By day she works with elderly patients with dementia on a ward at Foss Park hospital in York. By night she was strutting the stage with the Master of the House as the frightful, evil, but comic Madame Thenardier in Les Misérables at the Grand Theatre in Leeds. Dr Helen Spencer, ‘Bells’ to all her friends, is a woman of many parts, all of them performed with style and panache.
Spencer is a consultant psychiatrist on Wold View ward at the hospital, specialising in organic old-age psychiatry and fulfilling a teenage dream to be a mental health doctor. But she is also the founder and artistic director of a theatre company.
Her two worlds overlapped in perfect harmony when her immensely talented, vintage glamour musical cabaret quartet, the Hollywood Sisters, sang in a concert to raise money for a new sensory room on the ward. The aim was to create a more therapeutic environment and introduce more activities for patients, based on the evidence around the benefits of sensory experiences for people with dementia.
The sensory room opens later this year.
York musical favourites
Next month, Spencer will be back at York’s delightful and intimate Theatre@41 directing Musicals Across the Multiverse, a show that takes iconic musical favourites and presents them with twists and surprises. It’s performed by her own theatre company, Wharfemede Productions, which she runs with her partner and fiancé Nick Sephton; they’re regarded as cornerstones of the York musical theatre scene.
They’ll be getting married next year after Sephton proposed during the curtain call of the final night ofthe Broadway musical version of Little Women at Theatre@41. This was their first enterprise as Wharfemede; all the cast were in on the secret, but Spencer, taking a bow after a magisterial performance as Marmee, the matriarch in the eternally popular story, was taken completely by surprise.
Helen Spencer’s parallel lifetime passions
Spencer’s story is the fusion of two great passions in her life, which led to gaining two university degrees, the first in drama, the second in medicine. She was set on becoming a doctor from a young age but was held back by two prohibitive factors. “I suffered from asthma, and it was at its worst in the summer, when I knew that medical students would be sitting exams”, she explains. It was only later, at the age of 37, that she was also diagnosed with dyslexia.
So she opted for her parallel passion, and achieved a drama degree from Manchester University. Even after that, and setting up a theatre company, Envision, with another dynamo Susannah Tresilian – who went on to become a global theatre director, presenter of BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour, freelance producer on the Guardian Books Podcast, and transformational coach. Meanwhile, Spencer still dreamed of medicine.
She had a series of jobs in hospitals and GP practices, while at the same time running drama workshops at the John Thaw studio theatre in Manchester, performing and directing shows across Europe, and helping establish the Echo Viva festival in Trieste in Italy.
Theatre in the bloodstream
At the age of 25, after taking a ‘pre-med’ course, she was accepted into Manchester Medical School. For three years, drama had to take a back seat, especially during the final two intensive years of her degree. By the time she applied to do psychiatry training back home in Yorkshire – she’s originally from Otley – Spencer was married, with children – and still had the stage in her bloodstream.
“Theatre is part of who I am, a cathartic release. I really struggled during the years I was concentrating solely on medicine which is, of course, endlessly fascinating in itself, and I do love helping people. But theatre is such a joyful outlet. It has immense benefits for my own mental health, as well as bringing joy to others.”
Her way back was winning the role of the tough, loyal and foul-mouthed Beryl in Made in Dagenham at York’s Joseph Rowntree Theatre. In spite of the show being the last stage production before the pandemic lockdown, “It was a lightbulb moment. I’d forgotten what this feeling was like, and I’ve never looked back since”. Subsequently, she starred in Jason Robert Brown’s acclaimed two-parter, The Last Five Years, and directed a Pick-Me-Up Theatre production of Oliver Twist in which she also played the role of Fagin.
Musicals in the Multiverse and beyond
When she and Sephton got together, they both worked on the critically acclaimed Musicals in the Multiverse at Joseph Rowntree before setting up Wharfemede. Their own sequel, Musicals Across the Multiverse, builds on that success, and will include performers from Leeds, whom she met during Les Mis, alongside talented and experienced singers and musicians from the York scene.
They bring with them Matthew Claire, the musical director and arranger for the original Multiverse show. He has been essential to bringing the music to both productions, says Spencer. Multiverse, she says, is a licence to do exciting things with musical theatre favourites, maybe by switching gender roles, or changing a key from major to minor. “It will challenge preconceptions.”
There will also be more concerts from the Hollywood Sisters, developed by Spencer from the show Hooray for Hollywood, by the York Musical Theatre Company, just after lockdown. Spencer makes it all sound so easy: “We just get together, drink tea, eat biscuits, then sing something.”
Musicals across the Multiverse opens at Theatre@41 on 10 September.
Wharfemede Productions will present Sondheim’s A Little Night Music early in 2026.
