The Stage

Edinburgh King’s forced to scale back refurb plans

Published Thursday 5 May 2011 at 10:42 by Thom Dibdin

The King’s Theatre in Edinburgh is to get a much-anticipated refurbishment later this year, but the reduced programme of improvements fails to address the “pretty poor” conditions backstage.

The £2.625 million programme - about an eighth of the initial estimated cost - is detailed in a report by its owner the City of Edinburgh Council about the Festival City Theatres Trust, which runs the venue. The refurbishment will cover only emergency external work, the auditorium and front of house areas of the theatre, and comes amid financial difficulties for the trust.

John Stalker, the trust’s chief executive, told The Stage: “The programme of work is happening between September this year and July, with an interruption in the middle of it for several weeks of drama, the Edinburgh Gang Show and the pantomime. Immediately after the pantomime, we will stop [shows on stage] again and that will be when the bulk of the work is undertaken, for completion by the Edinburgh festival 2012.”

The works are the fourth scheme proposed over the last 14 years. When Stalker joined the trust in 2002, the estimated cost of essential repairs was £20 million, a figure clipped back to a more recent proposal of £9 million, including a £6 million council investment approved in 2008.

Stalker added: “If there had been £20 million on the table, you would have started from scratch and renewed the entire building, but that is not on the table, so the city council is doing what it can. You would certainly have not concentrated on just the auditorium - you would have concentrated on backstage as well. That is something which is pretty much needed because the working conditions backstage are pretty poor, but that will have to wait for another stage.”

The King’s season will now contain only three weeks of drama - touring productions from the National Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland, and a solo show from Simon Callow.

The financial difficulties of the trust were also detailed in the council report. The organisation had to be given a £400,000 advance on its 2011/12 council grant, and has recently completed a 23% cut in its staffing levels, down by 12 full-time employees from 52 to 40.

According to Jim Inch, the council’s director of corporate services, writing in the report: “The trust has experienced a trading downturn for a period, which has been aggravated by the impact of the winter weather at the end of 2010 and box office sales of the Festival Theatre’s Christmas production, The Secret Garden.”

Revealing that the trust had also received an extra £20,000 of Scottish Government support due to the bad winter, Stalker said: “It was a tough year and it is true that the weather at Christmas was a big slap in the face for us. It was the minor part of what was a very difficult year - the rest of the year was more problematic than The Secret Garden.”

Commenting on the general reason for the trust’s trading downturn, he added: “There is a question about the amount of work out there to fill our stages. Whether we get back to exactly the same size programme the year after next, I don’t know. There is still an issue, I think, around the country of a lack of work that is being produced. Those issues will be with us I think until the recession is firmly behind us. The arts are invariably last into recession and last out, and we are still seeing that across the country.”