The Stage

Theatre managers offered ‘toolkit’ to monitor audience emotions

Published Thursday 11 March 2010 at 15:20 by Alistair Smith

Theatre managers are being given access to a new audience monitoring tool, which aims to assess the quality of a production based upon theatregoers’ emotional response to it.

The Independent Theatre Council, Society of London Theatre and Theatrical Management Association have published a ‘toolkit’, created by think tank the New Economics Foundation, which measures the impact of a theatre performance on its audience’s well-being.

ITC chief executive Charlotte Jones told The Stage that she hoped that the survey would become an industry standard, which could be used to help justify theatre funding and was “more sophisticated and relevant to the sector’s work” than previous instrumental monitoring schemes that had been used by government to record theatres’ performance.

She added: “The key thing is that we saw it as an opportunity for the arts world to set their own agenda so that they could be measured in a way that bore some relation to what they made and that the way in which they measure it is related to their intentions in creating it. We very much hope that the sector find it is an empowering tool that helps them make a better case for themselves and also have a conscious relationship with the quality of their own work and the reason they’re doing it.”

Theatres can download a ‘well-being toolkit’ from the ITC website. It includes surveys which can be distributed to audience members asking them questions such as whether they felt challenged, moved or engaged by a production and whether they noticed time passing during the show. The answers to these questions are then brought together to give an overall measurement of the audience’s response.

SOLT/TMA chief executive Richard Pulford explained that the toolkit attempted to measure the success of a theatre production on its own terms.

He added: “Mostly people ask in post-show questionnaires ‘What did you think of such and such?’. This is really about trying to get at how people felt, which I think is often an altogether more helpful way of looking at audience reaction than what they thought.

“I think at the moment, when theatregoing is holding up so well in the face of the economic difficulties, I think there’s even more reason to suppose that people go to the theatre because of the way it makes them feel rather than the way it makes them think.”

A handbook detailing the scheme has been sent out to theatre managements and is available to download at www.itc-arts.org.