UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 254-iv

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE

 

ARTS development: THEATRE

 

 

TUesday 22 FEBRUARY 2003

MR STUART ROGERS, MR ANDREW ORMSTON, MS PAT WELLER

and MR GREG HERSOV

 

MR IAN BROWN, MR MICHAEL PENNINGTON, MS HENRIETTA DUCKWORTH and MS ANGELA GALVIN

MR PAUL EVERITT, MR COLIN ABLITT, MS KAREN HEBDED, MR ERIC GALVIN, MR HAMISH GLEN and MS JOANNA REID

SIR CHRISTOPHER BLAND, DAME JUDI DENCH, MR MICHAEL BOYD and MS VIKKI HEYWOOD

Evidence heard in Public Questions 311 - 438

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee

on Tuesday 22 February 2005

Members present

Sir Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair

Chris Bryant

Mr Frank Doran

Michael Fabricant

Mr Adrian Flook

Alan Keen

Rosemary McKenna

Ms Debra Shipley

________________

Memoranda submitted by Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham City Council, Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Stuart Rogers, Chief Executive, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Mr Andrew Ormston, Arts Directorate, Member of the Rep Board and City Council Cabinet, Birmingham City Council, Ms Pat Weller, Executive director and Mr Greg Hersov, Artistic Director, Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, examined.

 

Chairman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, can I thank the Birmingham Repertory Theatre for their hospitality here today. We very much appreciate it. From time to time we think it valuable to hold formal evidence sessions outside the House of Commons and it is very good of you to allow us to be here today. I would like to welcome you. This is part of the major inquiry we are conducting into theatre, and we are anxious to ensure that all aspects of theatre nationally, regionally and commercial subsidised local authority, are covered by this inquiry.

Q311 Alan Keen: At an earlier evidence session those representing amateur theatre were complaining that they felt there were still barriers - surprising nowadays to me - between the professional theatre and the amateur theatre. Can I have your comments on that? Do you think that exists in your area, and, if it exists, how can you break that down and encourage amateur theatre more and give them more access to professional theatre?

Mr Rogers: I am happy to answer how we view that in Birmingham. There tends to be an underlying suspicion between the two communities, but I do not think it is that real or that deep. The two areas that we have explored here, over the last three years have been very successful. One is through our education Outreach Programme. We have been offering master classes to amateur theatre companies, not only in acting and directing but also in the technical aspects of the work, so our chief electrician here has been out doing master classes in lighting and lighting design in amateur companies around the region. That has proved incredibly successful and popular. The other aspect that we have actively encouraged for the last two years - and this year will be the third year - once a year we have done a large-scale production on our main stage, which has mixed professional actors and professional creative teams with large community amateur casts. We have done two new plays related to Birmingham - musicals about Birmingham that we commissioned - and this year we are doing a new production about Don Quixote with Matthew Kelly and George Costigan playing the two lead parts. We work in partnership a local company called Shysters, who work with young people with learning disabilities, and we work with Chicken Shed in London, which similarly works in that area - and then up to sixty or seventy local amateur performers. So there will be a complete cast of about a hundred that will perform here for two weeks on our main stage and then go to London. Those sort of initiatives have helped enormously in Birmingham, certainly to break down the barriers and preconceptions on both sides.

Q312 Alan Keen: Is that relatively new?

Mr Rogers: It is new for this particular theatre. I would not claim it was new for the whole country. Similar initiatives are happening up and down the country, bringing the two communities together.

Mr Greg Hersov: In Manchester we have very strong amateur groups, and, rather similar to Birmingham, the way it seems to have worked with us is that there are various things we do within the theatre to do with certain educational programmes, and most specifically being able to mount certain productions, where we have involved people from the community in the production in a close way. A lot of those people have come from the amateur groups. There is give and take in the relationship in that way. If I was being honest with you, quite some years ago we did have a period of time in our theatre for amateur groups, and we could not continue with that because of all the other work we needed to do in developing the theatre, and it slipped away. I think it happens in these kinds of initiatives within theatre companies which draw people in from the outer world, and there is a proper collaboration and connection that goes on to that. Also, in my experience, the two worlds are quite proud of themselves.

Mr Ormston: There is one other aspect of support as well. The City Council supports a number of venues and arts centres that make themselves available to amateur companies, and that is in music and opera and theatre, and including one venue we operate ourselves, the Old Rep Theatre, which is the HQ if you like for a number of amateur companies in the city.

Q313 Alan Keen: Following this theme from an earlier session, I was really pleased to hear from a representative from Wales that the Welsh Assembly was encouraging formation of arts forums in local authorities or larger areas, in order to further the links between different organisations - and this could be visual arts as well as theatre of course. There are venues available potentially that other groups may not even know about. Is this something you have thought about? We have formed a sports forum in my own local authority to further links between sports councils, where some had a surplus of resources and needed more members, and that has started to work well. I had thought of doing the arts, and I was delighted to hear that in Wales forums are being developed.

Mr Ormston: In Birmingham there are two or three levels to that question. One is that Birmingham now has eleven districts where we are devolving some services, and we are doing local arts plans with the district committees, so local arts forums are developing. One aspect of that is that each company, like the Rep, has responsibility for championing the arts in one part of the city. The Rep is champion for the arts in Northfield. Whether they can do anything at Longbridge, I am not sure, but that is in their patch. Another aspect is that we have a cultural forum which feeds into the Birmingham strategy partnership, which brings together sports, libraries, heritage, museums and the arts under one umbrella or framework. We also work with all of our clients and all of the venues in a regular sort of collegiate meeting, where we jointly plan together a meet about every two months to bring companies in, together with politicians and councillors, and to do some joint planning across the sector.

Q314 Rosemary McKenna: I would like to ask exactly what you do with young people, particularly the schools.

Ms Weller: We do a great deal with schools. In the last two or three years we have been trying to build in-depth relationships rather than just one-off hits and disappearing. We have a schools partnership where we approach certain schools. We go as far across the region as we can and as widely across the region to engage in a three-year partnership, which is very intense in year one, tailing off a little bit in year two and then in year three, because we cannot afford to do all of the schools. We develop relationships in that with teachers and pupils over a long period of time. They come to us and we go to them. We have even been so far as to do some supply teaching in some of the schools - workshops, support material, connected to the plays and not connected to the plays. That seems to be reaping benefits because the children seem to be taking ownership of the theatre rather just a hit-and-miss visit. They know the theatre and the personnel, and that seems to be working for them.

Mr Ormston: The City Council here has a specific grant funding scheme of over a quarter of a million pounds per annum which is specifically there to connect Birmingham's grant-funded companies with schools in the city. It is jointly operated by the education service and ourselves. We plan strategically across the education sector to connect all eleven of our major companies to schools in the city.

Mr Rogers: The Rep probably splits into two areas. One is connected to the programming of work on the main stage and in this space here, and the other is the work that our education team does outside of the building. In terms of the two spaces here, we have a particular bias towards doing work in the main house that has curriculum links of some sort, and we make sure that at least twice a year we are doing a show that is of appeal to secondary school teachers and curriculum links. That work has been recognised by the Arts Council because we get a national touring contract from the Arts Council specifically to tour one large-scale piece of work that is interest to schools/students. For instance, we have done A View from the Bridge, The Crucible and work of that sort of nature - contemporary classics that schools are studying. It is the backbone of our programme in there. In here, we have a space that is completely devoted to new work. We run theatre days where pupils can come in and spend the whole day in the building. They come in in the morning, and if it is in here they will work with the writer or director, exploring the ideas behind the new play that they are about to see; and then they will see the play in the matinee in the afternoon. The same in the main house: they come in and work in the morning with some members of the cast and the director, and they take a scene and re-direct it for themselves. Then they watch the play in the afternoon. Outside the building we have an education team that is solely dedicated to producing projects that happen out in the community or out in schools. We have two creative partnerships close to us, one in Birmingham and one in the Black Country, and we work very closely with them. The projects there are endless, to be honest, but to give you an example of two we have done recently, we run a scheme called Transmissions, which is about encouraging writers from the age of 13 to 25 to write plays. We have just launched the outreach version of that, where we are working with five schools in the city, and over six months self-selected pupils who are interested in learning to write plays are given once-a-week courses and instructions from directors and playwrights, and then they gradually write their work and at the end of the nine-month period we have a festival of all the work happening in here which is open to the public, showing all the young people's plays. Equally, on the main stage we did a big year-long project through the Creative Partnerships Project in Birmingham, whereby the senior management team of the Rep swapped places with eight teachers in Birmingham, and we each shadowed each other. We spent some time in their school and they spent some time in the theatre, learning what we both did. Then, together, we put together a main-stage project where we commissioned the writer and a director, who then worked in twenty schools in the city and with the pupils then devised the play, which was then produced in the main house.

Mr Ormston: An additional point is that there is a huge demand from schools. In a city like Birmingham, where there has been a range of initiatives over some years, the value of this work has become increasingly recognised by schools and teaches, and the ability of us to service the demand that grows from schools is a real challenge for the future.

Mr Greg Hersov: We all see it as a crucial responsibility and obligation for theatre to have this double thing, with young people and education, which is to have a vivid, creative and imaginative relationship as to work, but also to have many other things to do with developing skills for voices and creative imagination of young people. That is a crucial part now of any theatre.

Q315 Rosemary McKenna: We understand it is obviously in your own interests to get young people into the theatre so that you build the audiences for the future, which is absolutely crucial, as well as the work that goes on. Is it easier because the council is the education authority as well as the owner of the theatre? Does that make it easier to work with the schools?

Mr Rogers: It certainly makes it easier to have a local authority that is supportive of the notion of arts activity happening with schools and in schools, yes. As Andrew said, there are particular schemes in Birmingham where we can apply to the local authority for pockets of funding for particular ideas we wish to develop, which is fantastic.

Q316 Rosemary McKenna: Is it seen as a non-elitist thing? It is really important that if you are going out into schools it is about all the children, not just those children, because you want to break down barriers.

Ms Weller: The other interesting thing is that we get literally hundreds of requests for work experience from schools, particularly schools we have built up a relationship with, obviously, but also from schools right across the region. We supply those opportunities as widely as we can. It is in all departments - marketing and administration and so on, and it is a very good source for schools from that point of view, as well as the straight teaching of theatre.

Mr Rogers: As Andrew said, the problem really is one of capacity because the demand is huge. We cannot fulfil the demand of the schools in Birmingham, much as we would like to. The real challenge for the whole funding system is how a fantastic initiative like Creative Partnerships, which is wonderful but is concentrated on a very small number of schools in Birmingham and across the country, can be rolled out as an entitlement to all pupils across the country. That is the real challenge, and that is the funding challenge, as well as the capacity-building challenge.

Rosemary McKenna: I think you are absolutely right. The importance of evidence sessions like this is that you get to put that on the record, and others read about it and hear about it. That encourages them to become involved in that.

Q317 Michael Fabricant: Birmingham is the second largest city in the United Kingdom, and your funding is a reflection of this. I noticed in your submission to us that about 45 per cent comes from public funding and 55 per cent from box office, marketing and other receipts. That is great, so well done! Of your 45 per cent of public funding you get about ₤1 million from Birmingham City Council, but ₤1.5 million comes from the Arts Council of England, which is quite a substantial sum of money, and reflects the importance of the Birmingham Rep in the second largest city in the UK. Nevertheless, I contrast that with smaller theatres. I wonder what your reaction is to the Independent Theatre Council. When they gave evidence to us a few weeks ago, they criticised the Arts Council and its policy by saying that new kids on the block do not get much of a look-in, because the larger theatre companies - and they did not mention you particularly, but you are the guy sitting here today - take the bulk of the money, and very little spare money is available for new innovative theatre groups to come in. Moreover, they went on to criticise - again, not identifying any particular theatre company - by saying that maybe the Arts Council is not critical enough, and once larger groups are getting the money, they continue to receive it even if they are not performing. Do you think they were right in saying that?

Mr Rogers: It has to be borne in mind that a large proportion of the subsidy that comes to organisations like the Rep is there because we do run very large buildings, so we have huge overheads and a lot of staff. We are also a producing facility, so everything, all our costumes and sets, is made in this very building, so there are staff and workshops in the building. Therefore a lot of our subsidy is necessary to support that. The smaller-scale, more experimental companies do not have those overheads; they do not have buildings, they do not make their own scenery, or their own costumes normally. I think it is the responsibility of the larger regional theatres - and one that the majority of us grasp wholeheartedly - to work in partnership with those smaller developing companies, and to make our resources available to them as well. We are constantly co-producing in this space in particular, work with smaller emerging companies not only from the region but national companies, and allowing them to open their shows with us. Therefore a small-scale touring company will quite often work in partnership with us, and we will give them this space free for ten days, together with all our technical staff, in order that they can do the dress rehearsals, the technical rehearsals, and open the show, which they will then tour around the country. That is good for us because it means we get the premier of their show, and it is good for them because we are passing on some of our subsidy in terms of giving them the space and our time free. Equally, with the main house show that we are developing with the community, we are working with a very small company based in Coventry called the Shysters, and I know they have worked with the Belgrade. They will get all the resources of Birmingham Rep to use and work with for those six months. We currently have a show out on tour that we co-produced with a small-scale company called Moving Hands, which is literally only three people; but we have done that twice in the Rep and we have now promoted a 12-week national tour of it. It is important that more and more the resources that are put into these large organisations are not just there for us but are there for all the wider theatrical community, and most of us recognise that and are very keen to invite people in and say, "come and refresh our programming and our ideas by working with you".

Q318 Michael Fabricant: It is not just a question of touring companies; it is also a question of theatres. Later on we will hear from the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Crucible and smaller theatres like the new Lichfield Garrick, which you will be familiar with, the Derby Playhouse and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. They have buildings and infrastructure too to maintain, and some of those were saying, "we cannot get a look-in, let alone for any theatre company that we might form within our theatre building; all our money is going into the maintenance of the theatre". Do you think that the Arts Council - and we will ask them this when they come before our Committee next week - should be assisting in the maintenance of such buildings in order to promote theatre companies within those theatres, or do you think that they should restrict themselves to the maintenance of revenue funding of theatre companies rather than the infrastructure? If I may make one criticism of what you say, although you talk about the outreach, by your going out into the regions, it all predicates the fact that people have to come into Birmingham, into this space, in order to see those local companies. Is that fair?

Mr Rogers: I do not think it necessarily predicates that. We give those companies a chance to open their work here, and they will then tour to many venues around the region and around the country. We do not buy the exclusive rights to that production just because we have allowed them to open it. We would hope it would go on around the country, if not around the world.

Ms Weller: It is not only to do with the production, it is to do with the development of the artists in smaller companies. We do exactly the same in Manchester as Stuart does in Birmingham and we have small-scale touring. We get into lots of relationships locally and nationally but particularly locally, developing individual artists. In fact, we help them achieve what ITC are saying it is difficult to achieve. They start with us in a very small way, and we put our resources into this space - the technicians. We work with them creatively over a period of time. We help them administratively along the ladder to the point where they can actually apply for Arts Council funding, and not always but often achieve it. So the wheel does go round in that way.

Q319 Michael Fabricant: You say they can ask for Arts Council funding. Whether they get it is another matter, in fairness. The Arts Council has not got unlimited resources. In your experience - and you will probably answer in a monosyllabic way by saying "yes" but I will ask it anyway - is the Arts Council tough enough? Do they ask you the tough sort of questions that the Independent Theatres Council believe they are not asking?

