Well, first of all I would like to direct you towards two other blogs:
Freestyle Baking - a comic video blog about baking without recipes.
Modern Mythology – a study of storytelling techniques in popular culture.
As for Clockwork? Well, unfortunately we can’t afford the £20,000 price tag associated with a professional Edinburgh show. This, combined with my disillusion with theatre (of which more later), has meant that Edinburgh’s a no-go.
The ADC has still to pay us for Clockwork – seemingly not content with taking over 50% of our takings, despite being no end of trouble to work with, they are now in breach of contract, citing a ‘downage’ in their computer systems as the reason why it’s been 56 days (the contract allows them 45 days) and I still haven’t seen any money.
I find it appalling that venues can be so shameless in taking extortionate sums from companies who have done all the work for them. While the ADC may be moderately unusual in that they are holding onto our money and gaining interest on it well beyond what their contract allows, this is not an uncommon phenomenon. As far as I can see, venues are the only winners financially in the theatre industry.
This makes it virtually impossible for non-West-End shows to even break even unless they have been significantly subsidised by funding bodies like the Arts Council, by sponsors or by the individuals who are putting on the shows. Indeed, I have friends who have lost thousands of their savings because they wanted to take a show to Edinburgh.
Frankly, it’s not right. But it’s also self-perpetuating. As long as there are people who will pay out of their own pocket to put a show on, and as long as there are funding bodies like the Arts Council, venues will continue to take the piss.
Now I’m not against funding bodies per se. But I find it hard to stomach that as tax payers we are expected to pay for tickets for a show that we’ve already, in essence, paid for via the Arts Council. If we are going to pay for arts with our taxes then I’d rather it got spent on arts that are free for everyone: statues, museums, or pieces of work (of the sort that Artichoke produces) that really open up the idea of art to people who might not otherwise see it.
This is going to be a highly unpopular view within the theatre community. But I do believe that until all of theatre starts running itself more like a business, it will remain a dying art. Companies need to make a choice: produce work that is profitable and that will bring audiences in, either through the subject matter or the quality of the piece (or, ideally, both); or gain funding for work that is free to its audiences and that is truly experimental and open.
As things stand, theatre feels incredibly unbalanced: on the one hand there are those bloodsucking venues and, on occasion, producers who are in it for the money alone. On the other hand, there are the companies who have come to expect a loss and to accept the ridiculous contracts thrown at them if they want to secure a space. If theatre is to live, someone needs to redress this balance. But it won’t be me: I’m off to watch TV.
March 13th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
It sounds as if Arts Council money is being directed in the wrong direction. By giving it to productions, who then give it to a profitable venue, it is simply allowing the venue to make more profits overall.
Would a better solution be for Arts Council to instead invest directly in controlling a venue, which they could then decide what was shown in it. This would be a more efficient use of the money, since they wouldn’t have to worry about subsidising a show such that it was now profitable for the venue, the Arts Council could use these lost profits to do more. It would also give flexibility over doing more accessible/cheaper showings and more, since the venue, not just the company, would have a remit of making things more accessible, and also giving room to those who wish to experiment more. Being optimistic, it could also have knock-on benefits – other venues will be in competition with this ideal venue, which will hopefully allow them to up their game.
I expect that as long as there are enough passionate people who enjoy it enough not to prioritise profits, the current situation is likely to remain.
It’s sad news about Clockwork, but with the risks associated with putting on a show at Edinburgh, it’s understandable.
March 14th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
I have to disagree with some of this. I can’t believe that venues are this big malicious money leach. I’m not necessarily defending the ADC particularly, I don’t know the specifics. But not all venues are equal. The venue that I work for in Edinburgh charge the companies a fixed fee and give them all the box office takings. They appear to charge alot of money, but they still run the business at a loss. Buildings, lights, staff are expensive. The ADC really needs to have paid you by now, but also, much as “breach of contract” sounds horrendous, Mutabilitie was in breach of contract too…
Ticket sales are the way money comes in, and not enough people go to the theatre and buy tickets. *You* don’t go to the theatre. If you don’t go, and you’re involved in it, why will anyone else?
Funding bodies are needed because of this. If those shows are free, then they’ll need *more* funding, how does that help? Then you get a narrower selection of projects getting funding. I agree that there are companies far too reliant on Arts funding, but also, again, not enough people paying for tickets.
Do you really want to run like a business? Clockwork *wouldn’t have happened at all* were it not for the *unpaid* efforts of your staff. That’s not a business, not even close. The more that culture (especially television) relies on theatre to come up with the New Interesting Stuff, and train people, we have to accept that it’s going to be a stretch to cover the costs. It’s hard to get people into a theatre unless they know what they’re going to see. I don’t really want a theatre world where we’re just doing the things that get audiences in. There lies endless adaptations of things already made popular by other media, and children’s shows.
March 15th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
I should write controversial posts more often – they seem to get more and longer replies. Excellent.
Rob: that sounds like a plan. The ACE does actually give a lot of venues funding already, some of which use that funding very well, I think, to subsidise really interesting work (such as the Theatre Royal Plymouth), while others seem to just throw it away on pretentious crap that no-one wants to see (I won’t name names, but there are a few in the Cambridge region)
Carl: First off, and I know I’ve said this to you in person, but Mutabilitie were never in breach of contract, we did things to the letter, much as it would have been a helluva lot easier to just do our own thing and the ADC be damned.
As for your other comments: I freely admit my post is biased, and born of increasing anger and frustration at the way that many venues are run. I know that there are venues who are run for the love of theatre – the Forest Fringe in Edinburgh, for example (I don’t know if this is the one to which you were referring). However, I’ve worked with a hideous number of venues who do run as an absolute, cut throat business, and they take advantage of companies and individuals who want to make something for the love of it.
