Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340-359)
WEST YORKSHIRE
PLAYHOUSE, SHEFFIELD
THEATRES TRUST
22 FEBRUARY 2005
Q340 Chris Bryant: Despite the fact that
some people think that the whole building looks like a crematorium?
Mr Pennington: I have never been
to a crematorium like that—"jam factory" is what
you used to call it. I think it has a grace of its own.
Q341 Chris Bryant: Let me ask a broader
question. There would be those who would argue that investments
in the arts, in theatre in particular, is an investment that ends
up in the pockets of the middle classes rather than everybody;
that it is a luxury rather than a necessity. In particular, when
local authority budgets are hard-pressed they ask why on earth
theatre should get the taxpayers' money.
Mr Brown: I think there is a problem
about sharing the product out to people beyond the middle classes.
There is no question that the middle classes like going to the
theatre, and I do not blame them for doing that. I suppose the
job of somebody running a theatre is to make sure that other people
get the chance to see that going to the theatre is also a good
thing. I think hand-in-hand you have to try and balance those
two things together. You have to have the outreach programmes
which ensure that working-class kids get the opportunity to go
the theatre at a price they can afford, and to start giving people
the opportunity to see a piece of live theatre early on in their
lives, because once you get an experience of this and it is good—and
more often than not it is good—you get a shift in young
people's attitudes, or society's attitude to theatre. It has suddenly
become a bit cool again. When you see an audience full of kids,
it does give you hope that it is not something that is going to
die out, which twenty years ago perhaps there were those who thought
it might. There seems to be a re-birth, and as long as you keep
renewing the audience and spreading access to it through cheap
ticketing, through going out, and also bringing people into the
theatre, then you have a chance of addressing that problem. Inevitably,
there is a middle-class element; it is something that is particularly
appealing.
Ms Galvin: I speak from Sheffield's
perspective, in that Sheffield in South Yorkshire is a place of
extremes. We have one of the wealthiest constituencies in the
country, in terms of disposable income and professional qualifications,
and we also have areas that fall into Objective 1 status. If we
were simply to work with people who live in Hallam constituency,
we could have a certain type of life, but it would not be very
interesting. We cannot ignore the fact that there is a core of
theatre-goers who have kept our theatres going through some pretty
rough times; and we want to reward them rather than ignore them
now. We also very much are aware that our place in the city and
the region is as a major cultural institution, and breaking down
the wall of being an institution and being a part of the community
is something we have done strenuously over the last five or six
years. We have had an education department working with communities
for nearly thirty years consistently. The work we have done has
been to try to analyse what prevents people from going to the
theatre. There is a notion that theatre is too expensive, and
we found that prices are of course a barrier. People have to work
out whether they can feed their family or whether they can afford
to take a bus somewhere. Going to the theatre, arguably, is the
least of your problems, but we do not want the price of a ticket
to become a barrier to attending something in our theatres. There
are other issues about just being used to the etiquette, if you
like, of what to do in the building, of being aware of what you
are going to see. One of my favourite analogies in our work with
young audiences is that if they go for a pizza, they know they
will get a pizza; if they go to the pub they know they will get
drunk; but if they go to the theatre they are not quite sure what
they are getting. So a lot of work with building audiences with
different segments has been to break down the mystery of theatre
and to enable people to understand not just the whole culture
of it but the particular productions—not programming work
that we think will tick boxes for young people, but to explain
our work and to see who comes. That has been a very effective
way of building audiences, from a genuine cross-section of the
community we exist within. As Ian says, we have to accept that
there is a large section of our audience that could be categorised
as middle class.
Mr Brown: Can I add one thing
to that, which I picked up from the previous panel? It is getting
harder for teachers to take kids out on theatre visits because
of regulations and because of the price of travel—they are
dealing not only with all the red tape and arranging to take the
kids out of school, but also with the cost of transport to the
theatre on top of the theatre ticket. It is becoming quite problematical.
