A venue’s success or failure rests on its programme and that programme’s ability to attract an audience. Stephanie Sirr warns of some potential pitfalls and advocates, above all, courage!
Programming a theatre is not unlike throwing a party. Get the mix right, find a wonderful company and market it well and you’ll have a house full of happy guests enthusing about your wonderful taste. Forget budgetary constraints. Ignore how little financial risk your Board/Council/nerves allow. Disregard the fact that the programme deadline was six months ago and your desire to provide a ‘something for everyone’ programme. You simply have to believe that the work is a) excellent, b) appealing to an audience you can visualise, and c) value for a patron’s money. Would you pay good money to see it?
Excellence is essential
In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s ghostly baseball players tell him “Build it and they will come”. Those ghosts never ran an Arts Centre in a town of fewer than 15,000 people. Your strongest marketing tool is the show itself and the responsibility lies firmly with the programmer – a fact usually remembered only when the thing sells out completely. Whether programming houses from 60 to 1500 seats, the issues are identical. It comes as a surprise to some tour bookers that audiences in Frome, Blackpool and Nottingham (my particular regional stamping grounds) are as discerning as those in London. Quality is the key, whether it’s the Chuckle Brothers or Wim Vandekeybus. Quality assurance needs to be conveyed to audiences before they book; compelling images, high-spec leaflets and posters, marketing contribution from the visiting management and a well thought out press and education pack are vital. A money-back guarantee goes a long way to declaring your faith in your choices; it’s not cheap but ignore at your peril. One London-centric company I programmed on the small scale had flimsier leaflets for ‘out of town’; another didn’t turn up for a fully booked workshop. Long-term relationships with companies are made and broken at this level.
Guaranteeing excellence without much hard cash is a perpetual nightmare. In a small venue, where even a sell out will only generate a £200 surplus, enormous effort is required to find three or four good companies each week. Additionally, there is nothing more likely to focus your mind than bumping into your patrons on Saturday morning in Safeway. With a larger house, producers can see the financial potential and there is at least the possibility of generating surpluses.
Whatever your scale, it is just not a level playing field. I have programmed theatres open 51 weeks a year and been able to take real financial risk on just six of those weeks. Those theatres have had weekly theatre running costs ranging from £1,000 after subsidy to £25,000. I know of at least one regional presenting theatre that needs £45,000 a week just to open the doors. Little wonder then that it’s hard for producers to understand why a £45,000 guarantee is impossible for you but not for the Civic theatre in the next town. How far can you lever shows out of people on force of persuasion alone?
Quality over celebrity
Every theatre manager knows that they have booked shows without having complete confidence in them because of the financial danger of the theatre going dark. The seeming reduction in the range of shows and numbers of independent producers in recent years compounds this.
Timescales are dictated by how many brochures per year a venue can afford to create and how long your nerves can stand a schedule with only the subsidised touring weeks confirmed. And unscrupulous people do nick work. One well-known theatre director attempted (unsuccessfully) to gazump me on a confirmed show knowing that his net potential was greater! Programming has to be about building and maintaining trust – with audiences as well as producers.
Programming as a producing theatre is an entirely different matter. At Nottingham Playhouse, the Artistic Director, Giles Croft, may be issuing commissions for new plays three or four years before realisation and assembling the season 18 months ahead. Getting it wrong could mean not just a loss-making week, but potentially squandering one seventh of our annual creative budget. A receiving theatre is only as strong as the work available to buy – being a producing theatre enables us to stage only work to which we are absolutely committed and, through touring, to offer that work to a wider community of theatres. The creative process is not an exact science but with the right mix of strong writing, direction, design, acting and production at least we can stack the odds in our favour. We are able to increase audiences through consistency rather than star turns. It’s very difficult for some receiving theatres to programme work without recognisable names. It’s not that theatre managers are philistines, rather that this is the way British audiences seem to work. Risk can be factored in the celebrity of a star almost as much as the quality of a production. In addition, big stars simply don’t want to commit in May to a show in December, yet your brochure has to be posted out in June.
Maximising potential
At the Playhouse, we see one of our roles as creating high quality, affordable touring work for the middle scale. Many subsidised producing theatres tour, to maximise potential from high production values. If audiences are ever going to take a risk on unknown actors in, God forbid, unknown plays, the potential of the best existing work needs to be exploited. Our highest attendances (OK, not including pantomime) tend to be at new or contemporary plays with unknown actors. This autumn we will tour Peter Brook’s The Man Who, a huge hit in Nottingham. Might it help wean audiences off ‘Soap Actress’ from ‘Past Soap’? We can but try.
In essence programming is the matching of people and the arts. Great advice from a past boss was “take the job if you’re going to like your audience”. Programming without empathy for your patron is a thankless task. You can assemble a season that ‘they’ should enjoy but ultimately, if you don’t like it, it won’t gel and won’t sell.
Stephanie Sirr is Chief Executive of Nottingham Playhouse.
e: stephanies@nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk