British Theatre Guide Blog

Perhaps it was inevitable, but it still comes as a relief that the Law Lords have ruled that there should be no prosecution for blasphemy over the BBC TV screening of Jerry Springer the Opera. Christian Voice, of course, is up in arms and threatening to use other means to fight what they see as unacceptable. 

A prosecution, or even a judicial review,  would have been a victory for intolerance. In spite of the ruling, however, intolerance from fundamentalists of all kinds will continue, for this kind of conviction of their utter rightness and the belief that their ideas should be imposed upon others is endemic in a certain kind of person.  Isn’t it time that the right to freedom of expression should be enshrined in our law?  Being, as we are, subjects with permission is far inferior to being citizens with rights.  I accept the right of the members of Christian Voice and their ilk, of whatever religion, to hold their opinions and try to convert others, but I want them to acknowledge that I have the same right.  Unfortunately they don’t, so that right should have the force of law, not just of custom.

We don’t have a news story about this year’s Oscars winners.  Why not? you may ask (or not, depending on your interest).  The answer is simple: Monday is supposedly my day off and I have regular commitments on Monday mornings and so, by the time I got in front of the computer, everyone knew the results anyway.  After all, the Oscar winners are one of the few (vaguely) theatre-related stories which the national press carries.

So, congratulations to Daniel Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton and commiserations to those who were in the running but didn’t make it.  I have to say, though, that I can’t really work up much enthusiasm and it rather looks as though people are beginning to feel the same way.  One little known fact about the 80th Oscars is that the US TV coverage now holds the record for having the lowest audience figures since records began in 1974.  It was 32m, which is 23m down on the highest ever, in 1998, the year of Titanic, and one million down on 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq.  I don’t have any international (including UK) figures.

It’s probably partly because most of the films were either European or didn’t do particularly well at the box office (or both) but I wonder if people are getting a bit sick of the hype?  I know I’m fed up to the back teeth with the celebrity obsession which seems to infect the print and broadcast media.  Popping into W H Smith’s recently I couldn’t believe the number of magazines dedicated to “celebs”, some (most) of whom I’d even heard of.  OK, the difference between the celebs at the Oscars and those who seem to live by the number of mentions they get in the press is that the former actually have talent but even then the number of column inches (sorry: centimetres) devoted to how much flesh the women were displaying outstrips (yes: deliberately chosen word) any talk of the films and/or performances by a huge margin.

It seems that celebrity doesn’t require any talent, skill, contribution to society or anything like that.  All it needs is to be known and suddenly people want to read about you, look at pictures of you and - especially - learn all about your love life.  And you make money out of it too!  You might just be 20 and have done nothing  more with your life than sat in the Big Brother house but you can publish your (ghost-written) autobiography, launch your own fashion label and get on the front page of The Sun.

What a sad society we live in.

Obviously the main reason for visiting theatre websites is to find out what’s on or discover a bit more about a production or show. That is so obvious that it hardly needs saying.  Why then do so many make it so flaming difficult?

If I want to find out what’s on at the theatre, I expect to be able to go o the site, click on something like “What’s On” and be taken to a list of forthcoming productions.  Then I want to find the production I want, click on that and be presented with the details.  Three clicks, that’s all.

A simple enough procedure, you would think.  But no: some sites have to make it extremely complicated.  There’s one - no names - where, after going past the “splash page” which simply says “Enter site”, you click on “what’s on” and are taken to a choice of various kinds of shows.  You then click on your choice and you are taken to a page which gives the barest details (name of play and author, plus date), and then you are asked to click on “More”.  Now we have the details of the play: a plot outline, details of the author and possibly the cast and creative team.  “Well,” you think to yourself, “I wouldn’t mind seeing this.  When is it on?”  Oh dear!  Another click required, to take you to the “dates and times” page.  Five pages so far!  Then one more if you want to book.  That tells you the number of the box office or, if you want to book online, there’s another link to click on, taking you up to seven.

It would have been far quicker to go straight to the “Contact” page, find out the box office number and ring them.  For goodness sakes, websites are supposed to make life easier!

There’s another where clicking on the “What’s on” link takes you to a page where you are given the choice of three different ways of finding out out what’s on: you can search for the show you want, you can look up what’s on this week, or you can ask it to list all the shows in the season.  Doing any of these takes you to a page which gives the most basic details, and you have to click on “More” to find out what you want to know.  Four pages.

