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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 254-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
Tuesday 25 January 2005 MR DAVID JAMES MR RUPERT RHYMES, MR PETER LONGMAN, MR MARK PRICE MR TOM WILLIAMS, MR MARK PEMBERTON, MR NIALL MONAGHAN, MR ALED RHYS JONES Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 102
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 25 January 2005 Members present Sir Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair Chris Bryant Mr Frank Doran Mr Adrian Flook Mr Nick Hawkins Alan Keen Rosemary McKenna Ms Debra Shipley ________________ Memorandum submitted by The Writers' Guild of Great Britain
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr David James, Chairman, Writers' Guild of Great Britain, examined.
Chairman: Good morning, Mr James. Thank you very much indeed for coming and starting our evidence session. Q1 Chris Bryant: Do you get a bit depressed about the fact that some of the straight plays that are being much celebrated at the moment are things like Whose Life is it Anyway? and Look Back in Anger which have been around for quite a long time now? Mr James: I would not say depressed. Some plays like Look Back in Anger always present new things to you and that is the reason for new productions. There is something for a fresh audience to see. Whose Life clearly has a point as well. Occasionally, pundits get annoyed when a lot of American film stars come over and go to the Donmar and get Nicole Kidman. Usually, they are working in new writing and presenting new plays. I am much more dispirited by something like a revival of Sleuth in the West End a couple of years ago which is an opportunity to make money. It is not for audiences to enjoy; it does not present anything new for the audiences to learn from and experience. Q2 Chris Bryant: Journey's End is even older and that is a war horse. The other part of what seems to be called new theatre is things like Feston or The Graduate which are really translations of movies onto the stage. Has theatre writing in Britain become rather pedestrian? Mr James: The West End is always a thing on its own. It is profit driven. If you look at the whole picture, I do not think it has become pedestrian at all. Do you need me to say why you are listening to some dumb American here? Q3 Chris Bryant: We would not say any American was dumb. Mr James: I have worked in the theatre for 30 years. I have been living here for 12. I love British theatre. It is my love of British theatre that brought me here and keeps me here. Q4 Chris Bryant: We are delighted that it brings lots of other Americans here as well to spend their dollars. Mr James: The West End is always going to be like Broadway. It is all about making money and therefore you have to draw those audiences. If you look at the picture of British theatre writing, there is an incredible array of stuff being produced around the country. The thing that bothers us is how difficult it is for career writers to make a living. Q5 Chairman: Chris has suggested that maybe there are not the talents around but an alternative would be that the talents are around but they are not being considered and commissioned. Chris has mentioned Journey's End, as he rightly points out, an old war horse. It is doing very well but nevertheless, apart from the subsidised theatre, would you say that managements are timid, cautious or overly commercially orientated in not commissioning new plays of the kind that used to fill the West End theatres? It is the same on Broadway. If anything, it is worse on Broadway. Mr James: Absolutely. It is very difficult. I feel that today very few producers really love the theatre. They are commercial managers, especially in New York. They are all real estate people. You do not have the producers who used to develop talent, people like Robert Whitehead. Also, because productions are more expensive, neither the writer nor the producer has the opportunity to fail. In the twenties, when you had Rogers and Hart starting out, their first three or four musicals failed but they were cheap enough that the producer could say, "Do another." That allowed Rogers and Hart to become a talented collaboration that produced the body of work that we all know and love. It is all about economics. I did not take your point as being that the talent is not there. Q6 Chris Bryant: I was not meaning that at all. Stephen Poliakoff is still out there and he is still writing but he does not write very much for the theatre. He mostly writes for television and Closer, I suppose is one of the few plays that has gone in the other direction in recent years. I wonder where the great new writing is happening. Mr James: I do not know if you have read the report I prepared. A lot of the new writing is happening in this country. Around the world, people in Europe and Asia look to this country for British theatre writing. Someone like Mark Ravenhill is always touring around. He is going to Europe and Japan to see his productions and there is a lively dialogue there. British theatre writers are much more highly considered around the world than they are at home. There is a lot going on but it is very hard to make a living. Even someone like Tanika Gupta needs an episode of Eastenders. It is very difficult to live on theatre writing. One young man I know wanted to buy a flat. He is now writing Holby City for the next six years. It pays the mortgage. That is his only option. If you are in the National it is not so bad and you can make a decent sum on your commissioning fees. Q7 Chris Bryant: What sort of fee would it be at the National? Mr James: I could not tell you exactly. We are in the process of putting together some guidelines for musical theatre pieces because no one handles them. We are working with the agents and we are talking about how fees would stack up. These are large sums for a musical which takes five years to write. In the West End, you might have a commissioning fee of 30 grand. For the National, it might be 20. For TMA it would be ten or something like that. We can find out. We have a contract with the National but I do not have those figures with me. Because it is the National, it may be more likely to get a production abroad or a move to Broadway. Q8 Chairman: Where would we be for newly commissioned plays without the National and the Royal Court? Mr James: We would be quite well along because so much of it does come out of the regions. Even the National does not do that many plays every year. Q9 Chairman: I am not saying it does but it does some. It could be argued that what it does is very safe but nevertheless it does it. Mr James: Absolutely. So much of it is getting the conduit in place for these plays to come from the regions and move on from there. There used to be a culture in this country of what was called the second production where if something had a production here it would move to a regional theatre and another regional theatre. That seems to have died now. It is very hard for these plays to gain attraction. You are absolutely right about the Court and the National. Even the RSC has a programme this year. They have commissioned 20 new pieces that are quite experimental. Some of them are full plays; some are not, but they are critically important for the public profile as much as anything. Q10 Chris Bryant: Mark Ravenhill was writing the lyric for Hammersmith, was he not? Mr James: No. Shopping and Fucking was for Max Stafford Clark. Then he did a couple more for companies like that and he has had a couple at the National. Q11 Rosemary McKenna: You inferred earlier on that there was something of less value in writing for television than there was for writing for the stage. Have not many people made their living by writing for television which has a much bigger audience than the stage? Mr James: Yes. If you want to write for television that is fantastic but so many people who may want to write for the stage simply cannot if they want to pay the bills. This is not the place to discuss television writing but there are so few single plays on television that you are much more likely to be stuck in an industry like Holby City or Eastenders where again you have very little creative overview. Q12 Rosemary McKenna: Thinking back, there was a time when one-off television dramas were absolutely fantastic and took a lot of people out into theatres. That is not happening now, is it? Mr James: No. There is some wonderful new stuff on like Jasmine a couple of weeks ago but that is not going to lead you to the theatre. I do not think the link is there in the audience's mind. Theatre is not top of the mind for a lot of people. Q13 Rosemary McKenna: Could you put an estimate on how many people are making a living out of just writing for the theatre? Mr James: I would have to go away and do some figures among our members. I do not know. Maybe 100 but they are not making a lot of money. Probably only a handful of writers only work in theatre. Harold Pinter is a member of ours and Alan Ayckbourn, people like that, but the vast majority depend on radio drama. There is a lot of teaching and a lot of things you have to do. There are people like Neil Duffield, a children's writer, who works it all out. He lives with his partner, quite simply. I do not think they spend a lot but he does a Christmas show and he just cobbles together a living. Q14 Rosemary McKenna: At my own local theatre in Cumbernauld which is both a theatre and a venue, the director of the theatre is also a writer and he does exactly that, trying to pick up bits and pieces. You said the talent was out there in the regions or in the provinces. People are writing out there and producing locally. I get a feeling that there is a bigger problem in local theatres financially than there is in the West End. Okay, the West End is important but out there is where the people are. If we can get people into live theatre, that is really important so the provinces really must be supported. Mr James: I as an American can say that you are so fortunate to have the funding system here because in America everything is commercially driven. Even someone like Susan Stroman who has directed The Producers comes here and says that no one in America has the opportunity that people have here because you have the subsidised sector which allows for the development of so much work in the regions. There are opportunities here which simply do not exist in America. The basic foundation of what you do here is extraordinary. It is a big problem even in the regions with the uplift you have. Ian Rickson who runs the Court said to me that you get an uplift but the amount of the pie that goes into what goes on the stage is constantly diminishing in comparison to the cost of light bulbs, PR and all the stuff like that. Also, these theatres need to fill their houses. If you are looking at new writing, that is a commitment in its own right. I think the DCMS document said 11 per cent of theatre production is new writing. Most theatres do not produce 11 plays in a year. They produce four or five. That is one new play in less than two years. What was a huge success was The Door at Birmingham Rep about four or five years ago. They got lottery funding. They had enough funding to say they were only going to do new writing for three years so they did not have to worry about anything. The money was there and they just started doing it. Their audiences were 30 and 40 per cent and they got up to 60 per cent capacity over three years. I talked to Ben Payne at Birmingham Rep last week and he said there definitely is a link between money, commissioning and new audiences, but it needs sustained support behind it. I have a note from my colleague and she is pointing out something else that is a problem for us as theatre writers. Quite often, if you have a nice hit, we supposedly get an eight per cent royalty for each performance once the show goes on. We have contracts with the former TNC, which is the National, the Court and the RSC. We have one with the TMA and the ITC, which is small scale and touring. Some theatres depend on a Christmas show to get them through the rest of the year. Something we have found occasionally is that writers are being told, "This is going to be such a hit and you are going to make so much money that we are cutting your royalty because we do not want you to make too much." This happens quite often and these people are afraid to say no because they might lose the next show. The point is they use the Christmas show to fund so much of what they do in the rest of the year. Q15 Mr Hawkins: In your very helpful written submission to us, you make the point that you found that for many theatres it is relatively easy to find commission money but still relatively hard to find production money. Therefore, many writers are being commissioned to write plays but with slim or non-existent hopes of seeing them produced. You talk about a glut on the market of unproduced product. It is clearly a great worry if there is a lot of talent out there, a lot of good work being produced and nobody ever puts it on. What would your suggestion be as to how to redress that balance? Is that simply an issue as to how the DCMS channels taxpayer funding? How would you suggest that we might recommend that that problem be addressed? Mr James: There used to be ring fenced funds and, when theatres got money, they said, "Here is your money. X per cent of it has to go to new writing." That does not happen now. There are several theatres I could name but I will not which go to the Arts Council and say, "Listen, we really support new writing" and they do not do it. We have no redress. It would be an enormous help if there was something that said, "Please spend a certain amount of your money." The Arts Council says it cannot demand that any more. It cannot ring fence because so many theatres get funding for new productions not just from the Arts Council. Even Ben Payne when I talked to him last week said, "We do not just look to the Arts Council." They look to more coproduction; they get city and local funding. Some of them get European funding. The Arts Council says it does not have the power to do that. We really need to say, "Yes, you