Theatre 2016

Theatre 2016 is the biggest UK theatre conference ever, apparently. Organised by BON Culture and its partner organisations, it ran at the Piccadilly, Lyric and Arts Theatres in London over 12-13 May 2016. It had something like 1000 delegates. I was asked by the excellent David Brownlee (cofounder of BON Culture) to give the opening keynote, presenting our British Theatre Repertoire 2014 report (of which David was a co-researcher), but also a report by BON & partners on the 'Hopes and Fears' of the theatre sector for the state of the industry now and over the next decade. I was pleased with how it went, given that I was a bit sceptical that what the theatre industry wanted to kick off their conference was a lot of pie charts, but they liked the jokes and actually gasped at some of the facts. That's particularly satisfying, given that I think this data is rather remarkable but it can be quite tricky to get people excited about facts and percentages. In addition, I think we made some excellent connections with some other industry bodies to build this dataset and make it something even more comprehensive a picture of what happens on British stages.