Susan Ferrier: My kingdom for a mouse

The CEO of Greenroom, tells how she's planning to bring the arts to an online audience

''All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances," mused Jaques in Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It. These days, there is a multitude of exits and entrances. First on the internet came the voyeuristic website Jennicam; more recently Channel 4's Big Brother.

''All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances," mused Jaques in Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It. These days, there is a multitude of exits and entrances. First on the internet came the voyeuristic website Jennicam; more recently Channel 4's Big Brother.

Greenroom-arts.com, a site dedicated to putting the performing arts online, whether drama, ballet, opera or music, is creating a variation on the theme in harnessing its audience's appetite for "true life". Its 400 Web pages and two hours of online video certainly blur the boundaries, mingling video documentary and historical fact with onstage action. Earlier this year, the Greenroom team marked out its ground by partnering the Almeida Theatre in the launch of its ambitious Shakespeare in Shoreditch project on the Web. This month, it has been providing webcasts from the Edinburgh Festival.

In addition, Greenroom has signed a 12-month contract as an exclusive provider of theatre content to BT's new ADSL platform, Openworld. The company is still seeking venture capital for expansion, so to plug the gaps it has developed a work-for-hire arm which produces interactive webcasts for film-makers such as Pathe.

The project was dreamed up late last year by Nick Hamm, a former director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who formed a small team to take his idea forward, including his brother Jonathan, a TV director; Phil Conil, a marketing specialist; and his Notting Hill neighbour Susan Ferrier, a divisional head of human resources for ING-Barings.

Ferrier, 38, now chief executive of the venture, left her job after deciding that Greenroom "would be great personal growth". Having grown up on a farm in Australia, she trained as a lawyer in Sydney and came to Europe to study for an MBA with an environmental focus. That course led her to London where she shifted focus and took jobs at Barclays de Zoete Wedd and NatWest Markets before moving to ING-Barings in 1998.

A call from Nick Hamm was the catalyst for change. "Nick and I lived on the same street and we met through our kids. He called me at home one night about his idea for a theatre portal and we identified the fact that performing arts had never really been exploited online and that no one had attempted to translate it on to the internet. It was the opportunity to get in at the beginning and make a difference," she says.

One of the team's first projects was with the Almeida, whose Shakespeare in Shoreditch production at the Gainsborough Studios, starring Ralph Fiennes, opened in March. Nick Starr, executive director of the theatre, recalls: "The Greenroom approached us to explore the possibility of an increased presence for theatres on the Web. They came along at the first stage of the project. What they did was remarkable: they found an interesting, sophisticated way of using background information as a tool to navigate the space and explore the studios' history.

"They took photographs, 360-degree views of the space, just as we were knocking out a concrete floor to turn it into a performance space. They gave people a way of looking into what was happening."

In its first week, he says, the Shakespeare site attracted about 75,000 hits. Ferrier wants to duplicate that success for productions nationwide and is now developing an integration of the theatre-going experience, enabling consumers to buy train tickets and book hotel accommodation on the site. Perhaps her biggest victory so far has been to win the Openworld contract to operate on a broadband platform.

Ferrier anticipates the contract will enable Greenroom to forge ahead in developing broadband content expertise. "Narrowband has tended to be a blur, so it's no good for action and sports. With narrowband you need to shoot close up and keep the camera very still. The more movement you have in the camera, the more data you capture and the longer it takes to play on your PC. With broadband, because you can send through more data, you can show more movement.

"Two years ago people got on the internet and thought, what's all the hype about? They saw a lot of text and slow download times, which was boring and annoying. Broadband will break through all of that."

More data, more movement, and a multiplied number of entrance and exit points. As broadband allows an increase in interactivity, the controller of the mouse will get to direct the production, choose the route, make his of her own story. "It'll make the job of a creator of entertainment more uncertain, I guess, but more exciting," reflects Ferrier, who is developing a film project with Pathe which allows Web users to dig deeper behind characters and even post suggestions for the musical score.

Nick Starr, at the Almeida, says writers such as Alan Ayckbourn, whose House and Garden production at the National Theatre segues drama into reality with a real-time fete featuring his characters, could have a field day with the internet's capacity for developing non-linear narrative. "I think there's a huge area of inquiry here, though it has to be recognised that the theatre is principally about a group of people sitting in a room and watching other people tell a story. We are going to see some breakthrough work done as technology becomes less of a fetish and more an invisible transmission, but we aren't quite there yet because of the bandwidth issue."

Meanwhile, Greenroom is still seeking funding but Ferrier says the proposition for investors is firmer now, with the company's production revenue streams maturing and the signing of an interactive TV contract with a yet-to-be-announced European telecoms platform.

With her own offspring - two infants under five - at home, she has turned into something of a performer herself. Of dot.com life, she says: "It's like spinning 25 plates, some slow, some fast. You need the skills to juggle tight resources when there's never enough. It's been tough finding the money but things are starting to loosen up now and we have a good chunk of cash coming from business-to-business activity."