Ms Weller: We recently had an appraisal - about three years ago - and that was about as tough as it gets, yes. A lot of recommendations were made and made very firmly, some of which we disagreed with, and we had long discussions, and some of which we could see the point. It is a very long process, at least a year from preparing through to the end of the recommendations. I would say it was tough; I would say we were taken to task on areas where we were not delivering, and we got some praise. I am sorry, it is monosyllabic, but having just experienced it, it was a tough process.

Mr Rogers: It is also true to say that up and down the country there are examples of theatres where boards of management or senior teams have moved on or been replaced because of influence from the Arts Council, because they were not delivering the sort of things they wanted to see for their subsidy. That doe happen.

Mr Ormston: Would you mind if I responded to one or two of your earlier points, because you asked a very wide-ranging question? The important point that both theatres have made, that they have developed a role as a hub of theatre activity in their centres, is something that we recognise. It is something that should be more formally recognised as a role for these very large theatres and well-funded producing houses. It is clear to me that in Birmingham both the Rep and Midlands Arts Centre, which is another producing theatre, have both occupied this space of working as a hub for other organisations and individual artists, and we need to see that more firmly in place and recognised in the way that they are funded. In terms of the theatres' investment in theatre buildings, there is a difference between receiving houses and producing theatres as a funder, and we see a difference. We do not fund the receiving houses in this city in grant format; we will support them in other ways, should they need it. We do not grant-fund because it is a more commercial entity and the quasi commercial way the receiving house works actually does allow them largely to look after themselves that way. However, many theatres live in heritage buildings, listed buildings, and there is a particular challenge of keeping those buildings up to the mark, and respecting their heritage. Some discussion between the heritage sector and the arts sector around that challenge would be very sensible, because the application of heritage funding to that big challenge will be needed.

Q320 Chairman: You have made a point, Mr Ormston, which demonstrates the kind of inevitably messy jumble of distribution of finance for the arts. On the one hand there is the ACE, which will have a policy - which is more than it used to have. Then there are local authorities, and the local authorities will be looking not so much at a policy overall for the arts as to competing demands from other local authority services as well. Then, you have the Lottery, and the ACE of course is a Lottery distributor; but, as Mr Ormston has pointed out, because you have listed buildings and historical buildings, the Heritage Lottery Fund may have a different kind of policy as indeed the London theatres are very much hoping they will have with their new project. Because there is such a profusion of funding bodies, and all of those bodies have different policies, logical perhaps within their own parameters, does that create difficulties for you?

Ms Weller: It is a little easier for us because we are not funded in any significant way by our local authority - it is a historical situation. Almost all of our funding comes from the Arts Council. A very small amount comes from the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities. It is not very small, but by comparison to what the Arts Council gives us. So it is less of a problem for us, although I have to say that over the last 10-15 years, up until quite recently, until the new Arts Council policy for theatre, it was quite difficult because quite often the Arts Council itself would have varying policies. You would have one from head office in London and one from the Regional Arts Office, and quite often they did not always see eye to eye, so we were juggling which priority we were going to deliver. In terms of the buildings themselves, we are a listed building, but when we applied for Lottery funding we went directly to the Lottery, not to the Heritage, and that is where our funding came from.

Mr Ormston: In Birmingham, the nature of the partnership between the Arts Council and the local authority at its best has been very, very productive. Whether that needs to be a more formal partnership is an interesting question, but certainly when we do work effectively in partnership it does work to the benefit of all the client organisations that we share. Stuart will have his own views on that.

Mr Rogers: I very much support that. In Birmingham the partnership seems to work remarkably well. I would also go along with what Pat said; that the reforms that the Arts Council has put in place over the last two or three years have radically improved the system, certainly for revenue funding. It is now a much clearer and much more transparent process. There are not a myriad of different schemes; there is one very simple central funding source. That seems to me a huge improvement. The links between the regional offices and the national offices are much better now; you get a much clearer sense that you are talking to one organisation than you ever did in the past. Where some of the issues arise is exactly where you mention, on the capital issue. Capital funding in this country for theatre or for the arts is in a perilous state because of the decline in lottery funding that is now coming through the system. I think it is not just about building brand new theatres either; it is about maintenance and upkeep of buildings like that. We are struggling to keep up with the basic maintenance. We live in fear of something major happening because we know we do not have the resources to be able to put aside every year so much money so that when the heating plant breaks down we can just go out and buy a new one. We do not have those resources, so although we can keep patching things up, our real fear is that when something major happens like that, where do we turn to? A national policy for a capital repairs and renewals for arts organisations would be hugely beneficial.

Mr Ormston: You mentioned competing resources in local authorities, which is absolutely right. One of the things that is urgently needed is the justification for the local authority expenditure in the arts and related activity in education. Many areas of local authority service now have formal targets or are recognised in the comprehensive performance assessment, whereas the arts still remains marginal to that. We do need to do some work fairly urgently that shows what impact investment in the arts has, in the way local authorities can use to justify their expenditure and investment.

Q321 Mr Doran: I want to follow about how you deal with the fabric of the building. Mr Rogers has probably answered my question. At the centre of our discussions in London has been the commercial theatre, which is quite unusual. They have put forward a proposal that ₤125 million should come out of the government or the public pot, and therefore they will put in another 125 million, and that would help to repair the fabric over 15 years of commercial theatres in London. Can you say more about how you deal with major capital projects? Is there any certainty at all when you are faced with these sorts of problems?

Ms Weller: It is robbing Peter to pay Paul. We have a relatively recently refurbished building - we were blown up by the bomb, and a great deal of Lottery money was spent on the building. That is six years down the line, and of course things are beginning to wear out and need replacing. We recently carried out a capital replacement plan, and came up with the appalling figure of 1.2 or 1.5 - I cannot remember which, but it is in the submission - over the next ten years, on worst-case scenario. It is true that just doing proper, sensible maintenance, year on year, is difficult enough. Like Stuart, I just hold my breath. Literally, when something goes wrong like the central-heating or air-conditioning, I rob Peter to pay Paul. If my exercise is coming in at 1.2 million, I suspect it will be pretty much the same for all the theatres across the country. Personally, really speaking personally, I would love to see the West End theatres refurbished and made more comfortable, but I worry about the needs of the subsidised theatre in the next ten years, for its building. One would hope that it would not be a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation.

Q322 Mr Doran: You are both in a different position, are you not? Birmingham Rep has very substantial support from the local authority, and the local authority has a fund - for which I congratulate it. You rely on the Arts Council.

Ms Weller: Which has no fund.

Q323 Mr Doran: Does that create a difference in your situation? Mr Ormston, would the City Council feel it had to put its hand in its pocket if it had major problems?

Mr Ormston: Certainly the Rep would feel that the City Council should put its hands in its pocket! We have tended towards being involved in any capital development in the arts portfolio in the city, and there is usually an element of equal leverage between the Lottery, the Arts Council and ourselves, which we try and respond to as positively as we can. That can take a variety of guises. It can be direct capital investment; it can be some arrangements around loans or loan write-offs. There is a variety of ways in which we can assist, depending on our own circumstances. We have quite severe competing needs for capital ourselves right now. I think one of the things that really needs to be tackled is the view of the regional development agencies and their investment in culture and cultural infrastructure. It seems to me that this infrastructure is an important part of the visitor economy and the economy of the city, and across the country there are varying degrees of success in introducing the RDAs as partners for capital investment or any other kind of investment, and that is something that should be looked at. If these theatre buildings, venues and concert halls did not exist, then the RDA agenda of flourishing cities and economies would not exist either. I would like to see that tackled.

Q324 Mr Doran: When I was looking at your submission from the City Council, you have obviously done some economic analysis. We have seen the national one, and you have talked about the actual expenditure and the actual jobs created, but you do not extrapolate and give us an economic impact.

Mr Ormston: That is the next step really. These impact assessments are quite hard. It has taken us four years really to come up with a consistency and sizeable enough portfolio to start drawing any conclusions at all, so we did not want to create a false picture; we wanted to be able to evidence and prove whatever we had done in this survey. So the next step is to start to apply the various impact models to it, and also we are this year extending the reach of that survey again. We are also looking firstly at the DCMS guidelines on evaluation and impact to see if we could incorporate the national guidelines as well, so we can see the model applied elsewhere. I would like to see this model applied across the region actually.

Q325 Mr Doran: Picking up another point from your submission and following Mr Rogers's point, which was a very good one on market co-ordination and funding for the arts generally, the Chairman has already pointed out the different funds. I do not think he induced RDAs and there are probably one or two others as well. You mention in your own report that you feel the local authority contribution is not properly recognised by government and is not taken into account. Do you have a strategy for arguing for more parliamentary policy and full recognition for local authorities?

Mr Ormston: Yes, there is work going on. Interestingly, Manchester and Birmingham are the only two cities currently trying to come up with an LPSA, a local public service agreement, phase 2 target for the arts. It has proven to be a hard and rocky road. I have been comparing notes with Manchester and what has happened is that our justification for spending on the arts has always been seen as a negative thing, that it is stopping children truanting or stopping bad behaviour or whatever. We are looking to see if we can have a positive recognised outcome for the arts so that we can hand-on-heart state the real value of the arts to our own councillors, as well as DCMS and ODPM. We feel that it is not correctly expressed by these rather more negative takes on the outcomes. In Manchester's case, they have been focusing on community cohesion as their justification of like-for-like investment, and here we have been focusing more on young people and the aspirations of young people. We have three weeks left to satisfy DCMS and ODPM that we have done this work satisfactorily for them to accept it. But it has been a year's work, and it has been difficult. We need to see that achieved across the piece.

Q326 Mr Flook: Can we look further at the balance between Arts Council funding and local government funding. It is historical, is it not, as to why Birmingham funds here a lot and Manchester does not fund you very much?

Ms Weller: It is a very specific historical thing in Manchester.

Q327 Mr Flook: I am trying to get it from a national perspective. That is true in lots and lots of different places, is it not? Is it a chicken-and-egg situation?

Mr Rogers: I think Manchester is probably the exception amongst regional theatres, in terms of the balance between local authority and the Arts Council?

Q328 Mr Flook: If I can touch on my constituency, the local authority spends a lot of money on our little theatre, the Brewhouse. The Arts Council funding from the south-west funds Yeovil, which is not my constituency, but it gives a huge amount of money, and there is a huge disparity there. The Arts Council funds for what you give to the artistic world nationally and in your own region, and it funds you to a greater extent: is that really fair? You get a lot of money from the council-tax payer and you do not; but you are both doing the same sort of job for your local environment.

Ms Weller: I am going to have to explain the historical situation - sorry! Although we do not, the library theatre in Manchester does; and it is just a question of a deal that was done 20 years ago. The Arts Council do the Royal Exchange, and the City Council will do the library. You could put all the money together and split it, and it would work the same - it just falls in that way. We really are exceptional, and I do not think there is any other -----

Mr Rogers: No, I think in most other regional theatres there is the partnership between the Arts Council and the local authority, in roughly the proportions that you see in Birmingham actually, give or take.

Mr Ormston: I have been in Birmingham for three years, and there has clearly been a long tradition of civic investment in the cultural sector. I was talking to the orchestra last night, and they told me that in 1921 they received a grant of ₤1,250 from the City Council, so there is clearly a long track record of investment and seeing the value of that, and the pay-off in Birmingham has been the clear understanding of the regenerative benefit of that cultural investment.

Q329 Mr Flook: Mr Ormston, you make quite an elegant case for the way in which the Birmingham City Council taxpayer, through the City Council, helps the arts and therefore again the people who live in the city, but is there a case for the money that the City Council or Greater Manchester gets from central government through the ODPM to be taken away and just given to the Arts Council directly - i.e., a bigger grant so that you can concentrate and allow artistic freedom to flourish without a local councillor telling you what to do?

Mr Rogers: I do not think there is a case because as organisations based in particular cities or regions, we have a responsibility to the artist generally, but we also have a responsibility to the communities whom we serve. Those communities are best represented through the local authorities, and the knowledge of those communities and the access to those communities is done through the local authorities. That, to me, is an essential partnership; that we work as much with our local authorities as we do with the Arts Council - and the two complement each other, in my view. I am not saying that the local authorities do not have any interest in the arts - they do, clearly - but they have a greater interest perhaps than the Arts Council in the way we relate to schools and the LEAs, to the work that we do in the communities, to the fact that we are the arts champions for Longbridge and Northfield Ward. Those sorts of issues are important for the life of this organisation or any organisation in a large city, and it is important that that formal relationship with the City Council is there. We also have to remember that the City Council own most of these buildings - this is owned by the City Council.

Mr Ormston: I agree that it is an essential partnership. It works best when it is seen as an essential partnership by both sides. Our prime responsibility is to the people of Birmingham and the Arts Council's prime responsibility is to the artists of Birmingham; and that combines very well indeed. There would be winners and losers across the country in that situation, which would be difficult to unpick. In addition, the kind of civic pride element to investment in culture and the arts in cities like Manchester and Birmingham are very important. It is all part of the whole; people being prepared to support the culture of their cities is part of the investment as it comes through a local authority angle to the cultural sector; so I think it would probably end up being a problem in all sorts of ways - hearts and minds and all sorts of issues.

Q330 Chris Bryant: You drew a distinction earlier between receiving houses and theatres that produce their own content, as it were; and I suppose that you could draw that distinction in the commercial West End; that every single one of those theatres is a receiving house. You can also argue, as they have argued very forcibly to us - and you say in your submission quite clearly, "it is important that public monies are not siphoned off to the commercial sector's undoubtedly important needs, for example capital refurbishment. The theatre owners are in the commercial world and should take responsibility for the required investment." That seems to be a pretty determined "no" to ₤125 million to West End theatres. Would you like to say a little more about that?

Mr Greg Hersov: You have said that quite strongly. We said it in the context of - what we are talking about is that the owners of the theatres are in a commercial world and they are commercial landlords with their premises in that kind of way, and we feel that that should be borne in mind quite strongly in relation to our needs and then subsidising -----

Q331 Chris Bryant: They will not make any financial gain out of any changes to the seating. I went to see Don Carlos last week, a production that started from the subsidised theatre. I am glad I am not a woman because I would have had to queue for ages for the toilet. The rake in the auditorium is so far that large numbers of even expensive seats are almost impossible to see the stage from, and I am sure there are many worse seats in the house. In terms of tourism and the number of people coming to Britain - and admittedly much of that then benefits London rather than the rest of the country -----

Ms Weller: I would not argue with any of that. As I said at the beginning, I would love, for women, for West End theatres to be refurbished. However, they are commercial landlords. They do take on knowingly the building that needs refurbishing and updating, and if there were lots of money I would say, "yes, yes, please go and do it"; but because I look at my own situation and I multiply that across the country, I am concerned that that money will then not be available to the subsidised sector that you are already supporting and investing in. It is the robbing Peter to pay Paul, which worries me.

Mr Ormston: I mentioned Heritage before. I think that with commercial theatres in Heritage buildings, there is a potential conflict between the commercial commonsense of the operators who might want to expand the stage-side, the seating capacity, create enough loos front of house or whatever, to increase their commerciality.

