Guardian’s Lyn Gardner calls on regionals to buck up

Lyn Gardner, of The Guardian‘s Theatre Blog, put out a post this week calling on regional theatres to do more to keep themselves in local people’s consciousness, writing:

“If these buildings are to survive it will be because local communities decide that they really cannot live without them any more than they can live without recycling services or streetlamps.”

We’re talking regional theatres here, the kind that are going to be suffering as local authorities as forced to slash their budgets this year. Gardner diagnoses the problem as being one of communication; theatres and companies have simply failed to embed themselves in communities’ consciousness in the way that other indispensable drivers of community cohesion do. And she makes no bones about laying the blame where it’s due:

“however good the work a theatre is doing, if most people in the local community never step through the door, the fault lies with the theatre.”

In Gardner’s view, a lot of the “outreach” work that theatres have been doing in recent years has been focused around box-ticking rather than driving audiences into the theatres to see productions:

“Too often outreach, community and education have been about accessing funding and the work done in those departments is entirely divorced from what happens on main stages and the rest of the artistic life of the building.”

Gardner’s points all segue nicely into those put by Anthony Alderson of the Pleasance theatre when A&C interviewed him in November, who told us that:

“There’s a balance to be struck between money spent on art and money spent on marketing… without marketing, you might as well not do the art.”

Alderson was confident that there was a lot of great theatre being produced in regionals all around the country. For him, the way it has been organised and funded in the past, notably removing support for touring, have dampened publicity and audience-building. Gardner notes that the Birmingham Rep is being forced into a sort of extended tour due to building work, and wonders if their coming to audiences rather than expecting audiences to come to them will build enduring audience numbers. A resurgent interest in the theatre after two years of touring would be good evidence than what funding there is might need more thoughtful redirection.

In the meantime, Alderson also pointed out that there is a lot local authorities could do to support theatres that needn’t cost them a penny. There’s a lot of potential to use council property to raise theatres’ profiles and put them back at the centre of communities. Alderson and Gardner would probably point out that theatregoing is a great stimulus to the local economy and nightlife, too. A worthwhile investment for councils to consider?

“What if we allowed artistic communities free space to advertise – for example on lampposts? This would bring greater exposure and it would pay for itself in ticket sales and less money spent on fly-posting and flyering.”

Saving money, boosting the economy and getting people into the theatre at the same time – as we keep saying, it’s easier than it looks!

Interview with Anthony Alderson

The cuts could provide an opportunity for reform

This week A&C spoke to Anthony Alderson, director at Islington’s Pleasance Theatre on North Road. The Pleasance is one of the few entirely self-sufficient large theatres still to be found in London, so it’s no surprise that its director has some strong views about government funding, its impact on those who accept it, and where it could be redirected.

Choosing to avoid Arts Council England (ACE) funding was a founding principle of the theatre, for which Alderson cites two reasons. The first and more pragmatic is that subsidies can suddenly be withdrawn for reasons outside the recipient’s control, as we are currently seeing.

The second reason is a more fundamental one. The theatre wanted to ensure that it retained “freedom to programme and to do what we want, rather than being curated or channelled by ACE policy.”

While the theatre itself doesn’t receive ACE funding, there are plenty of theatre companies who perform there which have Regularly Funded Organisation (RFO) status. To Alderson, this inevitably means giving up some freedom to the “young producers [at ACE] essentially curating what the arts in this country are, and I don’t think that’s the right way to fund things.”

Surrendering a degree of creative control is bad enough for companies struggling to produce impactful work on a shoestring budget. Unfortunately, this is not the only indignity suffered by the RFOs.

“I object to having to spend money on administration simply to track money and justify what you’re doing,” says Alderson. He describes the drip-feed of funding diverted into keeping track of itself as simply “bonkers”.

For him, there are far more efficient ways ACE and local government could help local theatre to flourish, and some of them needn’t cost a penny. The most critical factor in the success of any production is public awareness – and this is exactly where local authorities can help.

“What if we allowed artistic communities free space to advertise – for example on lampposts? This would bring greater exposure and it would pay for itself in ticket sales and less money spent on fly-posting and flyering.”

This kind of assistance to the arts isn’t just about packing in audiences and boosting sales revenue for theatres and companies, however. For Alderson, increasing the visibility of the theatre ought to be central to the government’s strategy for rebooting communities and instilling a new spirit of localism in Britain.

“The centre of the Big Society is the arts. Theatre brings communities together on all levels. We ought to be spending money on getting people in who wouldn’t ordinarily go into the theatre.”

Theatres, in Alderson’s view, provide a nexus for communities, functioning as a meeting place, a “pressure valve… the expression of our democracy,” and a stimulus to local businesses. He believes that tens of millions of pounds are spent in local pubs, restaurants, and other enterprises as part of the halo effect of theatrical productions.

“The return is far greater than the investment,” says Alderson. This may have been the argument deployed by every sector as they sought to hold off the Chancellor’s axe, but theatre has a case study; the Edinburgh Festival.

“The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which exists for 3 1/2 weeks of the year, puts between £85 and £100 million into the local economy,” he says. This is an exaggeration, but not by much; a study by Edinburgh Council in 2004-5(.pdf, summary on page 40) found that the Fringe generates up to £75m a year. Another study, launched earlier this year, will report on how much this has grown.

Ultimately, Alderson believes, it is the Fringe which points the way for the future of British theatre. “There is no culture for exchange or entrepreneurialism in some of the funded organisations…that’s where the money should be going.”

This is a far cry from the public lamentations of a prevision generation of thespians over the demise of the government funded repertory theatre (to which Alderson responded on The Guardian’s Comment is Free). And the Fringe can provide an equally rewarding career path for young actors as the rep once did; “There is a fantastic structure there for young people – plenty are happy working in the Fringe, not just the West End, and people make careers out of it.”

Alderson keeps coming back to the same refrain: the best place to spend money on supporting the theatre is on increasing its visibility. “There’s a balance to be struck between money spent on art and money spent on marketing,” he says. “Without marketing, you might as well not do the art.”

Whether that be allowing theatres and companies to advertise on council property for free, setting up local message boards for theatre companies to post programmes, or a central online box office selling tickets for every Fringe show in London, Alderson believes that artists need to be given the tools to get on with the job.

“It needn’t cost a lot of money and could be self-funding, but it needs capital to get it off the ground.”

For a government that hopes to save money by having ordinary people organise their local communities, the message couldn’t be any clearer.