Last year I did the Clore Fellowship (www.cloreleadership.org), and as part of that had to write a "provocation paper" on a subject of my choosing. So I went off and interviewed 8 artistic directors and a Chair of the Board about audiences, programming and quality. These incredibly generous people gave me about an hour of their time each (there's a list of their names at the bottom).
Then I tried to fit everything those interviews had got me thinking and talking about into a few thousand words. I mostly failed, and I certainly (in desperation) went for far too pat an ending. But here's the result, anyway.
(please note: the brief was to provoke thought and conversation: be very interested in hearing others' thoughts...)
“Giving
Them What They Want”: Theatre Audiences and Artistic Leadership
There
is an artform – or possibly a craft – which is practised by a
small number of people across Britain. It is not something one can
obtain formal qualifications in; it is surprisingly little studied
academically; there are very few books or articles written on the
subject. And yet the people who do it, and the people they work with
and for, have very clear ideas on how it is, and should be, done. It
is the programming of a producing theatre: what is produced, when,
and how.
This
job is done by the artistic director, who is often also the lone or
joint chief executive of the organisation. She will take advice from
a variety of sources: she may work with a creative producer,
associates, an advisory panel, a senior management team. And her
decisions must be approved by the Board of the theatre. But in the
end, the programming of the theatre is the artistic director's task:
success or failure will be laid at her door.
Over
the last year, I've interviewed eight British artistic directors: six
of regional producing theatres, one of a London producing theatre;
and one artistic director of a non-building-based national theatre.
I also spoke to one Chair of a Board of Trustees. I've asked them
all about audiences, quality, and success.
And with each interview I became more and more astonished at the
extraordinary balancing act they were all performing. Each seemed
perfectly able to hold competing interests and contradictory ideas in
creative tension. One or two seemed unaware of the obvious
contradictions in what they said – but most seemed aware yet
pragmatically undeterred. Like a chainsaw-juggling unicyclist
heading out on a narrow plank bridge over a bottomless chasm, if they
thought too much about the sheer ridiculousness of the task, they
might stop, I suppose...
“Q:
How do you know what the core audience will think of what you
programme?
A:
Well, you don't, do you?”
“Nobody
knows anything about audiences really.”
And
I've also become slightly depressed at the very little distance my
profession seems to have come in the thirty years since John McGrath
made his plea for a popular theatre in A
Good Night Out.
The opinions of “a
well-fed, white, middle class, sensitive
but sophisticated literary critic” are still very widely
universalised.
We are still making theatre for a fairly small club, and very
largely judging work by the standards of that club. And there are
very good reasons why. But I'm still dispirited. And a little
angry.
Let
me explain.
At
the centre of the whole enterprise is the audience. Financially, a
producing theatre routinely sails close to disaster: with earned
income from box office, bar and cafe making up between 40 and 75% of
a subsidised theatre's income, a couple of shows selling much worse
than expected can be enough to make a huge dent in a theatre's
finances.
And more than a couple may bring a theatre to bankruptcy.
And
it's more than that. An almost-empty art gallery, museum or library
may not be great for the leadership of that organisation – it
certainly doesn't help them make a case for public funding – but it
is often a rather pleasant place for the visitor: a chance to enjoy
the collections or the books in peace. An almost-empty theatre, on
the other hand, is not only a PR and financial disaster. It's a
horrible experience for everyone involved – audience, performers
and staff.
So
we need them. Desperately. But we also – often – don't trust
them.
“who
are the best guardians of what success looks like? I think it’s
the public... how many people want to come.”
“A
full theatre makes everybody happy.”
“obviously
one indicator of success is that people want to come and see the show
– so sold-out houses are an indicator of success, of excitement
about the piece of work”
“I've
sat in full audiences where audiences have been enjoying it, and it's
been shit. And I've done that often. I've done it more often than
sat in full audiences where it's actually been any good.”