Q332 Chris Bryant: They will not, will they? They will -----

Ms Weller: When they sell on.

Q333 Chris Bryant: Even when they sell on, they will not increase the value of the property.

Mr Ormston: But they increase their take through the box office.

Chris Bryant: No, they will not. They cannot; they will actually lose.

Q334 Ms Shipley: I have been sitting here, in the Rep, thinking, "goodness, it is actually 30 years since I first came to Birmingham Rep. I remember very clearly my drama teacher at Kidderminster College falling over in shock when she realised she was teaching somebody who had never been to the theatre. Because of my background I had never been to the theatre. She immediately dragged me out that day and brought me here to see Waiting for Goddo. I survived! Birmingham Rep, for me, has been very interesting. I like the way it has now integrated into what I call the cultural pedestrianised area of Birmingham, linking Brindley Place and the canals, and the industrial facilities available there, all the way through to - well, I stop at the Birmingham City Art Gallery, because I am biased basically. There is a nasty little blip of horrible food places you have to walk through, which is all pedestrianised; but apart from that little blip that you have to get rid of - fantastic! It is really showing up Birmingham to its best. Visitors love it, and everything about it is excellent. However, my constituency Stourbridge stretches up to Quarry Bank, and Quarry Bank cannot be more than ten miles from here. I would place a bet on virtually nobody coming here from Quarry Bank - the established town centre, yes, possibly, and my constituency, which is mainly located in the Stourbridge area, has the highest level of artists and artistic sort of people in the whole of the West Midlands, I am told, and it is really thriving. However, how do you reach out? I am thinking of my constituency specifically because it is near enough to expect a relationship with you. I liked very much reading about "stay and play" and your innovative idea with Sandwell and Birmingham. How could you develop that with Dudley, which would be mine - okay, it is the next one because you have done Birmingham and Sandwell - and what would be the input from Dudley to make that happen? To me, it looks like a fantastically innovative way of doing it.

Mr Ormston: The blip is under discussion, but only under discussion. I am sure the coming years will see the blip change, and possibly quite rapidly. There are some minor improvements happening because it has a new owner, Argent, which has invested in the blips that exist. It is not quite as bad as it used to be. The outer ring is roughly the same challenge that you are talking about: how do we connect the city centre and this concentration of cultural resources at the city centre to outer Birmingham and the surrounding city region? It occupies us in all sorts of ways. The City Council - the devolution into the districts has been accompanied by a policy concentration - I think they call it now a city of flourishing villages - is trying to focus on what is out in the outer parts of the city. We have developed a number of schemes, some through the organisations themselves but others through programmes called animates or art sites where we are creating surrogate art centres and arts development professionals in the outer city, to actively connect with local communities.

Q335 Ms Shipley: What can I expect? Quarry Bank is ten miles down the road and must be within your target catchment - is it not - please? It would be the sort of place that you are looking for, but it would not be naturally easy; there is no centre, so how would you reach them? How are you going to reach my town centre? I can see that is dead easy, but how would you reach -----

Mr Ormston: Let me give you an example. Following this meeting I go up to Shard End in the city, which again is not known for its connection to the cultural centre of the city. I am going there because we have secured a funding package to turn a community centre into a music centre, recording studio and arts centre, and we actually have a local arts professional working there with the youth service, with community groups, and a whole range of groups. Through the activity there they make connections to some of the city centre's best organisations.

Q336 Ms Shipley: As theatre, how can you reach them?

Mr Rogers: You are certainly right. Something like 82-83 per cent of our audience is coming from within Birmingham. That is undoubtedly true. We do have a responsibility to the city by virtue of the ₤1 million subsidy which we get from the city, which clearly is important.

Q337 Ms Shipley: You have a million plus from somewhere else.

Mr Rogers: Yes, from the Arts Council. What we try to do wherever possible is work in partnership with surrounding local authorities to develop things like those you have seen in our brochure, in terms of the writers' workshops we are doing in Sandwell. We have an annual community tour, which is in rehearsal at the moment, where we commission a play that goes on tour to outside areas of Birmingham. I do not know whether it is going to Quarry Bank or not.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. As you can see from Debra and others, we could have gone on a long time more, but we operate within a reasonably strict timetable. Once again, thank you very much, and Mr Rogers I thank you again for your hospitality.

Memorandum submitted by Sheffield Theatres

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Ian Brown, Artistic Director, Mr Michael Pennington, Actor, and Ms Henrietta Duckworth, Producer, West Yorkshire Playhouse, and Ms Angela Galvin, Chief Executive, Sheffield Theatres Trust, examined.

 

Chairman: Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you here today. Clearly, as a Yorkshireman myself I am obviously very proud of the achievements that we have both in our own native city of Leeds and in Sheffield, and we are very glad to see you here today.

Q338 Chris Bryant: Mr Pennington, the last time I met you was at the Old Vic, when I was researching with Glenda Jackson, and you gave us some very funny stories! What do you think should happen to the Old Vic, because we have had the Old Vic before us already?

Mr Pennington: You cannot argue with the success they are having. This lash-back that is happening with Kevin Spacey I think in due course will disappear. I, of course, hanker back to the repertoire in the days of the Old Vic in the days when I became stage-struck and spent a lot of my life. In the last manifestation, where Peter Hall tried to sustain those things, it was not viable for one reason or another, but I am not among the Spacey-bashers - as long as he can fill the theatre and as long as he can keep it going. There are all sorts of problems connected with the Vic which are probably not central to what we are discussing today, one of which is its geography, and the other one, which is that it is much more loved and cherished by people of my generation probably than people under thirty who would much rather go to the Young Vic. I do not have a formula about how it should survive, but if it is succeeding under this regime, they should continue.

Q339 Chris Bryant: Have you got a formula for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre? I think you held the view previously that the old idea was not a good idea. Do you think that the new thrust suggestion that we will be told about later on this morning is a good idea or a bad idea, as an actor?

Mr Pennington: It is a more wide-ranging debate than I was expecting! As a matter of fact, I do. Michael Boyd showed me the plans not long ago, and I think it is a good idea. I always felt that the fabric of the building should be kept, because it is exceptionally interesting - apart from being listed in any case - although it clearly needs all sorts of facilities to be added into it. What is needed is an up-to-date playhouse inside it; the current theatre is too big, seating up to 1200/1300. For straight theatre, for anything other than musical theatre, I think that is too big a theatre. As long as the RSC can accept that they no longer need to use a proscenium arch theatre regularly, which of course the old theatre is - and now they will not have that any more, in their home town - then I think it is very good. If it is like the Swan, albeit bigger, then it will obviously be a success. In other words, to rebuild the theatre within the fabric seems to me a solution, as indeed it always did seem to me the solution. It is amazing how simple the decision seems now as opposed to three years ago.

Q340 Chris Bryant: Despite the fact that some people think that the whole building looks like a crematorium?

Mr Pennington: I have never been to a crematorium like that - "jam factory" is what you used to call it. I think it has a grace of its own.

Q341 Chris Bryant: Let me ask a broader question. There would be those who would argue that investments in the arts, in theatre in particular, is an investment that ends up in the pockets of the middle classes rather than everybody; that it is a luxury rather than a necessity. In particular, when local authority budgets are hard-pressed they ask why on earth theatre should get the taxpayers' money.

Mr Brown: I think there is a problem about sharing the product out to people beyond the middle classes. There is no question that the middle classes like going to the theatre, and I do not blame them for doing that. I suppose the job of somebody running a theatre is to make sure that other people get the chance to see that going to the theatre is also a good thing. I think hand-in-hand you have to try and balance those two things together. You have to have the outreach programmes which ensure that working-class kids get the opportunity to go the theatre at a price they can afford, and to start giving people the opportunity to see a piece of live theatre early on in their lives, because once you get an experience of this and it is good - and more often than not it is good - you get a shift in young people's attitudes, or society's attitude to theatre. It has suddenly become a bit cool again. When you see an audience full of kids, it does give you hope that it is not something that is going to die out, which twenty years ago perhaps there were those who thought it might. There seems to be a re-birth, and as long as you keep renewing the audience and spreading access to it through cheap ticketing, through going out, and also bringing people into the theatre, then you have a chance of addressing that problem. Inevitably, there is a middle-class element; it is something that is particularly appealing.

Ms Galvin: I speak from Sheffield's perspective, in that Sheffield in South Yorkshire is a place of extremes. We have one of the wealthiest constituencies in the country, in terms of disposable income and professional qualifications, and we also have areas that fall into Objective 1 status. If we were simply to work with people who live in Hallam constituency, we could have a certain type of life, but it would not be very interesting. We cannot ignore the fact that there is a core of theatre-goers who have kept our theatres going through some pretty rough times; and we want to reward them rather than ignore them now. We also very much are aware that our place in the city and the region is as a major cultural institution, and breaking down the wall of being an institution and being a part of the community is something we have done strenuously over the last five or six years. We have had an education department working with communities for nearly thirty years consistently. The work we have done has been to try to analyse what prevents people from going to the theatre. There is a notion that theatre is too expensive, and we found that prices are of course a barrier. People have to work out whether they can feed their family or whether they can afford to take a bus somewhere. Going to the theatre, arguably, is the least of your problems, but we do not want the price of a ticket to become a barrier to attending something in our theatres. There are other issues about just being used to the etiquette, if you like, of what to do in the building, of being aware of what you are going to see. One of my favourite analogies in our work with young audiences is that if they go for a pizza, they know they will get a pizza; if they go to the pub they know they will get drunk; but if they go to the theatre they are not quite sure what they are getting. So a lot of work with building audiences with different segments has been to break down the mystery of theatre and to enable people to understand not just the whole culture of it but the particular productions - not programming work that we think will tick boxes for young people, but to explain our work and to see who comes. That has been a very effective way of building audiences, from a genuine cross-section of the community we exist within. As Ian says, we have to accept that there is a large section of our audience that could be categorised as middle class.

Mr Brown: Can I add one thing to that, which I picked up from the previous panel? It is getting harder for teachers to take kids out on theatre visits because of regulations and because of the price of travel - they are dealing not only with all the red tape and arranging to take the kids out of school, but also with the cost of transport to the theatre on top of the theatre ticket. It is becoming quite problematical.

Q342 Chris Bryant: You have all said very functional things about the theatre rather than inspirational things about the value of theatre itself. It has felt a bit to me in the inquiry we have done so far that everybody has talked about buildings, and they have hardly ever talked about the theatre.

Mr Brown: Yes, we got to the class issue. I have been running theatres for quite a long time now - this is my third theatre company that I have been in charge of - so the passion of seeing a theatre full of an evening is what drives most of the staff at the Playhouse. There is something about the live theatre experience that nothing else comes near, and that is why it has to be valued. I think it is something to do with the fact that in a city like Leeds the theatre is one of the few places where a wide cross-section of the community comes together on a regular basis for the telling of a story, either through music, dance or drama. I think there is nothing like that for capturing kids' imaginations. So when you see a five-year old at a Christmas show on the edge of their seat, that for me drives me forwards to make sure that that can continue.

Q343 Chairman: Certainly theatre can be very cheeky and very inventive. I remember coming to the Crucible and seeing a production of The Comedy of Errors in which one of the twins was white and one of the twins was black. You certainly could not do that kind of thing in the cinema or anywhere else in the same way.

Mr Brown: It seems to me that the theatre is still an arena where certain things can be discussed which cannot be discussed anywhere else. The recent events in Birmingham - whatever the rights and wrongs - it created a huge debate that continues. There was a Channel 4 programme on it last night, and it engenders the kind of debate that this country needs. Often, theatre plays can tackle subjects that television and films will never touch.

Mr Pennington: If I may say the same thing in a slightly different way, I happen to be doing a play in London at the moment which deals with a family preparing itself for the death of the wife or mother from cancer. It is a not untypical genre of play, and it happens to be a comedy as well. I was thinking about it last night and realising that you could make a film or a television film of it very easily, and it would be effective, but there is nothing like doing that play in a theatre in which every single member of the audience is in some way or another interested in the subject - they have to be, either from their own experience if they are of the age, or if they are younger, looking forward. The sense of being in the same space and breathing the same air as the actors and the sense of there being something unpredictable - it could of course go wrong, and which in any case would be subtly different from the performance the previous night or the performance the night after, is an irreplaceable thing. The theatre is the only performing art which makes its audience talented in that way, because an audience knows at some level that it is collaborating and making the event successful or not. They know that they are necessary to the occasion, in the way that a cinema audience or television audience simply is not. I regard the theatre and the work done in the theatre as the tap-root, both for talent that goes on into film and television, but a form of life-blood - to mix my metaphors - for the audience as well.

Q344 Alan Keen: We did not embark on this inquiry because we wanted to ask clever questions of important people; it was because we wanted to give the theatre world a chance to give their views and so that we can then hopefully get people listening to them. I understand that when you are running theatres it is a tough job. You must have sleepless nights thinking about the budgets and how to balance being more creative and so on. I am not being critical of you for lack of mix with the amateur theatre, but we just want the benefit of your views because you care about theatre and getting more people involved. We did hear criticism from the amateur theatre that they were kept at arm's length by professionals. Maybe it is just because of budgets, but we want more people to take part, not just kids but adults as well. How can you, as the professionals, help involve other people in not just coming to spend money but for them to enjoy being actors themselves? What can you do that is not being done now? What more should you be doing to encourage the amateurs?

Mr Brown: My take on this is that I think there is a bit of a gulf between the professional and the amateur theatre, and quite rightly so. My feeling about the amateur theatre is that it is fantastic to put our energies into encouraging young people to participate in the arts. Young people can benefit hugely from the confidence-building that goes with participating in a drama class, or just discovering things that they never knew and giving them social confidence. When you come to adulthood, if you want to continue to do that and do not want to go into it full-time, you have the right to do that, and the amateur companies around Leeds are hugely successful. They have none of the overheads that we have, and rake in huge amounts of the box office - and good on them, really. This year we have invited one of Leeds's biggest amateur companies into the Playhouse, the first time that it has happened in 15 years. It will be a very interesting experience, and I am quite looking forward to it. I will be wiser at the end of that week than I am now. Until now I have always kept it at arm's length, but I think it is a fantastic social exercise and it is a way for people to produce theatre in areas where theatre provision is not great - and it works fantastically well.

Ms Duckworth: I would add to that. Obviously, like Manchester and Sheffield and all the other theatres you are talking to, we lead huge community initiatives with wide-ranging community plays. We have one happening this summer and we commission one in two years. There is an enormous one planned for 2007 to celebrate the charter of Leeds. Those are initiatives that we are leading. It is partly in response to your first question. We feel we can target certain groups or communities that we have been working with, to make sure that those opportunities are being offered to key communities. There are different sectors within the amateur sector. I think you are possibly talking slightly more about the amateur dramatic companies, which are usually terribly well organised and have armies of volunteers who are all brilliant at coming together and creating a show. I think their needs are sometimes not recognised, and I do not think that necessarily a producing theatre is all that they need. One thing that is happening in Leeds is that the council is investing in a new venue, which will offer opportunities for those groups. My experience, and my previous experience is that there is often a conflict between an amateur company's desire to produce at a certain time of year, and all the initiatives and work that the producing company is scheduling and working towards; and if those come head to head because we both want the same time, clearly we cannot meet both desires.

