Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


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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