British Theatre Guide Blog

Over a year ago a colleague (actress and writer Viktoria Kay) and I were commissioned to write a community play about the town of Jarrow for the Jarrow Festival.  As you can imagine, it took a while and we finished it just too late for the 2007 Festival but we were asked to direct it for this year’s event.

 It’s a big piece, as community plays tend to be, covering the town’s past, present and future, and has over 40 parts for a range of actors, from 15 to 70+ (although they could be played by around 23 actors).  There’s live music, some dance and an opportunity for video work to be incorporated.  And it was to play in five different venues.

Funding applications went in months ago but were knocked back time after time and we eventually were offered funding (with a lot of strings, but we won’t go into that!) less than two weeks before we would have to begin rehearsals.  That’s a week to get the word out, followed by auditions on the Thursday and Friday, with rehearsals due to start the following Monday.

A thankless (although we worked extremely hard) - and ultimately fruitless - task.  The vast majority of those who would have been interested were already committed to other things and we were compelled to knock the project on the head.  Hopefully it might be possible to revive it next year, but who knows? It all depends on the funding.

And there’s the rub.  It turns out that the reason funding was refused was the fact that Viktoria and I were to be paid.  Naturally we were: it’s how we make our living.  But no: funders would not give money, no matter how worthy the cause, if anyone was to be paid.

Most of the organisers of Festival events are being paid, because they are employed by community centres, the local authority or schools and given time to do the work on the Festival.  Without their work the Festival could not take place.  They are professionals who are using their professional expertise to ensure the success of the Festival and are being paid to do so.  We, however, are freelance: nobody employs us full-time.  If we take on a project, then the project has to pay us, and this is what disqualifies our particular project from being funded.  We couldn’t even be offered a percentage of the box office income because Festival events must be free.

Obviously we’re disappointed - massively disappointed - but more than anything else I am saddened that the funding bodies seem to feel that either theatre is not important enough to be involved in a community festival or that, if it is, it cannot have any professional input. They’ll pay for transport hire, costumes and props to be hired , bought or made and lots of other expenses (all payment being made to commercial firms, of course) but not for the professional expertise which will bring the whole thing together and make it work.

Of course, it happens all the time.  You get actors being asked to take part in events or films for free because “it will look good on your CV”, even though others - such as the crew - are being paid.  I was, just this week, asked if I could put a producer in touch with some actors to play ensemble roles in a production for nothing (”It will look good on their CVs”), even though everyone else is being paid.

The problem is that we’re in theatre because we love the job and want to be part of it, so people do take advantage.  Profit-share in one thing - as long as it is fairly done and seen to be fairly done - but exploitation is something else.  I recently came across one company which was offering its actors £5 an hour for performances and nothing for rehearsals.  Now that is not only exploitation. it’s also illegal, but the idea of the minimum wage does not seem to have percolated through to the murkier parts of the theatre world.

What a business theatre is!

I listened to a play on Radio 4 today, the first time for - well, more years than I can remember.  It was Cavalry by Dan Rebellato, who just happens to be a BTG reader, which, to be honest, is the only reason I listened.

(As an aside, he’d sent me a notification it was on via Facebook. Up until very recently I’d steered well clear of social network websites but I was talked into joining and have not regretted it.  It’s proving very useful - and I’ve been experiencing some real “blasts from the past”, which has been wonderful. But back to the subject at hand…)

I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought it was a very clever piece of writing, but that’s not why I brought it up here.  It occurs to me that the BTG is ignoring a whole area of dramatic writing and performance.  We cover live theatre, of course, and Philip reviews a lot of DVDs, many of which were originally TV programmes, but we (well, Philip actually: I’m sure his days are longer than those of the rest of us!) have only ever reviewed seven audio dramas and we don’t even have an index for them - which is something I’ll have to put right asap - but even they were on CD, not radio.

Perhaps we should attempt to extend our coverage. We aspire to be as complete a guide as possible, so it would make sense, but there are, inevitably, problems, primarily of time and personnel.

Should we?  I’d appreciate some feedback on this.