Q345 Alan Keen: Is that because there are not enough formal links between them? Please do not think I am being critical; I just want the benefit of your experience.

Ms Duckworth: Sure, but a lot of amateur companies do fantastically. The number of amateur companies doing Christmas shows this year is enormous, fantastic - I love it - and they are all potential audiences and engaging with the power of live theatre, and I am entirely passionate about that. However, we have our Christmas show on, and there is not room in our theatre for an amateur group to do a Christmas show when we are doing ours, and that is a hugely important, artistic and economic event that happens in our theatre. I would say, "bring on more provision".

Ms Galvin: I would echo Henrietta and say that the amateur theatre community is hugely diverse, and simply engaging with that whole community would be quite a difficult issue in terms of resources. In Sheffield we tend to relate to - without creating a hierarchy - the upper levels - the people who regularly and consistently produce quite challenging work sometimes. We have moved away from The Desert Prince and that repertoire and tend to do some fairly interesting work. Because we have the luxury of space within our theatres we do a programme to work into the Lyceum four times a year, so there are four weeks in a year that we give over to amateur companies. I really would not want to give any more time to amateur companies for all sorts of reasons, not least the commercial ones that Henrietta spoke about. Also, for each week that we programme an amateur group, we are denying a professional company the opportunity to express their vision on stage, which is not very helpful. The one thing that I really envy amateur companies is that all of the ones we work with have reserves, which is something that we do not have ourselves. It is quite a wealthy sector, surprisingly.

Q346 Alan Keen: Do you have any formal links with them or do you just see somebody is putting on Jack and the Beanstalk and -----

Ms Galvin: We have relationships with the four companies that come in for those four weeks. It is a very long-standing arrangement. We involve ourselves to a certain extent by giving technical assistance, doing production workshops with people. It seems there is a rash of these new-build schemes to house amateur companies, and Sheffield is also considering an application to convert an old cinema into a venue for amateur companies. We have not put any barriers up. We were invited to say that the town was not big enough for the two of us, but it is of course, and the amateur companies have all come to us and said, "our aspiration is still to come to the Lyceum and this just gives us space to work in". If you are creating more people, who I suppose become an informed audience, that is the important thing; that they have more of a sense of what it takes to produce work and to act in it, to light it and design it. That cannot be a bad thing for professional theatre. It is a bad thing if it cuts across opportunities for people who have devoted their lives to trying to make a living out of it.

Q347 Mr Doran: I am sorry, but I am going to get back to boring money and buildings, but it is an important part of our inquiry. You heard our earlier discussion with the Manchester Royal Exchange and Birmingham Rep. Looking at your submissions, both theatres have problems with fabric. Reading the Sheffield submission I am not sure I would want to visit at the moment, but that is another issue!

Ms Galvin: We will give you a white suit and a mask to wear!

Q348 Mr Doran: Getting into the nitty-gritty of that, the West Yorkshire Playhouse clearly has problems and those at the Crucible are much longer in the making. You are both at the stage where you are having to work out how you are going to finance the refurbishment to make your theatre safe for the public and for the employees. I would be interested to hear from both of you how you approach that because, as you heard earlier, there is a morass of finding that is not always easy to access. You are both in the subsidised sector, so I am interested to hear the practicalities.

Ms Galvin: Our argument is that the capital refurbishment of the Crucible is not simply a bricks-and-mortar case; it has to come out of a business plan, which takes a long view of the contribution that the Crucible can make to the cultural life of the city, and that of the country actually. It is not just that we want a new carpet or we need to clear asbestos; it is what we can do with that building to enable us to work for another generation. Certainly, I am not going to try and raise that much money again in my lifetime, and I do not think we would be able to. We had created a plan, which is very much sketched through in our submission. It is about generating energy from our building, which is driven by art, not driven by the need to remove asbestos. But in order to have a longer-term artistic vision, we do need to make our building fit for purpose. There has not been a history of capital investment for all the reasons that were gone through by the people who were sitting here before. We have had to navigate our way through the funding system to find the sources of money that can support our aspiration. The first port of call has been the Arts Council and grants for arts capital. We had had monies pencilled in for us, and we are in the process now of creating the development plan for submission in May, to go to Council for September.

Q349 Mr Doran: How long has it taken you to get to that stage?

Ms Galvin: The first feasibility study that we commissioned was in 2003, and it is unlikely that any building work will happen before 2007. In the meantime, the amount of money that has been pencilled for us - we have been told very, very clearly that there is no more money from that source. The amount of money is not gaining in value, but the cost of building -----

Q350 Mr Doran: You have been allocated a pot.

Ms Galvin: Yes, but we have to make the case to open that pot and get to it. On other sources of funding, our city council has been very supportive to the theatres for a long rime, and have indicated that they will try to match the amount that has been allocated by the Arts Council. That would be difficult for them to do, and we appreciate that, but it is very helpful for us to have at least their endorsement for the project and their understanding of the impact it would make not only on the culture but the city public space.

Q351 Mr Doran: If a major emergency came along that would disappear.

Ms Galvin: Yes. As we have all said, there are many demands on the public purse so we imagine those might arise in the time we have got. Following the funding cycle of the Arts Council means that we are out of synch with Objective 1 funding that we could have drawn down, or Yorkshire Forward, the RDA, was indicating that if we put a case through with the city, they might be able to lead the funds, but as it stands we will not be able to get that money.

Q352 Mr Doran: We heard evidence from Birmingham that that was not always an easy route, that you have to build up a relationship with the RDA.

Ms Galvin: Well, we are told in our guidance that we do not have to answer all of your questions! I think it is fair to say that RDAs have not managed to get their heads round what "culture" means. There is an interpretation of it as "leisure", and so shopping centres and sports facilities perhaps are understood but there is a vacuum there and we have tried to fill that vacuum with our arguments, as have many arts organisations in Yorkshire.

Q353 Mr Doran: Is it something that DCMS could help with? Have you tried that route?

Ms Galvin: We have spoken directly to DCMS in the past, but our experience is that the Arts Council does not enjoy its clients talking to DCMS directly.

Q354 Mr Doran: It is a long haul and a difficult one.

Ms Galvin: Yes.

Q355 Mr Doran: Meanwhile, you have to operate and function. What about your own input into the pot? Do you have to raise a proportion?

Ms Galvin: We have undertaken a commercial survey to see how much we can generate from our commercial activities, but it is a chicken and egg thing, because unless we can improve our facilities we feel the limits of what we can generate commercially. The ratio of our income that comes from our own activities is relatively high, about 76 per cent. We are working very hard to generate it, but we do not have reserves and it is very difficult to build up reserves. Every time we make a small surplus, it goes straight into repairing a leaking roof or improving access.

Q356 Mr Doran: That is the patching up, not the long-term goal. I am naïve enough to think that if you have got the telly coming in, then you must be rolling in money.

Ms Galvin: Your word is "naïve" and I would not disagree with you. Obviously, having the snooker is a financial incentive to us - less so than it was in previous years because there have been changes in the contract.

Q357 Mr Doran: You have not tried to auction it off?

Ms Galvin: Well, the snooker have tried to auction it off, and they are approaching - I think seven cities have put in bids to host the championship from 2006, so Sheffield may lose. The City of Sheffield is managing the bid for the snooker. We are the main venue, but there is a whole package attached to that. I am sure nobody here came to talk about snooker! It is one of those examples where you think you have something that is a sure-fire earner, and actually it can be pulled from under your feet, and then you have a huge hole in your budget and programme.

Mr Brown: A few clearer guidelines about what we are meant to do with the buildings and a little bit - it is a bit of a dirty word to talk about maintenance or refurbishment. I do not want to spend my Arts Council grant on bricks and mortar, but I do have a responsibility to try and keep that building open. We are lucky that it is a good building - they built it well. There are going to be some big items of expenditure, probably heating plants and air-cooling plants. We have been unable to raise any cash for the things that we would like to do to the building - simple things like re-carpeting or re-seating and making the theatres working a little better in terms of flexibility. One of the things it is making us do, and one of the things that lack of money generally is making us do, is obviously that we are getting into bed with various different commercial partners, both in the production of work on stage and also in terms of selling what few assets we have. We are doing a deal with the district council at the moment about selling some land at the back of the Playhouse, which will net us a million pounds. The purpose of that money is that we use the interest to help us maintain the building over a period of time. It just takes us down avenues that we do not really have a great deal of time to deal with, and we can get into some quite complicated negotiations with hard-headed developers, which is not really what we are trained for.

Q358 Ms Shipley: I am very worried about the fact that the Arts Council does not enjoy clients talking directly to DCMS. It would be very unfair of me to wheedle away at you, so I am not going to and will just put on record that that is a concern because DCMS really should be open and available to quite a senior level of people approaching, and it might be worth the Committee considering the implications of that. The major implication is the Department's lack of leadership on the word "culture". It has a good grasp of "media", and sports are reasonably obvious, but the culture is a bit open-ended. In many ways that can be a good thing, but maybe some leadership is needed. If anyone feels able to comment on that, please do now.

Ms Duckworth: I think the DCMS has endeavoured to make definitions. There have been a lot of beautiful publications about creative industries, and quite a lot of work done on that. I am not going to quote anything now because I do not have it in my head.

Q359 Ms Shipley: Do you think that is good and strong leadership?

Ms Duckworth: I think it was an attempt to offer a definition. I do not think all the opportunities that could be made for the agencies to work together, to join up thinking, are taken advantage of. To a certain extent, the capital challenges that we all have are perhaps a best example of that. We are potentially at the start of a very significant city development at Quarry Hill where the theatre is located. There are enormous challenges being presented there, and there are enormous opportunities as well. I am involved with running a theatre, not property development.

Q360 Ms Shipley: I think Birmingham has grasped culture quite well.

Ms Duckworth: What does not seem to happen is the link between those enormous developments - linking local authorities and DCMS. There does not seem to be a nice link there, so this must be an opportunity that will potentially be lost.

Q361 Ms Shipley: That is very interesting. Mr Brown, given the way you described amateurs and professionals, why did you invite them?

Mr Brown: Because it was neighbourly really, and I thought it -----

Q362 Ms Shipley: Enabled who - you or them?

Mr Brown: It was a neighbourly thing to do! There is nothing in it for us really. The Grand Theatre in Leeds is closing for a year to have a huge refurbishment of three million pounds or something, and they are homeless. I think it will widen our audience and will be good for us.

Q363 Ms Shipley: Why did you do it Ms Galvin?

Ms Galvin: We are good neighbours too! It does us no harm for people to find their way into our theatres and to realise they are genuinely nice places to be.

Q364 Ms Shipley: The reason I said that is because the West End theatres are absolutely, as far as I can see, resistant to having anything come into their theatre that might be called "community" or might take effort from them to bring in. You have both said that it will enhance your audience. The West End theatres want a large amount of public money and they do not want to have to do anything for it. In fact, they go so far as to say it is completely impossible for them to do anything at all. You say that letting amateurs in in some form gets more people in and enhances the audience.

Ms Galvin: We operate in communities. We have a relationship with the community that we are based in. West End theatres do not have that, so from the very beginning they -----

Q365 Ms Shipley: Arguably, they should be created because the west End is one or two miles from Southwark and Lambeth - really deprived areas. There is a major chance for it to relationship-build. Actually, it is not very far from richer areas as well; there are plenty of rich people living there - if you do not want to go for the poverty angle. The idea is to reach out and it does not want to do that.

Ms Duckworth: Just to give evidence because my previous life was in the East End of London, the West End are very happy to take the money of amateurs, and it happens all the time. There were amateur companies using the Palladium and using the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, but they pay for it.

Q366 Ms Shipley: They are very willing to take but not very willing to give.

Ms Duckworth: So the amateurs have access.

Ms Shipley: Only if they pay a lot. There is very little giving going on as far as I can see.

Mr Flook: That is a bit harsh!

Ms Shipley: Do you think?

Q367 Mr Flook: Yes.

Ms Galvin: We were talking about DCMS and culture, but the only thing I would like to add to what has been said is that the reticence about taking leadership and the definition of culture seems to me to be driven in part by a fear of being labelled as elitist

Q368 Ms Shipley: Why would that be? I agree with you that it might well be that analysis, but why would arts or dance be elitist?

Ms Galvin: Because we still sit here and face questions based on the class breakdown of our audiences, and those are things that come to the surface whenever there is any discussion of this sort about the arts.

Q369 Ms Shipley: Perhaps that is something to be addressed. The Young Vic has done a very clever thing in offering free tickets to Southwark and Lambeth residents. My feeling is that there would be some people that came in, and if there is a way of doing that - that the West End offered free tickets off-peak and at all sorts of times, to targeted areas - I think there is room there for direct action in broadening the audience base.

Mr Pennington: I do not think anybody in theatre either in or outside London would disagree with that principle. I am sure that a large part of your working day is spent trying to work out how to do that provision and how to do five-pound nights and all those other things. The National Theatre can do a ten-pound -----

Q370 Ms Shipley: No, that it was free is the important point.

Mr Pennington: Sure, but that is also a budgeting and funding consideration, as to how you can afford to do it on the scale you wish to do it.

Q371 Ms Shipley: My experience of going to the West End, with the exception of the sell-outs like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is that there is a proportion of empty seats every night. It is not terribly hard to work out which nights there will be - let us just say 2 per cent of tickets that are available, and give those away in the community. Is that an impossibility?

Ms Galvin: When I first started working at Sheffield Theatres we had what was called a "pay what you can" night, and people did come and pay what they could. I asked our box office to calculate what the average amount paid was, and it was 34 pence. I also asked for a breakdown of where these people came from, and it was from the Hallam constituency!

Q372 Ms Shipley: Exactly. Is it possible to give away free tickets in targeted poorer areas?

Ms Galvin: If it is targeted, but as I come from a marketing background, I would say that putting some face value on the ticket is more valuable to the individual using the ticket and to the theatre than to give things away.

Q373 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I feel very nostalgic about Leeds and the kind of theatrical upbringing I had. When I was brought up we had the Grand Theatre, which was too posh for anybody to be able to afford to go to, Harry Henson's Court Players and the Theatre Royal, Moss's Empire and the City of Varieties which no respectable person ever set foot in!

Mr Brown: The same today!

Chairman: It is very different today and very exciting. Thank you very much indeed.

Memoranda submitted by Derby Playhouse, Belgrade Theatre Company

 

Witnesses: Mr Paul Everitt, Artistic Director, Lichfield Garrick Theatre, Mr Colin Ablitt, Portfolio Holder for Culture, Lichfield District Council, Ms Karen Hebded, Chief Executive and Mr Eric Galvin, Vice-Chairman, Derby Playhouse, Mr Hamish Glen, Artistic Director and Chief Executive and Ms Joanna Reid, Executive director, Belgrade Theatre Company, examined.

Q374 Michael Fabricant: Stuart Rogers, Chief Executive of Birmingham Rep said earlier on that the split between council and Arts Council funding was pretty well typical. When we visited the Garrick yesterday, that did not seem to be the case, and I wonder if I could just ask to have put on the record how the funding of Lichfield Garrick works with the Arts Council, and then perhaps we can move along the table to the other regional theatres.

Mr Ablitt: We have a local authority commitment of something over £200,000 a year, and probably nearer £250,000 this year, currently working to an Arts Council grant of £30,000, which is RFO for the next year or so.

