: The First Shadow and 1536, a debut play that has been a word-of-mouth hit. By the autumn, one in four West End shows will be a Sonia Friedman production. Not bad for a woman who left school at 16 without any qualifications.
Our interview takes place at her company headquarters in the heart of London’s Theatreland. The place is buzzing with activity. There are 55 members of staff and spirits are high because the new production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia opened the previous night to glowing reviews.
Friedman sweeps in looking glamorous in a tight black jumpsuit. Her long blonde hair is pinned back by a pair of sunglasses and she has her three small white fluffy bichon frise dogs in tow.
She pushes back a narrow bookcase, revealing the door into her private office. This little touch strikes me as quite theatrical with a hint of Harry Potter magic. In contrast to the corporate open-plan office, her room is like a cosy boudoir with soft furnishings, warm colours and dozens of framed photographs of a smiling Friedman with theatrical giants including Harold Pinter.
After I admire the photographs, she apologises for the smell of cigarettes (she’s a committed smoker) and ushers me downstairs to a boardroom. I can see why she wants me to see this room. Every surface and inch of wall space is covered in awards. Since it was established in 2002, Sonia Friedman Productions has won 62 Tony awards in the US and 74 Olivier awards in the UK, more than any other company in British theatre history.
It’s impressive, but with that workload there’s little time for any personal life. Friedman is single and doesn’t have children. Does she ever slow down or take time out? “I don’t know what to do with spare time,” she admits. “If I do have it, which I don’t, call it a Sunday afternoon, I will try and fill the time with something that nourishes me like watching a film, but it’s usually related to my work. I see it as self-education. I don’t want to waste a second.”
She was recently diagnosed with ADHD and says: “It does explain a lot. In one sense I’m pleased to have had an answer about how much I do, which I’m aware is unnatural and unusual. But also there’s a tiny bit of me grieving for my younger self, because it was really difficult when I was growing up.”
It was a chaotic upbringing, in Totteridge and Whetstone and then Islington. Her father, the violinist Leonard Friedman, left soon after Sonia’s birth, abandoning her mother, a concert pianist, with four children under ten. She found it difficult to cope, which meant Sonia, the baby of the family, was brought up by her older siblings. There were positive aspects to this feral upbringing: her older brother, the violinist Richard Friedman, and sister, the musical theatre performer and director Maria Friedman, put on shows starring the young Sonia. They entertained themselves, but also fed themselves and put themselves to bed. She has no memory of ever having a family meal.
With no boundaries at home and no parental guidance, school was difficult. Friedman rebelled against structure, authority and routine. “I went through many schools, got expelled for truanting and would do anything to avoid exams because I didn’t know how to study.” She’s very aware of her lack of formal qualifications when hiring staff. “When I look at someone’s CV I don’t care where they went to school or university. I just want to know why they love theatre and if they are curious about the world.”
Her first jobs in theatre were ad hoc backstage jobs helping with scenery. After taking a course in stage management, she was taken on by the National Theatre aged 19 and found herself in rehearsal rooms with playwrights such as Pinter and Athol Fugard. By the mid-1990s she had co-founded a touring theatre company specialising in new writing with the former Royal Court director Max Stafford-Clark.
She talks about her ADHD like a sort of superpower and one of the reasons she can run as many shows as she does. “I can cram and hyperfocus when I need to and I have an incredible group of people around me who do the detail. I get shipped in if there’s a crisis brewing.” But she admits that she has twice suffered from serious burnout, most recently after the pandemic. “It was traumatic. I had 18 shows on when lockdown came.”
What about the state of British theatre? Aren’t there too many revivals and adaptations in the West End, not to mention an overreliance on big screen stars to open productions? “You could have said the same thing 25 years ago when I first started working in the West End and, honestly, it’s not the case now. If you just look at the body of work I’ve done in the West End in the last two or three years, a lot of it is new work by unknown writers.”
Production budgets have doubled over the past decade as labour, materials and energy costs have increased, which is a big issue for the subsidised sector because it has to keep ticket prices affordable. “The subsidised sector is struggling and we in the commercial sector need to work more closely with them, but audiences are stronger than ever and the demographic has shifted hugely — they’re getting younger.”
She points to 1536, which is sold out. It’s a debut play by a female playwright with no stars, about three ordinary young women coming of age in a village in Essex at the time of Anne Boleyn’s trial and execution. The night I go, the house is packed with young people. Friedman attributes its success to social media and word of mouth.
Friedman is developing Quentin Tarantino’s debut play, The Popinjay Cavalier. Is it any good? “I loved the script and I wasn’t expecting to,” she says. “It’s a swashbuckling comedy set in the 1840s and it’s very funny. Because it’s Quentin, there’s a big nod to the 1930s movies like Zorro and The Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s also a homage to theatre and to actors.”
How much does Tarantino know about theatre? “It’s a completely new world for him, but he’s very theatre literate and has read loads of plays.” He’s also seeing a lot of plays in the West End. “He has strong opinions about everything. We have discussions about what is theatre? What is film? But the most refreshing thing about him, which not all writers and directors have, is his interest in the audience experience. He wants the audience to have the best freaking night out in the theatre they’ve had all year.”
The West End is doing better than Broadway, where she says “the biggest challenge is the economics”. It’s always been more expensive to produce there, but costs have “reached a level that is unsustainable for most. The exact same play that might cost £1 million to mount in the West End can cost the equivalent of almost six times as much on Broadway, which puts huge pressure on the ticket price” — and the Tony Awards lead-up means there’s always a bottleneck of plays opening at the same time. Yet despite “these very serious challenges” she “has to remain optimistic about Broadway… None of these challenges are insurmountable, but they do require a willingness to rethink long-established ways of working.”
With a new government, what message does she have for the culture secretary? “That theatre saved me and not just me. Getting kids together in a room to tell a story when they’re eight, nine, ten years old to have an opposing opinion, hear another point of view — it’s so fundamental. We must get drama back in schools, we must enable school groups to see plays. If you take a theatre out of a town, you have no society, no place to meet and share ideas. That’s my real concern, that without access to theatre and drama our society will pull itself apart.” And with that a knock on the door signals our time is up. As I leave, a delegation of about a dozen people holding scripts, clipboards and laptops are waiting their turn for an audience with Sonia Friedman.