must do more new writing." It is a struggle because new writing takes a bit longer so it takes a lot more PR. Unless you have something like The Door, because there is so little new writing, you are constantly going back to the beginning, saying, "Come and see this." If you go to a film, you know exactly what you are getting but with the theatre, even if it is the same price, you are not sure you will like it. We have to encourage this, keep building the audiences and saying, "Do the new writing" because 11 per cent is not enough. Q16 Mr Hawkins: Also in your submission you make the point that you have concerns about the recent closing of Birmingham Rep and the dangers that this may be a censorship of provocative ideas that we need to have addressed in the theatre. To what extent do you worry that this may be the beginning of a trend which would be very worrying? Mr James: Looking at my own country, people are starting to say, "Do not put this on." It is a very sensitive time right now. This is exactly why theatre is so important. I was talking to a friend of mine last week who teaches at the Westminster City School. He teaches very tough, inner city kids. I saw them do Macbeth in November and it was fantastic. He says giving these 15 year olds the chance to dream is so important. What is so important for the social landscape is when they work on new writing and develop their own plays it is an opportunity for them to say, "What if I were the kid being bullied? What if I were a Muslim?" It allows them to think like another person and that is what theatre does for me as opposed to a film. Q17 Mr Hawkins: My feeling is that theatre in education is fantastically successful in this country but my worry - I do not know whether it is a view that you share - is that when people go out of education and become young adults that is where theatre fails to keep their interest. Perhaps there should be a particular effort made by everybody in productions to aim a lot of the effort at things that would appeal to people in their early twenties, to capture that audience and keep the enthusiasm that many kids, particularly at secondary schools, have and are encouraged by good drama teachers to have through their teens. If you can capture them in their early twenties, you may have them as theatre audiences for the rest of their lives. Would you agree that that is something we should be looking at? Mr James: That is very interesting. I like that a lot. Everyone I talk to says if you can capture the kids at school you have them for ever. Turning them into ticket buyers is a second thing. Two or three years ago, there was an American show and it was all very twenty something. A friend of mine went to see it and said that the twenty somethings were coming into the audience but they did not know how to be an audience. They thought it was like a movie: come whenever you want; leave whenever you want; talk whenever you want; eat your popcorn. Teaching them to proactively buy their own ticket is a different issue but I am very glad you raised that point. Q18 Alan Keen: The questioning has led us to why we are here today. The reason we are here is not really just to ask how can theatre be more successful, whether in the West End or wherever, but how can we let people know the joy as well as the education that theatre can bring. We started talking about the links. Kids learn such a lot at school and are energised by what they hear. We mentioned Look Back in Anger which I was electrified by as a teenager because in the north east of England I thought all plays were about the rest of the world that I knew nothing about. How do we get those links going? Has the BBC a role, for instance? The BBC puts great drama on Radio 4. How do we let people know that this all has something to do with the same thing and let them know what they are missing? Mr James: I do not make my living by theatre; I make my living by branding so I look at consumers a lot. If this is the audience we are looking for, we have to go to them. We cannot expect them to come to us. What do kids do? It might be strolling theatre companies in shopping malls. Go where they are. I do not think they listen to the radio. I think a little qualitative research or some focus groups on what would interest them and get them into the theatre would be very useful. We talk about new audiences and everybody says they are young audiences. We talk in the greater consumer market place about the grey market which is the over fifties. There are a hell of a lot of people out there between 50 and 80 who could be wonderful theatregoers. There is traditionally this feeling that the theatre is an upper middle class thing. We need to think like these kids. Three or four years ago we were talking to the TMA about how we could use the buildings more fruitfully during the day. I went to the V&A the other Sunday and they had story tellers and a whole lot of stuff going on there which is clearly bringing people in. I think a lot more creativity has to go into this. Q19 Alan Keen: We have visited the US film industry a number of times over the years. Each film is a product. It is not really an art form. It is driven by how much can be earned from it. Is there any way of getting them to understand that they could probably energise young people if young people realise that there is a link between being a film star and seeing big US film productions and theatre? People do not see the link between the two. Maybe the link is tenuous anyway but can we bring that back to excite people so that they could enjoy taking part in the theatre, not just watching? Mr James: That is something we thought about last summer. We were talking about the press, saying why does not The Guardian Magazine on Saturdays talk to very famous people and ask, "What are your early experiences of theatre?"? I do not think Mr Beckham has been to the theatre much but a lot of people could say, "I went to the theatre and did this and that." Now that there is so much other entertainment, they need to be drawn back into theatre. Nicole Kidman comes over here and does the Donmar. Eight people see her. I did not get in. I could not get a ticket for that. If you have some of these people who do the RSC tours occasionally where the kids are coming, it gives so much more immediacy. These people are making a lot of money. Let them give something back. Q20 Alan Keen: You have mentioned there is no subsidised theatre in the States but presumably in the small towns there are just amateur dramatics and nothing else. Is there subsidised theatre in Chicago and the big cities or not? Mr James: The national endowment is very small by comparison to what you have here. I am not sure of the exact ins and outs but there are project based things there. There are always people trying to rip down the national endowment just like there are people trying to rip down the Arts Council. Over there, if you want to get people pissed off, you talk about pornography, the crucifix and the urine. Over here you talk about class. All that money went to the Opera House and it is the same thing about getting people pissed off about funding art. There are a lot of small, regional theatres but you have tax incentives and sponsorship because you can deduct any money you donate to a theatre from your income tax which allows companies and individuals to give millions. You have no incentive over here for anyone to give a cent. Q21 Mr Doran: Nick Hawkins raised the point that you made in your submission about the number of plays which are written but which are not produced because of the cost of production and difficulty of raising production money. Earlier in your submission you are very critical of the funding bodies, the Arts Council particularly. From a public policy point of view, on the one hand, you have these plays stacked up and, on the other hand, they are looking at ways of funding the arts productively. Would you not suggest that the Arts Council policy is quite the appropriate one? Mr James: I would not say I was being very critical of the Arts Council. I think two things are very positively important, which I tried to say in the document. One is that we are very encouraged by the restructuring of the Arts Council. You now have nine offices in one body. It allows the Arts Council to have a central policy which we hope will go across the country. Before when you had the ten separate bodies, if you had someone promoting new writing over here, it was because you had a good person in the job, not because there was a policy. Now, hopefully, we are trying to encourage the same policy across the country so that these nine theatre offices work together so that they develop central thinking. They are supposed to be working together as far as helping artists move around the country. Now, if you get to a region like the south east, there are next to no theatres there. Brighton has a huge number of theatre writers and artists of many kinds but no place to present the work. The Arts Council is hopefully saying that there is an opportunity if you want to work in Newcastle or something, for example. We are not sure how well it is working but in theory that is a wonderful thing. There is also the whole thing about changing the funding so that writers and artists can apply directly for funds. It is an extraordinary opportunity. The thing we are critical about is how difficult the application process is. It is a one size fits all document. It is the same document if you are the National Theatre or Joe Bloggs of Grimsby. You tick the boxes for social benefit and so on and the language is very difficult for writers to negotiate because we fall between the cracks in a way. We have talked to the Arts Council. We need a specific language for filling this thing out. Q22 Mr Doran: In the same context, in the same paragraph where you make that point, you say, "Additionally, writers often have their arms twisted to bend their applications to take on extra responsibilities (arranging their own productions, etc) ...". Is it not a good thing to get writers out of their garret and be involved? Mr James: If you want to. You might say, "You are doing your job very well but you should be doing this as well." If you want to write a play, get it produced and raise your own production capital, there are ways of doing that. If you want to do that, that is fantastic, but it does also raise issues about how to pay these people. Are you responsible for their pensions? There is a lot that you may not want to take on. You may just want to write a play or you may just want a bursary. That is where the Arts Council is falling down. On the point about a lot of unproduced scripts, I am not sure there are a lot but there are a certain number. Are there ways to move these scripts around more? Every year we have a forum for all the literary managers from all the regional theatres. There are about 45 around the country now. A lot of them say, "I have this script. It is not for me but I will send it over to you." That is terrific. We are trying to set up on the internet some kind of databases saying, "Here are some unproduced scripts if you are looking for something for a school." Q23 Mr Doran: A sort of script exchange? Mr James: Yes. A lot of plays that are produced are not published so how does someone see it again to move to a second production? Q24 Mr Doran: It has always struck me about theatre, compared to other art forms, that marketing has always been a problem, partly because there are theatre trusts etc., but there does not seem to be any overall body which has a focus on promoting theatre as an art form. Is that something that your organisation, the Writers' Guild, has addressed or is it a gap that you recognise? Mr James: It is a gap we recognise. We are not in a position to address it because we are a very small unit. We have 2,200 members and a staff of six. I do not think we have thought of it as an overriding thing but we talk to the literary managers and they still have trouble with their producers doing a new play. It is so hard to market. Perhaps there could be an Arts Council grant to train marketers. You are absolutely right. Q25 Mr Doran: I mention that because in my own experience I grew up in Edinburgh and for all of my life the Edinburgh Festival has been very important. There you see the best and the worst of British writing and the worst is often predominant. What the festival has is the festival organisation itself and the fringe which are heavy marketing organisations and they are immensely successful in persuading people to go and see something they did not know they wanted to see, which seems to be lacking in the rest of the country. Mr James: I do not think there is a network between all of these theatres. There is a gap there. There are no festivals where you get together the best of the regionals. There are a few things for young people. There is the mobile connection thing at the National. Every year they commission ten writers to write plays for young people and allow schools to produce those or not. They bring together the best of those at the National for two or three weeks. There are no festivals here that would show that that is what is going on in the region. Occasionally something will come from Cornwall to the Donmar but there is very little moving around. Q26 Mr Flook: You sparked a question in me when you said that Mr Beckham should be used to draw people into the theatre. You may like to know that on Saturday, for the first time ever, I went to see Manchester United play at Old Trafford. Why do you think I mention that? 67,000 people were in the audience. Repeatedly before the match the man kept saying over the tannoy, "This is the theatre of dreams." He kept saying it, time after time after time. People are paying 30 odd quid plus, sometimes much more than that, to watch 45 minutes of entertainment, have a quarter of an hour break, watch another 45 minutes of entertainment, go home and think they have had a brilliant time. Why are we not getting them? As you say, theatre is seen as very middle class. That game covers all ages, males and females, all types of socio-economic backgrounds. Why are we not getting them to the theatre? Is it possibly because it is very expensive, it