And an interesting week it was, too: full of theatre although I never actually entered one.  Well, that’s not quite true: I was in a theatre’s admin offices, but not an actual auditorium or even rehearsal room.  And yet…

I got a few hours break on Sunday night after uploading the weekly update and sending out the Newsletter, but then it was back to the computer to upload the Olivier results.  And fascinating they were too, not so much for who won what (although there were some surprises) but because of how they reflect the split that runs right down the middle of London Theatre.  As (almost) always, the successful musicals came from the commercial sector and the successful plays from the subsidised.

Plays have a hard time of it in the West End. They’re not a tourist target in the way that musicals are and so presenting them is a real risk.  A well-known star - preferably from Hollywood or, failing that, a major TV series - can make a play a West End success but not always: even the young J. J. Feild and the very experienced Angela Thorne weren’t enough to save Ring Round the Moon which announced early closure this week after less than a month.

This, of course, makes the Theatre Royal Haymarket rep company such a brave - and risky - venture.  I managed to see The Sea a few weeks ago on a flying visit to London and was greatly impressed.  The matinee was packed, so I hope that’s a good sign for the future.

Anyway, apart from the usual BTG daily editing and updating, I’ve had two new plays to read, a quotation to prepare for a Theatre in Education project, some work to do on my next production (including listening to hours of music), discussions about future plans for the company and, of course, planning the coming weeks’ North East reviewing.

I hate doing quotes!  Especially when you don’t really know what the job is going to entail.  You have to pepper them with so many ifs and maybes - how, for example, can you give a firm figure for researching and writing a piece?  It all depends on how much information is needed, how accessible it is, what approach the client wants you to take.  It would be wonderful to have an administrator/executive director so I could just concentrate on the artistic side but, alas, that would cost more than we’ve got.  I wonder how many theatregoers realise just how many companies are living from hand to mouth?

A friend of mine has just given up.  He’s been supporting his company financially by taking far, far less than he’s earned and actually injecting cash from other jobs’ earnings for years, and now he’s had enough.  I don’t blame him, but it’s so sad.  The theatre world is littered with the corpses of small-scale but very good theatre companies.  If the (financial) failure rate in the normal business world were a quarter of what it is in theatre, the government would be in a real panic.

And it’s not just companies: a young actor friend of mine, having just finished a run with a major national theatre company, is now cleaning houses for a living until, hopefully, the next job comes along.

What I haven’t (yet) done is write two articles that have been on the stocks for a few months or manage to get our What’s On pages online again.  Sheila Connor, who reviews for us in Surrey, sent me an email on Friday (now lost in the great email diasaster of Friday midnight!) telling me that I should delegate.  The fact is, I do but work has a habit of expanding to overflow the time available for it.

Back to my week: I’ve also changed my energy provider, thus saving £16 a month!

But I am going to the theatre tonight.  Not to review, just to watch. ‘Twill be a nice change!

I’ve always wanted to invent a cliche but that seems highly unlikely, so here’s a nice oxymoron instead!

It’s true though.  At Live Theatre in Newcastle on Thursday evening Fiona Evans (whose Scarborough is currently running at the Royal Court) had a reading of her new play Deepcut and I really wanted to be there.  But more than a week beforehand there were no tickets left so I went on the waiting list.  No chance!  I missed it.  I left it too late, of course - the story of my life…

But - and this is the pleasing bit - it does mean that there is such an interest in new theatre writing in Newcastle that they had to start a waiting list for tickets - and I was by no means the first on that list. And that is a very good thing.

It’s partially the fact that it was at Live, of course - the theatre has a loyal and enthusiastic audience - and partially because Fiona is developing quite a reputation as an up-and-coming playwright, but it’s good to know there is an appetite for new work in the region.  I do tend, at times, to get a little depressed when audiences turn up in their thousands for the umptyninth revival of Cats (much as I love the show), for some very ordinary middle-of-the-road play which happens to have a well-known face or two from the telly or for some tenth-rate comedy.

So my faith is restored.  Sorry I couldn’t make it, Fiona.  In future the first of my heart shall be the first of my hand.  No more procrastinating.  Hereto I’ve worked on the principle of never putting off till tomorrow what I can put off till next month: that must change!