Q342 Chris Bryant: You have all said
very functional things about the theatre rather than inspirational
things about the value of theatre itself. It has felt a bit to
me in the inquiry we have done so far that everybody has talked
about buildings, and they have hardly ever talked about the theatre.
Mr Brown: Yes, we got to the class
issue. I have been running theatres for quite a long time now—this
is my third theatre company that I have been in charge of—so
the passion of seeing a theatre full of an evening is what drives
most of the staff at the Playhouse. There is something about the
live theatre experience that nothing else comes near, and that
is why it has to be valued. I think it is something to do with
the fact that in a city like Leeds the theatre is one of the few
places where a wide cross-section of the community comes together
on a regular basis for the telling of a story, either through
music, dance or drama. I think there is nothing like that for
capturing kids' imaginations. So when you see a five-year old
at a Christmas show on the edge of their seat, that for me drives
me forwards to make sure that that can continue.
Q343 Chairman: Certainly theatre can
be very cheeky and very inventive. I remember coming to the Crucible
and seeing a production of The Comedy of Errors in which
one of the twins was white and one of the twins was black. You
certainly could not do that kind of thing in the cinema or anywhere
else in the same way.
Mr Brown: It seems to me that
the theatre is still an arena where certain things can be discussed
which cannot be discussed anywhere else. The recent events in
Birmingham—whatever the rights and wrongs—it created
a huge debate that continues. There was a Channel 4 programme
on it last night, and it engenders the kind of debate that this
country needs. Often, theatre plays can tackle subjects that television
and films will never touch.
Mr Pennington: If I may say the
same thing in a slightly different way, I happen to be doing a
play in London at the moment which deals with a family preparing
itself for the death of the wife or mother from cancer. It is
a not untypical genre of play, and it happens to be a comedy as
well. I was thinking about it last night and realising that you
could make a film or a television film of it very easily, and
it would be effective, but there is nothing like doing that play
in a theatre in which every single member of the audience is in
some way or another interested in the subject—they have
to be, either from their own experience if they are of the age,
or if they are younger, looking forward. The sense of being in
the same space and breathing the same air as the actors and the
sense of there being something unpredictable—it could of
course go wrong, and which in any case would be subtly different
from the performance the previous night or the performance the
night after, is an irreplaceable thing. The theatre is the only
performing art which makes its audience talented in that way,
because an audience knows at some level that it is collaborating
and making the event successful or not. They know that they are
necessary to the occasion, in the way that a cinema audience or
television audience simply is not. I regard the theatre and the
work done in the theatre as the tap-root, both for talent that
goes on into film and television, but a form of life-blood—to
mix my metaphors—for the audience as well.
Q344 Alan Keen: We did not embark on
this inquiry because we wanted to ask clever questions of important
people; it was because we wanted to give the theatre world a chance
to give their views and so that we can then hopefully get people
listening to them. I understand that when you are running theatres
it is a tough job. You must have sleepless nights thinking about
the budgets and how to balance being more creative and so on.
I am not being critical of you for lack of mix with the amateur
theatre, but we just want the benefit of your views because you
care about theatre and getting more people involved. We did hear
criticism from the amateur theatre that they were kept at arm's
length by professionals. Maybe it is just because of budgets,
but we want more people to take part, not just kids but adults
as well. How can you, as the professionals, help involve other
people in not just coming to spend money but for them to enjoy
being actors themselves? What can you do that is not being done
now? What more should you be doing to encourage the amateurs?
Mr Brown: My take on this is that
I think there is a bit of a gulf between the professional and
the amateur theatre, and quite rightly so. My feeling about the
amateur theatre is that it is fantastic to put our energies into
encouraging young people to participate in the arts. Young people
can benefit hugely from the confidence-building that goes with
participating in a drama class, or just discovering things that
they never knew and giving them social confidence. When you come
to adulthood, if you want to continue to do that and do not want
to go into it full-time, you have the right to do that, and the
amateur companies around Leeds are hugely successful. They have
none of the overheads that we have, and rake in huge amounts of
the box office—and good on them, really. This year we have
invited one of Leeds's biggest amateur companies into the Playhouse,
the first time that it has happened in 15 years. It will be a
very interesting experience, and I am quite looking forward to
it. I will be wiser at the end of that week than I am now. Until
now I have always kept it at arm's length, but I think it is a
fantastic social exercise and it is a way for people to produce
theatre in areas where theatre provision is not great—and
it works fantastically well.