Q375 Michael Fabricant: You were here when I was asking the Birmingham Rep about the Independent Theatre Council's assessment which said that one of the weaknesses of the Arts Council, in their view anyway, was that they tended to provide funding to large organisations and by having limited resources prevented smaller organisations or new kids on the block from getting any funding at all, or very much funding. Would you agree with that assessment?

Mr Ablitt: That is the position we find ourselves in, quite clearly - the figures speak for themselves. I was not involved in the communication.

Mr Everitt: At the point that we came to the Arts Council for funding, the bank was dry.

Q376 Michael Fabricant: The distinction that has been made by all the theatres in the earlier evidence is that between a receiving theatre, like the London theatres that receive touring production companies which come in, and those that have their own production companies. I suppose it could be argued that the Arts Council should concentrate its funding not on the fabric of the building but more on the provision of new touring companies or new in-house theatre companies. What is the Lichfield Garrick's potential for providing that sort of new artistic direction?

Mr Everitt: Our whole theory is that if the whole culture is going to work, then we must be creating work that reflects our local community, and the only way to really produce work that reflects the local community is to produce it yourself. Our ambition is to do a programme of work every year that reflects our local community; so our ambition is to produce a certain amount of work ourselves. That will be then backed up with that touring programme.

Q377 Michael Fabricant: If you were producing your own in-house production - and you mentioned yesterday the Garrick run - would that tour go out to other theatres?

Mr Everitt: That is a possibility, if it has success, but in the first instance it must be having a conversation with its local community. That must be its first impulse. If it then has success, there is a possibility of it going elsewhere.

Q378 Michael Fabricant: Is that the experience of the Derby Playhouse and the Belgrade Theatre?

Ms Hebded: I am not sure I understand the question.

Q379 Michael Fabricant: What is your experience of Arts Council funding; are you getting adequate funding; did you find the Arts Council flexible enough if you did approach them, in providing funding for various initiatives that you came up with? Did you find the door closed? How responsive were they?

Ms Hebded: There is never enough money, always; and everybody involved in the arts is always arguing for more money for themselves. Part of the question we are wanting to ask in the debate we are wanting to open - quite clearly we do not have the answers, but how do we share that money? How is that money to best support emerging companies, emerging artists, emerging buildings and emerging art, whilst not losing the fabric and the important companies and culture that already exist? This is not a criticism of the people who currently work very hard within the Arts Council organisation, but the system sometimes does provide blockages and there is not a clear flow to enable the new and up-and-coming to flourish.

Q380 Michael Fabricant: Do you run your own touring company, or is it more of a receiving house?

Ms Hebded: No, Derby Playhouse produces all its own work. We are a producing company. We are a company of people within a building. We receive £600,000-£650,000 from the Arts Council and £400,000 plus from Derby City Council, so we do have a good match between, and I think that is very important. A question was asked earlier about whether it is important to roll funding into one pot, but I think Birmingham Rep's response in terms of the importance of being in local theatre and a local community, having money from your local community, and a relationship with your city council is really important.

Q381 Michael Fabricant: This is almost a chicken-and-egg question. It could be argued that the reason why the new Lichfield Theatre has not got its own production company is that they cannot afford it; and they cannot afford it because they are only getting £30,000 from the Arts Council; the Arts Council might well argue, "we are only giving them £30,000 because they have not got their own production company". How did it start with the Derby Playhouse? Did you have your own production company long before the Arts Council came along, or did you approach the Arts Council and say, "we would like our own production company; can we have the money, please?"

Ms Hebded: Derby Playhouse has always been a production company. It started from an amateur company in a building - which is interesting in terms of your earlier question. It grew out of an amateur community into a professional theatre company, and then received funding. I could find out when we started to get Arts Council funding, but all I know is that we were behind historically some of the buildings in our region, which means that we get less than they do because of the history. I totally understand where you are coming from, which is that you get less again, although you are in a different region, because there were people there before. As far as we can tell, it is all based on a historical model.

Q382 Michael Fabricant: Is that the same experience with the Belgrade Theatre Company?

Mr Glen: Yes. The Belgrade was the first civic theatre building in the country after the Second World War and reconstruction of the city, and was always funded as a producing house. It should be recognised that large building-based companies do not have direct access to additional funding; they are expected to use the money they have been awarded, and so new initiatives and developments are difficult to attract money for. I quite understand that really because they are protecting the monies that are available for the new-initiative younger companies. What is dispiriting about the discussion is that it becomes an either/or. I do not think any of us would not support the argument on additional investment into individual artists, young companies or the aspiration of the Garrick to produce. However, if a government is to hold funding to a standstill until 2009, that makes it pretty difficult for the Arts Council to be able to respond to that.

Q383 Michael Fabricant: The Independent Theatres Council recognised the point that you made, and it is undeniable, but they also said that the Arts Council just is not critical enough about shifting funding from poorly-performing organisations into new organisations which may perform better. I asked this question of Birmingham Rep and the Manchester Theatre, and particularly the Manchester Royal Exchange believed that the Arts Council were pretty tough on this. Is that your experience

Mr Glen: I think they are. It is a pretty rigorous analysis of what you are doing and what your aspirations are, and how successful you are in delivering it. Clearly, theatres go through good times and bad times and you want to try and support. If the option is to close down a major facility to release the monies to be able to start to respond to new initiatives that are emerging seems not a very sensible and cost-effective way of releasing money to develop the art form.

Q384 Rosemary McKenna: Can I start by asking the Belgrade Theatre about their strategy for the future. It is very exciting and is obviously well thought-out, and you are hoping to do well. However, you come from a very difficult background in the theatre. Is there one thing that helped you drive it forward and begin the turn-around; or was it a series of things? What helped you go from a very poor position to facing a very exciting future?

Mr Glen: I have only been at the Belgrade for about two years, so a lot of the initiatives were instigated prior to my arrival. I suppose I was brought in as part of the idea of making the change in the theatre. Clearly, the substantial investment that gave stabilisation gives a bit of financial breathing space to assess what you are doing and starting to put together a plan for the future. The idea of being able to develop our building and so develop a range of work to offer the city, and the amount of work we can play host to as a facility for community-based art work - without that sort of investment, it becomes very difficult to see a future or turn the theatre around. Those are probably the two big building blocks towards a re-description of the Belgrade.

Ms Reid: We also got money from the Theatre Review monies, which is a really important injection of funds into all theatre in England. At that point the balance between the money we were getting from the Arts Council and the money from Coventry became almost equal, because up to that point we were getting more funding from our local council than from the Arts Council.

Q385 Rosemary McKenna: You became fully independent of the local authority in 1996 and created a theatre trust. Does that mean that you own the building, or does the authority own the building, with the theatre being a trust?

Mr Glen: It is held by the local authority. It was directly run by city employees, and then they created a kind of arm's length principle and an independent board of directors and trustees to run the theatre.

Q386 Rosemary McKenna: That is very similar to the situation with the Cumbernauld Theatre, which I know you are familiar with. It constantly fights a battle between Arts Council funding and local authority funding. Is there a sense of concern? Here, it would appear that it is difficult for new organisations to get funding from the various Arts Council bodies, and yet the more traditional ones hold on to their funding. Is that the same?

Mr Glen: That is an issue, and as long as I have been in this business it has been an issue about what proportion of available arts funding was soaked up by the big institutions, and what was left over for individual artists, new initiatives or exciting business plans out of a place like the Garrick. That has always been the case. My argument is that it should not be an either/or. Let us assume that we want to invest in our big buildings to a level that makes them productive, accessible and enjoyable, and have sufficient monies to be able to respond to new initiatives and individual artists.

Q387 Mr Flook: Looking at the memorandum written by Mr Edwards from Derby Playhouse, "The Arts Council of England has a complete lack of methodology for allocating funding. The process for allocating funds is arbitrary, based on historical precedent." Do you want to tell us what you really think? It seems to me to be a little bit ungrateful.

Ms Hebded: It is not ungrateful. It is borne out of a level of frustration, and all that Stephen is articulating in what he has written is what Hamish has described and what the Garrick are experiencing. What is interesting when you talk to different levels of this arts profession, the further down the scale you go - if you talk to a small-scale under-funded company - and I ran one and I got not a penny - you hit rage. Further up the ladder you go, the more pleasant everybody is and the more pleased they are the more grateful they are. Of course we are grateful, and we do very well out of the money that we get and we are very grateful for it, and we feel that we give a good return on the investment that we receive.

Q388 Mr Flook: Is that partially because at one point we are trying to be socially inclusive and cohesive from a community point of view, and on the other side you are looking for subsidy to produce good art?

Ms Hebded: We believe that the people of Derby deserve the best art that they can have, and we are based within Derby and have fantastic support from our audience. We run at 80 per cent capacity, which is extraordinarily good. The people of Derby love their theatre and deserve the best we can argue for them. In a sense that is our job, to argue for our own organisation. It is also important, as people involved in the theatre, who love theatre, that we make sure we have the argument at a broader level: if it has always been the case that we have rowed about whether or not the historical funding base is the right way to go, is there an opportunity through a forum like this to start a debate about whether it has to be this way if it has always been this way. I do not have an answer as to what the methodology might be. Somebody had suggested that funding per seat is a way of going, which would enable Derby Playhouse to re-open its studio, and that would enable us to interact with the amateur communities, the local community, and the young emerging companies in a much more effective way than just with our main house, which is tied up basically to make our money.

Mr Galvin: Could I add to that that we are not ungrateful to the Arts Council; we get tremendous support from them, and from the city. One aspect that we have not touched on is the successful efforts we have made to diversify our funding, to bring in support from big private companies in the city and other institutions for particular parts of work in the social agenda as well as in the mainstream of what we do. We do believe, very powerfully, that the main stage we have - at the moment until we reopen the studio - is really powerful in supporting community and young people, and those things. We are just getting to the point where the money we are raising is roughly equivalent to the grant from the city council, so it can be done. What I feel, as a relatively new member of the board, is that we have not had enough encouragement or the right sort of encouragement from the Arts Council for those endeavours to bring in more money. The result of doing that might be - and I suspect Karen will kick me hard at this point - that in times to come we might make a smaller call on the Arts Council and allow more people to come in. There is not a notion in the funding, as I see it, of us being able to progress as an organisation and diversify and draw on wider sources of resources, which I do think is important for the whole community, to allow that flow of new organisations and new talents, many of which we would hope would be in Derby and communities we serve, which would be a responsible part of our relationship as trustees.

Q389 Mr Flook: Mr Edwards wrote that you have also been successful in securing funding from the European Regional Development Fund.

Ms Hebded: Yes.

Q390 Mr Flook: Do you sometimes feel that if you have been successful somewhere else the Arts Council will say, "okay, then; we do not need to give them so much because they have got this route to go down?

Ms Hebded: No. I think that used to be the case. I sense that less from them. What is interesting is that they are very nervous about us relying on that funding. There appears to be a sense in which they would rather you did not raise it, because they feel it puts the business at risk, because what happens if you cannot raise it the next year. You raise large sums of money through out development department for various initiatives, and we put that money into the work we do to be able to deliver more output, and then what happens is that you feel you are being criticised for doing that, as opposed to being encouraged.

Q391 Mr Flook: How do you feel you have been criticised? Is it asides, or do they write letters saying "we prefer you not to"?

Ms Hebded: We are in the process of going through a rigorous assessment with the Arts Council. Within the forum of that assessment it has been suggested that whilst we might be raising £400-500,000 a year within our business plan we only budget to raise £100,000, which is really demotivating for your team that are raising half a million. I understand their concerns. I understand that you are particularly good at doing it for a period of time, then there may be a time when they move on. Hopefully, within businesses people move, and in a commercial business you set up something and then you bring in new people to manage that, and it continues to flourish. I do not see why that cannot be the case. Theatres like the Almeida live off the money that they raise, and they raise considerably more than we do; but because Derby has not done it before, there is a sense that it makes people very nervous.

Q392 Mr Flook: Do the others feel that the Arts Council sort of gives nudges and winks towards what you end up with?

Mr Ablitt: Certainly it has been said to me that we have an issue in that we are local authority-owned. As to a reason I do not know, but whether it is suspected that effectively grants to a local authority-owned theatre is purely subsidising the rate, I do not know, but there is an unwritten preference against funding local authority-owned venues.

Mr Glen: My experience of the Arts Council is much more about their concern about a period of great risk for the organisation. If you are going into a £10 million capital value project, it is about making sure the business plan can see you through the vagaries and what can go wrong within a building project, and how your business plan will be able to sustain us - in our case a second venue with another 300 seats. That is mostly where their attention is lying in terms of the Belgrade.

Mr Everitt: I would confirm that, because that is very much what was said to me when I first started. "Your business plan is a load of rubbish", and there was a whole attitude that we were going to fail and fall flat on our face. Actually, our business plan has proved to be very robust.

Mr Flook: The advice is as good as the advice given!

Q393 Mr Doran: I also thank the Lichfield Garrick for seeing us yesterday - it was extremely helpful.

Mr Ablitt: We really need to thank you for coming. It was a great opportunity for us. Thank you very much.

Q394 Mr Doran: I am really pleased to see such a strong connection with Dundee Rep. Most of my experience of theatre in the 70s and 80s was the old church and then in the new theatre, so it is very nice to see that experience moving elsewhere. We are picking up two themes here. One is the problems of the Arts Council, which the Derby Playhouse and others have recognised, and the lack of transparency; and the other is the lack of co-ordination of funding and the funding from local authorities and the difficulties we heard from previous witnesses about getting access to RDA and Heritage funding and all the other areas. I am interested in another aspect and that is the comparison of lack of transparency and lack of any calculation of outcomes in funding - a pot that drops once a year in your lap. Maybe that is putting it too strongly, but sometimes it seems that way because it does not seem to change very much, at least in the way it is carved up. You make a comparison with the European Social Fund and the Regional Development Fund and the way in which outcomes are measured. Can you say a little how that could be translated into the way the Arts Council goes about its job? There are obviously two different functions but the outcomes are much the same.

Ms Hebded: It is not a pot that drops from the sky and we have a funding agreement with the Arts Council where we do have to deliver against that agreement. The European Social Fund is an interesting one, in that we went to them for our hot ticket scheme, which is a funded ticket scheme whereby we take a proportion of our unsold seating capacity and make that available to the most deprived communities within Derby and Derbyshire. We found that people did not want free tickets but they wanted funded tickets. They did not see the value in the free ticket, but if you could say somebody else had paid for it, then they would think that was incredibly valuable. We have given away about 7,000 tickets so far through that scheme. That is very easy to measure because we have very specific areas of deprivation that we are looking at, and we can measure that. It is much harder to come up with a transparent system within the Arts Council for what they expect from us and what we give back to them. I think we are pretty good at giving them the information they require. Where it comes unstuck is what Hamish was talking about earlier, which is when there was a new pot of money or new ideal or initiative; how that is given out within the arts community is never very transparent, or does not feel it from where we are. There was an Eclipse Theatre initiative where a pot of money was made available for a group of regional theatres to become a partnership, to create a piece of work and tour it between themselves; and we only knew about that pot of money after it had been decided which theatre was going to be part of it. Then we are told it is a pilot, which is great, because you think they will then come back out again; but of course those theatres then become that circuit, and how that is measured is not fed back to us, so that we could eventually benchmark ourselves against it and make a pitch for that money later on. That is where we are talking about transparency. It is not so much in our regular funded grant, but it is when there is an additional pot of money or a funding round or something where we are all going in together to look at who gets the money that has come out.

