British Theatre Repertoire 2013: presentation

So, I've been working with David Edgar and David Brownlee (of SOLT & UK Theatre) on a project to gather statistics about the British theatre repertoire. In 2008, the British Theatre Consortium was commissioned to conduct some research into the success (or otherwise) of Arts Council England's new writing policies. In the process we discovered that ACE had, since the mid-to-late nineties, had stopped gathering detailed statistics about the shows they were funding. That is, in the noble pursuit of light-touch regulation, they no longer required companies to let them know what they had produced. For our report, and with the support of the Council, we gathered those figures from 65 of the 89 'regular-funded organisations' and were able to offer a snapshot of the state of the repertoire between 2003 and 2008 in our report Writ Large.

Since then we've been encouraging the Arts Council to continue gathering those statistics. Finally a couple of years ago ACE gave us a very small grant to conduct a pilot, looking at 2013. We also hooked up with David Brownlee on the way who was enthusiastic about the project and had some great ideas about how these figures could be gathered with minimal disruption to the theatres involved. He was at Audiences UK at the time but, happily, moved to SOLT and UK Theatre (then the TMA), in which position, he was brilliantly placed to be able to gather all the data we needed. He was also able to identify a researcher, Clare Ollerhead, to 'tag' the data according to a set of categories that we all drew up.

As a result, we have the most comprehensive and detailed statistical picture of British theatre that has ever been produced. Our figures address only SOLT and UK Theatre and so exclude a great deal of fringe theatre. Nonetheless, the data covers 5,250 individual productions, 59,288 performances, 31,800,543 theatre visits, and £961,700,417 in tickets sold.

We have already published an interim report offering some basic information about the make-up of the repertoire. Yesterday at our conference Cutting Edge: British Theatre in Hard Times I presented some further findings about repertoire, the regions and gender. The full report will be published in the next couple of weeks but here are some of the headlines:

  • Of new plays by a single writer presented in 2013, 31% were written by women. However, only 24% of performances were of plays written by women. Women’s new plays are performed in theatres which are on average 24% smaller than those in which men’s plays are presented. They attract only 17% of new play attendances and 13% of box office income for new plays. So women’s plays are given fewer performances, presented in smaller theatres with lower ticket prices, and therefore attract fewer people and lower box office income.
  • Women have fewer adaptations staged. Adaptations – of novels and other works – are usually commissioned and involve a more active choice by theatres. 25% of all new adaptations are solely adapted by women, compared to 31% of new plays. The major adaptations in the west end – Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – were adapted by men.
  • Women are dramatically less likely to undertake new translations of plays staged – again, usually commissioned and thus actively chosen by theatres. Of the 24 new translations in 2013, only 2 were solely by women (a mere 8% of all new translations).
  • Nonetheless, women are more likely to have plays for children performed. 35% of plays for children and young people were written by women, as opposed to 31% of new plays as a whole.
  • Compared with theatre between 2003 and 2009 (in the study Writ Large, from a smaller database), it appears that there has been an increase in the average size of theatres in which women’s work is performed, and consequently the attendance at women’s plays has increased. However, the gap between the total attendances at plays by women and men has also increased. 
  • In 2013, the National Theatre presented 22 new plays, of which 13 were by men and 3 devised. Of the 6 new plays written by women, only one – a translation – was presented in either of the National’s large spaces. 
  • 16% of all productions originate in London, with 13.1% of the national population. But London presents 46% of theatre performances, attracts 54% of all theatre attendances, and 66% of all box office income. 
  • While the commercial sector (the West End) contributes a little over a third of performances in London, it accounts for three-quarters of all performances, and 82% of attendances, and 85% of all London box office income. 
  • However, the subsidized sector sells its seats more efficiently. Attendances as a proportion of box office capacity are higher in subsidized theatres: the average attendance in the West End is 71%, while the average attendance in London subsidized theatres is 86%. 
  • Although ticket prices are much higher in London, prices throughout the country are in line with average household incomes in each area.

UPDATE:

The findings and the conference have started to get some coverage:

And the final, full report has had good coverage too:

British Conference of Undergraduate Research

I was invited to give the opening keynote at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research 2015 on 20 April 2015. BCUR has been going for five years. It's an organisation that encourages students to understand their undergraduate work - usually in dissertations and other final-year projects - as research. Placing their work in this context encourages students to take autonomous responsibility for the work, to defend it intellectually, and, by presenting it in a conference like this one, fosters skills of economy, clarity and speaking to wide audiences. This conference was attended by over 300 students from across the world. I could only stay for the first day, but saw a stunningly good range of papers on subjects as diverse as  Napoleon's horse Marengo, detection of secondary semen leakage in crime scenes, and the evolution of research within undergraduate curricula.  