Ms Duckworth: I would add to that.
Obviously, like Manchester and Sheffield and all the other theatres
you are talking to, we lead huge community initiatives with wide-ranging
community plays. We have one happening this summer and we commission
one in two years. There is an enormous one planned for 2007 to
celebrate the charter of Leeds. Those are initiatives that we
are leading. It is partly in response to your first question.
We feel we can target certain groups or communities that we have
been working with, to make sure that those opportunities are being
offered to key communities. There are different sectors within
the amateur sector. I think you are possibly talking slightly
more about the amateur dramatic companies, which are usually terribly
well organised and have armies of volunteers who are all brilliant
at coming together and creating a show. I think their needs are
sometimes not recognised, and I do not think that necessarily
a producing theatre is all that they need. One thing that is happening
in Leeds is that the council is investing in a new venue, which
will offer opportunities for those groups. My experience, and
my previous experience is that there is often a conflict between
an amateur company's desire to produce at a certain time of year,
and all the initiatives and work that the producing company is
scheduling and working towards; and if those come head to head
because we both want the same time, clearly we cannot meet both
desires.
Q345 Alan Keen: Is that because there
are not enough formal links between them? Please do not think
I am being critical; I just want the benefit of your experience.
Ms Duckworth: Sure, but a lot
of amateur companies do fantastically. The number of amateur companies
doing Christmas shows this year is enormous, fantastic—I
love it—and they are all potential audiences and engaging
with the power of live theatre, and I am entirely passionate about
that. However, we have our Christmas show on, and there is not
room in our theatre for an amateur group to do a Christmas show
when we are doing ours, and that is a hugely important, artistic
and economic event that happens in our theatre. I would say, "bring
on more provision".
Ms Galvin: I would echo Henrietta
and say that the amateur theatre community is hugely diverse,
and simply engaging with that whole community would be quite a
difficult issue in terms of resources. In Sheffield we tend to
relate to—without creating a hierarchy—the upper levels—the
people who regularly and consistently produce quite challenging
work sometimes. We have moved away from The Desert Prince
and that repertoire and tend to do some fairly interesting work.
Because we have the luxury of space within our theatres we do
a programme to work into the Lyceum four times a year, so there
are four weeks in a year that we give over to amateur companies.
I really would not want to give any more time to amateur companies
for all sorts of reasons, not least the commercial ones that Henrietta
spoke about. Also, for each week that we programme an amateur
group, we are denying a professional company the opportunity to
express their vision on stage, which is not very helpful. The
one thing that I really envy amateur companies is that all of
the ones we work with have reserves, which is something that we
do not have ourselves. It is quite a wealthy sector, surprisingly.
Q346 Alan Keen: Do you have any formal
links with them or do you just see somebody is putting on Jack
and the Beanstalk and—
Ms Galvin: We have relationships
with the four companies that come in for those four weeks. It
is a very long-standing arrangement. We involve ourselves to a
certain extent by giving technical assistance, doing production
workshops with people. It seems there is a rash of these new-build
schemes to house amateur companies, and Sheffield is also considering
an application to convert an old cinema into a venue for amateur
companies. We have not put any barriers up. We were invited to
say that the town was not big enough for the two of us, but it
is of course, and the amateur companies have all come to us and
said, "our aspiration is still to come to the Lyceum and
this just gives us space to work in". If you are creating
more people, who I suppose become an informed audience, that is
the important thing; that they have more of a sense of what it
takes to produce work and to act in it, to light it and design
it. That cannot be a bad thing for professional theatre. It is
a bad thing if it cuts across opportunities for people who have
devoted their lives to trying to make a living out of it.
