British Theatre Guide Blog

We’ve had the results of the TMA Awards and the nominations for the Manchester Evening News Awards and the Evening Standard Awards with, still to come, the Oliviers, the Critics’ Circle Awards, the Whatsonstage Theatregoers’ Choice Awards and the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS).

The Evening Standard, Theatregoers’ Choice, Oliviers and Critics’ Circle awards all concentrate on theatre in London, while the MEN Awards concentrate on Greater Manchester and CATS on Scotland, leaving just the TMA Awards to cover the entire UK.

Of course London is of huge importance but it isn’t necessarily the place where you are going to see the best theatre, as distinct from music theatre.    In fact, if you look at the number of plays which were nominated in any category in the Evening Standard “long list”, the West End only appears four times, and two of those were transfers from outside of London.  In fact, nine nominations went to productions which had originated outside of London.  Otherwise nominations went to a very limited range of theatres: the National (8, including one import), Donmar (and Donmar West End) (7), Almeida (5), Old Vic (3), Globe (2), Royal Court (1) and Young Vic (1).

I haven’t mentioned the Barbican, although one of its shows gained two nominations, but that was the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch, another import. Not did I mention the Roundhouse which was home to the RSC in the year in question.  And Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter, which garnered two nominations, actually played in a coverted cinema.

So what’s my point?  Quite simply that three of the most influential awards - Olivier, Critics’ Circle, Evening Standard - focus on just a tiny proportion of the theatre being produced in the UK: theatre seen in London.  It could be argued, I suppose, that if a production is really good, it will eventually find its way to London, but that isn’t necessarily the case.  Of the London theatres which we mention above, only the National, the Young Vic and the Barbican present “imports”, and they are only a very small part of the National’s programme - inevitably.

So no, it is not true that if a production is any good it will get to London, at least not in the leading playhouses or the West End.  This would not matter - not really - except there is a general public perception that if a production isn’t seen in London, then it can’t be of a high enough standard, and that is manifestly not true.

As a North East patriot, I was delighted that Live Theatre’s The Pitmen Painters won the TMA Award for best play and has been nominated for an Evening Standard Award in the same category.  I should not be surprised if it is nominated in other awards too, but had it not been picked up by the National Theatre, it could never have won anything more than a TMA Award.  It’s an excellent play and an excellent production, but Live has produced others equally as good in the past, as has Northern Stage, and so have theatres like Manchester’s Royal Exchange and Nottingham’s Playhouse - and many others throughout the country.

Fascinating though the awards season may be and wonderful though it may be to be honoured, it does present a very skewed vision of theatre in the UK!

Earlier this week I was contacted by a BBC Radio station and asked if the credit crunch is affecting theatre.  I had to admit that I didn’t know.  I had heard things but they were - at least - secondhand so I didn’t feel justified in making more than the vaguest of comments.  However I did decide to investigate further.

I have heard it said that the number of West End shows which have announced closure recently is proof that the crunch is having an effect (and certainly the media seem to be taking this line), but shows are always closing for one reason or another and sometimes it does seem to happen in clumps.  And when we look at those which have closed or are about to close, we see that some have reached the end of their planned runs, others have been panned by the critics and one was unable to persuade its cast to take a cut in pay when moving to a smaller venue.  Hardly evidence of a major downturn.

In fact, SOLT and those producers who have commented have been very bullish.  Nica Burns of Nimax Theatres was a little cautious, suggesting that theatre is bound to be affected in the coming months but insisting that the autumn season has been good.

I decided to take a sample of North East theatres - a 1,300-seater receiving house, a 400-seater receiving house and a producing/receiving house with two auditoria.

Philip Bernays of Newcastle’s Theatre Royal said, “We are currently on target in terms of audience figures and Box Office income, but we are reaching these targets slightly later than we usually do as people are booking later.

“We are generally not putting prices up in 2009 as we recognise that people are being cautious with the amount of money they have to spend, and are concerned that, from the Spring when there may well be a squeeze on pay rises, the situation will get tougher. Of course, not putting up prices whilst our own costs rise is also going to create pressure on our budgets.”

Peter Darrant of the Customs House in South Shields agreed.  He said that last minute booking had increased greatly and walk-ups (people paying at the box office on the night rather than booking in advance) were up 100%.  A children’s show this week had 60 walk-ups for one performance and 54 for another - a most unusual situation.  In fact, advance booking patterns have changed.  For example, a recent mail-out three days before one show brought in 100 bookings rather than the usual ten.

Group bookings, too, are down, as are school bookings for the panto, but - and this is the significant thing - actual attendance is up.  He believes that people are less willing to commit to spending in advance, but are still turning up.

 The Customs House, he believes, is lucky in that the bulk of its audience tends to be retired people - “Kids gone, income secure, mortgage paid” - but still he thinks all theatres are going to have to change their marketing strategies to deal with the new situation.  And, of course, things will change once the recession begins to bite.

Northern Stage reports no change in booking patterns.  In fact, their spring production of Look Back in Anger is selling well, as are the two children’s Christmas shows.

The theatre’s spokesman suggested perhaps the credit crunch and impending recession had not hit the north as badly as the south (and, in particular, the south east) - yet.  He expects Northern Stage to feel the effects in the new year.

The situation in this part of the country, then, is not too bad, but theatres are bracing themselves for a downturn but, instead of throwing up their hands in despair, they are, as Peter Darrant said, preparing to adapt their marketing strategies to the changing conditions.

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.

The Fringe is over and one of the facts to emerge is that, for the first time, theatre took second place in the league table of the number of shows in each category.  At 29% of shows, it fell behind comedy (32%), following a trend which has been becoming increasingly obvious over the past few years.

The Fringe publicity differentiates between what it calls “theatre” and “musicals and opera” and “dance and physical theatre” (both on 5%) and does not take into account shows for children (4%), some of which (for example, one of our 5 star shows Heartbreak Soup) are equally as appealing to adults as to children). And the “comedy” listings also include plays.  But, that aside, the trend is obvious.

On the other hand, the number of shows of each type is not an indication of the size of audience and we have no figures for audience numbers, so really what the Fringe figures indicate is the number of individuals or companies in each area which bring shows to Edinburgh.

What sparked this line of thought for me is the figures for the 2007-2008 season at the Newcastle Theatre Royal which we report in our NE News this week.  There the largest audience was for shows for children and families (nearly 108,000 - 32%), followed by drama (just short of 98,000 at 29%).  What was surprising was that musicals attracted an audience of just over 74,000 (22%).  Comedy (stand-up) accounts for just 1% (just under 3,400).

 MInd you, the drama figures include the annual RSC visit which almost always sells out.

Now these are actual audience figures for a theatre which, on average, plays to 70% capacity and are obviously, to a large extent, a reflection of its programming.

So I turned my attention to London (the West End, the Southbank and major off-West End theatres like the Almeida and Sadler’s Wells) and the picture is different.  There are, at the moment of writing, 15 plays (31%) running (some, of course, in rep at the National), 27 musicals (55%) and seven comedies (14%), although this category includes the Globe’s Dream and Merry Wives.

Again, we have to take into account that the West End is a special case because a large percentage of its audience is made up of tourists.

Confused?  Me too, although I suspect it only goes to show that you can’t rely on statistics which can be made to mean almost anything!

The conclusion must be that it is impossble to generalise about audiences and their preferences, which tends to make discussions about how to build audiences a tad difficult!

“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.