Q395 Mr Doran: We have heard from other witnesses about the risk factor. First of all, you have to get the finance to take the risk - and who will finance it. The Arts Council does not seem to be very good at risk.

Mr Galvin: Part of it is that they are very nervous with risk on our behalf, in a sense. They are not quite sure if we are making the right judgments about risk, and I see that very much as part of my job as a trustee of the theatre to make sure that we make the right judgments. We have people on the board who are very skilled and very professional in that role. Another benchmark of transparency that is important is the circulation of the information about performance. Benchmarking is very common in the sector I come from, which is education, and in other sectors. It is about knowing how good we are, in a sense, and how we shape up, and whether we should go and ask questions about how people do things better than us. I do not think we have got that, and probably not enough effort is made. I think part of the leadership role of the Arts Council is to help train and develop -----

Q396 Mr Doran: Do you need a theatres league table?

Mr Galvin: No, I would not go that far, having been in education! That said, there is a sense in which better information - maybe anonymised - can be put across the sector about what has been achieved. Karen mentioned 80 per cent occupancy in our seats. As a relative newcomer, I do not know whether that is good or bad! I look at the empty seats, and say, "I wish we could fill those". My suspicion is that we are doing very well in comparison with others, but it is nice, as a leader, to know where we are and what the scope for improvement is. It would be helpful if there were more transparency and information. No, I would not go for league tables; I think they collect some negatives as well as positives.

Q397 Mr Doran: It was tongue in cheek!

Mr Galvin: I realise that.

Q398 Mr Doran: As far as the Belgrade is concerned, you have a very carefully worked-out plan and have obviously been working hard on that. The comments you make about the Arts Council are fairly positive because they have clearly been with you and supported you all the way through, so yours is a positive experience. The points which you made about transparency and expectation - have you any views?

Mr Glen: I reiterate that I think there is a danger of a certain ossification of the funding channels, a sort of hardening of the arteries; and it would be good to keep it as flexible as possible. I think there is an inbuilt prejudice now, which I do not understand because there is a huge investment being made in regional theatres - but it is about, I guess, the exciting initiatives that might emerge from the buildings just as it might emerge from individual artists or small young companies. It is not beyond us to have exciting initiatives and attract money to deliver. We would argue that some of the buildings are very cost-effective agencies for some of the delivery of new initiatives and developments. I worry more about the idea of those three-dimensional outputs that are attached to European funding, which are very specific about full-time FTEs. The idea of the Arts Council sitting down for a series of targets for the year would be a nightmare. I do not think it provides the flexibility to understand the difference between Stratford East, the RSC in Stratford and communities in Oldham, say. I do not think there is a set of rules you could apply across the board to the various sorts of theatres with their independent artistic visions, with missions to take on particular pieces of work. If you simply allocated money on the number of seats and expected to increase box office by 10 per cent and reduce your overheads by X or whatever, those things would become a problem.

Q399 Mr Doran: One positive thing about the European sector is that because they are putting money into the arts in different ways, they understand the arts much better than, for example, the RDAs.

Mr Glen: I think they understand the arts as a tool for tourism; I am not sure they really understand the arts.

Q400 Mr Doran: It is only a link to tourism.

Mr Glen: There are various other pockets of money, but they are specific pots of money to develop the companies in cities and areas that are eligible.

Q401 Mr Doran: That raises the point about how the arts gets its message across in respect of the impact it makes on the economy. Earlier I was able to question a member of Birmingham City Council, and they have done half a job in identifying the actual spend and the impact on job creation, but the only way you will access public money is by doing more on outcomes, and impact; and it seems that the Arts Council and certainly the theatres have not been very good at doing that so far.

Mr Glen: I think that is true. At Dundee Rep I did an impact assessment ten years ago, and it became a crucial piece of evidence for me to take to Scottish agencies to attract money, which had previously thought it was an absurd idea that they should be investing money in theatre, until they had an economic impact, so they found they almost had to. I am less certain as to how well that has been done down south over the last ten years.

Ms Reid: We have one other building as well.

Mr Ablitt: Can I just add to that, because a comment was made that the Arts Council is less rigid with their outcome expectations. It so happens that I sit on the Arts Council West Midlands and there are a wide range and constantly fluctuating outcome expectations of their investments, but I just wonder whether they are communicated at all. I do not feel, certainly talking to Paul, that he has been made aware of them, and indeed that he has had much in the way of constructive dialogue at all. There are expectations about the council's money, but it is just such a maze.

Q402 Alan Keen: If we had been sitting where you are, we would have been giving you all the answers you wanted in respect of the questions. You have been so well behaved and respectful, and some of the other witnesses as well. Can I give you some freedom? We will put the report together - and DCMS might tell us to go and jump, but can I give you the freedom of not speaking for your own theatres and ask what paragraph would you like to go in there on theatre as a whole?

Mr Everitt: What a huge question! The whole thing about art must be - Samuel Johnson's thing and Shakespeare's thing about art must reflect society, is absolutely vital. For theatres like ours in rural areas, I think there are voices not heard in the country; there is a whole deafness to certain communities. I find Lichfield a fascinating community, in the fact that no‑one quite understands it. These days, in the make-up of its community, no-one quite wants to understand it. What is interesting to me is that as a working-class boy growing up, I felt that growing up anyway as a working-class man - in my early career at Theatre Royal Stratford East and then Oval House, I straight away identified that with the black theatre companies and the black and Asian communities, there was a huge struggle in the 90s for theatre for those communities to be created, and the whole fight with the theatres I was working with to reflect those voices. But they are not the only hidden voices in this country; there are also communities like Lichfield that are hidden. The resources are not being given for new artists to be created from those communities. That is the investment that we think should be coming out. It applies to your question to Birmingham Rep about working-class people going to the theatre. Actually, there are great examples of that in this country. Joan Littlewood was one of the principals of Stratford East in the 50s. There needs to be investment in those voices.

Mr Ablitt: I believe it is about quality of life. I think it is quite possible for art to get completely hung up in its existence for its own sake, but it is about the quality of life both in terms of the height of the quality and the breadth of people it touches. I think the function of our theatre and of others is to try and give the highest quality of artistic experience for the maximum number of people. Consideration of grant or consideration of public subsidy is a function of how you can achieve that bulk. The greatest thrill I get in our theatre is when I talk to people who have come to see a piece of quality art as a consequence of having been to see a piece of popular art that was probably their first experience in the theatre. We get adults and children in who have not seen theatre before, and they can graduate through the theatre to enjoying quality art, and they would not travel 20 miles for that experience because they would see it as a risk.

Ms Hebded: The two gentlemen on my right have talked about art and I am going to talk about money! To put it on the record, I think that the standstill funding that has been put on the table for the arts and the Arts Council is a scary place for those of us who work in the sector, especially because of the fantastic investments through the Theatre Review and through the extra money that went into the Arts Council is in danger of being lost if you start going through a stop-go like the one we had in the 90s. There is a real danger that we might go backwards - that everybody has a little bit of a breathing space to start to grow and flourish and look at what might be. That work has just started, and there is a real danger that we might just go backwards. As a sector we need to find the language to talk to government and to make the case. We need to be more transparent and come up with economic arguments, economic impacts and artistic arguments to have a strong dialogue with government to make sure we can continue. I am not talking about the same level every year because it is not possible, but we must make sure that we do not lose what was gained by that kind of foresight and investment.

Mr Galvin: I agree totally with what Karen has said but I also want to build on what Colin said a moment ago. One word I have not heard much about, which is an important ingredient - it is not the only reason or necessarily the most important, but people go to the theatre to have fun and to be entertained. I think there is room to recognise that that is an important part of people's quality of life. Like Colin, I get wowed by the wow factor - those people that have not been there before but come out and go "wow, I never knew things like this happened in our city". Perhaps there should be just a little paragraph saying that theatre is about fun too, which would be really good.

Mr Glen: I was going to make that point as well. We were certainly defeated in the industry by what looks like anything from the Treasury that threatens an investment that has been made and has proven itself to be hugely successful. I do not really understand the penny-pinching. The only thing I would add, in terms of building that together with art, is that you tend to get the mentality that shows a poverty ambition; you start to go into a mentality of the management of decline if you are on year-on-year cuts or stand-stills or equal cuts; it provides a different mental space for people in our sorts of organisations.

Ms Reid: At the moment theatre I think is at a really exciting stage. It is incredibly vital and the work is fantastic. We have seen Schiller on the West End, and it is absolutely amazing, and it is wonderful it is happening at the National. Actually, that is a direct result of the Theatre Review money that came in two or three years ago. It is sustained, regular funding which is really important. It allows the theatre to change gear, and we are ready to carry on and move on and move up, and to go back to the stop-start funding is a real disaster.

Chairman: That is useful time. Thank you very much indeed, and for your contribution this morning.

Memorandum submitted by Royal Shakespeare Company

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Sir Christopher Bland, Chairman, Dame Judi Dench, Honorary Associate Artist, Mr Michael Boyd, Artistic Director, and Ms Vikki Heywood, Executive Director, Royal Shakespeare Company, examined.

 

Chairman: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like very much indeed to welcome you here today. Sir Christopher, it is a great pleasure to see you! I think you probably come with a sigh of resignation having felt you had escaped our clutches in various other personalities before. We are delighted, Sir Christopher, as always to see you and your associates.

Sir Christopher Bland: Chairman, when a medal is struck to mark those who have appeared before you over the last ten years, I wish to be in the queue because I have several clasps on it and a purple heart!

Q403 Chris Bryant: Things have changed radically over the last few years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. When we did a brief report a couple of years ago, demanding that the building be pulled down, at the time you agreed and now you are not going to do that and you are going to come up with some plans, which we will look at later on this afternoon. I understand the bill is going up from ₤50 million to ₤70 million. At the time we saw you then - not exactly you, but the Royal Shakespeare Company was then saying that you could not really provide a decent theatre experience inside that building, and now you say it is possible. Why is that?

Sir Christopher Bland: I will ask Michael to explain exactly how the new auditorium will fit into the existing memorial theatre, but, as you say, there has been a lot of change - new chairman, new executive director, new artistic director, new finance director, and several new board members. The first thing that the new grouping did was to look at the options and review them very carefully. It became very clear that the alternative of redeveloping within the existing memorial theatre made the most sense. It was the least expensive of the two options, but more importantly it has a real chance of getting built. English Heritage made it absolutely clear that while they were in favour of our proposals for redevelopment within the memorial theatre, they were opposed to the idea of building an entirely new theatre on the Arden site.

Q404 Chris Bryant: Does that mean that you had wanted to stick with your original plan of pulling down the building and building afresh but you think English Heritage would have forbidden that?

Sir Christopher Bland: They made it absolutely clear that they opposed it. However, equally important was the fact that while the new theatre would have produced, if we had been allowed to do it, a wonderful solution on a Greenfield site - which, incidentally, also involved knocking down a grade II building, the hotel which itself was not without its problems - what we never satisfactorily solved under that model was what you did with the memorial theatre. You still had it! Within that, the proposal was for a 400-600 seat small seat, which would have been additional to the spaces we already had. It was very clearly the unanimous view of Michael and his artistic team that we did not want and could not support what effectively would have been an additional theatre in Stratford. Those were some of the arguments that caused us to come out unanimously both at the board level and amongst the artistic and administrative team, in favour of the proposal that is now on the table.

Mr Boyd: I immediately cross-examined the claim that you could not get a theatre of the necessary size within the existing bookends if you like of the fly tower and the front foyer, the major structural elements that you may want to preserve. It was a mixture of persistence and ingenuity on the part of the team that enabled us to come up with what I hope is a thrilling vision of a very intimate theatre. The single most important achievement of what we are planning is the reduction of the distance from the furthest seat from the stage from 27 metres to between 14 and 16 metres. That is a massive improvement, democratisation, of the theatre space. Actually, that has been achieved partly because of the imposed restrictions of the existing building. I ran a theatre building in Glasgow for eleven years, which was within an old church. I knew that the resonances between the old and the new could be extremely valuable and serve theatre very well, so I did not have a sort of pathological phobia about the old. I think that the auditorium that we have come up with is going to be everything that we dream of. It was always a 100-million project. There has been no change in the price as a result of this at all. There has been re-jigging within it, but it was always going to be a matching 50 million from the Lottery and 50 million raised from elsewhere. There has been absolutely no change on that at all.

Q405 Chris Bryant: But now it is 70 and 30 out of the 100 - is that right?

Mr Boyd: No.

Sir Christopher Bland: We hope to get 20 from the money, but .....

Q406 Chris Bryant: As I understand it, the old theatre as it is now is basically two very large rooms, one with the fly tower above it and the stage, and the other where it is front of house, where the audience is. With the thrust that you are proposing, basically a lot of the action will move from one room into the other room, and that is why you get closer to those people in the terrible seats at the back and the top of the gods. Is that going to make a more intimate theatre, or is it really just that you are closing off one of the two rooms, so that the stage itself will almost become irrelevant?

Mr Boyd: It is palpably more intimate by the difference between 27 metres, which is unacceptable, and 14/16. The worst seat in the Almeida Theatre in London is 14.5 metres away from the stage. That is just over 300. We are talking about a 1000-seater with just as good a proximity. It is a minor miracle. The principle of the actors being in the same room as the audience is really one we inherit from house playwright, but it is also one that chimes very strongly for me with our reinvestment in ensemble within the company, and the unique part of the theatrical experience is the togetherness and connectivity of the experience between audiences and actors. That has the highest premium on it of all, for me. It is more important than amazing designs.

Dame Judi Dench: That is true. I would only say that after a long, long break I was at the other place, the old other place with the corrugated roof in Stratford in the 70s, when I came back recently and went to the Swan. The atmosphere when playing in the Swan, which when I knew it was an old rehearsal room, is quite electrifying, and actually very, very demanding on the actor. In a way, it is not quite so demanding on the audience. When I was there, I had a night off and went to see Beauty and the Beast and the main house, which is where I used to play all the time in the 70s, seemed to be like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. I was appalled about how distanced you felt when you actually went there. Although I adored the show, I thought, "if only it was more accessible to us sitting here". It is the difference between sitting at the back here and playing to somebody here, or all of us sitting here and somebody playing in the middle here. The wonderful thing about the Swan is that it is so adaptable to Shakespeare, and I cannot imagine anything not working there. The thing about the new theatre is that it is an extension in a way of that feeling. I can only think that that is an advantage to everybody concerned. I know that if you look at the sight lines - I know exactly what you are saying about moving it into the other half of the room, as it were, but from a whole area of the auditorium, that will be entirely inclusive of the production. It is only if you are in the main house, part of the main house is cut off. The actual sight lines will be much better.

Q407 Chairman: Will that depend on the play and the concept? When the RSC had a permanent London home, as it were, at the Barbican, the pit was one room, and when I saw Dame Judi in All's Well that Ends Well in Stratford last year, that was in one room. But it can also work another way with the proscenium arch, can it not? I saw you in Juno and the Paycock at the Aldwych and that was a proscenium arch performance and that worked brilliantly too. At Stratford would the concept there be flexible enough to allow different approaches, and not as in, say, the Swan or the Old Vic, put you in one room and that would cover the concept of the production?

