Kate Collins Interview: "People Are Strange" - The Mystery of the Noisy Carrier Bag!
Title
Kate Collins Interview: "People Are Strange" - The Mystery of the Noisy Carrier Bag!
Date
21 January 2019
Description
Oral history interview with Kate Collins, Operations Director for the Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall.
What's the story?
Having worked at theatres in Wolverhampton and Sheffield, Kate Collins started work at the Theatre Royal in 2001 as Front of House Manager.
As Operations Director for the venue, she now occupies a senior role, overseeing what she has described as “everything that doesn’t happen on the stage”. This includes managing front of house, security and cleaning teams, as well as involvement in conferences and events.
In this interview Kate shares one funny and odd customer experience she had as Front of House Manager in her early days at the Theatre Royal.
Well, dealing with people, you’re always going to have “there’s nowt so strange as folk”. Let’s just say that you’re always going to have such of them. So I remember back in my earlier days of house managing, I remember one of the staff came out and said “there’s a guy sitting at the back of the Stalls and he’s had a carrier bag with him” and they couldn’t work out what it was. But the customers around him were complaining about him being noisy. They couldn’t quite put their finger on what the problem was. So it was just a plastic bag that he had. So it was Coco Cabana, it was a musical, it was a really odd show, but he was on his own with this carrier bag. So that’s not odd in itself, but he was behaving just a bit skew. So, anyway, in the interval he came out and I just approached him and said “oh, somebody’s said they can hear rustling or a bit of noise coming from it. Is there any chance that you can keep it down please?” And he just held up the bag and said “Oh, that’ll be the crickets”. And he had a bag full of crickets, just ribbitting away, I don’t know what crickets do, but they don’t ribbit, but they were just making the noise and obviously they got noisier when the music got noisier, so singing along to Copa Cabana, or whatever it was. And I was stunned, I didn’t actually know really what to say. So I said “can you leave them in the cloakroom”. So he did and went and watched the show in the second act. But if you’d said to me “what do you think’s going to happen today, that would not have been something that I could have even foreseen. So, people are strange!
As Operations Director for the venue, she now occupies a senior role, overseeing what she has described as “everything that doesn’t happen on the stage”. This includes managing front of house, security and cleaning teams, as well as involvement in conferences and events.
In this interview Kate shares one funny and odd customer experience she had as Front of House Manager in her early days at the Theatre Royal.
Well, dealing with people, you’re always going to have “there’s nowt so strange as folk”. Let’s just say that you’re always going to have such of them. So I remember back in my earlier days of house managing, I remember one of the staff came out and said “there’s a guy sitting at the back of the Stalls and he’s had a carrier bag with him” and they couldn’t work out what it was. But the customers around him were complaining about him being noisy. They couldn’t quite put their finger on what the problem was. So it was just a plastic bag that he had. So it was Coco Cabana, it was a musical, it was a really odd show, but he was on his own with this carrier bag. So that’s not odd in itself, but he was behaving just a bit skew. So, anyway, in the interval he came out and I just approached him and said “oh, somebody’s said they can hear rustling or a bit of noise coming from it. Is there any chance that you can keep it down please?” And he just held up the bag and said “Oh, that’ll be the crickets”. And he had a bag full of crickets, just ribbitting away, I don’t know what crickets do, but they don’t ribbit, but they were just making the noise and obviously they got noisier when the music got noisier, so singing along to Copa Cabana, or whatever it was. And I was stunned, I didn’t actually know really what to say. So I said “can you leave them in the cloakroom”. So he did and went and watched the show in the second act. But if you’d said to me “what do you think’s going to happen today, that would not have been something that I could have even foreseen. So, people are strange!
Type
Oral interview
Location of item
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Rights
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Contributor
Interviewers: Stephen Bray & Liz Mackenzie
Transcriber: David Chilton
Transcriber: David Chilton