If the site uses Flash rather than straightforward HTML or some of its more complex variants, you sometimes have to double the number of clicks because you have to click on a link before it actually becomes a link - “Click to use this control”.

When I first started to learn how to produce websites (way back in 1996, that was), it was drummed into me that you keep your content as few clicks away from the main page as possible - “No more than two clicks away” was the mantra.  While that is sometimes not possible, it’s a good idea to adhere to it as closely as you possibly can.  But seven?

Come on, designers, get your act together.  And marketing departments: if your web designers have fobbed you off with a site that takes far too long and the patience of Job to navigate through, demand your money back, sack them and get someone who considers the users rather than sees the site  as an excuse to show off their skills in Flash,  mySQL, PHP, ASP, javascript or any other technique which happens to be flavour of the week.

It sounds great, doesn’t it?  All children are to have five hours a week of culture a week.  That’s tremendous.  And the government is going to give £135m for this.  “Theatre, film, music, museums and other art forms can be life-changing for young people, broadening their horizons and raising self-confidence and aspirations,” says the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.  Brilliant!

But just hang on a moment.  Let’s start off with that last sentence - “Theatre, film, music, museums and other art forms…”  When the top government minister responsible for the cultural life of the country describes museums as an art form, one has to wonder if he really does know what he’s talking about.

“Well,” you may say, “he gets the wording wrong, but his heart’s in the right place.  After all,  he’s giving £135m.”  Yes, he is, and I’ve just done a very rough calculation - £135m a year boils down to approximately 53p per child per school week, or just over 10p per hour for each child.  Generous funding indeed. 

And where is the time to come from?  While league tables exist, schools are going to concentrate on raising their students’ levels as much as they can and they are not going to take time away from that. 

I was going to write “they would not be happy taking time away from that” but in fact they would.  Teachers do recognise - certainly more than government minsters - the value of cultural activities to the development of children but they and their schools are being judged (and, indeed, valued) on the basis of examination and SATs results, a system which they know to be fatally flawed but to which the government sticks like super-glue, so they are not going to risk being condemned for not achieving the targets imnposed on them.

Which is almost certainly why the proposal mentions in and out of school hours. But there are major problems here.  Let’s take a simple thing like taking the kids to the theatre.

Apart from the costs - let’s face it, 53p a week doesn’t go very far towards buying even a £5 theatre ticket, let alone paying for a bus to get them there and back - there’s all of the work involved: getting written parental permission, filling in a risk assesment, as well as the usual problems associated with taking large numbers out of school.  Couple that with an average of two to three hours marking, preparation, assessment and form filling after school each evening, after coming home from an after-school meeting, and you can see why there is not the enthusiasm for out-of-school activities that there once was.  And there’s always the fear that, if something goes wrong, the teacher will be pilloried.

Or suppose a teacher wants to bring a theatre company into school to perform for a whole year group.  Say the performance last s an hour and there are 200 kids in the year group.  Using their full week’s allocation of cash will raise £106, which is - at best - a third of the cost of a small (and rather cheap) company.  How are the other four hours to be funded?

What will happen will be the educational version of creative accounting.  The kids have to have five hours of cultural activity a week?  Great!  One one-hour lesson a week of creative writing, one of art, one of music, one of drama - there’s only an hour a week to fill.  But wait a moment: one English lesson can be devoted to literature.  That’s five hours - every week!  Now we can save up all those 53 pences and have a couple of major(ish) events every term.  Sorted!

I know I may have overestimated the number of children of school age and my 53p is therefore just a rough approximation, but it is enough, surely, to show this latest initiative up for what it is - a token gesture, a PR exercise, a sound bite.  If I wanted to be rather crude, I would say that the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families is well named, but I wouldn’t do such a thing.  Not me, sir: no.

In an interview in the Telegraph (see a summary here) in which he tells how the row over the Arts Council’s finding decisions have affected him, Sir Christopher Fraying, chair of ACE, “likened the process of deciding to cut or stop funding for some organisations to weeding a garden.”

I consulted two dictionaries.  One said that a weed is “any useless, troublesome plant” and the other described it as “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants”.

Is this how he thinks of companies like Compass, Quicksilver, Red Shift or London Bubble, or theatres like the Chester Gateway? One has to be kind and assume that he just picked a poor analogy, but even so it is so typical of the attitude of ACE throughout: dismissive of and arrogant towards anyone who objects to their plans.

