Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-399)
LICHFIELD GARRICK
THEATRE, DERBY
PLAYHOUSE, BELGRADE
THEATRE COMPANY
22 FEBRUARY 2005
Q380 Michael Fabricant: Do you run your
own touring company, or is it more of a receiving house?
Ms Hebded: No, Derby Playhouse
produces all its own work. We are a producing company. We are
a company of people within a building. We receive £600,000-£650,000
from the Arts Council and £400,000 plus from Derby City Council,
so we do have a good match between, and I think that is very important.
A question was asked earlier about whether it is important to
roll funding into one pot, but I think Birmingham Rep's response
in terms of the importance of being in local theatre and a local
community, having money from your local community, and a relationship
with your city council is really important.
Q381 Michael Fabricant: This is almost
a chicken-and-egg question. It could be argued that the reason
why the new Lichfield Theatre has not got its own production company
is that they cannot afford it; and they cannot afford it because
they are only getting £30,000 from the Arts Council; the
Arts Council might well argue, "we are only giving them £30,000
because they have not got their own production company".
How did it start with the Derby Playhouse? Did you have your own
production company long before the Arts Council came along, or
did you approach the Arts Council and say, "we would like
our own production company; can we have the money, please?"
Ms Hebded: Derby Playhouse has
always been a production company. It started from an amateur company
in a building—which is interesting in terms of your earlier
question. It grew out of an amateur community into a professional
theatre company, and then received funding. I could find out when
we started to get Arts Council funding, but all I know is that
we were behind historically some of the buildings in our region,
which means that we get less than they do because of the history.
I totally understand where you are coming from, which is that
you get less again, although you are in a different region, because
there were people there before. As far as we can tell, it is all
based on a historical model.
Q382 Michael Fabricant: Is that the same
experience with the Belgrade Theatre Company?
Mr Glen: Yes. The Belgrade was
the first civic theatre building in the country after the Second
World War and reconstruction of the city, and was always funded
as a producing house. It should be recognised that large building-based
companies do not have direct access to additional funding; they
are expected to use the money they have been awarded, and so new
initiatives and developments are difficult to attract money for.
I quite understand that really because they are protecting the
monies that are available for the new-initiative younger companies.
What is dispiriting about the discussion is that it becomes an
either/or. I do not think any of us would not support the argument
on additional investment into individual artists, young companies
or the aspiration of the Garrick to produce. However, if a government
is to hold funding to a standstill until 2009, that makes it pretty
difficult for the Arts Council to be able to respond to that.
Q383 Michael Fabricant: The Independent
Theatres Council recognised the point that you made, and it is
undeniable, but they also said that the Arts Council just is not
critical enough about shifting funding from poorly-performing
organisations into new organisations which may perform better.
I asked this question of Birmingham Rep and the Manchester Theatre,
and particularly the Manchester Royal Exchange believed that the
Arts Council were pretty tough on this. Is that your experience
Mr Glen: I think they are. It
is a pretty rigorous analysis of what you are doing and what your
aspirations are, and how successful you are in delivering it.
Clearly, theatres go through good times and bad times and you
want to try and support. If the option is to close down a major
facility to release the monies to be able to start to respond
to new initiatives that are emerging seems not a very sensible
and cost-effective way of releasing money to develop the art form.
Q384 Rosemary McKenna: Can I start by
asking the Belgrade Theatre about their strategy for the future.
It is very exciting and is obviously well thought-out, and you
are hoping to do well. However, you come from a very difficult
background in the theatre. Is there one thing that helped you
drive it forward and begin the turn-around; or was it a series
of things? What helped you go from a very poor position to facing
a very exciting future?
Mr Glen: I have only been at the
Belgrade for about two years, so a lot of the initiatives were
instigated prior to my arrival. I suppose I was brought in as
part of the idea of making the change in the theatre. Clearly,
the substantial investment of Stabilisation Funding gives a bit
of financial breathing space to assess what you are doing and
starting to put together a plan for the future. The idea of being
able to develop our building and so develop a range of work to
offer the city, and the amount of work we can play host to as
a facility for community-based art work—without that sort
of investment, it becomes very difficult to see a future or turn
the theatre around. Those are probably the two big building blocks
towards a re-description of the Belgrade.
Ms Reid: We also got money from
the Theatre Review monies, which is a really important injection
of funds into all theatre in England. At that point the balance
between the money we were getting from the Arts Council and the
money from Coventry became almost equal, because up to that point
we were getting more funding from our local council than from
the Arts Council.