has to compete with dining out, TV, sport and all these other things? It is being crowded out. However hard we try as a society, will we ever get people back into the theatre or is it something of a bygone age? Mr James: I think it is somewhere in between. I do not agree that it is expensive because, if you say they pay 30 quid to go to the football, they can go to the theatre for less than that. Q27 Mr Flook: That is why I stressed the 45 minutes, the break for a quarter of an hour and another 45 minutes. Lots of plays I have been to, if they are not very good and you are getting uncomfortable - it is an hour, 20 minutes, there is a big crush - (there was a big crush at Manchester United for their Bovril or whatever they have these days) but it is much faster and more responsive to a modern age. Football has responded to what people want, which is a faster society. Plays seem to be, to a large extent, much more slow moving, whereas football has responded to what was needed. Sky has added soundbites which are ten seconds long. The ads are shorter. Everything is faster and more frenetic. Theatre does not give that impression and that may be one of the reasons. Mr James: In some ways they have responded because a lot of plays are much shorter now. They have realised that audiences do not have the attention span. Many plays are 90 minutes and you are out. Many are an hour and you are out. We have responded and it is only the Tom Stoppards of the world who can get away with three hours of something. We know we are not going to get back to where we were 50, 60 or 70 years ago when theatre was one of the main forms of entertainment. Things have moved on. The entertainment pie does not only include football. It includes video games. Shopping is a form of entertainment. It is the same money you are using to buy the trainers that you could use to buy the theatre tickets. We feel there is a very healthy place for theatre in here. It is never going to be what it was. That does not mean it needs to be thrown in the dustbin and forgotten either. In my other work I often talk about male grooming and men using moisturizer. It was meant to take off and we were going to make tons of money. It never has but there is room for very strong growth and profitability if you accept that we are not going for here but we are going for here. That is something that is very helpful to a lot of people. We are not where we would like to be. We can move this to a very healthy place. Theatre has a place both as part of entertainment and as part of the social discourse and social dialogue. I am sure there are places in the country, regional theatres, where people do talk over the water cooler on Monday morning about seeing the same play. It is the social, cultural dialogue that has to move to the side. Q28 Ms Shipley: I put it to you that going to the theatre is not a very good experience any more. I am somebody who theoretically enjoys the theatre and used to go an awful lot. Now, when I think about going to the theatre, I think a crush of people when I arrive, bustling and jostling, sit down, something happens in front of me, it probably is not hugely entertaining, rarely is there social discourse that is also entertaining or the social discourse itself does not have enough content to be really cutting edge. You come out. If you are a woman, you queue for ever for the toilet, an important point, because it is so boring to do that. Then you go back in and you have more of the same. If you are a man you will have queued at the bar the whole time. You will have had a drink that is probably not very nicely prepared. If it is a glass of wine, it is warm. You all pile out and that is your theatre experience. That is so tedious. Do you agree? Mr James: Absolutely. Everything you describe is terribly tedious. I would not say that is always the case. Q29 Ms Shipley: Would you say it happens often enough for most people to recognise what I have just said, as in it is not a one-off? Mr James: It is not a one-off at all. Ann King has her all-party committee and a couple of months ago Andrew Lloyd Webber came and talked about the theatre billings. He said, "The reason this is such crap for people is that those buildings were built 100 years ago. The bars were ideal because the men were the only ones who drank and since women were not drinking they did not need the loos." Q30 Ms Shipley: That is such a cop-out. It would be possible to put on entertainment during the interval so that some people stayed in the auditorium area. You could have small things going on in various parts so there is not a great crush going into the bar. There are so many more creative ways round it, like build a new theatre. Mr James: I love going to the National. I love my sandwiches. I love going to the book shop. There are plenty of loos. It is the same with Sadler's Wells. Q31 Ms Shipley: I would agree but at the older theatres they could find innovative ways around what exists and they do not. Therefore they cannot market themselves in any other way than just listings. If they had a better package, perhaps their marketing people would have more to sell. Mr James: I have not made a tour of the regional theatres to see how a lot of those buildings work. A lot of them still could be an unfortunate experience. I think more in America than here a lot of people are not terribly curious and in order to go to the theatre you inherently have to be curious. You have to want to try a new experience. We talk about the Arts Council and we talk to the new writing officers. If you are going for innovation, a lot of that means you are going to get a certain amount of crap. I go to the theatre a lot and sometimes it is crap. That is part of the deal because the next time it will be wonderful. You and I have enough experience to know and accept that and say, "Okay. If I get pissed off I will leave in the interval. So what?" If we could build that curiosity about the theatre, there are a lot of new initiatives. At The Haymarket they have master classes for students. A lot of the regional theatres have small programmes for this, that and the other. I cannot say what it is like in the interval in all those places, but we were looking with the TMA at what we could do with those buildings during the day time, perhaps little concerts or tours. Q32 Ms Shipley: What about attracting children and keeping them there, having things like stilt walkers and puppet shows going on? Then it becomes an interesting thing to do but it is not happening. One of my questions was how are you going to build an audience for new materials. Marketing is missing but the product has to be bigger if marketing is going to succeed because of the crowded market place it is going to be operating in. Would you agree? Mr James: Yes. So much of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are saying it needs to be bigger. Q33 Ms Shipley: Not necessarily bigger; just more fully developed. You could have quite a small scale event happening but with a more developed product. Mr James: There are things like that but, because of where economics have been for a long time, our writers have had a very clear directive to write smaller plays for smaller casts. Cara Miller, who is a very talented young writer, is now going out to the movies. The last thing she wrote they did a reading of at Soho. It had five characters, one of whom was a child. Because it was a child they said they needed two actors to cover that part; that is six actors; that is too many; we will not put this play on. One of the things that has come out of the new Arts Council initiatives last year is that they are developing programmes to train people to write bigger plays again. There is a whole contingent of people called Monstrosity or something saying, "We want to write big events and perform them." So much of this is just building encouragement. There are opportunities and people who want to do this but there is a disconnect quite often in these regional theatres between the literary and artistic departments and the marketing and producers. Ms Shipley: That is appalling. That is unforgivable. Chairman: We could enjoy Mr James's evidence but we are keeping other witnesses waiting, so I think we had better move on. Thank you very much, Mr James. Memorandum submitted by the Theatres Trust Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Rupert Rhymes OBE, Chairman, Mr Peter Longman, Director, and Mr Mark Price, Planning Officer, Theatres Trust, examined.
Chairman: We are delighted to see you here this morning and we will start once again with Chris Bryant. Q34 Chris Bryant: Thank you, Chairman. Good morning and welcome. I suppose the good news is that in the 1880s the average British theatre used to burn down every 18 years and that does not happen now and we have not had a major theatre fire for many, many years. The problem is we have still got the theatres we had in 1880 in large measure. All of Frank Matcham's theatres are still around. The size of people has grown but the size of seats has not. The back-stage facilities are very poor for most working actors and directors and there are lots of artistic problems from people putting shows into theatres that were not designed for modern hydraulics. So what are we going to do? Mr Rhymes: First of all, can I say we welcome the opportunity of being here before you and I hope that you have got some of the answers to that sort of question in the document we have presented. Also as someone who throughout my working life was involved with theatre management I, too, am very glad that theatres do not burn down in the same way these days. You are absolutely right; there is a whole series of things that needs to be done. We have got some ideas and I think the easiest thing would be if our Director, who has had experience both in terms of the Arts Council and housing the arts work, and indeed now the best part of ten years at the Theatres Trust, gives you an answer to that particular question. Mr Longman: Mr Bryant is holding Act Now, the report we did just 15 months ago. We have not said a great deal about it in our submission partly because it is probably familiar to many Members here but also because we commissioned the report and my Chairman was then at the Society of London Theatre. We work very closely with the Society of London Theatre and its Director, Richard Pulford, is coming along to give evidence to you and he has written a rather fuller submission to you. On Act Now specifically, which dealt with the 40 commercially-owned theatres in the West End, we made the point that there was a huge economic impact there from those theatres to London in general and indeed to the UK economy. In one sense they were the last big nucleus of commercially-owned theatres left anywhere in Britain. One of the things we have seen over the last 50 years is a gradual move away from that time 100 years ago when theatre was such a profitable business that you could afford to buy the best sites in Shaftesbury Avenue, build a theatre there, if the thing burnt down you could afford to re‑do it and, frankly, if it had not burnt down you had to re-do it anyway to keep up with your competitors. The whole economics of theatre ownership has changed dramatically. We refer in our evidence to you to a report done by the Arts Council for the then Chancellor of the Exchequer - Harold Macmillan was his name, as long ago as that ‑ pointing out that the economics of theatre ownership were such that it was necessary for more of these buildings to come into public ownership. In the London West End they have not been deemed to be a priority for the Lottery because they are seen as commercial because a few producers - and you can put them on one hand ‑ have made a lot of money from shows from worldwide spin‑offs. The fact is that the building owners themselves do not make any anything like the return that they need in order to justify any expenditure. The response to this report has been universally favourable from the parliamentarians and indeed from the public. You may have seen an exhibition on at the Theatre Museum at the moment which explains the history of these buildings, and they were doing a simple survey there of members of the public on whether they think these buildings should be helped and that they are worth helping. There has been a unanimously favourable response to that. The Secretary of State commissioned a meeting with the Minister for the Arts and in effect they have commissioned myself on behalf of the Theatres Trust, the Society of London Theatres and their own senior officials to go away and find a solution. I think it might be more appropriate if you see the DCMS and indeed the Society to see where we are. I think we can see a way, hopefully, of meeting those urgent needs within the West End but part of our evidence, as you will have seen today, is that that need exists in a particular form in the West End; it also exists right across the rest of the UK. Q35 Chris Bryant: Yes, it is not just about London, is it, there are other places where there are commercial theatres which are a very significant part of the local night‑time economy and while many people will enjoy going into the major city centres to go to the theatre and some theatres of course are jewels of British architecture, some of them are fairly pedestrian buildings, in all honesty, are they not? Mr Rhymes: I think "monstrosities" is probably the word that you are looking for, yes. Q36 Chris Bryant: Talking of one such, the London Palladium --- Mr Rhymes: --- Jewels or monstrosities? I hope jewels. Q37 Chris Bryant: I am going to be generous and leave that to you to decide. I just wondered whether there is room for more self help. Looking at some of these buildings they are superb sites but they are theatres that are closed all day despite the fact that some of them are very attractive inside. Nobody has ever thought of using the daytime for the building to make money in some other way. The food is nearly always almost inedible. The drinks are expensive and the only version of orange juice they have ever heard of is Britvic. Could there not be more self help? Mr Rhymes: Let me try and deal with some of those points, and also picking up the points that were