Good Lord, I’ve just made a (very much delayed) New Year’s resolution!

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.

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!

Last week I received a review of the National Youth Theatre’s White Boy at the Soho from our reviewer Rachel Sheridan.  In her accompanying email, she pointed out - horror of horrors! - that they actually call it the soho theatre.  No capitalisation!

Now I know this is the modern way - playwright debbie tucker green, for example, wants to be called just that, without any capitalisation - and I also know that, in most editions of his work, the poet E. E, Cummings  is known as e. e. cummings (although, according to Wikipedia, he did say that he he preferred the capitalized version), but I am a proud pedant and insist upon capitalisation (notice the “s” there, unlike the American “z” in the quote for Wikipedia).

Does that sound petty?  I suppose it does and, if I restricted myself to so minor a pedantry, it would be, but (notice the Oxford comma!) I really do think language and the way we write it matter.  We live in a visually very sophisticated society, which is a good thing because it means that we have become skilled at reading visual messages, but, at the same time, we seem to be in danger of becoming desensitised to language, and that is dangerous.

Why is it dangerous?  Because the less complex the language we can use, the less complex the concepts and thoughts we can process.

You don’t believe that?  Someone told me the other day that he is distinterested in… well, the subject doesn’t matter.  He actually meant that he is not interested in it, that he is uninterested.  It appears that now those two very distinct and useful words, uniterested and disinterested, have lost their very distinct meanings and have become synonyms.  Thus we have lost a very useful word.  How soon before the concept of disinterestedness is lost?  Come to think of it, there are some who will say it already has been, with people looking first and foremost at “what’s in it for me?”

Now I am not advocating the return to the florid language of times past, nor to the obfuscations of legalese (or any other jargon, for that matter), but sloppy language leads to slopping thinking and slopping thinking leads to errors and confusion.

I probably go too far in the opposite direction - even when texting I will use capitals and proper punctuation: God forbis that I should ever write “c u 2nite”! - and I often delay (sometimes for hours) getting one of my own reviews online because I am searching for exactly the right word.

And it is so easy to lose the appreciation for beautiful language.  When Shakespeare sounds like a foreign language and the reaction to passages from the King James Bible is “eh?”, then we are in deep linguistic trouble.  Of course language must change and develop, and its natural direction is towards greater simplicity - the loss of inflection being a prime example - but far too many changes in modern English are the result of ignorance.  Witness the “grocer’s apostrophe”, where an apostrophe is added to every plural - potato’s , apple’s and so on - as inflection is so far in the past that people do not recognise that ’s is a replacement for the old genitive.

But I am wandering too far!  I simply insist that a little pedantry is a good thing!

Yes, it’s that time of year, the time when the Inland Revenue starts nagging that you have until 31st January to complete your tax  return online (and pay what you owe) or they’ll send the boys round with baseball bats to squash vital and delicate parts of your anatomy.

(In fact, what they actually say is you’ll have to pay loadsamoney extra but, when you get to my age, that’s almost as painful as having those vital and delicate parts squashed.)

 We all hate paying taxes but we all also want government to spend money on what we think is important and, as the old song goes, you can’t have one without the other.  So really I ought not to complain but pay up with a cheerful smile on my face and a song in my heart, knowing I’m doing my bit to keep good old Britain rolling along.  Who knows?  My little contribution might be just the bit that helps fund an earth-shatteringly brilliant piece of new theatre or buys a hundredth of a square  inch of a new lane of an already overcrowded motorway.  Or perhaps it might pay a tiny fraction of MP Boris Johnson’s salary.  (Would that we could stipulate that our money is not used for such wasteful purposes!  But I suppose medieval kings used tax money to pay their court jesters, so…)

Actually, what annoys me about taxation is not having to pay taxes (alright, it does annoy me, but I accept they’re necessary) but the condescension of government ministers when they tell us that they are giving an extra £Xm to the NHS or £Ym to education, as if they are putting their hands into their own pockets.  They’re not.  They’re putting them into ours, deciding what they want to do with our money and then expecting us to be grateful.

Oh well.  Rant over.  Do I feel better for it?  ‘Course not: I still have to fill in all those bloody forms!