Then & Now: Genevieve Hayes

From stage management to urban design, via the West End, 32 states and being married in a dress designed by an American drag queen, there has been plenty of drama in my life! It’s just that these days it comes in a slightly different form.

The golden thread running through everything I’ve done has been creating environments and making them work for the end user. I’m a fifth-generation theatre person – my grandmother was at Guildhall herself as a singer until she left to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service performing in Stars in Battledress during the war, my mother was a performer and my father a stage manager. I was destined to start down that road. It’s just not where I ended up.

I went to stage school from the age of 10, but after college and a spell in Hong Kong, I decided I wanted to be more formally trained, so at the age of 21, came to Guildhall (and overlapped with the likes of Ewan McGregor, Joseph Fiennes and Damian Lewis). Studying Stage Management and Technical Theatre definitely gave me theoretical as well as practical knowledge, which was really invaluable and completely transferable.

There were fewer than 30 of us on the course and we had a huge sense of camaraderie. It was very hard work; 12 shows a year with very little downtime, which was quite realistic but really made us feel we were all going through it together. This is one of the reasons we’re all still so close and meet up when we can.

After graduating I toured on musicals for years in the UK and USA – I got married on tour in a bookshop in Colorado, and the head of wardrobe who was a drag queen, helped with my dress. For a while, my husband and I moved back and forth from the US to the UK. He did his Master’s in Spatial Planning, we had two children and I continued to work in theatre.

Realising that theatrical working hours were not going to work for our family at that time, I made the decision to go back to university and took a Master’s degree in Urban Design. I’m fundamentally interested in environments and how they work for the user, whether that’s an actor or a member of the public. I was at the South Downs National Park Authority for a while, but have recently joined Troy Planning + Design as Design Director, which has offices in the UK, US and Amsterdam.

A stage manager’s skill set is completely transferable to Urban Design. You have the creatives, the technical specialists and the money people. Instead of a director and set designer, you have the developer and the architect, and the end users are like the actors. The town planners are like the technical directors who let you know about all the rules. Managing a project is essentially the same as managing a production. Now I get to do it all outside, rather than inside a theatre.

I know others from my course who have made a move like this, such as into garden design, and some who are working on theatre buildings and have to deal with planners. I really believe that all your skills are linked for the rest of your life, and the course I was on certainly equipped me well.

This article first featured in the Spring/Summer 2019 edition of the Guildhall magazine, PLAY, and was written by YBM for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.