I was asked to set a tone, talk about the value of research, and generally be a bit of a cheerleader. My talk began with the material about Sgt Bertrand the nineteenth-century necrophiliac and I talked about the value of the unexpected discovery and the odd chains of research that lead you from Naturalist theatre to reading about the profanation of Parisian graves in the 1840s. I defended a view of research as 'a kind of pointless openness towards the world'. An inspiring day.

Cutting Edge: British Theatre in Hard Times

Saturday 25 April 2015, 10.00am-6.00pm, at Central St Martins, King's Cross, London

I'm co-organising a conference, look.

In 2007 at our conference, How Was It For Us?, we asked what happened to theatre in the Blair years. Now we ask what's changed under the coalition - for better or worse. In this day conference, organised by the British Theatre Consortium and hosted by the MA in Dramatic Writing at Central St Martin’s, a group of leading theatremakers and thinkers will reflect on the fortunes of British Theatre since the 2010 General Election. The arts have been subjected to substantial cuts in funding; newspapers have been firing theatre critics; evidence suggests that the arts are being drained from the school curriculum; concerns continue to be raised about theatre’s diversity, in the audience and onstage. And yet, there are success stories; audiences have held up strongly; the percentage of new work is higher than it’s been for a century; there seems no diminution of the quality of new plays, great productions, and extraordinary performances. Is this all against the odds? Or has the theatre found new purpose and power in the age of austerity?

Speakers include Adjoa Andoh (actor), Kate Bassett (critic), Suzanne Bell (Royal Exchange), David Brownlee (UK Theatre), Chris Campbell (Royal Court), Giles Croft (Nottingham Playhouse), David Edgar (playwright), David Eldridge (playwright), Chris Goode (performance maker), Christopher Gordon (Rebalancing our Cultural Capital), David Greig (playwright), Sarah Grochala (playwright), Fin Kennedy (Tamasha), Lucy Kerbel (Tonic), Phyllida Lloyd (director), Chris Megson (Royal Holloway), Elizabeth Newman (Bolton Octagon), Mimi Poskitt (Look Left Look Right), Dan Rebellato (playwright, Royal Holloway), Joe Sumsion (Dukes, Lancaster), Laura Wade (playwright), Sam West (actor), Erica Whyman (RSC), Julie Wilkinson (playwright, MMU), Roy Williams (playwright), Jane Woddis (theatre researcher).

Doors will open at 9.30am for 10.00am start. Refreshments will be provided. Tickets can be booked below:

The Writers Guild has kindly subsidised a limited number of tickets for its own members; these can be booked below:

This conference is organised by the British Theatre Consortium, hosted by the MA in Dramatic Writing at Central St Martin’s, and kindly supported by the Writers Guild. 

Photograph © Tristram Kenton.

Gay Naturalism

In the next few weeks, I am presenting two further revised versions of my paper attempting to explore the curious (to my mind) absence of homosexuality from the Naturalist stage. Naturalism sought to use the latest scientific discoveries to fearlessly reveal the social problems afflicting contemporary society, with a particular emphasis on sexual taboos. In all of these respects, homosexuality would seem to be an ideal subject for Naturalism but, with very few exceptions, it does not seem to have been represented. This paper attempts to account for this.

I've given the paper a few times already. A truncated version was given at the TaPRA conference in September 2014, and longer versions to the London Theatre Seminar on 9 October and to University of Manchester's drama postgraduate seminar on 2 December.

This revised version will be given an outing (ho ho) at Edinburgh University on Friday 27 February at 4.30 and at the University of Sussex on 11 March at 4.00. Sussex have created the rather delightful poster (pictured) to publicise the event. It shows Boulton and Park, two celebrated and notorious Victorian cross-dressers who went under the names of 'Fanny and Stella' and whose arrest in 1870 was a public scandal that, if you'll forgive me, dragged in the seated gentleman Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, who was living with Boulton  (seated on the floor) when the scandal broke. The day after he was sub-poenaed to appear at the trial, Lord Arthur was pronounced dead. The official cause was scarlet fever but there are competing theories that he killed himself or that he fled abroad. Fanny and Stella were eventually acquitted since there was no proof of immorality (i.e. anal sex) and wearing women's clothes was not a crime.

Dario Fo

Rebellato, Dan. 'Dario Fo.' In Fifty Modern and Contemporary Dramatists, edited by John F. Deeney and Maggie B. Gale. Routledge Key Guides. London: Routledge, 2015, pp. 82-86.

I've written a short article on Dario Fo for this new collection of essays. It's a reference book but the articles have enough length to give a fuller labour of the writers involved. 

It's a good volume. At these moments it's always interesting to see who the living British writers deemed worthy of inclusion. The latest snapshot of the contemporary canon, then, comprises April De Angelis, Alan Ayckbourn, Howard Barker, Alan Bennett, Edward Bond, Jim Cartwright, Caryl Churchill,  Martin Crimp, David Edgar, David Hare, Terry Johnson, Martin McDonagh, Frank McGuinness, Mark Ravenhill, Peter Shaffer, Tom Stoppard, debbie tucker green, and Timberlake Wertenbaker. There are also some dead British playwrights in there still considered contemporary  (Pinter, Kane). It's not a bad selection; I might swap out Terry Johnson for David Greig, but hey it's not my book.

Static

from the original production...

from the original production...

My play Static is getting its North American premiere at the Third Rail Repertory Company in Portland, Oregon, opening 0n 24 April this year and running until 17 May. It's directed by the company's artistic director Scott Yarborough and cast announced so far are Maureen Porter, Kelly Godell, and Sam Dinkowitz. Obviously book early to avoid disappointment.

The original was co-produced by Graeae and Suspect Culture and sought to integrate sign language and English into one production, offering slightly different experiences for each community. We used BSL, but this production will use ASL, and it's not a disability-focused company, so it'll be interesting to see how the play feels different in its new context. Also, in 2008, the play was very contemporary in its references. I've suggested they might want to update them (particularly the music references) so that will also be interesting to see. Not sure if I'll be able to get out there but it will be good to see reactions. 

Out of the Unknown

OOTUDVD.jpg

Well it's always been an ambition of mine to become a DVD extra and now it's finally come to pass. The BFI has just released all of the twenty surviving episodes of the 1960s BBC TV science-fiction show, Out of the Unknown, on DVD. It's a bloody gorgeous box set and on the first episode, No Place Like Earth, an adaptation of two short stories by John Wyndham, you can, if you wish, choose to listen to a commentary by Mark Ward, a great expert on the series, and me. The thing is moderated by the quietly magnificent Toby Hadoke, actor, comedian, television researcher and fan, who I met when he acted rather brilliantly in my Dead Souls in 2006 and we've kept in touch ever since. Toby is a Doctor Who fan of a depth and intensity that makes me feel like a rank amateur, though we didn't make that connection at the time. Toby invited me to take part in the commentary because of my adaptation of Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos in 2003 and in the naive belief that I might have interesting things to say about Wyndham and this adaptation. Whether I did or not, you'll have to judge for yourself. I thoroughly recommend the box set, by the way, which I've only started working through, but it's a beautifully curated collection of some genuinely challenging and progressive television.

Critical Mass

Last year I was given a grant - as part of the British Theatre Consortium - to investigate theatre audiences, what they do, how and why they value theatre, and the roles it plays, if any, in their lives.  The principal investigator was Janelle Reinelt at Warwick University, and Chris Megson (Royal Holloway), Julie Wilkinson and I were co-investigators, with playwright David Edgar as consultant and Jane Woddis (Warwick) as project manager. We partnered with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Young Vic, and Drum Theatre, Plymouth taking nine shows from their 2013-14 seasons and exploring audiences responses to these shows by a series of questionnaires, interviews and workshops. 

The findings are necessarily provisional and offer, more than anything, suggestions for new directions of research. What is clear from all the research is that the theatre is highly valued by its audience and that its value is entwined in its audience's lives: we had evidence of people using the theatre as an opportunity to inform and articulate their political views of the world, to reflect on their lives and relationships, and to come to terms with ageing, mortality and loss. We suggest also that theatre spectatorship might be fruitfully considered as a long-term activity, in two senses: first, there is evidence that the memory of a single show matures and changes over time, beginning with an appreciation of the theatre's sensuous immediacy and then, within a couple of months, becoming a more reflective, cognitive memory; second, there is plenty of evidence that theatregoing is something that enriches a person to the extent that it may be considered a key part of life-long learning.

You can read the report by clicking on the cover (above) and David Edgar wrote a valuable article for The Guardian about it, which you can read here. There are some more commentaries on the report here and here.