Do It Yourself
A report in The Stage tells us that ATG has cancelled a musical - Houdini the Musical - that had been booked into the Regent Theatre, Stoke, because the actors were not being paid but employed on the basis that, if the show had a life beyond the Stoke run, they would receive a full wage for that. The TMA agreed that the arrangement was unacceptable and Equity pointed out that the whole affair could fall foul of employment legislation.
It seemed absolutely right and I found myself nodding in agreement. However I decided to do a bit more checking and discovered that the company behind the production is, in fact, run by very young actors, not long out of drama school, and, they say, this is the only way they could do this new musical on which they are so keen.
Then I began to think. On Friday evening I went to see a new play written by a friend of mine in a new venue. It had a cast of six (playing 19 parts between them) and it ran for one night. How did they get funding? I asked. They didn’t: they did it because it was something they wanted to do and they knew that this would be the only way they would get to do it. Hopefully it will have a life beyond the one night and they will have some profit to share, but that’s unknown.
I chatted to the writer, who was also one of the actors, and she told me they were sick of waiting around for auditions but there’s not very much original theatre being produced in the region and applying for Arts Council grants means having to jump through so many hoops to fit into the “priorities”, the forms are complex and time-consuming to complete and there is certainly no guarantee at the end of the day that any money will be forthcoming. So they decided to go it alone on a profit-share basis.
They are not alone. That’s how we did A Cold Coming last year and very recently a group of NE actors have got together to form a group to put on their own work on the same basis.
These people I’m talking about are all professional actors, directors and writers, some with decades of experience, but they feel that their only chance of working, given that the number of plays produced in one year in the region is in single figures, is to do it themselves.
It’s a dreadful situation. There is TIE work around and corporate work, but real theatre? the sort of work we came into the business to do? Forget it!
Or do it yourself.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I run a theatre company in Vienna, and many small companies have the same issue here. Do it yourself or don’t bother.