made to David James earlier on. Yes, a lot could be done but I think as a theatre manager I ought to explain one or two things that go on in the theatre during the day when it looks to the outside world that the place is shut up and nothing is happening. I am now talking about a purely commercial theatre. There is a fair amount of maintenance. If you have a complicated show such as a modern musical, there is an awful lot of work that has to be done to ensure that all the hydraulics and all the associated effects ‑ take something like Mary Poppins ‑ are dealt with in order to comply with modern legislation. In fact, there is not as much space around the building as you might imagine as a member of the audience. One of the great features of Matcham was to give the impression that there was a very large space. In places I have most experience of, for example the London Coliseum where I was for 20 years, you go into the auditorium and you think it is an amazing place, a vast place, and some critics of some of our operas refer to it as "cavernous". Once you got outside the auditorium (before the recent alterations) there was minimal space. We have only created 40 per cent extra public space by taking in other areas and indeed as far as the Coliseum is concerned taking out some of the basement that was private into public areas for work. Very little of that can actually be used on a regular basis for providing entertainment, although a lot does happen by way of tours and talks of one kind or another. Probably there is a little fault with regard to that not being sufficiently well‑known due to lack of marketing, picking up again a comment that has been made. If I can just say that in the past at the English National Opera if you had a lunchtime talk about Jonathan Miller you actually had to be quite careful about how you advertised it otherwise you could find yourself swamped and not have the space to put that on. To deal with the matter of bars, please remember that you have got to serve, talking about the Palladium, 2,000 people in a comparatively short time but you have got to employ the staff for the whole of the evening. I am not saying that the Britvic is necessarily charged at the right rate. That is probably a matter of the concession or the arrangement that the theatre owning management has with the caterer. To a large extent, those are dealt with by franchise operations even in subsidised theatres and part of the revenue for the building operation will be coming from that activity. I know from working at the National Theatre in the early days that Laurence Olivier was extremely hot with regard to how much we were making on the bars, a residue of being an actor manager himself. Chris Bryant: I understand the issue about back stage space. When I was young in the National Youth Theatre I think there were 140 of us appearing in Zigzagger at the Shaw Theatre and we all had to cram into a space which was 2'6" wide and suddenly appear on stage as if we had been running from a great distance, somewhat difficult to carry off. I wonder about the business of putting public money into private investment and the difficulty here where, as I am sure you will be aware, many of us have constituents who do not earn the £40,000 a year which is what 70 per cent of people going to West End theatre earn. How do you justify that? Chairman: And that is not what the people performing in the West End theatre mainly get. Q38 Chris Bryant: Indeed. Mr Longman: I think you should probably talk to the Society of London Theatres for a full breakdown of the earnings of those who go to the theatre. I read something in one of the pieces of evidence which gave a different impression to the one you have done. I had better not comment. At the risk of back-tracking, I was going to come back to the London Palladium as a specific instance of theatre owners helping themselves because we document in the Act Now report at page 21 a scheme to improve completely the backstage areas, give decent dressing rooms and modernise the stage, which has hardly been touched since the 1930s. They could have built something commercial there which would have given a lot of the capital needed to do that major investment but there would still have been a gap between what the commercial development would have been able to produce and the cost of doing the work. We and the commercial owners, when asked to address their building needs, are looking commercially at any opportunity going. There are planning applications at this moment involving building things above theatres, some of the income and profit from which can help do something for the costs of the works concerned. In terms of the ownership, Cameron McIntosh has just spent, as a remarkable act of personal generosity, £8 million improving the Prince of Wales Theatre. If Committee Members wanted to see a good example of what can be done in a theatre, do go along and see that one. The balance sheet value of that theatre, having had £8 million spent on it, is probably no more than it was before. The whole economics of theatre ownership are completely topsy-turvy in that sense. There is not the return on capital to justify the investment and there has not been anywhere in Britain now which is why most of theatres outside London are commercially owned. Q39 Chris Bryant: Can I ask about planning? For instance, if you are going to change the tiering in theatres because the seats are too close together and we have grown four inches over the last 100 years. Are there problems in terms of how English Heritage helps or hinders or other planning authorities? Mr Rhymes: I think it is perceived to be a problem. I am not saying that if you have a Grade I listed building there are no constraints but the Royal Opera House was a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Ancient Monument as well. They may not have things right and perfect but if you went in the Royal Opera House in the middle of the big Lottery funded refurbishment the horseshoe was about the only thing left standing with the ceiling. Backstage was razed to the ground. The bars were all rejigged. They took on space next door. The Lyceum Theatre was completely demolished backstage and a new bit was built on one side. That is a Grade II star listed building. On the seating in particular, look at the schemes which English Heritage and Westminster City Council have just given consent for, for the Whitehall Theatre here in London and for the Queen's Theatre which was bombed in the war. Arguably, it is not the best example of its type. Cameron McIntosh has planning consent for a scheme there which will involve taking three tiers of seating out and replacing them with two. It would increase capacity, better knee room and better sight lines and everything else. Q40 Chris Bryant: The stage machinery at Stratford is still listed. They cannot move it, can they, even though it is unusable? Mr Rhymes: No. I am sorry, that is not the case. The fact that a building is listed means that you have to argue and justify the case. I was in Stratford on Avon the other day. I know the machinery to which you refer and we gave evidence to your Committee earlier in the case of Stratford. I suspect that any scheme involving Stratford is going to involve the total removal of that stage machinery. There are other examples of its type around the country. If a decent case is made, there is no way, in my understanding, that English Heritage or the local council would be likely to stand in the way of those sorts of alterations. What is needed is the money. Stratford is fortunate because it has the commitment in principle of £50 million from the Arts Council England Lottery. It is also getting a sensitive architect who will look at the building, do a proper conservation plan, work out what is important, what is not important and which bits are sensitive. Q41 Chairman: One of the problems in trying to go to the theatre in London is that the person who wants to book a seat and to attend is treated too often as some kind of nuisance. If you want to book by phone, you have to pay a charge. I do not know why. The people are employed in the box office anyhow and that is part of the system but you have to pay a substantial charge on top of the price of the seat. That is if you can get through to the box office and that is if, when you speak to the box office, they are listening to what you say. I rang last week wanting to book for a matinee performance of something. I was given a whole list of seats. I said, "Have you got anything better?" and she said, "We do have things better for the matinee" for which I had asked originally. I was then told I could have an obstructed view seat. What on earth are theatres doing having obstructed view seats? This is not only the kind of historic theatres that Chris was talking about. When the Donmar was reconfigured, it was reconfigured in a way in which you could only be sure of having an unobstructed view if you were sitting in the front row. I know because I have sat in other rows and it is maddening to have a head, even if it is the head of the Lord Chancellor, in front of you. The Cottisloe reconfigures its seating systems and they have obstructed views too. For those of us who are really keen to go to the theatre, we often find it is an obstacle race and there is nothing more maddening - I hope you will agree - than to have psyched yourself up to something you are really hoping you will enjoy and then you have a bloody head in front of you for the whole of the performance. End of Ancient Mariner's oration. Mr Longman: I am delighted I am not in my former job of running the Trade Association for Theatre Managers and Producers. I am simply the chairman of the Theatres Trust. I would simply defer most of your questions and comments to when you have the Society here. Q42 Chairman: You must have a view. Mr Longman: I personally have a view and I certainly have a view having been at one stage in my career in a box office. The only thing I would say is at least we have progressed from your having that much view of the clerk who is attempting to sell you tickets to that much view, something that we started at the National Theatre. Sir Laurence's comment at that time was, "At least you can smile at them when you cannot sell them the ticket for one of my performances." The whole question of the telephone charges on top of the price of going to see the show is part of the economics of the theatre management, the bricks and mortar and the producing management. Personally, I find it undesirable that there should be an addition to the price that is listed for going to see a show. Q43 Mr Hawkins: I wanted first of all to congratulate you on Act Now, your report, and the work that you have done. I was personally involved some years ago with working with the Grand Theatre in Blackpool and I know how much your organisation has helped with that and all over the rest of the country. Your evidence reinforces that. In your report and in your submissions to us, you are obviously raising submissions about potential other sources of funding. You make the point that clearly a West End theatre is a huge boost to British tourism. To what extent do you feel that perhaps this has not been recognised enough in government? Mr Rhymes: I think it has been recognised in government. When we presented the report initially, there was a session with the Secretary of State and no one has come back and seriously queried any of the findings. The report has been looked at by people. It is one thing to say that; it is another thing to produce statistics like we did when we launched the report to say there were over £200 million of tax revenues for the government. The VAT taken by the Chancellor on ticket sales in the West End alone is £48 million a year, or was at that time. If you compare that with the 17 million we are looking at, I am sure I could make all sorts of cases to a Chancellor of the Exchequer but you may have more luck than we do. The report was never a clarion call to government saying, "Here is a problem; give us the money." These are commercially owned buildings. They have no desire to go into the Arts Council system and be revenue funded. We are not asking for that. In operational terms, they could make do. What we are arguing is that there is a commercial case for the government, for UK plc, to help with the buildings and the one-off costs of that. What the Society is coming up with, if you like, is a partnership from theatre owners to commercial schemes like the one which has been outlined for backstage at the Palladium and hopefully money from other public sources which I do not think is likely to exclude the Lottery. One could then make up an overall package but you have to look at each theatre differently and individually to see what is needed, what can realistically be achieved. There is a case in our evidence that the Arts Council England, which by and large stopped making buildings a priority after about five or six years of Lottery funding, really should reopen its doors to Lottery money for buildings. If you compare what the Arts Council Lottery is putting into arts buildings of all sorts with what the Heritage Lottery is putting into museums and galleries, which in a sense is a comparable job, ten years ago I came to this job from the Museums and Galleries Commission which I had run. We had a reckoning as to what needed to be done to put the UK's museums and galleries into order. The Heritage Lottery fund has been doing that pretty regularly, among its many other tasks, over the last ten years. The figures I saw showed that the Heritage Lottery was putting in an average of about £91 million a year into museum and gallery buildings. The Arts Council, over ten years overall, has been putting in about £35 million a year for theatre buildings, far less, which is why we still have this backlog in many parts of the country. Regardless of ownership, there are huge amounts still to be done. Q44 Mr Hawkins: It is the case, is it not, that all the surveys that are done of visitors to London, whether American, from Europe or from anywhere in the world, tend to cite the ability to go and see top quality plays at West End theatres as one of the main drivers of their choice to