The Stage

Redundancies likely as Watford Palace plans to become a seasonal producing house

Published Tuesday 11 November 2008 at 15:45 by Alistair Smith

Watford Palace Theatre is to cease to be a year-round producing house under plans put forward by management which will also lead to staff redundancies.

After its February 2009 schools production of Lysistrata, the venue will enter a period of restructuring during which it will not produce any in-house professional productions until the autumn.

From then, it plans to run a ‘seasonal’ producing operation, whereby it will operate as a receiving house during the summer months and as a producing house for the remainder of the year. The changes are likely to lead to redundancies among production staff and consultations are underway with those who will be affected.

Brigid Larmour, chief executive and artistic director of the Palace, told The Stage: “The fact is that since the theatre reopened, our fixed costs have been higher than our income by an unsustainable margin and, although we doubled audiences in the first year after I arrived, we haven’t been able to move far enough, fast enough to close that gap. So we’re looking at the whole structure of the operation. We’ve already reorganised the way we work in the box office to make some savings there, we’ve merged two administrative support posts into one, we’re looking at whether we can get better deals from our gas and electricity. We’re doing everything you would expect us to be doing when reviewing our business model.”

She added: “”In a people-based industry like the theatre, and at a company like the Palace, which has a very strong production team, and inspires enormous loyalty and affection in the staff, this is inevitably a very challenging process for all of us. But the hard economic realities mean that we have to take tough decisions in the short term in order to protect the long-term viability of this important and much-loved institution.”

Larmour explained she couldn’t comment further on potential staff redundancies, because of the consultation process which is ongoing. But she did stress that staff had been encouraged to bring union representatives with them to these meetings.

Equity said that it was in the process of arranging “urgent talks” with theatre management. A spokesman for the union added: “We are very concerned about what is happening at the Watford Palace. We’ve called for emergency talks with the theatre and have contacted the regional arts council and want to meet with them also.”