Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420-438)
ROYAL SHAKESPEARE
COMPANY
22 FEBRUARY 2005
Q420 Michael Fabricant:
Is Advantage West Midlands a new factor that has come in because
it is something we did not hear about before?
Ms Heywood: I would have to go
back and check, but I do not believe it is. I believe that that
50 million always included a substantial amount of donation support
from the RDA, and that is in recognition of the fact that the
RSC contributes about 35 million a year to the regional economy,
so it has a very legitimate draw-down on capital investment for
the region. Stratford has been identified by the RDA as in need
of that sort of investment.
Q421 Michael Fabricant:
One of the things that I have been thumping a tub over for the
last few weeks, ever since I heard it given in evidence, was a
point made by the Independent Theatres Council. I do not think
you were here earlier on when we were talking about it with other
witnesses who spoke of the difficulty of new theatre companies,
and indeed new theatres getting in, because funding provided by
the Arts Council tended to be locked in to large organisations—the
example was not given but such as yourselves, such as the Birmingham
Rep who are hosting us here today. It is causing a problem with
newcomers coming in because of lack of funding and because perhaps
the Arts Council is not tough enough in auditing the work that
is done with Arts Council money. What is the Royal Shakespeare
Company's view on this, and is there a role for it to nurture
theatre companies outside Stratford, outside London, or indeed
at the Lichfield Garrick, which has only been going for a few
months?
Sir Christopher Bland: Can I answer
the general question and then ask Michael to talk about the nurturing
point. Our view is that it should not be either/or, that there
is a very important role for national and international institutions
of outstanding excellence, which is what the RSC, the National
and other big arts organisations aim to be. That is something
that requires the very highest standards, and that is what we
aim to achieve. That helps and raises the general standard of
acting throughout the United Kingdom, from which not only smaller
theatres benefit, but also television and film as well. It is
one of the glories of the United Kingdom that we have such a wonderful
acting profession, which is in breadth and depth probably unequalled
anywhere in the world. We play a part in that.
Mr Boyd: We take very seriously
at the RSC a substantial subsidy from the public purse, in terms
of our husbanding of it—Vikki might want to say something
about our achievements. The main responsibilities I feel is that
we put it to good use. It is about doing things that no-one else
can. It is about exploring with a longer horizon, with a deeper
inquiry than is simply possible for smaller organisations such
as ones that I have run to do. We do have potential and responsibilities
as an international ambassador for the country, which we embrace
and enjoy. It is good, and it is increasingly two-way traffic.
We are reviving the old world theatre season tradition of the
RSC in terms of putting our work alongside that of the best practice
elsewhere in the world, to make sure we are up to scratch. I think
Christopher's point about us feeding the rest of the profession
is increasingly true, as we invest more in training ourselves.
More directly, at the same time as turning in on ourselves and
investigating ourselves and reinvigorating ourselves, as I hope
we have been doing over the last 18 months or so, and very clearly
plan for the future, it is also time for the RSC maybe to open
its doors, perhaps more than it has in the past. Cheek by Jowl
disbanded itself and have tried to re-join the funding train,
and they have found it very difficult; and they are quite cross
about it. Our response has been to commission them to do two projects
with us, in collaboration. It is partly selfish: we want to learn
from Declan and Nick, but we also want to be able to act as patrons
of what we regard as some of the best practice particularly in
terms of Shakespeare. So there is a partnership there that makes
sense to us. The Belgrade were in earlier on—last year we
partnered them in one of the best productions of our New Work
Festival, last autumn—the new Ron Hutchinson play which
was commissioned from them. We collaborated with them on various
levels. Next year, as part of the Complete Works of Shakespeare
Festival, we will be commissioning many small and quite experimental
companies to work with our voice department, with our movement
people, with our text people, and with some of our directors,
to woo them into approaching Shakespeare. They will be showing
the fruits of their work as part of our Complete Works Festival.
I think it is a very important part of our responsibility to engage
directly with the sort of companies that you are talking about,
but I must say that a lot of it is selfish in terms of our need
to grow and develop as a company.
Michael Fabricant: A symbiotic relationship!
Q422 Mr Doran: I do not
think anyone underestimates the importance of the RSC in our national
culture, and particularly in the culture of theatre. I have very
strong memories of a visit we made two or three years ago for
our 2002 report, and how wedded the previous office-holders in
the RSC were to the previous plan, to the extent that we produced
a report of our own which was very supportive of the then proposals,
and all the difficulties, as Michael Fabricant has said, were
pointed out to us. However, we see today that you are going in
a completely different direction. You have been allowed to make
somersaults. In this inquiry today we have seen representatives
of seven individual theatres and representatives of dozens more
in previous hearings. They must look at you with a tremendous
amount of envy that you can do these somersaults, make these big
mistakes and get things so wrong; and yet here you are, still
sailing along with your 12.9 million grants, still talking to
the Arts Council about a £100 million project, in ways that
they can only dream of. That does open up big questions, and it
is one of the themes that has run through this inquiry, which
is that the Arts Council funding is ossified: if you are in there
you are in there for life or until you do something very bad.
