Co-productions
“I know I sound blimpish, but I do feel the straight play is a doomed species. And what I get really angry about is the terrible starvation of the theatre out of London. You can see it in insidious ways. The death of regional work is very serious. You pick up the programme of the average rep company and you find no individual voice - it’s all co-productions with other theatres. Or it’s ‘devised’ work, and most of that is rubbish.”
So said Alan Ayckbourn to The Times earlier this week.
What he says about the straight play is a subject for another time, as is his comment about devised work, but the subject of co-productions is one which is worth taking up now.
He is absolutely right that co-productions between regional theatres are becoming more and more common, as are regional theatres’ co-productions with companies like Headlong, Kneehigh and Frantic Assembly, and the reas0n is obvious - money. Plays, and particularly plays wth a cast of more than three or four, are expensive to put on. Not as expensive as musicals, of course, but then the potential returns are much smaller. By sharing the costs, theatres are able to do more productions than they could otherwise afford and those productions have a life outside of the originating theatre.
It does, however, mean that, as Ayckbourn says, the “individual voice” is reduced because the theatres are doing fewer productions of their own. However, given the financial constraints that theatres are suffering from, it seems to me that co-production enables more adventurous - and more expensive - plays to be presented.
The ideal, of course, is what Ayckbourn wants - each theatre developing its own voice, its own style and even its own stable of writers - but financial pressures are making that very difficult, if not impossible, so in a way the co-production route is the least worst of all possible worlds.