Prue Skene had only been with Ballet Rambert for a few months when in 1976 she was tasked with organising the company’s 50th anniversary gala performance at Sadler’s Wells. “We tried to invite everybody who had ever been connected with the company,” she told Rambert Voices, the company’s oral history project. It was before the days of computers and databases, “but we did manage to reach an awful lot of people”.
Not all Rambert’s alumni were co-operative. Diana Gould, a former ballerina married to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, was still scarred from her experience many years earlier of working with Marie Rambert, the company’s founder. “I can’t be in the same building as that woman,” she told Skene, who remembered “an hour-long telephone conversation about all the terrible things that Rambert had done to her”. However, most people were thrilled to be invited to the gala, which was attended by Princess Margaret.
Skene, a great networker who was well connected throughout the arts world, recalled her own experiences of Rambert, who by then was in her eighties. “Sometimes you saw flashes of this very famous sharp tongue [but] she was wonderful … inspirational,” she said. Even when the company tilted from classical ballet to modern dance, Rambert still “came to rehearsals, came to performances, sitting on the edge of her chair, giving notes, taking an interest and understanding everything”.
Skene spent 11 years with Ballet Rambert, becoming executive director. She recalled how in her early days, with a staff of fewer than six, the company lived “hand to mouth”. The support and nurturing system was minimal and potential choreographers were in effect told, “There’s the opportunity, go and find a way to do it,” she said.
Touring was often for several weeks at a time and accommodation was basic, even for the administrator. “Very often I stayed in digs … a spare room in somebody’s house and there were terrible nylon sheets,” she said. After a performance in the regions there was rarely much to eat. “There was usually a Chinese in most towns, but that was it,” she added. In the US she was embarrassed to be upgraded to first-class on a flight while the dancers remained in economy.
The show always went on, although with some close calls. On one occasion Ballet Rambert was in Germany with Christopher Bruce’s ballet Dark Angels when the boxes containing Nadine Bayliss’s costumes went astray. “The local British Council lady and I just had to try and track every single trace of these boxes,” she said. When they were finally located her colleague was horrified to discover that the costumes were little more than tights strung together, though they made it to the theatre on time.
On another occasion their sets were being flown in from the US, just in time for a Newcastle performance. “All the wheels that could be greased were,” she said. However, when customs officials made a cursory check on one crate they found that one of the dancers had dropped in some contraband and then insisted on checking each crate carefully. “They did get to Newcastle, but it was a very close shave,” she said.
Skene became an increasingly influential figure in arts management and policy. During the 1990s she spent eight years on the Arts Council, serving as chairwoman of its dance and lottery panels. It was during the early years of National Lottery funding, which reshaped capital investment in arts projects such as the Lowry in Manchester and the Royal Opera House in London. The experience informed her book Capital Gains: How the National Lottery Transformed England’s Arts (2017). However, expectations elsewhere ran high and when other projects were turned down, usually because of flaws in their business models, she faced considerable local criticism.
Behind the gentle façade lay a formidable fighter for the arts in general and dance in particular. “Her smile was something special,” wrote Jonathan Heawood from the Stephen Spender Trust, which she chaired. “With a simple scrunch of her lips and a crinkle of her eyes, she could make you feel unique, as though she understood exactly what you meant and what you were going through.”
Dance remained her priority and in 1994 she joined calls for a dedicated national dance house. She said: “For too long, dance has been in the guest room, and even when a welcome guest has been dependent on the plans and priorities of others. If dance is to reach its full potential, it must aspire to the status afforded to its sister performing arts.” Evidence of the uphill battle she faced could perhaps be found in a letter she received from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 1998 addressed to “Dear Prune”.
Karen Prudence Patricia Skene was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, in 1944, the second of four children of Robert Skene, a company director, and his wife, Phyllis (née Langley). After the war the family moved to London, where she was educated at Francis Holland School; much later she took a degree through the Open University.
In 1963 she responded to an advert for a secretary at the fledgling National Theatre. The following year her engagement was announced to Noel Picarda-Kemp (obituary, August 14, 2003), a satirist who presented Late Night Line Up on BBC2. However, the marriage did not go ahead and she instead gained valuable management experience in Australia with a touring theatre company, “a wonderful way to see the country”, she told The Stage.
By 1973 Skene was deputy administrator (equivalent to deputy chief executive) of the Roundhouse in north London. She paid little attention to the rock concerts that dominated the programme, but her interest in contemporary dance was piqued by visits from Twyla Tharp’s company and Ballet Rambert. The latter “came and did a season and they were just lovely, the dancers were so nice and it was such a pleasure to deal with them”, she said. She joined them in 1975 as administrator, quickly developing relationships with sponsors, public-sector funders and fellow dance organisations.
In 1986 she married Brian Wray, the marketing director of Imperial Tobacco, whom she had met in the days when cigarette companies sponsored arts organisations, and they settled in Bath. However, after four months commuting between home and the capital she left Ballet Rambert to pursue a freelance career that included the presidency of the Theatrical Management Association in 1991-92. She was well known in the city’s cultural life, serving on the boards of the Theatre Royal and the Royal United Hospital NHS Trust.
Wray died in 2002 and Skene is survived by her partner, the actor and director Michael Pennington. They split their time between his home in Highgate and her flat in Pimlico, which was filled with books, pictures, flowers and an ageing television. Fourteen years after leaving Ballet Rambert, she returned to the company as chairwoman. Although she struggled with the temptation to tell her successors as executive director how things had been done in her day, it was, she concluded, “just like coming home”.
Prue Skene CBE, arts administrator, was born on January 9, 1944. She died after a short illness on March 5, 2025, aged 81