It seems to me that the RSC has got things very badly wrong, and
you are still in there.
Sir Christopher Bland: First of
all, we do not think that envy is the noblest of emotions and
should not inform public decisions. Actually, I am sure there
is some wish that they too could have some of the money that we
have, but on the whole our relationship with smaller theatres
is, as you said, symbiotic. It is collaborative and we are going
to continue to work on that. We can go back over the history,
but we were not there, so it is of limited value. What we can
say is that the alternatives, which included the alternative that
you originally supported, were explored at very great length and
very carefully, and we were absolutely clear that it was a very
radical change in policy, to move from that original proposal.
But we are convinced that it is the right decision, that to have
done that was plainly wrong from an artistic, financial, heritage
and planning point of view. We think that, having examined all
the alternatives including the old one, that we are now on not
only the right course, but very clear course, and that it will
actually happen. We believe that we can raise the money and get
the planning permission and get a wonderful theatre built.
Q423 Chairman: Can I ask
about what seemed to me, and I think a fair number of others,
to be another mistake, and that is that while of course you are
Stratford, you go to other places like Newcastle, but you ditched
the London base that you had for very many years. I went again
and again and again to the Aldwych, and that was the home of some
wonderful productions then. Then one went to the Barbican, and
that was ditched, and now you are wandering all over London, putting
on productions, almost all of them superb; but as part of this
re-think are you going to try and have one place in London which
people know is the RSC in London?
Mr Boyd: Yes. It is a journey.
To begin with, there was, I think, some confusion at the heart
of some of the RSC's thinking. I am bound to think that—I
am a new broom and am bound to have different ideas, and it is
my responsibility to try and steer the ship. In terms of London,
we began by being as prudent as we could, and collaborating entirely
with commercial producers, at no risk to ourselves. That was a
major contributing factor in us being able to get our house financially
in order. This year we have taken on the financial risk of producing
our own work in London, and thank goodness it has been very successful.
We have not been wandering all over London. Our entire tragedy
season has been presented under our own banner at the Albery Theatre
under our management. We have hired the theatre. It has been extremely
successful, exceeding its box office budget and so on. Under our
own management, even more ambitiously you could argue, we have
presented a season of Spanish Golden Age rarities, at the Playhouse
Theatre, which again is going very well. We have even been able
to bring in our own new work at the Soho Theatre, which is opening
shortly. I think we are achieving a consistency. The RSC always,
when it was at the Aldwych, had to be somewhere else as well,
like maybe the Arts or the Donmar Warehouse. Even when it was
at the Barbican, The Pit was a completely inadequate space for
Swan transfers and many a Swan show either did not come down to
London or got squeezed into the pit, or had to go searching for
another theatre that was perhaps more compatible. So this is not
a new issue. We are working towards consistent relationships with
theatres that are predictable for our audience in London. Eventually,
certainly once we reach completion of our redevelopment in Stratford,
we want a compatible space in London, that is within our own four
walls. I have said that before, and that is our broad timetable
that we are working towards.
Q424 Chairman: I accept
that completely. I went to the RSC when it had a brief season
at the Haymarket for example. You did some productions in not
long ago at the Old Vic. Whatever the inadequacies of the Barbican
or indeed the Aldwych, one knew where one was going, and that
was important not simply in terms of personal convenience, but
in terms of the identity of the RSC in London.
Mr Boyd: It has been important
to people that they have known that they are going to the Aldwych
to see our tragedy season this year. I completely agree with you,
and my mailbag has made it clear to me as well; and that is where
Vikki and I are working together.
Q425 Mr Doran: I take
entirely Sir Christopher Brand's point that you are moving on,
but we have to look at this point seriously. I am less interested
in the RSC because you are obviously a major and important institution
in this country, and the people in front of me are not responsible
for the situation, but you have been able to perform somersaults,
and there is a cost that must have had to be met then by you,
and we would be interested to know what that cost is for the previous
aborted plans. I am more interested in what it says about Arts
Council funding and what it means for theatre funding generally,
that one of the large institutions funded by the Arts Council
can get it so wrong and yet you are still sailing on.