All the artistic directors I spoke to
flipped back and forth between apparently trusting an audience, and
their sense of what was good (“Everybody knows when something's
working or not”) and the acknowledgement that the reasons an
audience attends and enjoys themselves are complex – and that
artists may disagree with an audience's judgement.
“Say
I buy a ticket to something that I think you will like. We want to
have a good time. We've paid twenty quid, there's a bus or a taxi, a
round of drinks – so we've got a lot of investment in it being
good. And you go there and most things are theoretically
serviceable... People like a good story. And they laugh at the
jokes that aren't funny because they're asked to. People are very
polite. And partly that persuades them that they're having a good
time. And they don't want to be persuaded that they're not
having a good time.”
“Sometimes
I was sitting there thinking 'oh my God why is everyone clapping,
this could be so much better'... that is where professional judgement
does come in”
I
do this too. I want to believe that the audience is right: that I
can sit in an audience and tell whether they're enjoying themselves,
and that that is the most honest and morally
right assessment
of the success of a show. After all, “theatre is always made as a
conversation with the audience. The audience is half of the work”.
If you didn't care about a live audience, you'd be making short
films or writing novels. And it's very pleasant to believe that the
audience are the best arbiters when you're sitting in an auditorium
that's fairly full of people who appear to be enjoying your show.
But then, I too have sat in theatres where a large audience was
apparently having a great time – and thought the show was lazy,
misguided, or simply terrible. So what then? Are they simply wrong?
And if an audience can be wrong about this, was that other audience
wrong about my
show? Or is it all just a matter of taste?
“Obviously
it's going to be a matter of taste. It's got to be taste, hasn't
it?”
So whose taste should we pay attention
to?
“We're
certainly not programming for critics.”
“Of
course the critics are in your head when you programme. I think
anyone's lying who says they're not”
Theatre
faces ever-increasing competition for audiences: what with cinema,
multiple TV channels, and hours spent online, it's amazing anyone has
time to go to the theatre at all. And in the competition for
audiences, and with the almost total loss of the old model of
season-ticket holders, national press attention is extremely
important. As one AD told me, “we
had to get a national reputation before I could get a local
reputation. I had to interest the industry before I could interest
the local audience.” Every artistic director I spoke to – every
freelance director I know – has a detailed understanding of the
output and taste of each individual critic at each of the major
national papers.
But
those dozen or so people aren't the whole audience. The artistic
director of an Arts Council- (and usually local council-) subsidised
producing theatre is using public money to make their work. And all
of those I spoke to were very aware of that fact.
Allegedly, it used to be a rather frequent occurrence that an
artistic director would “take over a theatre and run it into the
ground by doing a Moliere season or whatever: 'I'm an artist, I need
to create great art'”. I don't know whether this was ever a common
attitude, but certainly none of the artistic directors I spoke to had
it. Most of the people I spoke to were extremely conscious of a duty
to “other people's money” and to the theatre that will “be –
hopefully – here long after I’m gone.”
“It
may sound simplistic, but everyone pays for us, so everyone has an
equal right to experience us and be enriched by us... The ambitious
aim is to somehow at some point reach everyone.... It's clearly
impossible.”
The 'everyone' here is probably limited
to those living within a reasonable distance of the theatre building
– or more simply, everyone who lives within the council boundaries.
But even this is more of an aspiration than a reality. Even a
large, successful regional theatre like the Sheffield Crucible will
be visited by only a proportion of the population of Sheffield.
So who will come? Who is the theatre actually serving?
The obvious answer is those who are
interested in going to a theatre at all (and that already excludes a
great swathe of the population who just don't think of it as for
them)
– and, more specifically, those whose taste matches the
programmer's taste.
“You
can only programme work that you want to see... Because you totally
have to believe in what you are doing. And if you don't, if you
programme something for the sake of putting it on, because you think
it will be popular, or you're trying to reach all of the people some
of the time, the audience are going to smell that. They can sniff
that out, no question.”