And this was in an interview in which he laments that “people have treated me like a leper” and “people have said some horrible things.”

Oh poor you, Sir Christopher!  People should just accept that it is OK for you -  behind closed doors, without providing adequate time for reply and without prior warning - to destroy or at least put at risk the work to which they have dedicated their lives.

Talking about Nick Hytner’s “bollocks” comment, he admits to feeling “raw” and said, “The National Theatre is a beneficiary of this redistribution” and  “I can completely understand organisations that are dispossessed getting angry”  which rather tends to suggest he thinks that Hytner should shut up and be grateful - sort of You’re alright, Nick: forget about the rest.

He says, “I am the first chairman of the Arts Council since the 1950s to work in the arts world. It’s a plus and it’s a minus. The plus is, I hope, I understand a bit about the arts. The minus is I know a lot of these people.”

He may know them, but he certainly doesn’t understand them.  He doesn’t understand, as Sam West pointed out at that Equity meeting, that the big theatres and companies depend on the smaller ones because that’s where new actors, writers and everyone else in theatre learn their art.  It’s a pyramid: take away bits in the middle or at the bottom and the whole edifice comes tumbling down.

He told the Telegraph that Arts Council was “staffed by dedicated professionals and that actors did not have a monopoly on caring about the arts.” One must ask: professional in what?

Since Nicholas de Jongh said that it is time for Arts Council to go, others have taken up the cry.  I happen to believe that an arts council is the best way of delivering public funding to the arts (although not the Arts Council as presently constituted)  and Frayling’s mixture of whinging and bluster is not going to change my mind - nor anyone else’s, I suspect.

The scene: outside Northern Stage in Newcastle.  A group of 15/16 year old girls and their teacher surround two actors whio have just come off-stage after this evening’s performance.

What is this? A group of stage-struck youngsters? Drama students trying to get tips for their GCSE exam or wanting to know how to become an actor? Autograph hunters?  Theatre groupies?

None of these.  It is actually a group of GCSE Physics students who’ve come to the theatre to see Unlimited Theatre’s Tangle because it deals with Quantum Physics. and they wanted to talk about how this difficult (or, to me, impenetrable) subject was presented on stage.

I thought it was great! Here we had a piece of theatre dealing with a very non-theatrical subject exciting a group of non-theatregoers. Brilliant!

OK.  This is not an earth-shattering post, not a comment on a burning theatrical issue of the day, but what happened here is so important, for  this is what theatre is all about - getting people excited and wanting to discuss, even argue.  And as we get involved in the day-to-day problems of running theatres and theatre companies, as we immerse ourselves in the undoubtedly very important issues which face all of us who try to make theatre in Britain in 2008, let’s not forget that this is what it all comes down to - reaching out to our audiences and getting them excited.

Well done to Jon Spooner and Unlimited for dealing with subjects which bring in those audiences which other companies don’t reach, and well done to that Physics teacher who had the courage to step outside the lab and fire his students’ enthusiasm in a most unsual way!

That’s “call” in both senses of the word -  as in “to telephone” and “to say bad things about”.

I live more than 300 miles from London, so when I go to the theatre there, I go as an ordinary audience member, not as a critic.  I pay the same ticket prices as anyone else and book in the same way as anyone else.

Today I have been trying to book tickets for Speed-the- Plow at the Old Vic.  It was almost a day-long job.  I’ve started trying at 11.00 this morning and it’s now 3.10 and I have just got through.

 First I thought, “Book online.  As the editor of an internet theatre site, you should use online facilities.”  So I tried Ticketmaster - well, you have to support your advertisers, don’t you?.  Tickets not available for the performances I want.  Indeed, it looked like tickets weren’t available, full-stop.

So I phoned the 0870 box office number.  Engaged.  OK, use ring-back.  After half an hour, still no response, so I rang again.  Engaged.  For the next hour I tried every ten minutes.  Always engaged.

So I thought, “Use the Ticketmaster phone number.”  I got straight through - well, after listening to countless options for pop concerts.  A very helpful lady told me that they have only a very limited ticket allocation for the Old Vic and it has been sold, so I should try the box office.  I explained my predicament.  “Have you tried the 020 number?” she asks.  I didn’t know there was one, so she gave me it.

Wonderful!  Perhaps this might be better.