Q385 Rosemary McKenna: You became fully
independent of the local authority in 1996 and created a theatre
trust. Does that mean that you own the building, or does the authority
own the building, with the theatre being a trust?
Mr Glen: It is held by the local
authority. It was directly run by city employees, and then they
created a kind of arm's length principle and an independent board
of directors and trustees to run the theatre.
Q386 Rosemary McKenna: That is very similar
to the situation with the Cumbernauld Theatre, which I know you
are familiar with. It constantly fights a battle between Arts
Council funding and local authority funding. Is there a sense
of concern? Here, it would appear that it is difficult for new
organisations to get funding from the various Arts Council bodies,
and yet the more traditional ones hold on to their funding. Is
that the same?
Mr Glen: That is an issue, and
as long as I have been in this business it has been an issue about
what proportion of available arts funding was soaked up by the
big institutions, and what was left over for individual artists,
new initiatives or exciting business plans out of a place like
the Garrick. That has always been the case. My argument is that
it should not be an either/or. Let us assume that we want to invest
in our big buildings to a level that makes them productive, accessible
and enjoyable, and have sufficient monies to be able to respond
to new initiatives and individual artists.
Q387 Mr Flook: Looking at the memorandum
written by Mr Edwards from Derby Playhouse, "The Arts Council
of England has a complete lack of methodology for allocating funding.
The process for allocating funds is arbitrary, based on historical
precedent." Do you want to tell us what you really think?
It seems to me to be a little bit ungrateful.
Ms Hebded: It is not ungrateful.
It is borne out of a level of frustration, and all that Stephen
is articulating in what he has written is what Hamish has described
and what the Garrick are experiencing. What is interesting when
you talk to different levels of this arts profession, the further
down the scale you go—if you talk to a small-scale under-funded
company—and I ran one and I got not a penny—you hit
rage. Further up the ladder you go, the more pleasant everybody
is and the more pleased they are the more grateful they are. Of
course we are grateful, and we do very well out of the money that
we get and we are very grateful for it, and we feel that we give
a good return on the investment that we receive.
Q388 Mr Flook: Is that partially because
at one point we are trying to be socially inclusive and cohesive
from a community point of view, and on the other side you are
looking for subsidy to produce good art?
Ms Hebded: We believe that the
people of Derby deserve the best art that they can have, and we
are based within Derby and have fantastic support from our audience.
We run at 80% capacity, which is extraordinarily good. The people
of Derby love their theatre and deserve the best we can argue
for them. In a sense that is our job, to argue for our own organisation.
It is also important, as people involved in the theatre, who love
theatre, that we make sure we have the argument at a broader level:
if it has always been the case that we have rowed about whether
or not the historical funding base is the right way to go, is
there an opportunity through a forum like this to start a debate
about whether it has to be this way if it has always been this
way. I do not have an answer as to what the methodology might
be. Somebody had suggested that funding per seat is a way of going,
which would enable Derby Playhouse to re-open its studio, and
that would enable us to interact with the amateur communities,
the local community, and the young emerging companies in a much
more effective way than just with our main house, which is tied
up basically to make our money.
Mr Galvin: Could I add to that
that we are not ungrateful to the Arts Council; we get tremendous
support from them, and from the city. One aspect that we have
not touched on is the successful efforts we have made to diversify
our funding, to bring in support from big private companies in
the city and other institutions for particular parts of work in
the social agenda as well as in the mainstream of what we do.
We do believe, very powerfully, that the main stage we have—at
the moment until we reopen the studio—is really powerful
in supporting community and young people, and those things. We
are just getting to the point where the money we are raising is
roughly equivalent to the grant from the city council, so it can
be done. What I feel, as a relatively new member of the board,
is that we have not had enough encouragement or the right sort
of encouragement from the Arts Council for those endeavours to
bring in more money. The result of doing that might be—and
I suspect Karen will kick me hard at this point—that in
times to come we might make a smaller call on the Arts Council
and allow more people to come in. There is not a notion in the
funding, as I see it, of us being able to progress as an organisation
and diversify and draw on wider sources of resources, which I
do think is important for the whole community, to allow that flow
of new organisations and new talents, many of which we would hope
would be in Derby and communities we serve, which would be a responsible
part of our relationship as trustees.