Sir Christopher Bland: First of
all, a couple of years ago we were not sailing along; we were,
to use your analogy, holed below the water line, and bailing out
furiously. One of the somersaults we have done—and it has
been a good somersault—is to restore our finances and run
our organisation tightly and properly. Vikki and Michael and our
new finance director have played an absolutely critical role in
doing that. Last year, the year for which these accounts contain
the story, we had a surplus of 2.4 million, and this year again
we will also run a surplus; and that has gone a long way to eliminating
the carried-forward deficit of those difficult years. Organisations
can change in both directions. We have had very clearly—and
the numbers demonstrate it in terms of performance and creative
excellence as well, which is more important—
Q426 Mr Doran: Can you
say a little about the Arts Council funding process?
Ms Heywood: You are right that
the Arts Council funding process has been sympathetic to the company
in times of difficulty, but I could not say that that has been
at the additional expense of, if you like, the public pound. It
did give the company a year, called our minimum risk model year,
to take a breath, to slightly draw its horns in, in terms of its
productivity, and to sort its house out. I do not think it would
have been given any longer, and if you were on the inside you
would have felt the pressure from the Arts Council to get on and
solve it and prove that it was being taken into account. In that
year, the company cut a million pounds out of its cost base in
recognition of its responsibility to sort itself out. It is continuing
to look at ways in which it can move money, as it were, from the
administration into the work. That is a very important role that
the company needs to play in leading the way in doing that. If
you look at what the RSC does for its money and the way in which
it does it—and we talked earlier on about the uniqueness
of that—you cannot deliver it for much less. It now has
to have responsibility not only for the work to present in London
but also in Newcastle, and also out on the road regionally. You
asked about how much public might have been wasted in the previous
scheme. The answer to that is that the majority of the cost has
been met by private donation, and only £200,000 of public
money has been spent on the previous scheme that went nowhere.
The company has been right in keeping the public pound that is
spent on that process very low. It is now in the process of applying
for the 50 million but that has not yet occurred. That award has
not yet been made by the Arts Council and we are hoping that we
receive it. The previous scheme was not part of an Arts Council
award.
Q427 Ms Shipley: During
evidence sessions on the previous proposal I was extremely critical
of the financial viability of the project, so I would like to
take the opportunity of congratulating you on what appear to be
very realistic proposals and thoughtful solutions to specific
problems. The thrust stage seems very exciting. I understand that
we will have the opportunity this evening to look more closely
at the proposals. My interest is two-fold. I have a masters degree
in architecture which is just simply modernism and on the other
side I have an English Heritage . . . I have an architectural
background but to me that was an irrelevance as to whether or
not the building was pulled down. It was a case of whether it
was financially viable and did it find the solutions to solve
the problems. What you found your way to is solutions and so I
congratulate you. I am sure it is a hard thing to do, turning
round the finances as well. That is vitally important. I remember
going through the feasibility study of the previous proposal line
by line, and it was out by massive amounts of money in my personal
view. The Arts Council should also be congratulated for the support
it has given you in the way you describe. I pressed it very hard
when it came before the Committee to investigate what was going
on, and it has done that and it should be congratulated for doing
that while finding a way of supporting you through a vigorous
process. All of that is to the good. Many colleagues have talked
about finances, so I will just look at your outreach work, because
that was inaccurate as well when you came before us on the select
committee. When I had the opportunity on the Today Programme
to argue this, I was told by your then director that outreach
in one specific part of my constituency—and he gave a massive
figure for the number of people that had come to the theatre from
that part and there are not that many people living there! It
was hugely wrong. What I would like to know now is how you are
addressing your outreach work. I know there are excellent ideas,
but how have you been reaching out to the community?
Mr Boyd: The show you are seeing
tonight by the end of its journey will have played 15 weeks from
Forres to Truro to Ebbw Vale—you will only see one tonight,
but they are excellent Shakespeare productions, Two Gents
and Julius Caesar. They are playing largely at non-theatrical
venues, and therefore playing areas in order to access areas that
do not normally necessarily have that kind of theatre provision.
Q428 Ms Shipley: Would
you like to take the opportunity to reassure me that you have
changed the way that you are recording who is coming from where
and who is going where, and how you are monitoring your processes?
Mr Boyd: We are really getting
rather good now not only at the statistics of our audiences, but
quite intimate details about their lives. We are beginning to
get quite knowledgeable.
