The Stage

Mixed reactions to Arts Council England’s £2.5m ticket giveaway

Published Tuesday 10 February 2009 at 18:35 by Alistair Smith

Arts Council England’s £2.5 million scheme to give away more than half a million tickets to under 26-year-olds across the country has been welcomed by some of the UK’s leading performers, but greeted with scepticism in other parts of the industry.

A Night Less Ordinary was unveiled at the Donmar Warehouse this week, with support from Spooks star Rupert Penry-Jones and West End performer Sheridan Smith.

Launching the giveaway, ACE chief executive Alan Davey said: “A Night Less Ordinary is designed to encourage more young people to go to the theatre. It’s as simple as that. We hope it will help create new audiences and a new generation of arts attendees, and we want, in particular, to reach young people in England who rarely or never attend the theatre.”

More than 200 venues, ranging from the National Theatre to a consortium of village halls in Cornwall, will take part over a two-year period and it is hoped that around 618,000 free tickets will be claimed by youngsters.

Penry-Jones and Smith both said that they felt the move would be good for performers.

“The idea of free tickets for young people is important to me personally because I love the idea of being able to perform to people of that generation,” said Penry-Jones. “Some of the best nights I’ve had performing in the theatre have been when there have been these schemes of free tickets and cut-price tickets, and suddenly there’s an electricity in the auditorium and you can feel it’s a different type of audience.”

However, leading industry figures have questioned whether the scheme is the best way to attract new audiences to the theatre long-term and whether the giveaway will encourage youngsters to return as paying customers.

“The initiative seemed to be rushed,” said National Campaign for the Arts director Louise de Winter. “The sector would have appreciated more time to think about how it might deliver something like this.

“Having said that, everyone wants to try to increase access and it will be interesting to see how ACE monitors it to make sure that these tickets are actually increasing access.

“The impression we’ve had is that people have taken it on because there was no alternative and they felt it was something they had to be seen to be getting behind. But actually, they would have preferred to have been properly consulted about means and mechanisms.”

This point was echoed by Charlotte Jones from the Independent Theatre Council, who said that there was “generally quite a lot of disgruntlement about the idea”.

She added: “There’s a feeling that it shows a lack of understanding of how the industry works and how you develop audiences for theatre. It’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem and it’s unsustainable.”

Davey acknowledged that giving away free tickets alone would not be enough to develop new audiences and stressed that the initiative required a holistic approach to encourage youngsters to return to the theatre.

He said: “A lot depends on what you do around it and how you grab and nurture the people that you get hold of, so they don’t become people who are just addicted to free tickets.

“We have to try all kinds of different things to make sure it does work and isn’t just a doling out of free tickets.”

Culture secretary Andy Burnham, who announced the outline of the scheme at last year’s Labour Party Conference, said he felt that the initiative was “sowing the seeds of something equally significant in the performing arts” as free entry has been for museums and galleries.

He told The Stage that he felt it would be particularly important outside of London.

“I think it might begin a healthy process of theatres questioning what they are doing and how they are selling themselves and what they are putting on,” he said.

“What I notice is that when I go to the theatre in London, there is a more age-balanced audience. In some theatres outside London, the age profile can be very heavily skewed towards the over-fifties. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s possibly because there’s a certain way of operating that appeals to certain age groups in certain parts of the country.”

* For more information about the scheme visit the A Night Less Ordinary website at: www.anightlessordinary.org.uk