This belief that the audience will know
if you make work cynically was almost an article of faith amongst the
artistic directors I met.
“the
key thing is not to programme anything which you think “oh that’s
the banker”... Because if I don’t believe that thing can be
brilliant, then that’s going to wash down like a hideous tide of
horribleness.”
“I've
always done the plays I've wanted to do, that I'm interested in
putting on. That has to be the bottom line, I think...”
“I
have a duty to put on plays I want to see.”
And yet. How is it possible to marry
this need for the individual artist's investment and belief in every
single show with the desire to serve “everyone”? In London, the
circle is more easily squared: there are plenty of other theatres
down the road, so if a local council tax payer isn't getting the work
they want at your theatre, they can easily go off somewhere else and
find it. But almost all the regional artistic directors I spoke to
provide a city with the only subsidised theatre for quite some
distance. So they feel “a duty” to provide “something for
everyone”.
And it's not only a moral duty – there
are financial imperatives:
“I
hope even if I don't like it, I hope it's not something I would be
ashamed to have on. But you know, hand on heart, I couldn't really
say – [touring theatre
company], for example, that's not really my thing. But
there's definitely an audience for it. And they come in and have a
perfectly lovely time, and it's a different audience, and it means we
can programme other things either side of that... because we're not
going to have [the same] people coming every week, so if you think
about all the performances we have on all year, we must have lots of
different groups of people coming, who self-select what they want to
see out of the programme.”
It sounds a little like providing a
selection box. Of course, it's not for everyone – as previously
discussed, it's a narrow band of society that will be reading that
season brochure and picking and choosing the shows they'll turn up
to. But the problem is, even that limited segment of society that
reads your season brochure or sees your posters will have varied
tastes. And how do you know what they want – what range of
flavours to put in their selection box? Even if you were prepared to
just give them what they want, how can you if you don't know what
that is?
This is the conundrum commercial theatre
tries to solve by only ever putting on work with plenty of
familiarity factors: a title, a star, a writer (preferably all three)
that we already know the public like. Regional reps in Leeds,
Bolton, Oldham or Plymouth find it rather harder to attract
well-known stars, but they certainly try – and a well-known TV
actor in the right part makes a massive difference to box office.
“'Who's in it?' That's always the
first question.”
Failing a TV star you can still go for a
well-known playwright or classic well-loved play (preferably on the
syllabus to get lots of schools in). But repeating the same safe
list of titles won't get you national press attention and plaudits.
There's “a danger of becoming the theatrical equivalent of UK
Gold”. And nobody bothers to review UK Gold – or provide public
subsidy for it.
Of course, you can always ask the public
what they want to see. But that may not be particularly useful. One
artistic director I spoke to had a Jacobean tragedy currently selling
badly in his main house – despite the feedback he'd received from
focus groups which had indicated that audiences wanted to see more
Jacobean drama.
“I
don't really take very much notice [of
focus groups]. Because I don't really believe in it.
Because people will say what you want them to say... Sometimes they
say, “we'd like to see more unusual plays”, and then we do
something more unusual and they don't come!”
And in any case, “people actually
don't want what they want” - or perhaps more precisely, people
don't know what they want. Because they haven't read every play that
exists, they haven't met every interesting artist out there, they
don't know all the options. They've got jobs and families and other
things to do with their time, so they've delegated that judgement to
their subsidised expert.
“We
are selling our judgement. You've got nothing else to sell.”
“People
want you to surprise them... to be surprised and delighted”.
Which
is why unexpected hits and failures happen. Why there's no formula.
Why Bill Kenwright still makes losses on things now and then despite
years of expertise, and why Les
Mis
has unexpectedly been running for 25 years in the West End. As Sam
West said recently in a speech to the House of Commons, “If
in trying to drum up support for Les
Miserables I'd
called a hedge fund to say "how'd you like to back a musical
adaptation of a 900-page Socialist novel by two unknown French
guys?", I don't think they'd have called me back.”
So where does this leave the beleagured
artistic director? Needing to provide enough familiarity to get
people in through the door, yet needing to surprise and delight them
enough that they go home and tell their friends they must see it too.
Needing to personally love every play she programmes, yet with a
duty to provide something for everyone. Needing to sell enough seats
to keep the theatre financially viable, but not “sell out” or
“pander” so far that the national critics or the Arts Council
decide the work's not of high enough quality.
Oh – and no-one can actually tell you
what they mean by 'quality', either. But the audience certainly
aren't the people who decide.
The Arts Council of England
and Wales, under pressure to include some element of peer review in
their assessment processes, recently (2010) set up a system whereby
all ACE-funded work is now seen by an artistic assessor, who writes a
report on the quality of the work. Informal peer review, of course,
has always happened, as has assessing critical response. The
Australian Council for the Arts has gone even further, and is
currently advocating an extremely thorough research-based method for
assessing “artistic vibrancy”. There are, apparently, five
elements:
Quality & Excellence
of Craft;
Audience Engagement &
Stimulation;
Development of Artists;
Curation & Development
of Art-Form;
Relevance to the
Community.
Each
can be assessed using a combination of surveys, focus groups,
internal discussion and interviews. The audience will be asked about
whether they were emotionally engaged and intellectually stimulated;
the local community will be asked about relevance. But the quality
and excellence of the craft demonstrated – “the demonstrated
skill of the actors, directors, set designers and other crew members”
- is to be assessed only via interviews and surveys of artists,
staff, peers and guest artists. Not any ordinary audience members.
These are the ways we judge
quality. Industry peers, expert witnesses. Not by asking a bunch of
amateurs.
They may need to be taught
to recognise it, though.
“the
reality is that when you sit in a theatre, you recognise quality.
Now I've trained them, they won't take less than that quality.”
Few were as blunt as this,
but several of my interviewees talked about developing their
audience's tastes.
“some
of the things I did were to catch the audience up with some of the
things that had happened in theatre in the last 20 years”
“it
is really important that you do want to take them by the hand and
lead them somewhere – you cannot pander – I mean otherwise we'd
have a staple diet of Ayckbourn”
It sounds rather
patronising put like that – and there are those who think this
attitude is old-fashioned:
“That
used to be a very common way of describing things, didn't it - “I
want to take the audience on a journey” - that there's a direction
you knew you should be taking the audience in – and it was a
direction towards Howard Barker or the late Jacobeans or whatever it
was.”
There is certainly a whiff
of superiority here I'm uncomfortable with. The experts who know
what is good for the audience better than they do can all too easily
get very sniffy about all
popular theatre. But there are truths I recognise buried
here. Expert knowledge is different to amateur appreciation –
there is a difference in the judgements Anthony Blunt and I would
offer in an art gallery. And left to programme a theatre themselves,
the audience would only ask for, and get, what they already know
about – how can they do otherwise?
But they don't want that,
necessarily. They want to be surprised and delighted.
And there is another side to this: a
side which came up rather less often in my interviews. It works
both ways. The artist needs to be surprised and delighted by the
audience, too.
“theatre
is a conversation with an audience... a theatremaker should always be
thinking about the audience, and if they think about an audience that
is essentially themselves replicated then it may not be the most
interesting conversation that you could have.”
The best theatre is made when the
artists involved are fascinated by their audience. Not assuming they
know how they will react, not pandering to their perceived whims, but
entering into a dialogue in which the end result isn't already
decided. Where the audience are genuinely part of the show – where
the show would be different if a different group of people had turned
up.
For a live art form, it's depressing how
rarely that happens.
In my experience, it happens most often
in work for children, and in work made for non-traditional theatre
spaces. My theory now is that this is because making that work
requires theatre artists to come to their audience afresh: they can't
assume they know how they'll behave or react, because the usual rules
won't apply.
