The Stage

Theatre funding is a mountain to climb

Published Thursday 1 April 2010 at 15:00 by Alistair Smith

As those who argue against state-funded theatre cite The Mountaintop as the model of private sponsorship success, Alistair Smith argues the award-winning play is remarkable simply for the fact that it ever came into being

A little less than a fortnight ago, I found myself watching one of the biggest upsets in the history of the Laurence Olivier Awards when The Mountaintop walked away with Best New Play, beating the much-fancied West End hits Jerusalem and Enron in the process.

What made The Mountaintop’s victory all the more unlikely was the way the play had come to fruition. Unlike Jerusalem and Enron, it had not been developed through the subsidised sector - as most of our new writing now is - but was first staged at Theatre503, an unfunded fringe theatre above a pub in Battersea, south London.

Towards the end of its run, commercial producer Sonia Friedman saw the play and immediately decided to transfer it into the Trafalgar Studios, a West End venue run by the Ambassador Theatre Group that happened to have a gap after the early closure of its previous tenant.

This was a new, political play about Martin Luther King - not a comic romp, not a musical - which had come into being without a single penny of money from the government and no star names attached. This is incredibly rare.

A couple of days after the Oliviers, Arts & Business unveiled its new strategy for raising funds from the private sector. The mood among most of the arts world - and certainly the two main political parties - is that with public finances likely to suffer in the coming years, philanthropy, private giving, corporate sponsorship, call it what you will, is going to have to play a larger part in funding the arts.

The general argument against increased private support for theatre has been - to oversimplify somewhat - that it only works for the big boys - National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company and the like - and that private money is likely to have some kind of malign influence on the quality of the work produced. Surely, one might think, The Mountaintop is a poster-boy to counter that argument.

True to form, the Adam Smith Institute, a right-leaning think tank which has recently come out with proposals to all-but scrap government funding for the arts, certainly thought so.

Sam Bowman, writing on the institute’s website, says: “This year’s Best New Play winner at the Olivier Awards, The Mountaintop, is a remarkable work. Not only has it won near-universal praise for its depiction of Martin Luther King’s final night alive and secured a production run on Broadway, but it has succeeded without any government arts subsidy. What this shows is that state funding is not necessary for the production of great art…

“That a play like The Mountaintop was able to succeed without state funding vindicates the ASI’s recent report calling for government arts funding to be radically overhauled. Government funding for the arts distorts the market against unfunded but potentially very good plays by allowing bad, government-supported plays to undercut and out-advertise them. The result is that bland, state-approved plays can often out compete better plays that could not win the Westminster stamp of approval.

“Some have claimed that the free market inhibits innovation in the arts, which The Mountaintop’s awards and commercial success disprove.”

But, I’m afraid, this just isn’t the case. If one looks a little more closely at the situation, one realises that The Mountaintop is so remarkable because it is a complete and utter exception to what usually happens. Government funding may not be “necessary” for the production of great art, but it certainly helps. Of the nominees at the Oliviers - which one might like to remember is run by the Society of London Theatre, a majority commercial organisation - The Mountaintop was the only work in the Best New Play category which hadn’t received state subsidy. If one looks back at the last five Olivier Awards - four out of the five best new plays have come from the subsidised sector.

And, while The Mountaintop has indeed originated at a non-funded venue, Theatre503 does everything it can to operate like a subsidised theatre, just without regular funding from the arts council. Rather than relying on government support, Theatre503 relies on box office, money from trusts and foundations and the kindness of both strangers and friends.

“It’s very easy to look at this as a success story but it’s entirely dependent on knowing which people to ask to pay for your work,” explains Theatre503 co-artistic director Tim Roseman. “It’s extraordinarily limiting to the creative process - it’s restrictive to the theatre in terms of the kind of plays that it can produce.

“Because four of the eight shows we produce each year have to come with funding attached from external sources, it means that people are coming to us with a project that their well-connected university links or their private patronage, or their comfortable background or parents’ friends, or their industry connections are paying for. No disrespect to those people because they are often extraordinarily talented artists, but in no way is that representative of the actual gene pool of people who should be making theatre.”

In other words, The Mountaintop could easily have slipped through the cracks had the financial side not also been in place.

Theatre503 is resourceful and imaginative about the way it raises money to fund the work it produces - as well as more traditional friends schemes and donor relations, it organises events such as charity poker tournaments to raise funds. But, as a small venue, it has to work hard to scrape together enough cash to put on its shows and when you’re asking for money from private donors, it often comes with far more strings attached than public money.

“Philanthropy as a top up is fantastic,” adds Paul Robinson, Theatre503’s other artistic director. “But the problem is that it more often than not comes with contingencies - a typical example might be someone who will give us money but wants to be all over the show. And that’s obviously not an ideal scenario.”

The Mountaintop, as it happens, was initially funded almost entirely by private donations - people who were willing to support the talent of an emerging playwright. They were, if you like, investors who never wanted to see a return on their cash other than the success of the show and its team. That, of course, is wonderful, but extremely rare and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that hundreds of other great plays are going to be found this way.

The Mountaintop was, if you like, a beautiful fluke, made possible thanks to the hard work of a talented team, many of whom gave their time for free or below market rates, and the good fortune that a commercial producer came to see the show in the first place and then managed to find a West End home for it at short notice. It is not an example of how we’re going to find hundreds of other great new plays.