Mr Boyd: It is not that confining a spatial concept to say you will be in one room always. I would say first of all the world is still your oyster without a 19^th century proscenium arch theatrically. I think increasingly - really film and other media have taken over the assault of the visual senses in terms of the amazing effects you can pull off. I think what is really special about theatre, and particularly about Shakespearian theatre, is the relationship between actor and audience. If we are a specialist theatre, to that extent that is what we should specialise in. I make no apology for that. The most flexible theatres tend to be the worst theatres. There will be a certain degree of flexibility within this space. You will be able to do all sorts of interesting things. You will be able to go into the round, conceivably. You will probably be able to play the different kinds of thrusts to a certain extent. You cannot design - and this was one of the trickiest things about the previous drive on redevelopment in Stratford - was the attempt to hang on to both proscenium and thrust ambitions. It does not work spatially; you end up with a room that has acres of space in it that reduces intimacy, makes acoustics more difficult, and atmosphere and tension very difficult to generate in the space. We are being uncompromising to a certain extent.

Q408 Chris Bryant: I remember seeing Peggy Ashcroft play the same part at Stratford, and one of the remarkable things was that most of the set was non-existent; it was very, very open stage, and she was a very long way away, and I was up in the gods, and yet she managed to make that seem a very intimate space. I just wondered whether that sense of enormous space, which is something that you can also bring to Shakespeare productions, which you will not see in many other productions, is something you will lose.

Mr Boyd: Shakespeare ain't Wagner nor should he be forced to try to pretend to be Wagner. He has got a grand scale of emotion and ideas, and this is not going to be some diddy space; I hope it will be able to marry the epic with the intimate, I hope. I listened fondly to stories of good experiences from the back of our balcony, 27 metres away from the stage. I have had some fond and sometimes some quite proud experiences myself in the back row of the balcony, but that is not an argument. Just because processed cheese can be enjoyable, it is not an argument for not having even better cheese. I do not buy that argument. I would buy it, I suppose, if we, as a company, were on the run from the necessary skill base for classical acting - if we were simply becoming more intimate because actors could not cope with anything bigger. If anything, the reverse is true. We are concentrating in a way now on the building of actor skills and actor training that we have not done for a very long time at the RSC and nor has anyone else in British theatre. I do not feel that we are doing it apologetically in a way.

Q409 Chris Bryant: Many West End theatres and other theatres were built in an era where the hoipoloy were not expected to come into contact with the posh people in the glamorous seats. There were separate entrances - and you have separate entrances for the gods, do you not? Is that one of the things that would be changed?

Mr Boyd: Yes. There will be no servants' entrances.

Q410 Chris Bryant: Not even for the actors?

Mr Boyd: Oh, yes, always for the actors.

Q411 Chris Bryant: I have written a bit about the theatre, and my experience was, from meeting many actors who have been very substantial figures in the 1960s and 1970s - very famous theatre and television stars - that when they come to retirement they live, to be honest, in penury. I just wondered whether you think that the theatre looks after its talents well enough and helps them financially and helps them make good financial decisions for themselves.

Dame Judi Dench: I do not think that you are advised about making provision for yourself; I think you have to be canny about that. But I do think that we look after actors very well. I do think that the whole business of Denville Hall and the committee that puts everybody in touch with everybody, works very well indeed. I hope that nobody slips through that net. It is just the lack of the draw. If you go on working, it is just luck really. I think that people are provided for, but not necessarily advised.

Sir Christopher Bland: They are a bit like MPs. This is a transitory and risky profession, and it has taken some time for MPs to have what you will be surprised to hear I regard as entirely appropriate provision for your retirement. That does not exist in either sport or drama; it is left to individuals to look after themselves. There is an argument that you should try to encourage 15-year old actors and actresses to start thinking about their pension, but this is really tough.

Mr Boyd: Before you get to that point, there is the issue of what you pay actors when they are working, which is one that we have to address if we are moving towards a situation where we are going to be asking actors to stay with us for two or three years; thus they cannot do their adds and their telly or whatever. We are going to have to up the ante of what we are going to pay those people to compensate for that. In our planning, we are beginning to take that on the chin. It is a good thing. As you bring the notion of consistency and permanence and ensembles to the fore, you bump into those issues, but at its extreme - I trained in Moscow, and a friend of mine was a member of the Pushkin Theatre there on regular salary, but he only performed about once a month. They can get to a stage that if you take ensemble too far it can almost get to a civil service extent, and they were well pensioned and so on. However, there was not a lot of job satisfaction.

Q412 Michael Fabricant: Thinking about being well pensioned, I used to work in the Soviet Union in the eighties, and they had a pension, but I would not say it was "well pensioned", but I take your point. Can I say how delightful it is to see Sir Christopher Bland again. I thought that he rather stalks us, first of all as Chairman of the BBC when he used to come before us; and then and now still Chairman of BT, and now as the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Sir Christopher Bland: Chairman, the stalking is entirely the other way round.

Q413 Michael Fabricant: I rather wondered whether your career path was determined solely on whether you had been interviewed by this Committee!

Sir Christopher Bland: This is true!

Q414 Michael Fabricant: I want to follow on a bit from Christopher Bryant's questioning. I am still a little confused about the genesis of this new idea of the regeneration of the theatre. I wonder to what extent it is determined by local opposition, by the opposition of English Heritage - which, incidentally, I thought was completely mad! I think the exterior of the theatre is ugly; it does not make use of the lovely river frontage; and I think English Heritage were completely wrong in saying the theatre shell had to be maintained, but there you go! If English Heritage and local people had not objected to a change in the building, would you have stuck to the original plan that we heard about and got so enthusiastic about three years ago?

Sir Christopher Bland: No.

Q415 Michael Fabricant: Why not?

Sir Christopher Bland: I think it is because of the second part of my answer to Chris Bryant's question, that if we had gone down that route it would have wound up with this very small theatre that we did not really want inside a building that we had not been able to pull down, and indeed has some wonderful listed interiors that are well preserved - and we can do something about the river and the front. The answer is that we would not.

Q416 Michael Fabricant: When we went round the theatre three years ago, it was clear that not only was the performance space not really adequate for its purpose, and that both actors and audiences felt uncomfortable with it, but behind stage the resources were terrible. I remember we went underneath the stage or behind the stage and there was an entire area where there were blocks and tackle doing God knows what! If my memory serves me well, English Heritage had preserved some amazing structure which nobody ever sees. Have you been able to resolve that problem? Has English Heritage said that at least you can move that structure and cart it off to a museum?

Ms Heywood: We have not got into the detail of that discussion yet but I have no doubt that that will be the case. What is now accepted on all sides is that we have to come up quite dramatic solutions to real problems now. In relation to the budget as well, this piece of work is not simply transforming the auditorium; it will transform the way the company operates in Stratford. I am sure that there are offices in cottages and there is very, very difficult provision made for production and wardrobe. We have no dedicated space for learning, and yet we have an extremely productive learning and education department, and we need to resolve these issues as part of the master plan of the whole redevelopment. It will be looking at the organisation as well as the auditorium. What we thought was very important in drawing a line and starting with a new team was to start with the auditorium. That was the bit that we have resolved as part of the process of the board deciding which option to pursue. I think that is fundamental in terms of the long term. The heart of any redevelopment has to be the problem you are trying to solve, and you hold on to that through all the ups and downs along the way. It was universally agreed that there was a problem with the RST.

Q417 Michael Fabricant: It was not just the auditorium, was it, because when we spoke to both the actors and the technicians, they spoke about backstage?

Ms Heywood: Yes, and that will be part of this scheme.

Q418 Michael Fabricant: It worries me a little because you say that some questions have not yet been resolved, particularly with regard to various structures which have no actual function nowadays and do not work, and yet were occupying huge areas behind the stage.

Ms Heywood: It is worth remembering where we are, which is that we are in the process of finalising our architect. We have got the centre of the scheme, in terms of the auditorium but the "what will it look like and how will it work?" is the next part of the job we will be doing. That will have to be in negotiation with English Heritage, and indeed all interested parties. Our plan is that that should be a very consultative process. I would feel from every conversation we have had to date with English Heritage that they would look very sympathetically on absolutely the areas that you are talking about where the old has got to be made way for the new.

Q419 Michael Fabricant: Michael Boyd made very clear earlier on that we are not talking about extra funding, that it is still 100 million; but that does need to be clarified. In your own submission Securing Resources and indeed Sir Christopher made this point, you are not only looking now for public money from the Arts Council but also from Advantage West Midlands, and it is going to be now a total of 70 million public funding, an extra 20 million. What would that extra 20 million be used for, or have I misunderstood what you have said and what is down here?

Sir Christopher Bland: I think you have misunderstood. The global figure - but you would have to go back and look at the previous plan - was always in round figures ₤100 million. That, then, had something of a Roman battle casualty feel about it. It was a very, very large number. In our application to the Arts Council we have broken down in very considerable detail exactly where the 97 million plus VAT is to be spent, and also where it is to be obtained from. Roughly speaking, the crude figures are that 30 million we expect to be able to raise from private sources, from individuals, from charities, from foundations, and of course from America.

Chairman: I do not want to cramp any questions, but on the other hand, while the redevelopment at Stratford obviously is a very important aspect of a national institution, we are also very keen to learn from our witnesses their views of the role of the RSC and the role of theatre and wider aspects of our inquiry.

Q420 Michael Fabricant: Is Advantage West Midlands a new factor that has come in because it is something we did not hear about before?

Ms Heywood: I would have to go back and check, but I do not believe it is. I believe that that 50 million always included a substantial amount of donation support from the RDA, and that is in recognition of the fact that the RSC contributes about 35 million a year to the regional economy, so it has a very legitimate draw-down on capital investment for the region. Stratford has been identified by the RDA as in need of that sort of investment.

Q421 Michael Fabricant: One of the things that I have been thumping a tub over for the last few weeks, ever since I heard it given in evidence, was a point made by the Independent Theatres Council. I do not think you were here earlier on when we were talking about it with other witnesses who spoke of the difficulty of new theatre companies, and indeed new theatres getting in, because funding provided by the Arts Council tended to be locked in to large organisations - the example was not given but such as yourselves, such as the Birmingham Rep who are hosting us here today. It is causing a problem with newcomers coming in because of lack of funding and because perhaps the Arts Council is not tough enough in auditing the work that is done with Arts Council money. What is the Royal Shakespeare Company's view on this, and is there a role for it to nurture theatre companies outside Stratford, outside London, or indeed at the Lichfield Garrick, which has only been going for a few months?

Sir Christopher Bland: Can I answer the general question and then ask Michael to talk about the nurturing point. Our view is that it should not be either/or, that there is a very important role for national and international institutions of outstanding excellence, which is what the RSC, the National and other big arts organisations aim to be. That is something that requires the very highest standards, and that is what we aim to achieve. That helps and raises the general standard of acting throughout the United Kingdom, from which not only smaller theatres benefit, but also television and film as well. It is one of the glories of the United Kingdom that we have such a wonderful acting profession, which is in breadth and depth probably unequalled anywhere in the world. We play a part in that.

Mr Boyd: We take very seriously at the RSC a substantial subsidy from the public purse, in terms of our husbanding of it - Vikki might want to say something about our achievements. The main responsibilities I feel is that we put it to good use. It is about doing things that no-one else can. It is about exploring with a longer horizon, with a deeper inquiry than is simply possible for smaller organisations such as ones that I have run to do. We do have potential and responsibilities as an international ambassador for the country, which we embrace and enjoy. It is good, and it is increasingly two-way traffic. We are reviving the old world theatre season tradition of the RSC in terms of putting our work alongside that of the best practice elsewhere in the world, to make sure we are up to scratch. I think Christopher's point about us feeding the rest of the profession is increasingly true, as we invest more in training ourselves. More directly, at the same time as turning in on ourselves and investigating ourselves and reinvigorating ourselves, as I hope we have been doing over the last 18 months or so, and very clearly plan for the future, it is also time for the RSC maybe to open its doors, perhaps more than it has in the past. Cheek by Jowl disbanded itself and have tried to re-join the funding train, and they have found it very difficult; and they are quite cross about it. Our response has been to commission them to do two projects with us, in collaboration. It is partly selfish: we want to learn from Declan and Nick, but we also want to be able to act as patrons of what we regard as some of the best practice particularly in terms of Shakespeare. So there is a partnership there that makes sense to us. The Belgrade were in earlier on - last year we partnered them in one of the best productions of our New Work Festival, last autumn - the new Ron Hutchinson play which was commissioned from them. We collaborated with them on various levels. Next year, as part of the complete works of Shakespeare Festival, we will be commissioning many small and quite experimental companies to work with our voice department, with our movement people, with our text people, and with some of our directors, to woo them into approaching Shakespeare. They will be showing the fruits of their work as part of our Complete Works Festival. I think it is a very important part of our responsibility to engage directly with the sort of companies that you are talking about, but I must say that a lot of it is selfish in terms of our need to grow and develop as a company.

Michael Fabricant: A symbiotic relationship!

Q422 Mr Doran: I do not think anyone underestimates the importance of the RSC in our national culture, and particularly in the culture of theatre. I have very strong memories of a visit we made two or three years ago for our 2002 report, and how wedded the previous office-holders in the RSC were to the previous plan, to the extent that we produced a report of our own which was very supportive of the then proposals, and all the difficulties, as Michael Fabricant has said, were pointed out to us. However, we see today that you are going in a completely different direction. You have been allowed to make somersaults. In this inquiry today we have seen representatives of seven individual theatres and representatives of dozens more in previous hearings. They must look at you with a tremendous amount of envy that you can do these somersaults, make these big mistakes and get things so wrong; and yet here you are, still sailing along with your 12.9 million grants, still talking to the Arts Council about a ₤100 million project, in ways that they can only dream of. That does open up big questions, and it is one of the themes that has run through this inquiry, which is that the Arts Council funding is ossified: if you are in there you are in there for life or until you do something very bad. It seems to me that the RSC has got things very badly wrong, and you are still in there.

Sir Christopher Bland: First of all, we do not think that envy is the noblest of emotions and should not inform public decisions. Actually, I am sure there is some wish that they too could have some of the money that we have, but on the whole our relationship with smaller theatres is, as you said, symbiotic. It is collaborative and we are going to continue to work on that. We can go back over the history, but we were not there, so it is of limited value. What we can say is that the alternatives, which included the alternative that you originally supported, were explored at very great length and very carefully, and we were absolutely clear that it was a very radical change in policy, to move from that original proposal. But we are convinced that it is the right decision, that to have done that was plainly wrong from an artistic, financial, heritage and planning point of view. We think that, having examined all the alternatives including the old one, that we are now on not only the right course, but very clear course, and that it will actually happen. We believe that we can raise the money and get the planning permission and get a wonderful theatre built.

Q423 Chairman: Can I ask about what seemed to me, and I think a fair number of others, to be another mistake, and that is that while of course you are Stratford, you go to other places like Newcastle, but you ditched the London base that you had for very many years. I went again and again and again to the Aldwych, and that was the home of some wonderful productions then. Then one went to the Barbican, and that was ditched, and now you are wandering all over London, putting on productions, almost all of them superb; but as part of this re-think are you going to try and have one place in London which people know is the RSC in London?

