The Stage

Landmark fringe deal offers actors access to accounts

Published Thursday 24 March 2011 at 13:17 by Natalie Woolman

A London fringe company claims to have become the first theatre group in the world to adopt open book management - making all its financial data available online to actors and staff on its productions.

Industry leaders hope the management system, used by several major companies with multimillion pound turnovers, mainly in the USA, will be adopted throughout the sector - with the idea of making theatre organisations more accountable to their employees.

Red Table Theatre created its open book theatre scheme in response to the profit-share model used by most fringe companies. A long-standing complaint has been the lack of financial information, says the company, “when as we all know, the profit that one shares in a fringe production is usually zero”.

The initiative is being supported by the Directors Guild of Great Britain, with the organisation hoping to hold events promoting the scheme in London and in Edinburgh during the Festival Fringe. The guild hopes the new model will make it harder for “unscrupulous producers” working on the fringe to get away without paying staff when there is a profit to share.

Guild chair Ivor Benjamin said: “This is about bringing a level of honesty and transparency into the finances of non-profit fringe. To me that is the key thing.”

Under the open book theatre policy, all the company’s business and production information will be made available to actors and backstage staff, showing a full breakdown of the production budget and ticket sales as they come in. For RTT’s current show, all the information is available online in real time in a password- protected section of the company website.

Actors are each given one share in the production, as is the designer, technician and stage manager. The writer and director are given two shares apiece, and the company retains three. The value of these shares can also be viewed online at any time.

The new model aims to bring the non-profit fringe under signed agreements. Although RTT co-founder Rafe Beckley stressed that the Equity fringe theatre agreement was still the ideal, he claimed he had not even seen the document in four years working in the sector.

He said: “We aspire to using the Equity fringe theatre agreement - that is the agreement we think should be used. It is the agreement where actors get paid minimum wage. What we are doing is we have recognised that in between the Equity fringe agreement and nothing, there is nothing.

“The Equity fringe agreement is difficult financially because the producers have to commit to a minimum wage for the actors and when you are on the fringe, on a low budget, by doing that you rob your production budget. The danger is unless you have good financial backing, you end up with no marketing budget, no props and scenery budget. The [Equity fringe] agreement in and of itself is absolutely right.”

In the open book theatre agreement, staff are presented with terms and conditions of employment including working hours, health and safety, and grievance and dismissal procedures.

Charlotte King, who is currently appearing in RTT’s production of Just So Stories, said she felt both more “invested” and “safer” working under the new model and would take the agreement with her to jobs in future.

Charlotte Jones, chief executive of the Independent Theatre Council, said: “I think it is about recognising that there is a need for some sort of transitional way of making work but ITC does not regard that as an end in itself - it is a step on a route towards aspiring to proper union management association conditions.”

Equity declined to comment on the development.

More information and model contracts are available at redtabletheatre.com