Portrait: Peter Kosminsky
Mephistomania: Steve Day

In May 2006, a small independent company, Artichoke, presented French artists Royal de Luxe's The Sultan's Elephant in the streets of central London. The product of five years' work, the show broke new ground on all fronts. Working with her co-founder and director of Artichoke, Nicky Webb, Helen Marriage was the event's producer. To realise the project, Helen raised £1.3 million for a piece of theatrical magic offered free to Londoners without a logo or sponsor's message attached, and persuaded London's agencies and authorities to bring the city's commercial and ceremonial centre to a halt, as a 12-metre high elephant, a sultan and his entourage, and a 7-metre high little girl, shared the joys of London with audiences estimated to number over a million people. The project received media coverage from Afghanistan to the US, and has left an entirely new sense amongst policy makers, artists and spectators of how the arts can contribute to the life and possibilities of a city.

The project was monumental in many ways: in the scale of the artists' creative vision; in the physical presence of the elephant and the little girl in the streets; in the audience numbers involved; in cost; in the persuasion required to unlock the permissions, collaborations and financial support on which the project would live or die; in the risks involved in mounting this extraordinary piece of work in the heart of a capital city of the scale and complexity of London; and in the drive and vision of Helen Marriage, who, as a producer with no institutional support and working through a small independent production company, dared to doeverything necessary to make it happen.

In her career, Helen has worked for a number of organisations - Artsadmin, where she started her involvement with producing, LIFT, Canary Wharf, Salisbury Festival - but this was her first major project as an independent. It was an extraordinary feat of bravura producing, sustained - with wrong turnings, crises, and cancellations - over the five long years it took to make it happen. It was unprecedented to see a new production company harness the political will of a city such as London to such epic effect, with no official mandate to do so. The Sultan's Elephant happened because Helen and Nicky decided that it should.

Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb founded Artichoke in 2002, the result of a longstanding collaboration which Artichoke's chair David Aukin describes as 'a marriage'. They first worked together in the late 1980s at the LIFT Festival, where Helen was Associate Director and Nicky was Marketing Director. When Helen set up the Arts & Events Programme at Canary Wharf in 1991, and then took over as Director of the Salisbury Festival, her collaboration with Nicky was fundamental in shaping and pursuing her vision. Together they created Artichoke, and as co directors are developing the company's future, building on the phenomenal achievement of The Sultan's Elephant.

K: How do you describe who you are and what you are doing?

H:Labelling is really hard because the whole issue about the producer, the creative producer, is a recent phenomenon. I'm doing what I've always done, which is making things happen. My work over the past fifteen years has always been in association with Nicky Webb. We share a need to delight and amaze our audiences. While we love working with artists, and that's what we do, our aim is always to advance the next piece by an artist only in a context that makes sense for a public. I am always trying to take the work of an artist and make it work better for people, to create platforms that really surprise audiences, delighting them with their own pleasure. I'm interested in people who don't think this work has anything to say to them or don't even know it exists, or think they already know what they like. As producers, we know it's possible to change people's attitudes and feelings through the work of artists.

Being a producer is about making decisions and taking responsibility. The thing I love doing is building teams of people who are all working to one end and who all feel real love for what they are doing, extending themselves beyond what they thought they were capable of. It is about moving people, intellectually and emotionally, and it's about persuasion, making people love the project and making them all - artists, team members, funders, officials - feel they want to be part of its happening.

K: Whose support did you have to secure in this way to make The Sultan's Elephant possible?

H: The first thing was the agreement of the artists, who were pretty reluctant to come and work in the UK. It took a while to persuade them that all things were possible. Simultaneously there was the money: no-one knew in early 2001 what it was going to cost -the show had scarcely been imagined, let alone built, and something like this had never been attempted before in central London. Then there was the need to persuade the Arts Council that this was a project they wanted. The deal we did was that if they bought into the idea of the project, we would guarantee we'd make it happen. We didn't actually know we could, we just made a promise. Miraculously, and wholly admirably, they did the deal and stuck to it through all the difficulties. Raising the rest of the money proved harder than I'd anticipated. The London Development Agency's contribution took literally years to secure. And the rest of the cashwas found in a variety of ways, persuading people they really wanted to be part of making this happen.

Then it was a question of making the operational people think that this was real - tricky, as we had no mandate, we weren't doing it on behalf of anyone or anything official. I quickly realised the trick was to make them love it as much as we did by carrying them along on an irresistible wave of courage, confidence and commitment. In Nantes, at the show's first performance, their hearts were won over, and they will tell you now it was the best thing they ever did. We omitted, however, to take anyone from the Royal Parks or Buckingham Palace - and later they would see the project as 'an infringement of the dignity of the ceremonial route'. With the help of the Arts Council and the Department of Media, Culture and Sport, who at our request became actively involved in the make-orbreak
discussions, we encouraged them to change their view, and permission was eventually given. Those discussions, where we were actively challenging the perspectives of the Lord Chamberlain's office, were genuinely daunting and scary.

K: As an independent producer, you had the freedom to pursue this extraordinarily ambitious project. You decided it was your vision and you would fight to realise it, even if it took - as you discovered - five years. But this freedom meant you were also alone, with Nicky, with the risks and the responsibilities. This took equally extraordinary confidence and nerve.

H: In my early professional life in the 1980s, I knew I had the capacity to produce extraordinary things, but I didn't let myself. I sheltered behind other people. It was a terrifying moment when I realised I was going to have to make things happen, and a huge liberation when I realised that I could. At the Salisbury Festival, I realised what I was capable of, but I drove the organisation beyond its limitations. It was a hard lesson to learn, and after I left I had a long period of self-doubt. People advised me to set up my own company and produce events, but independence seemed lonely. I longed for someone to give me a job - but apart from running a festival, there are no jobs for people like me.

In 2002, Nicky and I set up Artichoke. We've worked together since 1991 when I was made Director of Arts & Events at Canary Wharf. I could never have done the things I've done since then without her.

The role of the producer is to take responsibility, and together we do that. I am constantly asking people within institutions or organisations to say yes - or rather not say no - to something that appears unusual, to persuade them that what has to happen is fine, OK, safe, reasonable and all the things it doesn't seem to be. With The Sultan's Elephant we had to sometimes formally and often informally sign off on things, explicitly taking the responsibility, so that people who felt exposed were able to feel a bit safer.

I have no fear about running an event; I'm never happier than when I've got a walkie-talkie in my hand. Things that are frightening to other people -arguing with artists about what can and can't happen, the physical danger of a show, the risk of a security incident, of causing injury, managing huge crowds, negotiating obstacles out of the way -I enjoy knowing I have to solve these problems. And it helps that we always work with really top-notch production people - Jonathan Bartlett who I've worked with for over twenty years, and Alan Jacobi and his team at Unusual. With them around, and the care that's gone into all the pre-planning you know you're safe in the hands of grown-ups. And having insurance helps...

My only real fear - and it can be overwhelming - is not being able to pay the bills, or to pay the people who've made a commitment to work with you. There was a moment when I realised I absolutely hadn't raised enough money for The Sultan's Elephant. With final confirmation from the company and from our operational partners of the true cost of the route through London, the financial gap was truly enormous and it gave me proper panic attacks - I didn't sleep for a fortnight. But I made a list of thirteen things we could do, and we found solutions with the help of others. Artichoke's Board had to be brave too, within the confines of the allowable risks they could take. Miraculously, by the time of the event itself, we had covered all our budgeted costs. I felt a different person, completely liberated to produce the event itself and to meet all the inevitable challenges.