The West End theatre owner and producer on taking risks, 45 years of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards and how the Fringe changed her life
ica Burns is getting ready to run the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for the 40th time. She is also taking steps to ensure they are still there in decades to come.
“After we had two years off because of Covid, I was thinking, are the awards relevant any more?” she says in the Covent Garden office from which she runs the seven West End theatres she co-owns through her company Nimax. “I said this publicly, and I’m really glad I did because I got this huge response back from the comedy industry saying they really want it to carry on. I got phone calls, letters, emails. And so I thought, well, OK, we’ll do it as long as people want it.”…
Her experience, at Edinburgh and in London, is that showbusiness always requires gambles. “I’m a risk-taker,” she says. In London, she and her husband remortgaged their home to help to buy their half of Nimax (the American producer Max Weitzenhoffer owns the other half). “People in the business were taking bets about when, not if, I would go bankrupt,” she says with a chuckle.
She never did. Last year her seven theatres (the Palace, the Lyric, the Apollo, the Garrick, the Vaudeville, the Duchess and @sohoplace) played to 92 per cent capacity. “Which is incredible.” Yet Burns, who was appointed CBE after her championing of theatre during the pandemic, knows how fast things can turn. When the economy started to suffer in 2007, so too did the West End. Things were looking a bit wobbly for Nimax. Then Burns rallied with a hit production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Kathleen Turner. And she had a veteran American producer, Liz McCann, to thank for letting her bring it from Broadway. “She said, ‘Good news, I’m giving you the show. Because I want to give you a chance and help you.’ It was definitely a woman-to-woman act of encouragement. I am very grateful to her.”…