Ripon's theatre festival has earned more than applause — it has earned investment writes Andrew Palmer, Group Editor

Somewhere between the deckchairs on the Market Place and this Friday's season finale — the Duke's Theatre Company's touring Romeo & Juliet at Ripon Racecourse, still to come — it has become clear that this year's Ripon Theatre Festival is not simply a good week of theatre. It is the moment a five-year experiment in what a small city can do with modest means and serious ambition finally proves its argument.

The timing gave that argument an unexpected edge. Ripon has just learned it will not be shortlisted for the inaugural UK Town of Culture 2028, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's new competition, which drew interest from towns across the country. The bid, "Small City, Big Landscape" — developed through the Uredale Community Partnership, with Ripon Together (Ripon C.I.C.) as proposed delivery body and North Yorkshire Council as the accountable body — made a considered case for the city. That it didn't make the shortlist stings, but the partnership behind it is right that the journey doesn't end at a rejection letter. If anything, the festival now drawing to a close this week is the strongest possible rebuttal: Ripon does not need Whitehall to tell it what it already is.

Because what Katie Scott and her team have built over five years is not a nice-to-have cultural add-on. It is infrastructure. Around a third of the festival's budget comes from Arts Council England; the rest — this year, some £25,000 — has to be raised and earned, largely through ticket sales, before a single seat is filled. That the festival keeps growing against that arithmetic, expanding to eight days and drawing professional companies who now seek Ripon out rather than needing to be persuaded, is precisely the kind of trajectory a funding panel should find hard to ignore — and it has done so without pricing out the audiences it exists to serve, keeping tickets affordable and building in free events specifically so that cost is never the reason someone misses out.

What struck me most this year, though, wasn't the scale — it was the reach. The festival's Reach Out programme took performances into care homes and to bedsides, insisting that theatre has no business staying only where audiences can easily come to it. A British Sign Language interpreted performance, a first for the festival, extended that same principle to audiences who have too often been an afterthought for regional arts programming. Add a disabled-led production, work with learning-disabled adults, and puppetry sessions developed for Young Onset Dementia groups, and a pattern emerges that is difficult to dismiss as coincidence: this is a festival that treats accessibility as a design principle, not a box to tick once a year for the sake of a funding application.

None of which is to say the theatre itself took a back seat. Far from it — the city was given over to it entirely, Kirkgate was closed for a pop-up performance, the cathedral forecourt and Minster Gardens were pressed into service, and a free family day that let generations who rarely share a programme sit down together anyway. None of it runs on goodwill alone, but a great deal of it runs on goodwill nonetheless: a festival of this size, on a budget this tight, depends on a team of volunteers who turn up year after year for no fee beyond believing in what the festival is trying to do, working alongside professional lighting and sound engineers whose contribution is too often invisible in a review. Both deserve their line here — funders backing this festival are, in effect, backing that volunteer commitment too and getting remarkable value for it.

It is worth setting this alongside other events on the city's cultural calendar, which, for all their charms, have never matched the theatre festival's pull, and alongside Harrogate's classical music programming just up the road – long-established and successful in its own right but working in a different genre and facing the particular challenge classical music faces nationally of bringing in newer audiences. Ripon's theatre festival, by contrast, seems to have already solved the problem that is quietly worrying concert halls and civic arts venues everywhere: how to be serious about art without asking audiences to leave half of themselves at the door.

Entertaining

Kirkgate proved popular

This brings me back to the topic of money, as it is impossible to write honestly about a festival's achievements without acknowledging the costs involved. A panel weighing a grant application for Ripon Theatre Festival is not being asked to gamble on an unproven idea. It is being asked to back five consecutive years of growth; a director, Katie Scott, who has turned modest resources into a nationally noticed festival; and a programme that already does – voluntarily, and on a fraction of the budget that larger institutions enjoy – much of what accessibility and community strategies elsewhere exist only on paper to promise.

Ripon didn't need a Town of Culture title this summer to prove its case. It is making it anyway, over eight days and across a dozen venues, to audiences from five years old to ninety-five. The next move belongs to whoever is deciding what that's worth.

For more information on Romeo & Juliet, click here