Unfortunately it rang once, then started indicating it was engaged, and then it hung up.

So, back to the 0870 number.  On about the tenth try, I got through!  Well, I got through to a recording which told me I was being placed in a queue.  After a while, a nice pre-recorded gentleman came on to apologise for my being kept waiting but I will be spoken to as quickly as possible.  After all, they are, as he said, committed to answering calls as quickly as possible.  Well, I waited for ten minutes but it was between 10am and 1pm, which, the voice said, is their busiest time, so I would call back later, as they advised.

I tried -  at 1.15, 1.30. 1.45, 2.00 - but no luck: it was engaged.  Tried the 020 number - ring once, engaged tone, hang up.  Did that at least half a dozen times.

Tried the 0870 at 2.30 - engaged.

Tried at 2.45 - engaged.

Tried at 2.55.  Got through!  Sat listening to how important my call is and how committed they are to answering my call as quickly as possible for just over ten minutes and finally - finally! - spoke to a real person.  Booked my tickets - at £90 for two, plus a transaction fee, plus something else that I’m not sure of because by then I was so tired that I wan’t listening properly and if I’d asked her to repeat, that would have delayed some other poor bugger who’d been trying for hours to get through.

I’ve booked by phone or on the Net for shows at many West End theatres, the National, the RSC and London fringe venues, and have always found it pretty painless, fast and efficient - except at the Old Vic.  Always - without fail - the Old Vic takes longer than anywhere else - hours instead of minutes - and I always say I’ll never go there again, but I never remember until I’m actually in the process of trying to make the booking.

I’m going to see The Sea at the Haymarket and booked via Ticketmaster.  It took less than five minutes and I downloaded my tickets there and then.  Why can’t the Old Vic be as efficient?  If they can’t afford the staff to service the number of calls they get, then they should turn over all their ticket sales to a specialist ticketing company.  You don’t do your theatre any good by alienating customers by making them wait hours and spend loadsamoney on phone calls.

Come on, Kevin Spacey: you’ve got a damned good programme - now sort out your box office!

So now we know.

 The highest profile cuts (the Bush, the Orange Tree, Bristol Old Vic, the National Student Drama Festival and Exeter Northcott) have been reversed.  One wonders how much  the very public support of major theatrical figures like Nick Hytner had to do with that. Perhaps rather more surprising - but most welcome for all that - Eastern Angles have also had their funding reinstated, as have Jacksons Lane, Harrogate Theatre and the Birmingham Opera Company.

But 165 organisations have still been dropped by Arts Council and a further 27 have had their funding cut.  This is core funding and it is what keeps the companies alive: without it, the majority will either have to cut their activities to the bone or close.  Indeed the Drill Hall has already closed and we can expect to hear of more closures over the coming weeks.

No one has a right to Arts Council funding but ACE must assume some responsibility for the companies it chooses to stop funding.  It must give them a reasonable space in which to prepare a case for appeal, enough time to the actual cessation of funding to find alternatives, and be absolutely clear and accurate in presenting its reasons for its decision.  It cannot be said that any of this has been the case this time so a bad taste has been left in everybody’s mouth and trust in the organisation has been severely damaged.

That is probably the worst legacy  of the whole sorry business.  How can the arts world trust ACE after this debacle?  Already one influential figure - Nicholas de Jongh of the Evening Standard - has called for the Council to be scrapped, but if that happened and funding decisions were left to the DCMS, then that would be an even bigger disaster.  The arms-length principle must be maintained.

What is needed is a root and branch look at all of ACE’s funding procedures - a major reconstruction job, in fact.  Incoming chief executive Alan Davey has the Herculean task of re-establishing the arts world’s trust in the organisation and if he doesn’t realise that, he shouldn’t be in the job.  Now that the funding brouhaha is finished (barring any legal challenges), his first job must be to make the Council more arts-led, more transparent and more hands-on.

If, as many of the affected companies have complained, the officer responsible for “looking after” them never leaves the office to see what they are doing, that must change now.  It should be part of their job description that they see the work of the companies for which they have responsibility a minimum number of times a year.

ACE claims that it is putting into action Brian McMaster’s recommendations about excellence.  Excellent!  Now let’s see them institute another of his recommendations - peer review.  Let the professionals assess the work that is being funded, not the desk-bound bean-counters, some of whom wouldn’t recognise excellence in an art form if it hit them in the face with a wet fish.