come to London? Mr Longman: Yes, that is absolutely true. In answer to the first point of your previous question, you could spend some time with my former employers, the Society, and go into the Wing Report because this, for the first time, spelled out the economic impact. That was followed up by Chris Smith when Secretary of State, looking into the creative industries export work. We refer in our submission to you to the fact that one of the things that is perhaps not widely recognised is the amount of expertise of British theatre architects and consultants that is used around the world. Mr Rhymes: On the economic impact, £1.5 billion was the latest figure for the economic impact over all the West End. The recently published Arts Council report adds a further 1.1 billion for other theatres outside London. That is £2.5 billion in economic impact. Q45 Mr Hawkins: Finally, to what extent are you as an organisation concerned about the impact of Lord Lloyd Webber's recent announcements about the difficulties in his Really Useful Group in terms of the knock-on effect on the theatre buildings that you and we are concerned about? Mr Rhymes: Can I declare an interest? Some of you may know that the Theatres Trust is itself set up by Parliament with all-party support and we own three West End theatres. We are the freeholders. The Lyceum is let on a very long lease to Clear Channel. We are the freeholders of the Garrick Theatre which is one of those smaller playhouses. The reason the freehold came into public ownership in the first place through the old GLC was because it was in the way of a road scheme and in danger of being knocked down. The Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue we own except for the stage. Really Useful, who are our tenants, own the rest. We have owned them since the demise of the GLC. Those two playhouses changed ownership two or three times so it will not be a surprise again to see a further change. The main thing that surprised me with the Evening Standard piece when this news first broke three or four years ago was that they thought it was worth putting an entire front page to it. Everybody has known for quite a while that the Playhouses in particular are not the main core part of their business. He bought all the theatres together some while ago. The important thing to hope is that anybody else now buying those will have the same commitment and interest that he does and that Cameron Macintosh does and the owners of Clear Channel and also the owners of Ambassador Theatre Group do. These theatre buildings in the West End are owned for the first time ever by people whose ultimate business interest is theatre. Ten years ago one could have gone down a list of 40 theatres and shown a significant number were ultimately owned by businesses that had no interest in theatre at all and were waiting for the chance to offload them, knock them down, and make a profit from use for something else. Q46 Mr Flook: May I first declare a couple of points of interest. One is I used to do a little bit of work in a number of ways for Apollo Theatres which now of course is Clear Channel in Central London. The other is that Stephen William Cohen's (?) mother is one of my most favourite constituents! Whenever I have been sent the Theatres Trust's booklets and annual reports I have always been drawn to them. I think they are extremely well presented. You will appreciate that Members of Parliament get a foot of bumph nearly every week, if not more than that, and for some reason these always come out as worth reading. Up and down the country you find fantastic examples of the work you are doing. I commend every Member of Parliament who does not to read these reports, particularly those of us on the Committee, and I think those who have read them are much the wiser for all of these reports. This is an extremely interesting report particularly in what it says about tourism and the way in which the commercial London theatres attract people to our principal city. I think on that basis alone you make a very compelling point, but probably not until the very end and it could be further forward. The amount of money that is given to the Exchequer directly attributable to the West End theatre (figures which are seven or eight years old) is between £200 and £230 million, which is an extraordinary amount and puts into context I think the £25 million that the Department is thinking of allowing the West End theatres to have. I am also told that 38 per cent of those people who visit the West End theatres come from outside London. So I am wondering what arguments you are putting out into the public arena to get people to accept and acknowledge that you are deserving of that £125 million, where it should come from, and how you are going to make comparisons with the amount of money that soccer seems to have had over the last few years through the Football Trust? Mr Rhymes: While the Director is thinking about the best way of answering the football feature in your question and previously, can I thank you for your comments about our publications. I shall take great delight in conveying those to fellow trustees who give up a great deal of time and their expertise, so it is good to know that it is actually read when we put documents out. Peter? Mr Longman: I think somewhere there is a statistic that says more people go to theatres than go to football matches. Maybe I am wrong or out‑of‑date. Mr Rhymes: I was being careful but can I quote from Wyndham Report which is now a little out of date because it was done in my time: nearly 12 million seats are sold each year compared for example with about four million for Greater London's 13 League Football teams. Q47 Mr Flook: That is fair enough but I suppose if you looked at the national soccer figures they would blow you to pieces because just Liverpool and Manchester alone would probably fill every other week nudging 150,000 to 200,000 seats and they only play for 90 minutes. Sorry? Mr Longman: I think in a civilised world we have football, we have libraries, we have swimming pools, we have all sorts of different ways of spending leisure time, and the theatre is one of them. You can talk to the Society, which I think was quoting 12 million likely visitors this year for the theatre which is not a huge decline on previous years. I think the important thing is that the nature of theatre and the sort of productions one goes to change. These days there is a much greater emphasis on less formality and certainly some of the old buildings give that feeling of formality. I remember Fiona Shaw, a distinguished actress, was one of our trustees and when she first appeared in the West End in a starring role her father from County Cork came over and asked whether he had to wear a bow tie or whether he could wear his sports jacket. I think one of the nice things about a lot of the new theatre buildings, places like Keswick or one of my favourites the Landmark at Ilfracombe, is that they are much less formal as buildings, they are friendlier, and they are easier to get into. The Landmark down in Ilfracombe has a lovely café area which anybody can walk into at any time of the day or night. You can hire it for conferences and there is the tourist information centre on the same site so you are bringing people in the whole way through the day even though, as Rupert Rhymes implied, the actual auditorium itself may be in use for rehearsals and technical things and not able to be looked at. I remember going up to the new theatre at Keswick in the Lake District where again there had been a long‑standing need. The Arts Council gave it one of the earlier Lottery grants. I think it was a lesser-known Brecht, a cold night in January, and I walked up to that theatre and I could see from the outside into big windows and there were children and young people in there thoroughly enjoying themselves. It was a good place in the town to hang out where you could go to the bar and have a drink. There were exhibitions and it was a social centre as well as a cultural centre. The Theatres Trust is not a preservation body. If I hark back to 100 years ago if we could have those economics today you would be rebuilding those theatres when they burned down and able to afford to rebuild them in modern mode. It is interesting to see that Cameron Macintosh's investment of £8 million at the Prince of Wales theatre. He is never going to get that money back in commercial terms, the balance sheet of the building has not gone up, but there are people there now who turn up extra early to have a nice drink there and they stay on afterwards. The bar takings have gone up and they are talking about using that building now outside of normal hours for other sorts of activities. So you can improve these buildings and make them more intensively used. Q48 Mr Flook: Can you throw some light on this point, thinking more specifically in this case of London; although attitudes and social ways have changes quite considerably (and shopping was mentioned by Mr James as a pastime and it is true, so is eating out) theatres all seem to start at exactly the same time, they all finish quite late, right in the middle of what is most people's eating period. Is there any reason why all the theatres in London seem to the start at quarter to eight? Mr Rhymes: Again, it is probably a question for the Society but my ‑‑‑ Q49 Mr Flook: ‑‑‑ your observations from your years? Mr Rhymes: ‑‑‑ my observation would be that all of the surveys that we have conducted with regard to what time do people prefer inevitably came back to this period between about 7.15 and eight o'clock. It depends upon the length of the production, it depends upon what is happening to your last transport home and whether that runs. You do not really want to catch the night bus if you have been to the theatre. And as far as the start time and the gap between when you left work, it is very often a matter of much more interest in getting some kind of refreshment in a pleasant atmosphere rather than rushing straight from the office, collecting one's partner, and going into the auditorium. Chairman: In New York everything is eight including the Met Opera. You go for a three and a half hour or four hour opera and it is all the same, eight o'clock. Alan Keen: I, too, would like to congratulate you on your report and what you do. This is not so much a question as just an illustration. It is ironic that David James mentioned Ann Keen who chairs the All‑Party Theatre Group because she was at the theatre with a friend this last weekend. The tickets were extremely cheap because they were restricted view and she had to stand up and watch it, whereas I was at a football match where I used to like to stand up and now I have to sit down! I am delighted that Adrian has been converted to football. Mr Flook: Not football, I am the rugby sort. Q50 Alan Keen: It is absolutely true that despite your efforts there are still a lot of changes that need to be made to the structures and the pricing and the way that people talk because I know when Ann was told the seats were restricted view she did not realise she would not be able to see anything at all and would have to stand up to watch it. There is something needed in the dialogue between the people dealing with this. Mr Rhymes: On this question of restricted view and obscured view, I am not quite sure what your point is. Is it that those seats should be removed and not sold or is it the fact that they somehow still exist and are being sold? Q51 Alan Keen: I was just recounting that story to illustrate that there are problems. I did not ask any further questions. She did not realise how bad the seat was. Mr Rhymes: The experience I have had is that if you have a very good show that is selling out, the public will actually resent it if you do not sell them a seat even if it is inferior. I have not run buildings for some while but certainly in my experience if you had Goodall's Ring at The Coliseum or Olivier's Othello at the National Theatre at the Old Vic people would have strung you up if you did not sell them a seat that existed even if they could only sit down for a quarter of the time. Chairman: Chaçun à son goût. Thank you very much indeed. Most interesting and we shall ask the questions in the appropriate departments to which you have directed us. Memorandum submitted by the Central Council for Amateur Theatre Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Tom Williams, Chairman, Central Council for Amateur Theatre (lead body), Mr Mark Pemberton, Chief Executive, National Operatic and Dramatic Association (and Secretary of CCAT), Mr Niall Monaghan, Chair, Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain, and Mr Aled Rhys Jones, Director, Drama Association of Wales, Vice Chair CCAT and English Speaking Secretary of the International Amateur Theatre Association, examined.