Ms Heywood: We have been monitoring
the audiences that have been attending the regional tour and also
the audiences attending the shows in London. We are about to start
a similar journey with audiences in Stratford. We needed to get
closer to its audiences. It has also been doing a large piece
of work with its business partner, Accenture, on analysing in
a way we never could, because they put it on computers and things
like that, the real detail of our audience—where they come
from and what they like doing outside the RSC. That is opening
us up to a number of different audiences. The interesting one
for us is the family audience, which has tripled for Shakespeare
in the last year. That has been as the result of our directly
targeted ticket prices and our activities around productions.
We have seen the success of that and want to continue it, not
just in terms of the family audience, but into other segments.
The other area we have been working with is with under-25 audience,
which we have a great responsibility to do. We tried a scheme,
which has been extremely successful, and we are considering continuing
that into Stratford and other places, and 6,000 under-25 year-olds
have visited the 12-week season at the Albery Theatre for a fiver,
and those seats are not just the cheap ones, they are right throughout
the house. Half of those can be booked in advance and half booked
on the day. That works in terms of that audience because they
are not traditionally advance bookers. They are absolutely the
audience you have to get to because exactly the moment you start
to lose people is about 16 or 17 through to 25. It has been phenomenally
successful and we are now looking to use that in other areas.
We are starting to target particular sectors of the audience and
drive the ticket pricing to reach them rather than have a broad
spread of a simple one-price reduction, and that works quite well
for us.
Mr Boyd: I would like to join
a couple of questions up on the danger of institutionalisation
and ossification of funding and the outreach issue. We are currently
engaged in a major overhaul of our thinking on touring, as one
way of looking at outreach, and there is a danger that you evolve
something that in its earlier stages of evolution was genuinely
refreshing the parts that other things could not reach, and was
radical and serving a very fresh, real purpose. It can go stale
and sclerotic. With touring we have been looking back to Theatre
Go-Round, an early theatre and education small-scale operation
that came out of the core of the company and played an important
part in the early years of theatre education. This last year we
piloted a scheme of doing a production with our core tragedy ensemble
actors of Macbeth specifically for young people, which
went to not a huge number of schools, but it went around schools
in the Warwickshire area. It was so successful that we are going
to build on that this year, and one of the comedies we will be
doing specifically for young people. The findings of that really
small-scale performing-in-schools kind of work, which became unfashionable
for a while—that thinking is going to be fed into our touring
strategy as a whole. It will need constant refreshment as we go.
Q429 Mr Flook: We discussed
the plans for the auditorium, but when we went a few years ago
there was quite a lot of talk about the Theatre Village, sometimes
known as Shakespeare Land. What will happen to that?
Ms Heywood: The company is still
working with the district council on a master plan for the waterfront
area. Words like "Shakespeare Village" are perhaps unfortunate—well
meant but unfortunate.
Q430 Mr Flook: Not my
phrase!
Ms Heywood: No, absolutely. We
are working with the district council and the county council and
with local groups on how Stratford can really look at itself as
an area of public realm. A large number of people visit Stratford
every week, and we need to play our part within that redevelopment.
Q431 Mr Flook: So those
plans of three or four years ago are still alive.
Ms Heywood: Yes. The bridge, the
pedestrianisation—all of that is coming. It now needs to
link in with our plans, and it is also applying to the regional
development agency, the county council and district council.
Q432 Mr Flook: From when
those plans all came out three years ago to today, how many of
not just the senior but middle management teams are still in existence
working for the RSC?
Sir Christopher Bland: We do not
know.
Ms Heywood: We can come back to
you with that.
Sir Christopher Bland: There have
been quite a lot of changes.
Q433 Mr Flook: I appreciate
there is always a revolving change, and my question was not directed
at that. It was the management at box office, down to that level.
Sir Christopher Bland: We will
give you a rough cut of the figures by the time you get to Stratford
this afternoon.
Q434 Mr Flook: As one
of the four national flagships, immensely important and of tremendous
quality, is it for the Royal Shakespeare Company to lead the Arts
Council of England, or does it happen that it is the other way
round?
Sir Christopher Bland: That is
a difficult question to answer—no doubt why you asked it!
It seems to me that it is a relationship that changes. I think
we are a leading organisation and we have to play our part in
leading Shakespeare in particular and British drama in general.
The Arts Council role becomes crucially important when things
go wrong, and then they have to take some difficult decisions
and push the organisation to change itself; and I think that works
pretty well because look at what has happened. Then, when we ask
for what in any terms is a very substantial sum of public money—is
it going to be properly spent—are the objectives and the
plans right, and can a project of this size—which is far
bigger than anything that the RSC has contemplated for 50 or 70
years—be properly managed and run? That is where the Arts
Council absolutely has to satisfy itself.
Q435 Mr Flook: They operate
as—put it into the corporate world—non-executive directors.