Q347 Mr Doran: I am sorry, but I am going
to get back to boring money and buildings, but it is an important
part of our inquiry. You heard our earlier discussion with the
Manchester Royal Exchange and Birmingham Rep. Looking at your
submissions, both theatres have problems with fabric. Reading
the Sheffield submission I am not sure I would want to visit at
the moment, but that is another issue!
Ms Galvin: We will give you a
white suit and a mask to wear!
Q348 Mr Doran: Getting into the nitty-gritty
of that, the West Yorkshire Playhouse clearly has problems and
those at the Crucible are much longer in the making. You are both
at the stage where you are having to work out how you are going
to finance the refurbishment to make your theatre safe for the
public and for the employees. I would be interested to hear from
both of you how you approach that because, as you heard earlier,
there is a morass of finding that is not always easy to access.
You are both in the subsidised sector, so I am interested to hear
the practicalities.
Ms Galvin: Our argument is that
the capital refurbishment of the Crucible is not simply a bricks-and-mortar
case; it has to come out of a business plan, which takes a long
view of the contribution that the Crucible can make to the cultural
life of the city, and that of the country actually. It is not
just that we want a new carpet or we need to clear asbestos; it
is what we can do with that building to enable us to work for
another generation. Certainly, I am not going to try and raise
that much money again in my lifetime, and I do not think we would
be able to. We had created a plan, which is very much sketched
through in our submission. It is about generating energy from
our building, which is driven by art, not driven by the need to
remove asbestos. But in order to have a longer-term artistic vision,
we do need to make our building fit for purpose. There has not
been a history of capital investment for all the reasons that
were gone through by the people who were sitting here before.
We have had to navigate our way through the funding system to
find the sources of money that can support our aspiration. The
first port of call has been the Arts Council and grants for arts
capital. We had had monies pencilled in for us, and we are in
the process now of creating the development plan for submission
in May, to go to Council for September.
Q349 Mr Doran: How long has it taken
you to get to that stage?
Ms Galvin: The first feasibility
study that we commissioned was in 2003, and it is unlikely that
any building work will happen before 2007. In the meantime, the
amount of money that has been pencilled for us—we have been
told very, very clearly that there is no more money from that
source. The amount of money is not gaining in value, but the cost
of building—
Q350 Mr Doran: You have been allocated
a pot.
Ms Galvin: Yes, but we have to
make the case to open that pot and get to it. On other sources
of funding, our city council has been very supportive to the theatres
for a long rime, and have indicated that they will try to match
the amount that has been allocated by the Arts Council. That would
be difficult for them to do, and we appreciate that, but it is
very helpful for us to have at least their endorsement for the
project and their understanding of the impact it would make not
only on the culture but the city public space.
Q351 Mr Doran: If a major emergency came
along that would disappear.
Ms Galvin: Yes. As we have all
said, there are many demands on the public purse so we imagine
those might arise in the time we have got. Following the funding
cycle of the Arts Council means that we are out of synch with
Objective 1 funding that we could have drawn down, or Yorkshire
Forward, the RDA, was indicating that if we put a case through
with the city, they might be able to lead the funds, but as it
stands we will not be able to get that money.
Q352 Mr Doran: We heard evidence from
Birmingham that that was not always an easy route, that you have
to build up a relationship with the RDA.
Ms Galvin: Well, we are told in
our guidance that we do not have to answer all of your questions!
I think it is fair to say that RDAs have not managed to get their
heads round what "culture" means. There is an interpretation
of it as "leisure", and so shopping centres and sports
facilities perhaps are understood but there is a vacuum there
and we have tried to fill that vacuum with our arguments, as have
many arts organisations in Yorkshire.
Q353 Mr Doran: Is it something that DCMS
could help with? Have you tried that route?
Ms Galvin: We have spoken directly
to DCMS in the past, but our experience is that the Arts Council
does not enjoy its clients talking to DCMS directly.