Q389 Mr Flook: Mr Edwards wrote that
you have also been successful in securing funding from the European
Regional Development Fund.
Ms Hebded: Yes.
Q390 Mr Flook: Do you sometimes feel
that if you have been successful somewhere else the Arts Council
will say, "okay, then; we do not need to give them so much
because they have got this route to go down?
Ms Hebded: No. I think that used
to be the case. I sense that less from them. What is interesting
is that they are very nervous about us relying on that funding.
There appears to be a sense in which they would rather you did
not raise it, because they feel it puts the business at risk,
because what happens if you cannot raise it the next year. You
raise large sums of money through out development department for
various initiatives, and we put that money into the work we do
to be able to deliver more output, and then what happens is that
you feel you are being criticised for doing that, as opposed to
being encouraged.
Q391 Mr Flook: How do you feel you have
been criticised? Is it asides, or do they write letters saying
"we prefer you not to"?
Ms Hebded: We are in the process
of going through a rigorous assessment with the Arts Council.
Within the forum of that assessment it has been suggested that
whilst we might be raising £400-500,000 a year within our
business plan we only budget to raise £100,000, which is
really demotivating for your team that are raising half a million.
I understand their concerns. I understand that you are particularly
good at doing it for a period of time, then there may be a time
when they move on. Hopefully, within businesses people move, and
in a commercial business you set up something and then you bring
in new people to manage that, and it continues to flourish. I
do not see why that cannot be the case. Theatres like the Almeida
live off the money that they raise, and they raise considerably
more than we do; but because Derby has not done it before, there
is a sense that it makes people very nervous.
Q392 Mr Flook: Do the others feel that
the Arts Council sort of gives nudges and winks towards what you
end up with?
Mr Ablitt: Certainly it has been
said to me that we have an issue in that we are local authority-owned.
As to a reason I do not know, but whether it is suspected that
effectively grants to a local authority-owned theatre is purely
subsidising the rate, I do not know, but there is an unwritten
preference against funding local authority-owned venues.
Mr Glen: My experience of the
Arts Council is much more about their concern about a period of
great risk for the organisation. If you are going into a £10
million capital value project, it is about making sure the business
plan can see you through the vagaries and what can go wrong within
a building project, and how your business plan will be able to
sustain us—in our case a second venue with another 300 seats.
That is mostly where their attention is lying in terms of the
Belgrade.
Mr Everitt: I would confirm that,
because that is very much what was said to me when I first started.
"Your business plan is a load of rubbish", and there
was a whole attitude that we were going to fail and fall flat
on our face. Actually, our business plan has proved to be very
robust.
Mr Flook: The advice is as good as the
advice given!
Q393 Mr Doran: I also thank the Lichfield
Garrick for seeing us yesterday—it was extremely helpful.
Mr Ablitt: We really need to thank
you for coming. It was a great opportunity for us. Thank you very
much.
Q394 Mr Doran: I am really pleased to
see such a strong connection with Dundee Rep. Most of my experience
of theatre in the 70s and 80s was the old church and then in the
new theatre, so it is very nice to see that experience moving
elsewhere. We are picking up two themes here. One is the problems
of the Arts Council, which the Derby Playhouse and others have
recognised, and the lack of transparency; and the other is the
lack of co-ordination of funding and the funding from local authorities
and the difficulties we heard from previous witnesses about getting
access to RDA and Heritage funding and all the other areas. I
am interested in another aspect and that is the comparison of
lack of transparency and lack of any calculation of outcomes in
funding—a pot that drops once a year in your lap. Maybe
that is putting it too strongly, but sometimes it seems that way
because it does not seem to change very much, at least in the
way it is carved up. You make a comparison with the European Social
Fund and the Regional Development Fund and the way in which outcomes
are measured. Can you say a little how that could be translated
into the way the Arts Council goes about its job? There are obviously
two different functions but the outcomes are much the same.
Ms Hebded: It is not a pot that
drops from the sky and we have a funding agreement with the Arts
Council where we do have to deliver against that agreement. The
European Social Fund is an interesting one, in that we went to
them for our hot ticket scheme, which is a funded ticket scheme
whereby we take a proportion of our unsold seating capacity and
make that available to the most deprived communities within Derby
and Derbyshire. We found that people did not want free tickets
but they wanted funded tickets. They did not see the value in
the free ticket, but if you could say somebody else had paid for
it, then they would think that was incredibly valuable. We have
given away about 7,000 tickets so far through that scheme. That
is very easy to measure because we have very specific areas of
deprivation that we are looking at, and we can measure that. It
is much harder to come up with a transparent system within the
Arts Council for what they expect from us and what we give back
to them. I think we are pretty good at giving them the information
they require. Where it comes unstuck is what Hamish was talking
about earlier, which is when there was a new pot of money or new
ideal or initiative; how that is given out within the arts community
is never very transparent, or does not feel it from where we are.