Since those letters were sent out in December the arts world has been in turmoil and the reputation of Arts Council England has sunk to an all-time low.  If changes are not made - and are seen to be made - then more and more people will start to wonder why we have an arts council at all, and that will take us into very dangerous territory indeed.

13,630,810 attendances, £469,729,135 in box office takings and a VAT contribution of £70m: that’s a pretty good record for one year’s work. That is what the members of the Society of London Theatre did in 2007.  Now add in all the takings from other London venues (unknown, alas) and the additional spend that goes with theatregoing - travel, meals and so on - and you can see why theatre is a major contributor to the capital’s economy.

Now add in the box office receipts and additional spend associated with theatregoing throughout the UK (again, the figures are unknown - to me, at any rate), and, in spite of the howls of protest from the philistines who scream whenever public subsidy is mentioned,  it is perfectly obvious that theatre is a major net contributor to Britain’s economy.

(Proof?  in the financial year in question, ACE paid out £46,981,038 in grants to Regularly Funded Organisations and in Grants for the Arts, which are Lottery funded,  for one-off projects.  That leaves £23,018,962 out of the VAT that SOLT members paid.  OK, we have to take into account local authority support for theatre throughout the country, but if we do that we have to factor in the VAT paid by these theatres - and, of course, the rates, income tax on theatre workers’ salaries and other associated taxation.  No matter how you look at it, the taxpayers get a good deal from theatre subsidy.)

We should celebrate that more than we do.

What does not surprise me is the fact that just under three million (21.6%) of those attending went to see plays as distinct from musicals.  As an aside, a significant proportion of the 2.95m playgoers (722,000 - just a smidgeon under a quarter) were at the National Theatre alone. 

But back to musicals. One only has to look at what is playing in the West End at any one time to see how huge a part of what is on offer musicals are. It would be interesting to compare similar figures from across the country, but I am sure that musicals would still hold the top spot.  And I suspect it will always be so.  Part of the reason, of course, is that musicals are the “feel good” shows par excellence, but there is also the fact that (the big) musicals are spectacle and people love spectacle.  They also appeal to a wider range of people, if only because of the fact that they include so much: songs, dance, acting, comedy, often spectacular sets and costumes. 

Just as a matter of interest, I decided to compare attendances at premier league football games for the same period. Trying to compare (as far as it is possible) like with like, I took into account just the London clubs, and their attendance was 41,88,835 (less than a third of those who attend theatre).  The figures aren’t really comparable, of course, as there are far too many variables and it’s also pretty irrelevant, but it’s interesting to look at the figures all the same.

Yes, I know - I’m rambling.  But it’s so nice to have the chance to do so on a happy subject after a few weeks of the doom and gloom engendered by the ACE funding cuts!

Today is the last day for those organisations affected by the ACE cuts to submit their appeals.  From now on, it’s up to Arts Council.

Or is it?  We’ve reached a situation where both sides are so entrenched that it seems unlikely that anyone will budge.  OK, ACE may make a few concessions - the Bush, for example - but for it to do anything else than to inker with its plans would be to admit it is wrong and there is nothing bureaucrats hate more than admitting to error. 

Some organisations have already accepted the situation - they’re the ones we haven’t heard from - but most are firm in the opposition and some will go ahead with plans for a legal challenge. But if that happens ACE has already said that, when it wins as it is sure it will, it will claim costs, thus making the organisation which it has already deprived of funds pay out more.  Whilst that is undoubtedly legally correct, it would be another PR own goal.

The relationship between ACE and its clients, especially in the theatre world, has never been worse, and even though there are undoubtedly some of its decisions which are perfectly justified, nothing short of stopping the cuts and going through a much more transparent process will restore confidence.  But that would be to admit it was wrong, and that seems highly unlikely, to say the least.

Time for adjudication!  Time, in fact, for culture secretary James Purnell to step in and sort out the mess.  For him not to do so would be a gross dereliction of duty.  He is responsible for the health of the cultural sector and the paymaster of ACE.  He has a duty to both sides in the dispute and it is also incumbent upon him, as a minister of the crown, to ensure that the workings of government and of government-funded quangos are transparent and fair. If he fails to intervene, he will lose all credibility in the eyes of the arts world, and with an Arts Council and a minister lacking the respect and trust of the sector, the arts in England will be in a very parlous state indeed.

Over to you, minister!