Mr Boyd: Yes. It is a journey. To begin with, there was, I think, some confusion at the heart of some of the RSC's thinking. I am bound to think that - I am a new broom and am bound to have different ideas, and it is my responsibility to try and steer the ship. In terms of London, we began by being as prudent as we could, and collaborating entirely with commercial producers, at no risk to ourselves. That was a major contributing factor in us being able to get our house financially in order. This year we have taken on the financial risk of producing our own work in London, and thank goodness it has been very successful. We have not been wandering all over London. Our entire tragedy season has been presented under our own banner at the Albery Theatre under our management. We have hired the theatre. It has been extremely successful, exceeding its box office budget and so on. Under our own management, even more ambitiously you could argue, we have presented a season of Spanish golden age rarities, at the Playhouse Theatre, which again is going very well. We have even been able to bring in our own new work at the Soho Theatre, which is opening shortly. I think we are achieving a consistency. The RSC always, when it was at the Aldwych, had to be somewhere else as well, like maybe the Arts or the Donmar Warehouse. Even when it was at the Barbican, the pit was a completely inadequate space for Swan transfers and many a Swan show either did not come down to London or got squeezed into the pit, or had to go searching for another theatre that was perhaps more compatible. So this is not a new issue. We are working towards consistent relationships with theatres that are predictable for our audience in London. Eventually, certainly once we reach completion of our redevelopment in Stratford, we want a compatible space in London, that is within our own four walls. I have said that before, and that is our broad timetable that we are working towards.

Q424 Chairman: I accept that completely. I went to the RSC when it had a brief season at the Haymarket for example. You did some productions in not long ago at the Old Vic. Whatever the inadequacies of the Barbican or indeed the Aldwych, one knew where one was going, and that was important not simply in terms of personal convenience, but in terms of the identity of the RSC in London.

Mr Boyd: It has been important to people that they have known that they are going to the Aldwych to see our tragedy season this year. I completely agree with you, and my mailbag has made it clear to me as well; and that is where Vikki and I are working together.

Q425 Mr Doran: I take entirely Sir Christopher Brand's point that you are moving on, but we have to look at this point seriously. I am less interested in the RSC because you are obviously a major and important institution in this country, and the people in front of me are not responsible for the situation, but you have been able to perform somersaults, and there is a cost that must have had to be met then by you, and we would be interested to know what that cost is for the previous aborted plans. I am more interested in what it says about Arts Council funding and what it means for theatre funding generally, that one of the large institutions funded by the Arts Council can get it so wrong and yet you are still sailing on.

Sir Christopher Bland: First of all, a couple of years ago we were not sailing along; we were, to use your analogy, holed below the water line, and bailing out furiously. One of the somersaults we have done - and it has been a good somersault - is to restore our finances and run our organisation tightly and properly. Vikki and Michael and our new finance director have played an absolutely critical role in doing that. Last year, the year for which these accounts contain the story, we had a surplus of 2.4 million, and this year again we will also run a surplus; and that has gone a long way to eliminating the carried-forward deficit of those difficult years. Organisations can change in both directions. We have had very clearly - and the numbers demonstrate it in terms of performance and creative excellence as well, which is more important -----

Q426 Mr Doran: Can you say a little about the Arts Council funding process?

Ms Heywood: You are right that the Arts Council funding process has been sympathetic to the company in times of difficulty, but I could not say that that has been at the additional expense of, if you like, the public power. It did give the company a year, called our minimum risk model year, to take a breath, to slightly draw its horns in, in terms of its productivity, and to sort its house out. I do not think it would have been given any longer, and if you were on the inside you would have felt the pressure from the Arts Council to get on and solve it and prove that it was being taken into account. In that year, the company cut a million pounds out of its cost base in recognition of its responsibility to sort itself out. It is continuing to look at ways in which it can move money, as it were, from the administration into the work. That is a very important role that the company needs to play in leading the way in doing that. If you look at what the RSC does for its money and the way in which it does it - and we talked earlier on about the uniqueness of that - you cannot deliver it for much less. It now has to have responsibility not only for the work to present in London but also in Newcastle, and also out on the road regionally. You asked about how much public might have been wasted in the previous scheme. The answer to that is that the majority of the cost has been met by private donation, and only £200,000 of public money has been spent on the previous scheme that went nowhere. The company has been right in keeping the public pound that is spent on that process very low. It is now in the process of applying for the 50 million but that has not yet occurred. That award has not yet been made by the Arts Council and we are hoping that we receive it. The previous scheme was not part of an Arts Council award.

Q427 Ms Shipley: During evidence sessions on the previous proposal I was extremely critical of the financial viability of the project, so I would like to take the opportunity of congratulating you on what appear to be very realistic proposals and thoughtful solutions to specific problems. The thrust stage seems very exciting. I understand that we will have the opportunity this evening to look more closely at the proposals. My interest is two-fold. I have a masters degree in architecture which is just simply modernism and on the other side I have an English Heritage ... I have an architectural background but to me that was an irrelevance as to whether or not the building was pulled down. It was a case of whether it was financially viable and did it find the solutions to solve the problems. What you found your way to is solutions and so I congratulate you. I am sure it is a hard thing to do, turning round the finances as well. That is vitally important. I remember going through the feasibility study of the previous proposal line by line, and it was out by massive amounts of money in my personal view. The Arts Council should also be congratulated for the support it has given you in the way you describe. I pressed it very hard when it came before the Committee to investigate what was going on, and it has done that and it should be congratulated for doing that while finding a way of supporting you through a vigorous process. All of that is to the good. Many colleagues have talked about finances, so I will just look at your outreach work, because that was inaccurate as well when you came before us on the select committee. When I had the opportunity on the Today Programme to argue this, I was told by your then director that outreach in one specific part of my constituency - and he gave a massive figure for the number of people that had come to the theatre from that part and there are not that many people living there! It was hugely wrong. What I would like to know now is how you are addressing your outreach work. I know there are excellent ideas, but how have you been reaching out to the community?

Mr Boyd: The show you are seeing tonight by the end of its journey will have played 15 weeks from Forres to Truro to Ebbw Vale - you will only see one tonight, but they are excellent Shakespeare productions, Two Gents and Julius Caesar. They are playing largely at non-theatrical venues, and therefore playing areas in order to access areas that do not normally necessarily have that kind of theatre provision.

Q428 Ms Shipley: Would you like to take the opportunity to reassure me that you have changed the way that you are recording who is coming from where and who is going where, and how you are monitoring your processes?

Mr Boyd: We are really getting rather good now not only at the statistics of our audiences, but quite intimate details about their lives. We are beginning to get quite knowledgeable.

Ms Heywood: We have been monitoring the audiences that have been attending the regional tour and also the audiences attending the shows in London. We are about to start a similar journey with audiences in Stratford. We needed to get closer to its audiences. It has also been doing a large piece of work with its business partner, Ascentia, on analysing in a way we never could, because they put it on computers and things like that, the real detail of our audience - where they come from and what they like doing outside the RSC. That is opening us up to a number of different audiences. The interesting one for us is the family audience, which has tripled for Shakespeare in the last year. That has been as the result of our directly targeted ticket prices and our activities around productions. We have seen the success of that and want to continue it, not just in terms of the family audience, but into other segments. The other area we have been working with is with under-25 audience, which we have a great responsibility to do. We tried a scheme, which has been extremely successful, and we are considering continuing that into Stratford and other places, and 6,000 under-25 year-olds have visited the 12-week season at the Albery Theatre for a fiver, and those seats are not just the cheap ones, they are right throughout the house. Half of those can be booked in advance and half booked on the day. That works in terms of that audience because they are not traditionally advance bookers. They are absolutely the audience you have to get to because exactly the moment you start to lose people is about 16 or 17 through to 25. It has been phenomenally successful and we are now looking to use that in other areas. We are starting to target particular sectors of the audience and drive the ticket pricing to reach them rather than have a broad spread of a simple one-price reduction, and that works quite well for us.

Mr Boyd: I would like to join a couple of questions up on the danger of institutionalisation and ossification of funding and the outreach issue. We are currently engaged in a major overhaul of our thinking on touring, as one way of looking at outreach, and there is a danger that you evolve something that in its earlier stages of evolution was genuinely refreshing the parts that other things could not reach, and was radical and serving a very fresh, real purpose. It can go stale and sclerotic. With touring we have been looking back to theatre go-round, an early theatre and education small-scale operation that came out of the core of the company and played an important part in the early years of theatre education. This last year we piloted a scheme of doing a production with our core tragedy ensemble actors of Macbeth specifically for young people, which went to not a huge number of schools, but it went around schools in the Warwickshire area. It was so successful that we are going to build on that this year, and one of the comedies we will be doing specifically for young people. The findings of that really small-scale performing-in-schools kind of work, which became unfashionable for a while - that thinking is going to be fed into our touring strategy as a whole. It will need constant refreshment as we go.

Q429 Mr Flook: We discussed the plans for the auditorium, but when we went a few years ago there was quite a lot of talk about the Theatre Village, sometimes known as Shakespeare Land. What will happen to that?

Ms Heywood: The company is still working with the district council on a master plan for the waterfront area. Words like "Shakespeare Village" are perhaps unfortunate - well meant but unfortunate.

Q430 Mr Flook: Not my phrase!

Ms Heywood: No, absolutely. We are working with the district council and the county council and with local groups on how Stratford can really look at itself as an area of public realm. A large number of people visit Stratford every week, and we need to play our part within that redevelopment.

Q431 Mr Flook: So those plans of three or four years ago are still alive.

Ms Heywood: Yes. The bridge, the pedestrianisation - all of that is coming. It now needs to link in with our plans, and it is also applying to the regional development agency, the county council and district council.

Q432 Mr Flook: From when those plans all came out three years ago to today, how many of not just the senior but middle management teams are still in existence working for the RSC?

Sir Christopher Bland: We do not know.

Ms Heywood: We can come back to you with that.

Sir Christopher Bland: There have been quite a lot of changes.

Q433 Mr Flook: I appreciate there is always a revolving change, and my question was not directed at that. It was the management at box office, down to that level.

Sir Christopher Bland: We will give you a rough cut of the figures by the time you get to Stratford this afternoon.

Q434 Mr Flook: As one of the four national flagships, immensely important and of tremendous quality, is it for the Royal Shakespeare Company to lead the Arts Council of England, or does it happen that it is the other way round?

Sir Christopher Bland: That is a difficult question to answer - no doubt why you asked it! It seems to me that it is a relationship that changes. I think we are a leading organisation and we have to play our part in leading Shakespeare in particular and British drama in general. The Arts Council role becomes crucially important when things go wrong, and then they have to take some difficult decisions and push the organisation to change itself; and I think that works pretty well because look at what has happened. Then, when we ask for what in any terms is a very substantial sum of public money - is it going to be properly spent - are the objectives and the plans right, and can a project of this size - which is far bigger than anything that the RSC has contemplated for 50 or 70 years - be properly managed and run? That is where the Arts Council absolutely has to satisfy itself.

Q435 Mr Flook: They operate as - put it into the corporate world - non-executive directors.

Sir Christopher Bland: Yes, but we also have our own executive directors. Our board has very clear responsibilities for that. It needs to make sure that the executive responsible, that is Michael, Vikki and Andrew, and the project director who we have just appointed, who has a lot of experience to run this project, do their jobs properly. There are two tiers of supervision.

Q436 Rosemary McKenna: I totally and utterly support the RSC and the work that they do. My most exciting theatrical experience ever was in 1973 when I went to Stratford and saw Ian Richardson in Richard III and Eileen Atkins and yourself, Dame Judi as a totally wanton Juliet. It was the most exciting experience. You actually say there that the RSC has done more to revolutionise the teaching of Shakespeare in our schools than any other single organisation. Dame Judi, do you think that is the work that actually goes on in the schools, or the performances that go on?

Dame Judi Dench: I would love to accept your compliment but that was not me! I was at the Old Vic playing Juliet, but thank you very much.

Sir Christopher Bland: Including the wanton bit!

Dame Judi Dench: I will pass it on - I know who did it. I have an enormous trunk of letters from schoolchildren, mostly to the RSC, who have come on school visits to the theatre. The gist of a great deal of them is that they did not want to come at all and were very ambivalent about it, but they say, "having seen the thing we are totally changed", especially Trevor Nunn's production of The Comedy of Errors when we were the very first company to go to Newcastle. After the first night at Newcastle, when we came out and sang, the audience came up on the stage and we had to actually ask them to go home at the end. The repercussions of that were very, very young people, who said "I never thought that theatre could be like this". I could not feel more excited about the whole working of going out into schools and talking to people, and actors working with young people. The best thing is when they are rather half-hearted and unwilling, and then you can get them together, and suddenly wanting to see something at the theatre. When I went to Stratford in the 50s I can remember my parents and I getting some tickets and we could not go in because we felt we were not dressed properly, because everybody was dressed in a certain way, and that was how you went to the theatre. That does not happen now. Anybody can go in and sit anywhere and wear anything, and really appreciate it. Michael mentioned Theatre Go-Round, which my husband was in doing Henry V; and the feedback from that was like nothing you can get from an audience. You might get some people who might wait at the stage door or write you a letter, but the actual feedback you get from working with young people on texts - and that is what Michael is doing now - it is available to people to learn not only how a text is made up, which sounds boring but is not, but also how you can learn to speak and sustain your voice so that you can do 100 performances and not just four or five, or until it runs out. You can learn about the set, about the way things are made, and everything that goes into it. You can see the actual space that the actors work in. It is just invaluable.

Q437 Alan Keen: Dame Judi, if Mr Bramovich got fed up with football at Chelsea and gave you £100 million but said he did not like Shakespeare for example, how would you invest the money?

Dame Judi Dench: Who is this who is giving me this money?

Sir Christopher Bland: The owner of Chelsea.

Dame Judi Dench: I see, yes, of course.

Q438 Alan Keen: Would you give subsidised tickets to more people, or pensions for actors? How would you direct that money to help British theatre?

Dame Judi Dench: I would give money to small - which I do every week, I think - theatre groups starting up, just to encourage them. I do not think I would give them to pensions for actors - that is the risk we take. We take the risk of doing two jobs and then be out of work for the rest of our lives. That is why we take a dangerous path, so that is up to us to organise. The whole business of touring is terribly important, and I would expect to give money to more tours going round. I was the very first company to tour West Africa - Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. These are children who could never ever see Shakespeare and that was their syllabus - Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Arms and the Man. At the end of Twelfth Night, when the two of us came together - we were astonishingly alike as Viola and Sebastian, in Lagos the first time we did the performance it stopped the how for about 11 minutes. That kind of fire in somebody's imagination is just -----

Chairman: We all have our great memories, and among other things your Sally Bowles in Cabaret, for example, and other great theatrical experiences. You at the RSC do other things than Shakespeare, like your wonderful Jacobean season. Other theatrical companies may or may not do Shakespeare. Dame Judi for example was Cleopatra at the National Theatre, and it seems to me that above all the key thing about you is that you do Shakespeare. Whatever else you do, and however remarkable it is, the key fact that you do Shakespeare and can be relied upon to do it is fundamental to your existence and your future. Thank you very much indeed. We are most grateful to you for rounding off an excellent morning.