The Stage

Hackney gets green light for £1.1m sale to balance books

Published Thursday 18 March 2010 at 13:00 by Alistair Smith

Hackney Empire has received planning permission to redevelop a piece of land it owns adjacent to its building, paving the way for a £1.1 million sale of the site, which will go some way to restoring the beleaguered venue’s finances.

The historic London variety hall was granted permission this month by Hackney Council and is finalising its section 106 agreement - expected to be a formality - with the developers who will buy the leasehold of the property on Wilton Way near the Empire. As revealed by The Stage, the theatre was forced to close “for a period of reflection” earlier this year, after huge problems with its finances were uncovered.

Interim chief executive Clarie Middleton said: “What this means is that we can pay off a large chunk of the debt and therefore stabilise. We are looking to get as near as possible to break-even this financial year and, as we move into the summer, be able to pay off more of that debt. I think we may have got that deficit down to around £200,000 from £1.1 million.”

Middleton explained that one of the significant issues she had identified with the Empire’s historic box office performance was the audience was not made up of enough repeat bookers: “90,944 of all bookers - 85% - have only made one booking since January 2004. Although the number of bookers retained has nearly doubled (from 4,579 to 8,936), this still means that the majority of bookers each year are new. A loyal core of bookers can have a disproportionate effect on a venue’s operation - 13% of the bookers who did book more than once in 2008 delivered 27% of ticket income. The marketing rule of thumb is that it costs at least five times as much to get a new customer as to keep an existing one.”

She added: “We need to take a million pounds a year to run the organisation before anything happens on stage and it just hasn’t been happening.”

Meanwhile, she also confirmed that Susie McKenna, a long-term associate of the Empire and its regular pantomime director, is to stay on at the venue in the role of creative director.

“We will be recruiting for the full senior management team after we have the programme in place for this year [the Empire is hoping to have a reduced programme on stage from the summer]. Susie McKenna will be staying, she’ll be the core of the new team as creative director. The core values of the programme will be the same - diversity, variety, inclusion and excellence. But we’re also trying to make sure it works from a business point of view and also make sure that the artist is more central to what we do, so we’re looking to build a stable of creative associates for which Susie will be the catalyst.”

However, while McKenna has been retained, 11 full-time and 32 part-time roles have been made redundant, with a skeleton staff of eight full-time and six part-time staff now running the building.