Chairman: Gentlemen, we would like to welcome you here this morning to this final section of this first session and ask Chris Bryant to start. Q52 Chris Bryant: I had not intended to ask any questions but now I have been told that I will. We have an extremely vibrant amateur dramatic sector in many South Wales Valley constituencies, certainly in mine where I could go to a new production every week. How strong do you think the connection is between theatre in schools and local amateur dramatic societies and do you think that we should improve on that? Mr Williams: I think there is a very strong connection through theatres which run youth groups because they connect very closely with the schools in their constituent areas and they develop the drama which is going on in the schools. Obviously a lot more could be done. The amateur theatre tends to work in the evenings because amateur theatre practitioners are doing other jobs during the day. Children used to finish school when I was at school at four o'clock; they now seem to finish earlier and earlier, sometimes at three o'clock, and to get that link between what they are doing during the day and what they do during the evening is more difficult. It does work and I think Niall Monaghan could say where we have dedicated buildings owned by amateurs there is certainly a greater connection than just dependent upon casual interest. Q53 Chris Bryant: But do you think we are spending enough on theatre in schools? My own perception is that practising theatre and seeing theatre in schools is not only important in terms of the English curriculum (it is much easier to understand Shakespeare if you have acted some of it) but also it is a good way in particular for some youngsters who are not necessarily particularly academic to find a means of self‑expression which otherwise they might not? Mr Williams: That is so. Mr Pemberton: The key thing to remember is that amateur theatre is essentially extra curricular. We can supplement work that may be done by the professional sector in schools. What we do is provide opportunities for young people to then perform using the skills that they might have gained through working with a professional artiste in a school context. Q54 Chris Bryant: That sounds sort of, "No, it is nothing to do with us". That sounds like you are too apart. Mr Pemberton: I think also of course there are links between amateur groups and schools in finding the children who can play children's parts within plays or musicals. I do not think that there is as yet much formal linkage between the amateur sector and the schools, but that may be because there is not the infrastructure in place that enables that to happen. Q55 Chris Bryant: I should declare an interest, that I am an associate of the National Youth Theatre. I just wonder whether youth theatre in general, rather than that specific organisation, has been funded enough over the years. Mr Pemberton: The National Association of Youth Theatre is a funded organisation and you should probably direct your questions on youth theatre to the dedicated body that deals with that sector. Q56 Chris Bryant: Tell me about getting permission to do plays because I remember historically one of the great difficulties is if you wanted to do, and you might not want to, but if you wanted to do a Brecht, it was almost impossible because the family made life misery for anybody who wanted to do it. Sweeney Todd, a production which quite a lot of people wanted to do, Stephen Sondheim refused to allow that to be shown as a movie when they made it for television. Sometimes owners of copyright can be very difficult. Mr Williams: They can, yes. We find that very often they are open to negotiation. The biggest difficulty of course is that the right-holder obviously wants to see professional productions rather than amateur productions, so if there is to be a professional production of something which is in copyright in London, there is a bar on any amateur production within 100 miles even if it is a small village hall with an audience of 30. There are difficulties. The Beckett family, the Beckett right-holders are sometimes a bit difficult. They do like to see Beckett done as Beckett wrote it and not as somebody thinks it ought to be done. Q57 Chris Bryant: I think it is terribly difficult with Waiting for Godot not to get caught in that cycle of, "Let's go!", "We can't", "Why not?", "We're waiting for Godot". Mr Pemberton: That is a very special issue, but I think there are certain problems occasioned by the fact that, for example, there are restrictions placed on amateurs as to how they may perform a piece of theatre or a musical. It may be, "You must do it as written and as we dictate in how it will be presented". Now, that could be perceived as fettering the artistic creativity of an amateur group because professionals, after all, are able to do productions which they can set in modern times and they can completely transform the way in which they are presented, whereas the amateurs are told, "You must do it this way", and we would certainly like to see more leeway in creativity. There will inevitably be occasions, as someone said, where works will be withdrawn because they are perceived as competing with professionals. We take that as rather flattering, "Gosh! They're scared of us because we might actually infringe on their box office potential". It does seem ludicrous that a small group working in the Outer Hebrides is forbidden from doing a show because it is on in the West End. Q58 Chris Bryant: Tell me about theatre buildings that people use because quite often the local theatre to me that everybody uses is the Park and Dare, but sometimes people might use schools because quite a lot of schools have well-equipped halls which can be used by the amateur groups. Is it easy enough for people to find venues to put things on or is it too expensive? Mr Monaghan: My organisation represents 96 actual theatre-owning organisations, so we have our own buildings which we have either adapted from other purposes, factories, et cetera, or we have taken on old theatres and reconstructed them ourselves, so from my point of view we find that we already have a venue and our problems are actually keeping that venue going, managing it and running it. We also allow other organisations to come in and use our venues and there is actually a shortage. Where you are performing, say, in a community centre or a village hall, it gives the perception to the public, the am-dram sort of perception that it is a draughty, cold, damp place to go and watch a third-rate production, whereas in reality in some of our theatres in our membership, you actually enter into a modern, warm, air-conditioned theatre with good equipment with an amateur production which is of a very high standard. It is difficult in some respects to find the venues, but where we have the venues, it is actually convincing the audience that the venues are of a good enough standard that they should come and see us. Mr Pemberton: I represent the organisation that effectively represents producing companies and they are hiring venues. These can be some number-one regional venues of 1,500 seats down to the village hall circuit and each poses its own challenges. There are some regional theatres, and I think Aled can comment on this in Wales, which occasionally expel amateurs from use of their venues because they frankly feel, "We don't need amateurs. We are a professional venue and we don't like them". Others take a highly enlightened attitude which is that these are weeks in which they can hand over to the amateurs, it pushes that community button which is part of their Arts Council funding and it means they can sit back and let the amateurs fill those weeks almost to capacity because amateur theatre is hugely popular, has loyalty and there is a nice rental which comes in without bothering the management too much. On the village hall side, that is a vibrant part of our community activity and it is absolutely vital that those village halls have a multi-purpose which includes theatre. With school halls, what is interesting is that we are concerned about the threat posed by the Licensing Act which is that community and village halls are exempt from fees, but not school halls, whereas in various cases it is the school hall that is the community hall and we do not understand why they will be subject to paying a fee, but in another village next door which has a community hall, that will not be. Mr Rhys Jones: In your own constituency, in the Rhondda, I think that perhaps they are setting the standard, if you like. It does vary from local authority to local authority what relationship that amateur theatre company has with the hiring of a venue. The work which has been done by Polly Hamilton in Rhondda in bringing together a holistic view to how the venues on her patch work with whatever community project is coming in is something that we are looking to spread around to other local authorities. Q59 Chris Bryant: Would you say that there is a trend towards doing more war horses, you know, lots more productions of An Inspector Calls or Carousel or is there more of a trend towards experimenting towards big community projects where you might get 250 local people involved in creating a play and building it and part of it might be out on the streets and part of it is in the theatre? Mr Williams: I think there is a very wide range of theatre done. Obviously the old war horses are produced. Stoppard and Ayckbourn are very near the top always and Shakespeare is always very near the top, but you do get new work produced and what I would call 'cutting-edge work' is also produced in our theatres. In the musical hall scene ---- Mr Pemberton: Well, in the musical hall scene, yes, there are the bread-and-butter G and S and Rodgers and Hammerstein, but amateur musical groups are actually desperate for new musicals and the hit shows in the West End take years to be available for amateurs and they are itching to do all kinds of work which they simply cannot get their hands on. Equally, you have to remember that they are essentially commercial operations and they are not subsidised, so they have to look at the bottom line very carefully and do works that have clear box office potential because you could have an amateur group founded 100 years ago, a vital part of the community, which in one show could be destroyed through poor box office. Mr Rhys Jones: To come back to the relationship between schools and amateur theatre, again in Pontypridd recently the only way that they could get access to the set text for a drama, which I think was either When We Were Married or An Inspector Calls, one of the Priestley plays, was the amateur theatre company which packed out the uni in Ponti and they had to put on two extra matinées to get the schools in and that was the only access they had to see the set text that they were being examined on, so there is a very strong demonstration of the relationship there. Q60 Chris Bryant: An Inspector Calls is a great piece of socialist theatre. Mr Williams: I was at an amateur production of Pygmalion last Saturday which was an absolutely full matinée, absolutely full of schoolchildren because it was a set text and they had travelled 50 miles to see it. Q61 Alan Keen: I was asking David James earlier how Hollywood, for instance, could help get people interested in drama at their own level. You are telling me that commercial theatre, because they have got to watch the bottom line, can stop amateur theatre by suppressing their ability to use current ‑‑‑ Mr Williams: Rights' holders hold the rights to works and they tell you whether you can perform it or not. Q62 Ms Shipley: Could you say that again? Mr Williams: The people who hold the rights to the work can dictate who can perform it and when, yes. Q63 Alan Keen: With amateur theatre we are talking about a local level. Can you tell me a little bit about how local authorities fit in. Local authorities have tended, with the reduction in revenue support grant with the previous Government and the current Government, to cut back on leisure services which would cover your area. Obviously some local authorities must be better than others. What role do local authorities play in helping or not helping? Mr Williams: In most cases amateur theatre acts independently of all authorities. In some areas where local authorities own venues of course the amateur companies do have strong liaison on the use of those venues. Mr Pemberton: I would say that in some cases local authorities, in particular local education authorities, can actually be deterrents. We have been talking about opportunities for children and certainly there is a perception that some LEAs are using the very old regulation dating back to 1968 in a particularly irksome and attentive manner because they are trying to piggyback on to very old legislation the current level of debate about child protection and child protection regulations and are making it very difficult for young people to be involved in theatre because it is seen, for some reason, as potentially a dangerous activity, whereas we feel it is a good social activity that provides young people with opportunities to perform and engage with the community. Q64 Alan Keen: We will be writing a report with recommendations in it. What would you like us to say? My own local authority in West London has two theatres and the stages are not being used all the time, not by any means, and there must be something lacking. There is money lacking but we must be able to spend some money to bring people together and try to fill those gaps and help the amateur dramatic groups through the local authorities providing some help to provide a theatre and a stage for them. Are you really saying there are no links at all? Mr Williams: I am not saying there are no links at all. I am saying they are tenuous in some areas; they are strong in other areas. It depends on a number of factors. First of all, there is obviously the strength of the amateur theatre movement in an area and the interest of the local authority in engaging with it. Where dialogue is recognised as being appropriate on both sides it happens. Where it is seen as appropriate on only one side it probably is not and all too often it is not seen as being appropriate on either side. Mr Rhys Jones: One of the things that would influence that would be if a local authority had a policy towards the arts in general, and that is not always the case. If I understand it correctly, it is a requirement of the Wales Assembly Government for a local authority to develop an arts policy. Again, that has not worked entirely. I think there is one local authority which is saying "No, we are not doing it." That helps because it then starts that negotiation and it starts looking at mechanisms for delivering it within the local authority area. If that is not in place then you are working in a vacuum. Once that negotiation has started then you have got somewhere to go with it. Also what tends to follow on from that is the development of smaller working groups to look at specific issues. Once that is in place then you can go forward. Q65 Alan Keen: I am sorry to quote my own area but sometimes it is easier to work on facts and reality as an example rather than to talk in theory. I was a prime mover in reforming the Hounslow Sports Forum. We started it last year again because I realised that we had got lots, particularly in West London with the proximity to Heathrow Airport, of sports facilities and sports fields because in the old days every big commercial company had its own sports field and clubhouse, and we