New Theatre Royal's newly appointed chair of trustees Angela Parks: 'The arts turn an existence into a life worth living'

I moved to this city last year and I love it.

It’s a great place to live all year round with so much to do – great coffee at the beach, brilliant street art, world-class museums, and fantastic cultural events.

I was delighted to be appointed chair of New Theatre Royal and many of my hopes and aims for the year relate to that. We’ve got a board planning session in January where we will be looking at what sort of organisation we want to be. We want the theatre to be a valuable part of the city, but how do we best do that? Should we be giving people in Portsmouth more opportunities to take part? Should we be creating our own work? Should we be expanding the range of productions we show? Whilst we’d love to do all of it we have to work within our budget so we need to decide our priorities.

Last year I saw Motionhouse perform at NTR. They’re a dance/contemporary circus company and the athletic tricks they performed were incredible. They are coming back in February with a show designed for families and I hope as many people as possible get to see it. It’s world class entertainment on our doorstep.

One of my highlights of 2022 was seeing Ocean Colour Scene play at Victorious and I’m looking forward to Simon and Oscar from the band performing acoustic versions of their hits at NTR in May. I’ve also got tickets for my parents to see The Royal Naval Benevolent Trust Centenary Celebration Concert. I love that there is such a wide variety of events available and my goal is to ensure that this continues.

I’m a huge fan of art in all its forms. I’m on the board of Art Space Portsmouth which provides low-cost artist studios and my day job is running an arts consultancy that helps artists and other creatives to deliver projects. Portsmouth is a priority place for Arts Council England investment and I hope that lots of local artists can benefit from this and other funding in 2023.

There is so much great art happening in the city including The Corner Collective which runs regular exhibitions and sells work from the city’s predominantly street artists, Pete Codling who is producing drawings on replica sails of Mary Rose and HMS Victory, and DVMission which runs a 48-hour film-making challenge. I aim to get to as many of these as possible and try to support artists by purchasing their work.

The arts are essential. They turn an existence into a life worth living, a house into a home and a city into a place where people can thrive. With the cost-of-living crisis we are all having to make hard decisions about spending money and when it comes to making decisions between heating and eating then tickets to events and Netflix subscriptions are obvious things to cut. Fortunately in Portsmouth we have a huge amount of free art and culture we can access including Aspex Gallery, the main city museum and the We Shine festival in November. My goal is to ensure as many people as possible get to access free art and culture through the work I do and the artists/organisations I work with.