Sir Christopher Bland: Yes, but
we also have our own executive directors. Our board has very clear
responsibilities for that. It needs to make sure that the executive
responsible, that is Michael, Vikki and Andrew, and the project
director who we have just appointed, who has a lot of experience
to run this project, do their jobs properly. There are two tiers
of supervision.
Q436 Rosemary McKenna:
I totally and utterly support the RSC and the work that they do.
My most exciting theatrical experience ever was in 1973 when I
went to Stratford and saw Ian Richardson in Richard III
and Eileen Atkins and yourself, Dame Judi as a totally wanton
Juliet. It was the most exciting experience. You actually say
there that the RSC has done more to revolutionise the teaching
of Shakespeare in our schools than any other single organisation.
Dame Judi, do you think that is the work that actually goes on
in the schools, or the performances that go on?
Dame Judi Dench: I would love
to accept your compliment but that was not me! I was at the Old
Vic playing Juliet, but thank you very much.
Sir Christopher Bland: Including
the wanton bit!
Dame Judi Dench: I will pass it
on—I know who did it. I have an enormous trunk of letters
from schoolchildren, mostly to the RSC, who have come on school
visits to the theatre. The gist of a great deal of them is that
they did not want to come at all and were very ambivalent about
it, but they say, "having seen the thing we are totally changed",
especially Trevor Nunn's production of The Comedy of Errors
when we were the very first company to go to Newcastle. After
the first night at Newcastle, when we came out and sang, the audience
came up on the stage and we had to actually ask them to go home
at the end. The repercussions of that were very, very young people,
who said "I never thought that theatre could be like this".
I could not feel more excited about the whole working of going
out into schools and talking to people, and actors working with
young people. The best thing is when they are rather half-hearted
and unwilling, and then you can get them together, and suddenly
wanting to see something at the theatre. When I went to Stratford
in the 50s I can remember my parents and I getting some tickets
and we could not go in because we felt we were not dressed properly,
because everybody was dressed in a certain way, and that was how
you went to the theatre. That does not happen now. Anybody can
go in and sit anywhere and wear anything, and really appreciate
it. Michael mentioned Theatre Go-Round, which my husband was in
doing Henry V; and the feedback from that was like nothing
you can get from an audience. You might get some people who might
wait at the stage door or write you a letter, but the actual feedback
you get from working with young people on texts—and that
is what Michael is doing now—it is available to people to
learn not only how a text is made up, which sounds boring but
is not, but also how you can learn to speak and sustain your voice
so that you can do 100 performances and not just four or five,
or until it runs out. You can learn about the set, about the way
things are made, and everything that goes into it. You can see
the actual space that the actors work in. It is just invaluable.
Q437 Alan Keen: Dame Judi,
if Mr Bramovich got fed up with football at Chelsea and gave you
£100 million but said he did not like Shakespeare for example,
how would you invest the money?
Dame Judi Dench: Who is this who
is giving me this money?
Sir Christopher Bland: The owner
of Chelsea.
Dame Judi Dench: I see, yes, of
course.
Q438 Alan Keen: Would
you give subsidised tickets to more people, or pensions for actors?
How would you direct that money to help British theatre?
Dame Judi Dench: I would give
money to small—which I do every week, I think—theatre
groups starting up, just to encourage them. I do not think I would
give them to pensions for actors—that is the risk we take.
We take the risk of doing two jobs and then be out of work for
the rest of our lives. That is why we take a dangerous path, so
that is up to us to organise. The whole business of touring is
terribly important, and I would expect to give money to more tours
going round. I was the very first company to tour West Africa—Nigeria,
Ghana and Sierra Leone. These are children who could never ever
see Shakespeare and that was their syllabus—Macbeth,
Twelfth Night and Arms and the Man. At the end of Twelfth
Night, when the two of us came together—we were astonishingly
alike as Viola and Sebastian, in Lagos the first time we did the
performance it stopped the how for about 11 minutes. That kind
of fire in somebody's imagination is just—
Chairman: We all have our great memories,
and among other things your Sally Bowles in Cabaret, for
example, and other great theatrical experiences. You at the RSC
do other things than Shakespeare, like your wonderful Jacobean
season. Other theatrical companies may or may not do Shakespeare.
Dame Judi for example was Cleopatra at the National Theatre, and
it seems to me that above all the key thing about you is that
you do Shakespeare. Whatever else you do, and however remarkable
it is, the key fact that you do Shakespeare and can be relied
upon to do it is fundamental to your existence and your future.
Thank you very much indeed. We are most grateful to you for rounding
off an excellent morning.
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