Nick Giles confesses to having been a terrible pupil. “I was a really bad student but I had a fantastic music teacher called Penny Mark at Larkmead. I was vile to her, really unpleasant. But she was gentle, and kind. Penny was taking a lesson one day, and she played us some Scott Joplin, and for some reason — largely because she was such a good teacher — she picked up on the fact that I had responded to something in that sound.”

Born and brought up in Abingdon, Nick went on to gain an M Phil in 20th-century music and composition. But he opted for a slightly less financially risky career than that of a new and unknown composer: he ended up in theatre management.

“I was always interested in theatre, but I guess you’re not really conscious that there are such things as arts managers and directors. But I’ve always loved venues, and the whole experience of going somewhere. That stayed with me, so when I stumbled into my first job, at M&S, I knew I didn’t want to stay there for very long. But it was very good training. Having done a degree in management, I moved on to a little marketing agency, and did some work with arts clients. So I thought, ‘why don’t I go and work in a venue?’”

Last year’s 70th birthday celebrations at the Oxford Playhouse unearthed some intriguing stories — including the fact that, at the start of her career, renowned actress Susan Hampshire was instructed to paint the Playhouse loos. I wondered if callow young theatre managers were also expected to perform unglamorous chores.

“Absolutely,” Nick laughed. “My first theatre job was at Riverside Studios in London, and I spent most of my time plugging holes: Riverside leaked all over the place. Because I was the key holder, every time there were high winds in the middle of the night, I would get called out. I would end up in the driving rain and freezing cold.

“There was a huge pitched roof over studio two, and it had a long gutter, with only three drain holes in it. They were perfect pigeon-sized holes, and I vividly remember one occasion when a pigeon had decided to die with its feet stuck out of one of the holes. It only had to block one hole to make the gutter leak. I had to go up there in the rain, and proceeded to get my foot stuck. It was the most unglamorous management job you could imagine.”

In due course, Nick returned to Oxfordshire, and became deputy director of the Oxford Playhouse — relishing, he told me, the warm and enthusiastic atmosphere that he experienced there.

Then it was time to strike out on his own, and a year ago he moved just over the county boundary to become director of the Newbury Corn Exchange.

Since then, the economic downturn has sprung up in earnest, so I asked whether that had affected audience numbers, or influenced the planning of future shows.

“It’s a bit more difficult to tell here, because we changed the programme completely when I arrived. There’s a lot more theatre now. But although this has involved taking a bit of a gamble, people are really going for it. The first real test was when we did Filter Theatre’s Twelfth Night in the autumn. It was the first time a piece of work like that had ever come here, and we sold more tickets than anywhere else on the tour, apart from the Tobacco Factory in London. OK, Twelfth Night is a strong title, but Filter is a completely unknown contemporary company. People loved it, there was fantastic feedback.

“When I arrived, I was faced with looking at a sheet of paper, and discovering that the biggest audience we’d had for a piece of one-night theatre in the past three years was maybe 20 people. So to suddenly take the gamble and say, ‘we’re going to stage four pieces of theatre in the next season and aim to sell 600 tickets’, with all my team going into apoplexy and wanting to have nervous breakdowns, was quite something. But people have responded.”

Encouraged both by the local response, and by audience members beginning to travel from further afield, Nick has programmed more firsts. There’s Improbable’s new show Panic, for instance, which will open its national tour in Newbury before ending up at the Barbican in London. It’s described in the Corn Exchange brochure as: “Ancient myth bleeding into modern life to reveal a tale of love or sex or panic, but usually a giddy mixture of all three.”

Nick Giles’s enthusiasm for his job is palpable, and, in particular, he plainly relishes the chance to bring new work to the Corn Exchange. It’s an enthusiasm, he told me, that was first fired up back home in Abingdon.

“If I hadn’t been motivated by teacher Penny Mark, I wouldn’t be where I am now. In terms of programming work here, one of the most rewarding things is the thought that someone might come to see something, who would never have tried it if I hadn’t put it on. If they go away thinking, ‘wow, that was fantastic, I’ll come again’, that’s a real drive for me. To think that the intervention by Penny so nearly didn’t happen: she could so easily have been someone who thought, ‘you’re a monster’.”

lFull details of the forthcoming programme at the Corn Exchange, Newbury, are available on 01635 522733, or at cornexchangenew.com