Rendering 7 Theatre

Making a play: theatre needs risk-takers now more than ever.

The headline of the article is "Making a play: theatre needs risk-takers now more than ever". The author of the article is Lyn Gardner The article was published on the web site www.guardian.com on Monday 27 May 2013. The article provides the information about the last year's press conference at London's National theatre, which highlighted the challenges facing regional theatre, Gavin Machin fromSalisbury Playhouse rightly suggested that risk in the theatre means different things in different places.

In the beginning of the article the author states that ffter all, audiences in Salisbury may find new experimental work a bigger stretch than audiences at BAC in London or even West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, which through itsTransform seasons is exploring how to bring 21st-century theatre into a regional rep.

Then she states managing risk is one of the trickiest challenges artistic directors face, particularly in times of funding cuts. ACE recently announced that it would have to pass on the cut of 1.09% that resulted from the budget to its NPOs. Maria Miller has made it clear she sees the arts as a commodity and that the arts must accept their share of cuts. The next spending review, which takes place in June, is likely to bring more misery. Further cuts would almost certainly bring the viability of some theatres and companies into doubt.

The author adds that as Bristol Old Vic's Tom Morris recently said in an interview, "If you've got less money, you have to manage your risks prudently and inevitably one of the risk areas is new writing." On this note, Fin Kennedy and Helen Campbell Pickford, who produced the In Battalions report which detailed how government cuts were affecting new writing, have just launched a new Delphi study, which asks the question: how can theatremakers, theatres and the Arts Council work together to help protect risk-taking on new work and new talent within their organisations without creating significant extra expense? There's more information here.

Then she reports northampton and other regional theatres are between a rock and a hard place. They can carry on taking risks and try and build an audience that way, or they can just try to give audiences what they think audiences want. The difficulty is that if producers always knew what audiences wanted they'd all be very rich – and they're not. Giving the audience what you think they want didn't work in the 1980s, and it's unlikely to work now. The danger is that we will see an increasing gap between what's happening in London and other metropolitan hotspots and what's happening in the rest of the country.

Anyway the author reports somewhere between theatremakers doing what they want, and theatres giving audiences what they think they want (which often turns out to be not what audiences want at all) lies the possibility of opening up a real dialogue, a level of engagement with audiences that puts them right at the heart of the process. That would embrace them not just as consumers of whatever the theatre decides to give them, but as equal participants.

In the very end of the article the author writes that this transformation of a building into an organic community would require unprecedented transparency on the part of theatres and a genuine transformation in the way they view audiences. At a time of limited resources, it may seem like a stretch too far – but those who saw the decline of regional theatre that followed the funding cuts of the 1980s and early 1990s will know that retreating to the past or burying your head in the sand will only lead to disaster.

In my opinion as funding cuts push theatres to the brink of financial viability, managing risk becomes paramount. Can we do it intelligently? I think we can.