The Royal Shakespeare Company has recently turned around its fortunes, cutting debts of nearly £3m. Gillian Bates talks to new Executive Director, Vikki Heywood, and finds out how it?s been done?
When Vikki Heywood became Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in April last year it was clear some serious decisions needed to be made. By the end of the 1990s, the company?s balance sheet was looking worse than that of a third division football club. Almost £3m in debt, the company faced upheaval with uncertainty over its theatre, job cuts and management changes.
Recovery
Now the budget is balancing, the debt reduced to £400,000 and plans are moving apace to refurbish the main theatre in Stratford and erect a temporary theatre next to the Other Place whilst the redevelopment goes on. The buoyant attitude amongst staff is reflected in ticket sales: the main Stratford theatre has had its best season for a decade, and overall the company made £9.2m from box office takings between April 2003 and March last year.
But how did our leading international Shakespearean company get into such a grim state in the first place? Heywood is cautious not to point the finger in any one direction: ?What makes a company successful and what flips it to be unsuccessful is a whole range of things. There were lower levels of income, and local and national negativity to proposals to redevelop the Stratford theatre, combined with loss of focus and an emphasis on London. Things tipped and became hard to turn round? there was no one particular thing, it was a whole set of circumstances both financial and in public perception.?
Heywood, who is a great believer in teamwork, clearly enjoys a close bond with RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd: ?Critical to me is a close working relationship with Michael. I would find it a very lonely job without an artistic director as a colleague who had sympathy to the way that I think the company should be run and managed. There is a strong element of trust between us.?
Financial controls
Together they set about sorting out the problems. Taking control of the finances was crucial. Heywood created a system of open financial accounting and then delegated budgets throughout the company. In effect, more people had control of money for their areas of expertise and this led to greater co-operation and trust. Several million pounds were also saved out of the base cost of running the company. Heywood describes this as ?pulling our horns in on all sorts of activity. We lost staff and cut budgets. Now the pressure is off and we are effectively solvent.?
Programme-led revival
Meanwhile Boyd, in his inaugural season as Artistic Director, set about creating an artistic programme for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST), which was both popular and risk taking. For the first time ever, the company performed four of the great ? and most popular ? tragedies in one season. The combination of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet in repertoire during one season, guaranteed that audiences, some of who will come to see several shows in a short period, flocked into the theatre.
In the meantime, The Swan Theatre was going great guns with productions of rarely performed plays from The Spanish Golden Age, artistically led by associate director Laurence Boswell. These and the Tragedies proved so popular they have been transferred to the RSC?s rented London theatres, the Albury and the Playhouse.
Audience focus
Marketing was another key element. The RSC discovered that its long-term bookers wanted to know what was on well in advance: ?We put our tickets on sale three months earlier than we ever had before,? said Heywood, ?And we got a significant increase in the number of advances. We have done it this season and it has gone up again.?
A sponsorship relationship with Accenture ? a global management consultancy ? has led to more detailed market research being carried out which informs programming. ?An early analysis of box office data at the Albury Theatre means we can work out what our target segments should be and then target them. This is resulting in real benefits.? The company has discovered, for instance, that family bookers for the Shakespeare plays love workshops and it now programmes family days, which all members can enjoy together before they see a show.
Building the future
One of the major issues that Heywood has had to deal with is the controversy surrounding the ?refurbishment versus rebuilding? plans for the theatres in Stratford. An earlier scheme to knock down the main theatre, the RST, met with resistance both locally and nationally. Adjoining the 1930s RST is the Victorian Swan Theatre. New plans will keep both intact whilst refurbishment is carried out on the inside of the RST. The 1,400-seat auditorium will be reduced to 1,000, with the priority of creating much better viewing for audiences in the circles.
Whilst this is going on, the company will be performing in a temporary theatre attached to the Other Place, using its bars, dressing rooms and other facilities. This will be made out of ?corten? ? steel that will quickly rust to match the famous redbrick colour of Stratford buildings. Typically astute, Heywood also recognises another benefit to using this metal ? it has a good value as scrap, so it won't go to waste if the RSC can't sell its temporary auditorium when the spruced up theatre reopens
in 2009.
Vikki Heywood was born in London in 1956 and brought up in London and Cornwall. She went to Central School of Speech and Drama to study stage management and went on to became company manager for the RSC. She then worked for a range of arts organisations including Contact Theatre in Manchester and the London International Festival of Theatre. She was Executive Director and Joint Chief Executive of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Her dad, Ken Taylor, is a professional writer. His play, a three-parter called ?The Seekers?, opened the then brand new channel of BBC2. She has two younger brothers and a sister. One brother, Matthew Taylor, is the Liberal Democrat MP for Truro and Chair of the party. She is married with children.