To take one example, the National
Theatre of Wales spent its first year making “located” pieces of
theatre: work which was developed in a spirit of research and
enquiry, in a specific Welsh location – sometimes including
non-professional performers from that location. I saw two of those
first twelve pieces. They were both disjointed, flawed, highly
variable in quality and tone. One of them, frankly, bored me. But
they both contained fresh and joyful moments, and one (The Passion
in Port Talbot) was the most exciting piece of theatre I've seen
in years. Was that because of the way the work was created: in
partnership with a whole town?
NTW's first show, A Good Night Out In
The Valleys was the result of a series of workshops with people
in the South Wales Valleys: “asking them what they thought a show
about the valleys should be like, asking them what they thought the
valleys story was, asking them what a good night out would be.”
The company set themselves the challenge of making a piece of work
which responded to whatever they discovered – even when it didn't
quite suit their expectations.
“we'd
expected to do a piece with six characters in it and we had six
actors, and one of the things we got as feedback was that they really
liked character changes, so we ended up making this piece with about
30 characters...”
The messy, multi-strand, anarchic piece
they created sold out at every venue they played at. People loved
it. However, I've also heard it described as “playing to the
lowest common denominator... it was crass”.
And John E McGrath, NTW Artistic Director,
said it was a piece that “amongst some of the great and the good in
Wales was not considered necessarily an appropriate piece to start a
national theatre with.”
Some people just don't like funny plays,
of course. They feel that somehow the thing isn't valuable or worthy
if it's making them laugh. The same woman who told me A Good
Night Out in the Valleys was crass, also told me she thoroughly
enjoyed it. I felt rather sorry for her.
And also rather depressed. Because this
is where we've got to. Thirty years on from John McGrath's call to
arms for a populist theatre which doesn't universalise the
middle-class literary critic's opinion, subsidised theatre is still
essentially a middle-class entertainment, judged by the standards of
a small group of white, middle-class, university-educated people.
And that's not an insult, despite what
it may sound like. Extremely talented theatre-makers are making and
programming work they love and believe in, in theatres across the
country. And audiences are enjoying it – including me. But we're
still deceiving ourselves if we claim that we're making “something
for everyone”. And we're all too often not making work out of a
genuine spirit of enquiry. We still talk about taking an audience on
a journey towards something we think they'll like, rather than
inviting them to join us in a journey towards an unknown destination
– a journey on which we both might discover something surprising
and delightful.
Addendum,
Spring 2012
I sent this paper to my interviewees to
check I hadn't insulted or misrepresented them, and they kindly
agreed to let me go ahead.
John E McGrath replied with a point
which feels important to add. He questioned why I'd been depressed
by some of the attitudes to programming and to popular theatre I'd
come across:
“If
your paper is asking what role the audience should have in
programming, then what the NTW first year suggests is that it's not simply a
question of choice, but of engagement, in a variety of ways, in
creation of work. That seems an exciting rather than a depressing
thought!”
John, I salute you. And I look forward
to seeing and hopefully making more work which genuinely engages with
audiences in its creation. There are some brilliant people out there exploring what that means. Exciting times.
With enormous thanks for the time,
thoughtfulness and patience of my interviewees:
Helen Birchenough, ex Chair of the
Board, Salisbury Playhouse
Ian Brown, ex Artistic Director & Chief
Executive, West Yorkshire Playhouse
Daniel Evans, Artistic Director,
Sheffield Crucible
Sean Holmes, Artistic Director, Lyric
Hammersmith
Gwenda Hughes, ex Artistic Director of
the New Vic Theatre, Stoke
John E McGrath, Artistic Director,
National Theatre of Wales
Andrew Smaje, Chief Executive, Hull
Truck Theatre
Simon Stokes, Artistic Director, Theatre
Royal Plymouth
Joe Sumsion, Artistic Director, Dukes
Theatre, Lancaster
And
a moment's regret for all the other amazing artistic directors and
programmers I didn't get to speak to – but then this paper would
have been even longer and further past its deadline than it is
already.
