Prue Skene, CEO of Ballet Rambert and potent behind-the-scenes force in British arts

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23-04-2025

Prue Skene, who has died aged 81, was a gifted cultural administrator and a discreetly potent force in the British performing arts.
She began in the 1970s; her principal domain was dance. Compared to most attracted to that art form, she was inspired relatively late in life – at the age of 30, after seeing the work of New York choreographer Twyla Tharp at London's Roundhouse, where Prue was employed as a secretary.
It was there that she also caught a performance by Ballet Rambert, which had been Britain's first independent classical dance company when it was founded in 1926, but had latterly become 'contemporary' – still a novel tag in 1970s London. She was instantly taken by Rambert's The Parades Gone By, a funky, high-camp piece by the late Lindsay Kemp that parodied Golden Age Hollywood​, and never looked back.
Prue Skene campaigned tirelessly on behalf of Rambert's daring output, finessing international tours, supporting its choreographers and dancers, and becoming its much-loved and reliable executive director (1975 to 1986), then later board chair (2000 to 2009).
She also brought her lightness of touch and unswerving advisory hand to other pioneering companies, including the English Shakespeare Company in the late 1980s and, in 2016, Cardboard Citizens, a project bringing in the homeless to create theatre, where she was also chair.
As one Rambert colleague put it: 'If Prue said something, it would happen.'
Prudence Patricia Skene was born in Amersham in 1944, the second of four children to Phyllis and Robert Skene, and educated at the Francis Holland School when the family moved from Buckinghamshire to London after the war.
Her parents had met at Oxford University but Prue showed no signs of following them there. Nor did she recall culture being high on the agenda in a comfortable home, though did think she was taken to the Opera House, where she felt sure she had seen the ballerina Margot Fonteyn but was unable to confirm it.
She moved into secretarial work, which brought her to the Roundhouse, considered edgy and rough, almost 'fringe', in the 1960s and 1970s. Huge bands of the era – The Who, Pink Floyd – played there at weekends but they weren't for Prue Skene, not least because she was a weekday worker and went home on Fridays. She came into her own when invited to help administer the dance company that had so electrified her.
One of Rambert's great hits was Cruel Garden, designed by Kemp and Ralph Koltai, and choreographed by Christopher Bruce, an important associate director at Rambert. Based on the works, and murder, of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, the piece was made precisely for the Roundhouse space, premiering in 1977. For Skene it remained perhaps the company's signature show.
In 1985, she married Brian Wray, marketing director at Imperial Tobacco (cigarette companies then being acceptable arts sponsors) and they made a life together in Bath. This marked a career pause. But within six years she was at Arts Council England, becoming a significant and astute force in the distribution of National Lottery funds to arts organisations.
The list of posts she occupied was prodigiously long, and included executive producer of the English Shakespeare Company; director of the Arts Foundation; and trustee of the Nureyev Foundation.
As chair at Cardboard Citizens, she showed her trademark steadiness. Founder and former CEO Adrian Jackson recalls: 'Prue was very determined and committed. As CEO life is sometimes easier with a pliant chair: Prue was not that. She tended to get what she wanted.'
And few knew about her weaving skills. To a niece in the British Library once, looking together in the entrance hall at a huge tapestry If Not, Not (after RB Kitaj's mid-1970s painting), Prue said: 'I cut the last thread on that: same as launching a boat – smashing a bottle on the prow!'
Skene was as modest as she was multi-talented. In 2000 she was appointed CBE for her services to the arts.
Brian Wray died in 2002. Skene then shared her life with actor Michael Pennington, who survives her.
Prue Skene, born January 9 1944, died March 5 2025
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