Gordon Dickerson
Gordon Dickerson is a London based theatrical agent.
He studied Modern History and Politics at Southampton University and on graduating began to work in various capacities front of house at The Theatre Royal, Brighton. After 7 months he landed a job as the assistant to the Theatre Producer at The Robert Stigwood Organisation in Brook Street, London, where he worked on shows such as Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palace Theatre, Evita at the Prince Edward Theatre, the London premiere of Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at Drury Lane and a very short lived show from Australia at the Phoenix Theatre.
As his job became more precarious, he left the company to travel to New York, hoping to land a job there, but a few months later an opportunity arose back in London at the Literary Agency, Fraser and Dunlop Scripts Ltd in Regent Street. After a stint as temporary assistant to the managing director he was offered a full time job as an agent with specific responsibility for promoting the agencies stage plays regionally in the UK and overseas.
A few years later the agency merged with another and the newly combined organisation PFD moved to new offices in Chelsea Harbour. By the early nineteen nineties I felt in need of some kind of change and decided to leave the agency but was persuaded by a number of clients including John Osborne to set up on my own and to represent them. This is what occurred and since 1994 I have operated as an independent literary agent occasionally acquiring new clients but always trying to ensure that I only have as many writers and plays as I can cope with as a one man operation!
Retirement beckons in the not to distant future as the work of placing new plays by unknown authors has become much more difficult in the UK. Moreover, in Europe there is still a great demand for well written small cast comedies but there is little outlet for these in the UK certainly not enough to generate an on going income for writers, so there is a fundamental problem about supply and demand. There are opportunities for writers in other areas such as film and television, of course, but apart from the lucky few residuals and up front monies are, in the main, not as good as they used to be making it very difficult for many writers to be able to sustain a career from their writing. Fortunately, I have a number of well known writers whose work continues to be performed around the world but how long that will last is anyone’s guess, the world has moved on so much in the last few years that even terrific plays written in the seventies and eighties let alone those from the fifties and sixties bear little resemblance to the lives we all now lead.