Q354 Mr Doran: It is a long haul and
a difficult one.
Ms Galvin: Yes.
Q355 Mr Doran: Meanwhile, you have to
operate and function. What about your own input into the pot?
Do you have to raise a proportion?
Ms Galvin: We have undertaken
a commercial survey to see how much we can generate from our commercial
activities, but it is a chicken and egg thing, because unless
we can improve our facilities we feel the limits of what we can
generate commercially. The ratio of our income that comes from
our own activities is relatively high, about 76%. We are working
very hard to generate it, but we do not have reserves and it is
very difficult to build up reserves. Every time we make a small
surplus, it goes straight into repairing a leaking roof or improving
access.
Q356 Mr Doran: That is the patching up,
not the long-term goal. I am na-ive enough to think that if you
have got the telly coming in, then you must be rolling in money.
Ms Galvin: Your word is "naive"
and I would not disagree with you. Obviously, having the snooker
is a financial incentive to us—less so than it was in previous
years because there have been changes in the contract.
Q357 Mr Doran: You have not tried to
auction it off?
Ms Galvin: Well, the snooker have
tried to auction it off, and they are approaching—I think
seven cities have put in bids to host the championship from 2006,
so Sheffield may lose. The City of Sheffield is managing the bid
for the snooker. We are the main venue, but there is a whole package
attached to that. I am sure nobody here came to talk about snooker!
It is one of those examples where you think you have something
that is a sure-fire earner, and actually it can be pulled from
under your feet, and then you have a huge hole in your budget
and programme.
Mr Brown: A few clearer guidelines
about what we are meant to do with the buildings and a little
bit—it is a bit of a dirty word to talk about maintenance
or refurbishment. I do not want to spend my Arts Council grant
on bricks and mortar, but I do have a responsibility to try and
keep that building open. We are lucky that it is a good building—they
built it well. There are going to be some big items of expenditure,
probably heating plants and air-cooling plants. We have been unable
to raise any cash for the things that we would like to do to the
building—simple things like re-carpeting or re-seating and
making the theatres working a little better in terms of flexibility.
One of the things it is making us do, and one of the things that
lack of money generally is making us do, is obviously that we
are getting into bed with various different commercial partners,
both in the production of work on stage and also in terms of selling
what few assets we have. We are doing a deal with the district
council at the moment about selling some land at the back of the
Playhouse, which will net us a million pounds. The purpose of
that money is that we use the interest to help us maintain the
building over a period of time. It just takes us down avenues
that we do not really have a great deal of time to deal with,
and we can get into some quite complicated negotiations with hard-headed
developers, which is not really what we are trained for.
Q358 Ms Shipley: I am very worried about
the fact that the Arts Council does not enjoy clients talking
directly to DCMS. It would be very unfair of me to wheedle away
at you, so I am not going to and will just put on record that
that is a concern because DCMS really should be open and available
to quite a senior level of people approaching, and it might be
worth the Committee considering the implications of that. The
major implication is the Department's lack of leadership on the
word "culture". It has a good grasp of "media",
and sports are reasonably obvious, but the culture is a bit open-ended.
In many ways that can be a good thing, but maybe some leadership
is needed. If anyone feels able to comment on that, please do
now.
Ms Duckworth: I think the DCMS
has endeavoured to make definitions. There have been a lot of
beautiful publications about creative industries, and quite a
lot of work done on that. I am not going to quote anything now
because I do not have it in my head.
Q359 Ms Shipley: Do you think that is
good and strong leadership?
Ms Duckworth: I think it was an
attempt to offer a definition. I do not think all the opportunities
that could be made for the agencies to work together, to join
up thinking, are taken advantage of. To a certain extent, the
capital challenges that we all have are perhaps a best example
of that. We are potentially at the start of a very significant
city development at Quarry Hill where the theatre is located.
There are enormous challenges being presented there, and there
are enormous opportunities as well. I am involved with running
a theatre, not property development.
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