were not using them all. I felt there were gaps and I felt there were gaps between the schools and the sports facilities and the sports clubs. It has been going through my mind for a few months now that we could do with an arts forum as well. Are there other examples of this where you can bring people involved in the arts together, not just the performing arts, to get the full benefit of the various facilities that are there or facilities which could be acquired to be used for the arts? Are there other examples of this around the country? Mr Williams: I think there are. I cannot bring any to mind immediately but it depends very much on local initiative. Mr Rhys Jones: Again, it is a requirement of the Welsh Assembly Government to set up cultural fora within each local authority and the Arts Council are being requested to ensure that this is being achieved. Again it is hit and miss with different local authorities on the success rate of what is happening there but the Swansea Cultural Forum, which works with the local authority, with the voluntary sector, the professional arts, et cetera, now has staff who are working to market the arts in the area to raise the profile of what happens in Swansea. That is a reasonable working model of what is going on to promote a bridging between the local authority, the arts community in general, whether it is professional or voluntary, and the arts funders. Q66 Alan Keen: I am sorry, you said this was a condition. This is something that I have missed. Are you just talking about Wales but not England? Mr Pemberton: There is not really that equivalent in England. Each local authority is meant to have a cultural policy and they were meant to consult with the voluntary sector but it is how you define "voluntary sector", and it has not tended to embrace the amateur sector, which is what we feel is genuinely a voluntary sector. Mr Williams: It also depends on how you define "consult". Mr Pemberton: I have some experience in a local authority where instead of having consultation processes they just told the hard‑pressed arts officer, "Go away and write our cultural policy for us." Yes, there does need to be more work on ensuring there are more local arts councils or arts fora that do genuinely bring together professional arts and amateur arts because for too long there has been this divide between the two. We feel one of our primary missions is to finally in the 21st century get rid of this ghastly divide that exists between professional and amateur. Q67 Alan Keen: It just seems glaringly obvious to me that there are so many facilities that local authorities have and they are not fully used. Is this something that you would really like us to ‑‑‑ Mr Pemberton: Yes. Q68 Alan Keen: Would each of you in a few words say what you would like us to say on this particular issue. Mr Pemberton: Access to venues is absolutely crucial. There are limited venues and groups can find it problematic to find somewhere suitable at the right size and right price for them to hire. It is often forgotten that when a theatre is threatened with closure and a campaign is put in place by the professional arts world to save that theatre there are also amateur users who are equally threatened. If that theatre goes then so does access to a venue that can keep that society going commercially and it can wither and die. So it would be so good if there was a regional policy regarding the provision of venues. Q69 Alan Keen: Could you just give me an update on the Welsh situation. I was not understanding that it was just Wales when you were answering my question before. When did the initiative start and how is it going? Mr Rhys Jones: Once the Assembly was brought into being the Plus 16 Education Committee was set up and they had a responsibility to look at culture which in turn brought together a paper, the name of which I have forgotten, which brought in the advent of the Culture Committee and the Culture Minister. I think it has taken off from there. There was a second paper that came out of that which looked at how best to use "culture" to improve the life of Wales. One of the tools of that was seen to be the creation of these cultural fora. As I say, they are meant to be happening in each local authority and there has been some success, some failure. A lot of it depends on personalities, on local authority attitudes, the amount of Arts Council activity in a specific area, whether or not there is an existing network, or whether somebody has to go in and bring that network together. It is being seen as a very positive step forward and as a tool for improving the profile of the arts and activity within the arts in Wales in general. Alan Keen: It is ironic that Wales have taken this initiative. I have watched it on TV and the Welsh Assembly lacks a bit of drama compared with this Parliament. Chris Bryant: I would be very, very careful, Alan! Q70 Mr Flook: We have got this far in the proceedings without mentioning panto once. It is January and certainly in Somerset it is panto season, and I presume elsewhere in the shires and elsewhere in the cities. I am spending quite a few of my weekends going to various pantos because they ask me. You can see from the dramatic society cards that a young girl turns into a young lady who gets to 21, she is outgoing, she is confident, she is on the stage, she is very good. She goes to university if she has not gone already. Then she seeks a career in whatever it is outside of Somerset and may come back when she is 40 and may get involved again. There is a huge shortage of those in their 20s and 30s volunteering for amateur dramatic societies. Mr Williams, I presume it is your bag. Have you done a study of that? When they go to the cities do they volunteer or are they too busy doing things that those in their 20s do? Mr Williams: I can only speak from my own experience of my own group, and we are perhaps very fortunate in that they tend to live near us and join our society. Talking of pantos I have seen two and in the next fortnight I am going to be seeing another three. They are wonderful things for village communities. On the young people, yes, they do go away, they go to university, but they always go and live somewhere and if their interest is captured well enough they will join the local society. The difficulty in their 20s and 30s is that they have careers to develop and in any leisure activity that takes up the time that theatre does you will find that there is a drop‑off and they will come back again in their late 30s and 40s when the children are old enough to bring along as well as to leave at home with somebody else looking after them. I think that is an inevitability: When people start families the pattern of their leisure changes. Q71 Mr Flook: And what are you doing collectively to try and counter that or have you just got to accept it? Mr Williams: I think we tend to accept it and we tend to know that out there there are people with the interest. In my own group, which is a successful one, we do have a lot of people in their 20s and 30s who are members. We are very lucky and we know that. My bigger concern is where we fail on total social inclusion and on ethnic diversity in our amateur theatres. Q72 Mr Flook: As you may or may not know, there is not much ethnic diversity in Somerset but I take the point in your submission where I think the phrases you use is "amateur theatre is vital for community cohesion", and that is no more true than at Bishops Lydeard, which is quite a big village on the edge of Taunton. Last year for the first time in many, many years they put on an amateur production and I was struck by how much one end of the village was working for the first time with the other end of the village. There is a social point there as well. Mr Williams: Struck but I hope not surprised. Q73 Mr Flook: It was really comforting. Taunton does not have a big theatre. It does not have a theatre with a fly tower and the other major problem that all of them seem to get is a lack of help from whoever it is. They have to pay the same rate as a commercial organisation to take that week. Mr Williams: Yes. Q74 Mr Flook: Is there any way round that? Mr Pemberton: That is what we are saying about the commercial imperative and that is why you have to pursue popular works because you are expected to stump up the same fee as a professional company although that professional company may well be subsidised in which case it is bringing in more innovative work. Q75 Mr Flook: And may have a well‑known name which will help sell seats. Mr Pemberton: One thing we absolutely hate is if an amateur theatre is treated as a cash cow when it does not have the cash in the first place. Venues do seem to think we can keep stumping up their charges because we will want to be coming in because we always do two weeks of the year. Mr Williams: Niall may be able to help you. I am sure that a number of the theatres who belong to his organisation give cheaper rates to amateurs than to professionals. Mr Monaghan: Yes we do. A lot of our members favour amateurs because they are owned by amateurs themselves and encourage them to come in. Taking the point you mentioned earlier about the pull of a professional name to a production, we certainly would welcome more blurring of the edges between professionals and amateurs, for example regarding the restrictions put on them by their own professional bodies and whether a professional is allowed to perform in an amateur production. They are often not. If we could have more blurring of that it would enable us to use names or professionals who are resting, as they call it. They are not allowed to perform at the moment because they cannot find a production they would be allowed to perform in. Q76 Mr Flook: Where does that rule come from? Mr Rhys Jones: That is Equity, is it not? Mr Monaghan: Equity rules, yes. Q77 Mr Flook: So what have you been saying to Equity over the years? Mr Williams: I think it is more relaxed than it used to be. Q78 Mr Flook: More relaxed or more ignored? Mr Williams: More relaxed. Q79 Mr Flook: The actual rules are more relaxed or they just turn a blind eye? Mr Williams: The rules are more relaxed. Q80 Mr Flook: Can we relax them more? Mr Williams: That is something you will have to ask Equity if they are giving evidence to you. Mr Pemberton: I want to pick up on what you were saying about what we are doing about this. I would point out that we are all effectively self‑help organisations. There is only so much that our bodies can do because we rely solely on what we can raise ourselves. If there were a funded infrastructure body as exists in other voluntary activities, it may be that some of these more developmental issues could be pushed forward. Q81 Mr Flook: I did not have money in mind when I made that point. Mr Pemberton: We are limited in what we can do. Much as we would love to know more information about our sector we have not got the resources to carry on the research. Q82 Mr Flook: I was thinking more of what door banging are you doing on behalf of your members rather than what cheque books are you going to use? Mr Pemberton: We are banging on a lot of doors. Q83 Mr Hawkins: I wanted to come back to this issue of young people involved in amateur theatre because that was how I first got involved. In the sporting context there has been a worry that people have been put off involvement in coaching of young people in sport because of the administrative and cost burdens of the Criminal Records Bureau checks. Is that also an issue here? Are we seeing fewer adults being prepared to go through that process to help young people in the amateur theatre groups that you represent? Mr Williams: Absolutely, yes. My organisation acts as a counter signatory organisation for the Criminal Records Bureau for our members but, even so, we are finding difficulties. For example, my own hobby is lighting and years ago we were training a young lighting designer a 15-year-old girl, who was working alongside me in a darkened theatre. You cannot do that any more and a lot of people say, "I do not want to do it any more because of the risks involved." We have to have a chaperones and so getting young people into our organisations and teaching them not just drama (because you could have youth leaders with two or three adults and a group of children) but on the technical side of things and having them involved in lighting and sound in small enclosed areas we cannot do any more. It is causing us difficulties. Volunteers just do not want to get involved and go down that route any more. Mr Pemberton: A lot of times I hear the phrase "all the fun has got out of it because we are having to watch our back for developing regulations and developing legislation", and there have been some major upsets between amateur groups and local education authorities, as I said, about the application of child protection legislation. Q84 Mr Hawkins: I rather feared that might be the case. That is something that you would encourage us as a Committee to highlight as a problem for you? Mr Rhys Jones: Yes, we are willing to take the responsibility to dispel the myths and to work with the companies about issues of legislation or what have you, but it is swimming up‑stream and legislation keeps developing, keeps moving and keeps moving - and the only funded organisations at the moment for amateur theatre in the UK are in Scotland and Wales. There are no funded organisations outside of that and yet we have to take these things on. Q85 Mr Hawkins: Sorry, Mr Williams, were you going to add something there? Mr Williams: I would not like anyone to get the impression that we do not take the legislation seriously. We recognise the need for all of this child protection legislation, for health and safety legislation, for licensing, for disability discrimination, but they do all impinge on the work which we as volunteers are doing. The legislation does not make any distinction between the voluntary and professional sector and we need to have the same disciplines as the professional sector without having the back‑up of the professional advice. Mr Monaghan: Our theatre management teams, if you take my organisation, are made up of teachers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, et cetera, who