The Stage

New writing in subsidised theatre trebles over a decade

Published Wednesday 6 January 2010 at 16:25 by Lalayn Baluch

Subsidised theatre is hosting more than three times as much new writing as it was a decade ago, according to new research.

According to the report, commissioned by Arts Council England and undertaken by the British Theatre Consortium to explore the impact of ACE’s £25 million funding boost for theatre in 2003, new work now makes up 47% of the repertoire in large subsidised theatres.

This marks a significant increase from the findings of the Boyden report on theatre in 2000, which discovered that it comprised only 14% of work being staged. That report also argued that new writing was failing to attract audiences into main houses. But according to the recent research, the profile of new writing has been significantly raised following the funding boost.

Box office performance of new works has gone up from 62% average capacity in 2003/4 to 68.6% in 2007/8, while tickets sales have also increased, with almost 1.5 million sold in 2006/7, compared to just more than one million tickets in 2003/4.

“New plays no longer appear to be ghettoised in small spaces,” says the BTC report. “New play productions are evenly divided between auditoria of under and over 200 seats. Over the period of our sample, nine out of ten tickets for new plays were sold for main stages.”

The research, based on findings from 65 subsidised theatres, revealed that new writing for young people was a particular success story, representing 26% of all new writing productions.

BTC member and playwright David Edgar welcomed the results. He believes the 2003 uplift helped theatres become less conservative in their programming. He told The Stage: “That I think is good, because it demonstrates that playwrights are being employed in a variety of different ways and that playwrights are now much more a part of theatre-making than they were ten to 15 years ago.”

However, despite these notable increases, the research also revealed that playwrights still feel dissatisfied with the work opportunities available to them.

Edgar believes this is because writers outnumber available writing opportunities. He said that not enough was done to help playwrights develop their career once a first production had been staged and said that mid-career playwrights were unhappy working with some literary departments and dramaturgs because they were too prescriptive.

Edgar also criticised ACE’s decision to remove new writing from its funding priorities in 2007.

“One of the ironies is that the arts council has slightly turned its back on new writing and new writing is not a priority because it is more interested in experimental and innovative ways of theatre-making, including devising,” he added. “Just when that is happening, their earlier policies and support for new writing has suddenly become successful.”