There was an Eclipse Theatre initiative where a pot of money was
made available for a group of regional theatres to become a partnership,
to create a piece of work and tour it between themselves; and
we only knew about that pot of money after it had been decided
which theatre was going to be part of it. Then we are told it
is a pilot, which is great, because you think they will then come
back out again; but of course those theatres then become that
circuit, and how that is measured is not fed back to us, so that
we could eventually benchmark ourselves against it and make a
pitch for that money later on. That is where we are talking about
transparency. It is not so much in our regular funded grant, but
it is when there is an additional pot of money or a funding round
or something where we are all going in together to look at who
gets the money that has come out.
Q395 Mr Doran: We have heard from other
witnesses about the risk factor. First of all, you have to get
the finance to take the risk—and who will finance it. The
Arts Council does not seem to be very good at risk.
Mr Galvin: Part of it is that
they are very nervous with risk on our behalf, in a sense. They
are not quite sure if we are making the right judgments about
risk, and I see that very much as part of my job as a trustee
of the theatre to make sure that we make the right judgments.
We have people on the board who are very skilled and very professional
in that role. Another benchmark of transparency that is important
is the circulation of the information about performance. Benchmarking
is very common in the sector I come from, which is education,
and in other sectors. It is about knowing how good we are, in
a sense, and how we shape up, and whether we should go and ask
questions about how people do things better than us. I do not
think we have got that, and probably not enough effort is made.
I think part of the leadership role of the Arts Council is to
help train and develop—
Q396 Mr Doran: Do you need a theatres
league table?
Mr Galvin: No, I would not go
that far, having been in education! That said, there is a sense
in which better information—maybe anonymised—can be
put across the sector about what has been achieved. Karen mentioned
80% occupancy in our seats. As a relative newcomer, I do not know
whether that is good or bad! I look at the empty seats, and say,
"I wish we could fill those". My suspicion is that we
are doing very well in comparison with others, but it is nice,
as a leader, to know where we are and what the scope for improvement
is. It would be helpful if there were more transparency and information.
No, I would not go for league tables; I think they collect some
negatives as well as positives.
Q397 Mr Doran: It was tongue in cheek!
Mr Galvin: I realise that.
Q398 Mr Doran: As far as the Belgrade
is concerned, you have a very carefully worked-out plan and have
obviously been working hard on that. The comments you make about
the Arts Council are fairly positive because they have clearly
been with you and supported you all the way through, so yours
is a positive experience. The points which you made about transparency
and expectation—have you any views?
Mr Glen: I reiterate that I think
there is a danger of a certain ossification of the funding channels,
a sort of hardening of the arteries; and it would be good to keep
it as flexible as possible. I think there is an inbuilt prejudice
now, which I do not understand because there is a huge investment
being made in regional theatres—but it is about, I guess,
the exciting initiatives that might emerge from the buildings
just as it might emerge from individual artists or small young
companies. It is not beyond us to have exciting initiatives and
attract money to deliver. We would argue that some of the buildings
are very cost-effective agencies for some of the delivery of new
initiatives and developments. I worry more about the idea of those
three-dimensional outputs that are attached to European funding,
which are very specific about full-time FTEs. The idea of the
Arts Council sitting down for a series of targets for the year
would be a nightmare. I do not think it provides the flexibility
to understand the difference between Stratford East, the RSC in
Stratford and communities in Oldham, say. I do not think there
is a set of rules you could apply across the board to the various
sorts of theatres with their independent artistic visions, with
missions to take on particular pieces of work. If you simply allocated
money on the number of seats and expected to increase box office
by 10% and reduce your overheads by X or whatever, those things
would become a problem.
Q399 Mr Doran: One positive thing about
the European sector is that because they are putting money into
the arts in different ways, they understand the arts much better
than, for example, the RDAs.
Mr Glen: I think they understand
the arts as a tool for tourism; I am not sure they really understand
the arts.
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