in the evenings become theatre managers and (if you take, for example, health and safety) become employers, so my organisation tries to provide advice and guidance to its members, but we draw on our own membership and any professional advice that they have to provide that and to feed it back. We have to put caveats into our advice to say "this is not to be taken as gospel; this is guidance". I brought for the Committee if they wish to see some examples of some of the work that we do in terms of advice and also annual reports if you wish to have copies. Q86 Mr Hawkins: If you could give them to our Clerks I would certainly be interested in them and I imagine, Chairman, that the rest of the Committee would be interested as well. Mr Monaghan: If we could have more resources to employ professionals to advise us. If I take health and safety again because it is a big issue and we have our own buildings so we have to ensure that the construction of sets and the lighting rigs are safe to use, in the last year my organisation put on four one‑day workshops for health and safety which we had to employ a professional to give to us and we have to pay out of our own funds or money to attend those workshops. We do them in licensing law, on the Disability Discrimination Act, et cetera. If we could have better access to resources to help our members develop these skills better to a more professional degree then I think it would help. Q87 Mr Hawkins: Do you take the view perhaps that if the Government is going to load all of this on to voluntary organisations like yours that the Government, having taken the decision to impose the legislation, ought to be providing the funding to put on the workshops to explain how the legislation is going to impinge? Mr Monaghan: I think so to a certain degree. The Government is loading legislation on us. The legislation is there for a reason and it is right that we should have good health and safety. Theatres are dangerous places. So we agree that legislation is appropriate in most cases but, yes, I do think they must recognise that amateur theatres do not have the funding resources that professionals do and, yes, we are trying to do the same job but without the same money and, yes, we would welcome that. Mr Williams: I think also it would be helpful to us if we were specifically consulted when legislation was in prospect rather than having to pick it up. Mr Pemberton: It is meant to be a statutory condition of the compact for relations between government and the voluntary sector. Every piece of legislation is meant to have been run by the voluntary sector, I am afraid it is not happening. Q88 Mr Hawkins: I agree. The final point was touching on a question one of my colleagues asked about the Equity rules. Is that again something that you would be inviting this Committee to consider recommending, that the Equity rules should be relaxed still further? You mention they have been relaxed in recent times. Mr Williams: I do not think I would put it in those terms. I would rather put it in the terms that it would be advantageous to theatre as a whole for the distinction between professional and amateur to be as indistinct as it is in other countries. Mr Rhys Jones: The relationship with the arts in general, whether it is theatre or whatever, is a continuum. You start in youth theatre. You might not come back to it. You might go into the professional theatre or you might not come back to it until you are in your 40s, as I mentioned earlier. You might come back in a different relationship as a teacher or as a facilitator. It is a very different relationship but it is a continuum. You tend to stay with your art form for your entire life so it is a different relationship at different times. Mr Pemberton: All professional actors have been amateurs in a previous life. Q89 Ms Shipley: I was responsible for the Protection of Children Act which requires you to do the checking and I was also responsible for changing Part 5 of the Police Act to set up the Criminal Records Bureau. You ask about consultation and how it would affect you. Can I assure you that one of the reasons I did the legislation was because a schools outreach person told me that when he vetted eight people to work in a voluntary outreach capacity of the eight people he wanted to vet and subsequently did, two of them were found to be child abusers, one a convicted paedophile and one just about going through court, so the sorts of people who are going to do things to children have a nasty habit of winkling their way into the voluntary sector in the nicest possible places such as the things you are involved with. I would hugely refute the idea that all the fun has gone out of theatre because of something like child protection. Come to Stourbridge. I am patron of our operatic society and also our theatre group and our pantomime group which is a complete sell out. I was pleased to shake hands only last night with an eight‑year‑old who had just been on stage. There were plenty of men involved, plenty of women involved, plenty of children involved, all ages involved, and it was a massively popular event. So the fun has not gone out of amateur theatre because of child protection issues, which I am sure you would like to agree with. If not, I would like to come back to you because you are saying that LEAs are inappropriately using it. I would like you to name names now because it is outrageous if they are doing that. I wrote the legislation. I know what is involved. Who are inappropriately using it? I am sure you are right; some are. Mr Williams: Can I say what is happening is that the 1966 regulations were specifically for child employment and they define how many hours a child can be employed. What they are being used for specifically now are as a child protection measure. They are not protecting against exploitation in employment, they are being used as a straight child protection measure. I have no objection to that. I have no objection at all provided that it is open that it is being used as child protection. The strange thing is that because it is employment law that is being used there is no protection for a child who is going to be on stage for only four days. They do not need to be registered, they do not need to have a chaperone. Q90 Ms Shipley: Thank you for telling me a loophole which I will be taking up with the minister. Mr Pemberton: Tom, that is not quite true. Can I clarify. What it is is the 1968 (not 1966) regulations were written in order to enshrine when a child needed to licensed or not licensed by a local authority and the regulations apply whether the child is licensed or not licensed. In fact, the requirement to have a chaperone applies however much the child is actually performing. What has happened is that in 1968 a specific exemption was written into those regulations to benefit amateur theatre which said that a local authority could issue what is called a body of persons exemption which would mean that the amateur group would not have to go through the form filling. It still has to abide by regulations but it does not have to go through the bureaucracy. That body of persons exemption has virtually vanished and some local authorities are refusing to accept it ever even existed. Q91 Ms Shipley: I would still like you to name names. Mr Pemberton: I will get on to that. Another thing they are doing is claiming the exemption from licensing, which happens if a child is performing fewer than four days in a six‑month period, cannot apply if a charge is made to attend their performance; and that is wrong. Two local authorities who made that claim were Birmingham and Solihull and we have got them to change their licensing policies as a result of pointing out to them that this was simply not the case. We are developing a very positive relationship with a body called the National Network for Children in Employment and Entertainment and are trying to get them to develop a model document for all local authorities. Q92 Ms Shipley: The Chairman is got going to let me ask many more questions. There are only two named authorities? Mr Williams: I am not aware of any local authority which has granted a body of persons exemption. Q93 Ms Shipley: Which group of people would find out that the LEA is inappropriately using legislation because legislation should be used appropriately obviously? Mr Pemberton: Each of our members would route it through to the respective representative body to say, "There is something going wrong here; they are telling us that we cannot do this." We hope what they will have done is read our information which tells them exactly what the law does say. They point it out to us, we go to the local education authority and say, "Oi, you should not be doing this." Q94 Ms Shipley: It is a shame my colleague Nick has gone because I wanted to explore the Criminal Records Bureau idea but perhaps it is not the moment now. Just to go on to another area, the link with amateur and professional. I have just intimated that at Stourbridge we have an absolutely thriving, top‑notch, superb amateur sector and it is great because all the traditional skills of tap dancing and ballet and all the different skills that come into putting on an operatic event or a pantomime are really thriving in Stourbridge, from little children all the way up to adults. It is fabulous. However, I do not think there is a lot of innovative work going on. There is a lot of traditional work which is fabulous and that gets everybody in the community involved and, as I said before, it is packed out, but the innovation is not there. How would you suggest that innovation in theatrical terms could be incorporated into the really hugely popular amateur events? Is there a way to do that so that we can grow the writers, because our dancers and our costume people are growing beautifully? Mr Pemberton: I can think of two ways in which we could achieve that. One is by providing some form of funding to an infrastructure body that can develop best practice and encourage new writing to come through the amateur sector because that cannot happen at the moment because no money is going in to develop it. The second one is back to venues which is if there was more subsidy going into the cost of hiring venues then more money could be put towards innovation because more risks can be taken by the amateur group --- Q95 Ms Shipley: I am ever so sorry to I cut you off but I know the Chairman is going to cut me off any second now and I just wanted to run this model by you. If the public funding is going into a major professional theatre and it is getting substantial public funding, do you think it would be a good idea for them to be required to develop links with amateurs which would allow if not the main theatre itself to be used then small‑scale foyer events to be happening virtually simultaneously, developing a relationship with the two? When they are marketing the main event the amateur can come in as well and the two can be marketed together so, for example, a reading could be done in the foyer event by amateurs if somebody has written a play, and just during the interval a short section of it could be read round the bar. I do not know. I am making it up on the spot. Mr Pemberton: What amateurs want is access to the stage itself not necessarily to the periphery. We want to storm the boards. Q96 Ms Shipley: Need it be either or should it not be both? Mr Pemberton: Yes, absolutely. Mr Williams: Of course it should and of course a theatre is a community building no matter who owns it or runs it and of course it should involve the whole of the community; I think that is axiomatic. Q97 Ms Shipley: Do you think there needs to be a statutory way of linking that money to community more than just bringing in schools for visits and that sort of thing? Mr Williams: I would hate to think that anyone was trying to force people into paths that they do not wish to go. I think leading by example is far better than legislation. Q98 Ms Shipley: How long will that take? Mr Williams: I think it is possible. Again as Mark said, if we were able in the amateur sector to push forward our own developmental things, we would then be able to link in far more effectively with our professional colleagues. Mr Rhys Jones: Quite apart from providing some sort of infrastructure support from the Arts Council of England, which does not exist at the moment for amateur theatre in England, you talked about changing things and moving from traditional to more innovative amateur theatre‑‑‑ Q99 Ms Shipley: I was misleading if I said from one to the other. I would like to have both. Mr Rhys Jones: Fair enough. Within Finland 80 per cent of amateur theatre productions work with a professional director because there is a fund that they can tap into to bring in a professional director which automatically boosts the quality of the production. Then you get professional actors who might like to work with that director who go for auditions at the same time, so you get more of a feeling of an organic theatre rather than professional and amateur. The two work together. Q100 Ms Shipley: How do you get the audience involved in that change? Mr Rhys Jones: The audience just go with it. There is not a problem with that. There is an amateur theatre production that has been in production for three years and playing to full houses and the cast changes periodically but it is a purely amateur theatre production in a place called Mikkeli. The 20 per cent who do not tap into that do so out of choice because they have their own director they want to work with who is part of the team and they do not want to work with a different director, but 80 per cent of amateur theatre companies in Finland work with professional directors so the whole field is nurtured at a seed basis, at a grass roots level. Q101 Ms Shipley: Is it a lot of money? Mr Rhys Jones: Who knows? Finland is a small country. Maybe it is the dark nights! Q102 Chairman: That was a very cunning ploy of yours, Debra. You kept saying "the Chairman is going to shut me up" so I did not dare to shut you up"! Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for your part in what we have found a very informative and entertaining session. Mr Williams: Thank you very much, Chairman. |