As for people paying for tickets and not going to the theatre enough. I would ask: why is that? My answer would tend to be that there simply isn’t enough good stuff on. I used to go to the theatre around 4 times a week and felt, 9 times out of 10, that I had wasted both my time and my money, neither of which I had a lot of. That’s why I rarely go any more: I have even less time and I don’t particularly want to pay £15 for the privilege of falling asleep in an uncomfortable seat for 3 hours. I wonder whether this lack of audience is because shows/venues don’t particularly have to answer to anyone, and I think they should have to. I’m in danger of getting off the venue topic and into a whole new rant, but it is related – if the ACE expects us to pay for art then there has to be accountability to us for the decisions they make.
Your point about the ‘Clockwork’ ADC not being run as a business is fair – although I would point out that we make more effort than most amateur companies to treat our actors fairly: we have paid travel expenses and bought, if I remember correctly, two rather large meals for get ins and dress rehearsals, as well as making sure you were all well-sugared during rehearsals, so give us some credit. However, I had always seen the ADC run as a preview/workshop, with the potential Edinburgh run being the full malarkey, and for that the reason we would need £20,000 is in order to run it as a fully professional show, paying each of our actors and crew a decent wage. We would be running that as a business, and when it became clear that it would not be feasible we didn’t go ahead. Simple as.
As for theatre training people and coming up with New Interesting Stuff: where is your evidence that TV and film doesn’t do just as much training and experimentation as theatre? I’ve certainly come across far more opportunities run by both mainstream and independent film/television companies for getting started in the medium than theatre, which tends to hold competitions for people who are already established and have done all their hard training off their own backs.
March 15th, 2010 at 8:09 pm
OK, withdraw my Mutabilitie-doesn’t-always-go-by-the-book comment. I stand by the rest of the post I think though.
PGP (Augustine’s and The Vault) are the Edinburgh venues I were talking about. Obviously my experience of venues is far lower than yours. I just am wary of being too judgemental about business’s costs, they often end up being far higher than you’d expect them to be.
I would always agree that there should be accountability, I just would be very careful at putting too much reliance on that accountability being measured by how much money it brings in. Risky ventures rarely make money early on.
I was not *complaining* about Clockwork, my points there were entirely referencing your post and how you can’t on the one hand request more business-thinking (ie dispassionate concern about cash in & out) and on the other hand run a show that requried freely-granted investment from a reasonable number of people. The difference here I think is that you don’t consider the preview / show-construction phase to be part of that business, and I would. Maybe that’s overly simplistic of me, we both have a friend who works for next-to-nothing on his business to get it going.
As for TV training… I had a friend of the family, few years older than me, who was trying to get into television work. I can’t remember now exactly what it was, camera or lighting or something like that. She worked in Jessops selling cameras and doing wedding stills for years, because the attitude whenever she contacted Yorkshire TV or whoever for work was “you want to get *paid*?”. They’d have her shadow someone for nothing, but if she actually wanted to support herself with those powerful needs to eat, they wouldn’t help her. So that was impossible. When eventually she did manage to get a relevent paid job it was always on a short term contract and for next-to-no money. Didn’t sound like much effort into training to me. Infact, most businesses are like that, just TV has seemed worse from what I have heard. Perhaps things are different now. I just see the most interesting bits of tv over the last few years (eg The Mighty Boosh, League of Gentlemen) seem to often come out of fringe theatre. The barriers of entry are lower, the opportinuty to play higher.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Okay, I don’t know how coherent I’m going to be as I need sleep, but I’ll give this a go.
By accountability re:funded pieces I didn’t necessarily mean judging pieces by ticket sales. I did write something like this before and then deleted it because I didn’t think it was relevant, but I’ll type it again here: funded shows shouldn’t be judged by ticket sales, but I wonder if there’s a way of gauging people’s reactions. Gomito is a case in point: I’m sure that when they started hardly anyone came to see their work, because they weren’t known as a company, but their stuff is clearly good, experimental and adds something to the theatre world. I am glad that they are finally getting ACE funding (or I think they are…?). They’ve earned it. However, there are many, many companies and venues that get funding and seem to be allowed to do whatever the hell they like: they may think that their work is saying something when in fact it’s pretentious rubbish – and yes, I have a particular venue (although not a theatre one) in mind when writing this. The problem is, of course, that these things are entirely subjective – I would argue that a certain amount of assessing whether audiences are interested in seeing it is a good way of knowing whether something has value. Perhaps it’s worth funding experimental shows like this completely and making them free – once or twice – to get audiences in, and if the work speaks to them then continue to fund the company.
Re:Clockwork – incidentally, I had fully intended on splitting our profits between all those involved, so that it would have been paid work and in that sense a professional business venture, complete with semi-bonus culture. However, because the share taken by the ADC was disproportionately high (good lord, I never knew tax/VAT could be added to so many different things) all I have been able to do is pay expenses. So the ADC run was a failed business, I suppose, giving one more reason why we aren’t taking it to Edinburgh.
As for training, I think your friend would have had an equally difficult time of it trying to get into theatre. I worked for nothing for a year in theatre, and again when I got work it was always short contract jobs that didn’t even pay my living costs (despite the fact that I was still living with my parents). From what I can see now, TV has a lot of opportunities to get onto training courses that offer a moderate wage – the BBC in particular are really good for this, as well as The Network – who I got some training with way back in 2007. They both actively encourage entry level people – in fact, I’ve been told that I’m over-qualified for some of them due to my theatre experience – somewhat frustrating but also laudable that they want people who really haven’t got *any* experience. And yes, some theatre transfers to TV shows, but The Office began because some backstage TV/radio bods persuaded someone to give them a camera and a minimal budget, and many, many writers of video diaries have ended up being offered jobs in TV (here’s hoping).