Matthew Xia: ‘Theatre has a critical personnel shortage. We may not be able to match our ambitions'
Since taking the helm at Actors Touring Company, its artistic director has been busy reforming the direction and governance of the organisation and shows no signs of slowing down, with multiple projects on the go or in the pipeline. He talks to Theo Bosanquet about redefining what ‘international’ means, funding cuts, how the climate for making work has changed and the talent-drain crisis
When Matthew Xia took on the role of artistic director of the Actors Touring Company in November 2018, he was excited about the prospect of expanding the focus of a company that was founded in the late 1970s to produce international, actor-centric work. As he wrote in The Stage: “It was important to, as ever, respond to the present, but also to indicate a slightly different direction of travel.”
The director’s inaugural production was Amsterdam, which he says aimed to “honour the European tastes and aesthetics of my predecessor [Ramin Gray], but also started to move us elsewhere in terms of whose story we were shining a light on”. The play, by Israeli writer Maya Arad Yasur, ran to acclaim at London’s Orange Tree Theatre in autumn 2019. The intention was then to commence a UK tour at co-producers Theatre Royal Plymouth early the following year, but global events took over.
“The pandemic meant that I didn’t actually do my first tour for ATC until Rice,” he says, referencing Michele Lee’s play that toured between February and April this year. This means he ran a company with ‘touring’ in its name for nearly four years, without doing any touring.
Xia knows about the precarious nature of creative work having been a composer, journalist and DJ (as DJ Excalibah, he had a BBC Radio 1Xtra show for four years). He says his first priority when lockdown hit was to ensure everyone contracted with ATC was paid. He then had to think about alternatives to live performance, and commissioned three writers – Yasur, Kimber Lee and Stephanie Street – to write ‘letters of hope’ that could be experienced in people’s homes as a “small act of theatre”. More than 780 households around the world took part.
The other project he focused on was reforming the direction and governance of ATC. “I really went to town on making sure our values, our vision, our principles and mission were hard-baked into everything we did,” he explains. In practical terms, this included appointing a new board. Several trustees had resigned before Xia was appointed, in “protest and frustration” over the handling of Gray’s departure. Gray left shortly after being given a formal warning in relation to an investigation into complaints of “inappropriate verbal conduct”.
Xia’s organisational changes also included relocating the company’s headquarters. “We were based at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall,” he says. “I had to walk past two inhabited palaces to get to work, which didn’t sit very well with me. It was also on the top floor, completely inaccessible to someone in a wheelchair. It was an ivory tower.” ATC is now based at the newly opened Brixton House theatre in south London, and Xia says he is enjoying being rooted in a community.
During lockdown, he also set up an informal Black cultural leaders group with more than 50 members, who met fortnightly to discuss both the challenges of the pandemic and their response to Black Lives Matter. In 2020, he directed 846 Live at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, which was a direct response to the murder of George Floyd (the title refers to the 8 minutes and 46 seconds his neck was compressed by a police officer). As a director, he has also recently won plaudits for his revival of The Wiz at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, despite it having to cancel 15 Christmas performances due to Covid.
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Then, he got to work on Lee’s two-hander Rice, which centres on an encounter between a chief executive and her migrant cleaner. Xia points out that before he joined ATC, it hadn’t produced work by a female writer for eight years. So he vowed that for his first three years the company would only produce work by women to “redress the balance”. Other commissions in the pipeline include a new piece from J’Ouvert playwright Yasmin Joseph, in collaboration with Soho Theatre, and a co-production with the Belgrade Theatre and Brixton House of Mojisola Adebayo’s Family Tree, which won the Alfred Fagon Award in 2021.
But the climate for making work has changed markedly in the past two and a half years, he says, and the oft-mentioned talent drain has impacted touring theatre particularly hard. Xia shares the example of ATC’s finance manager having to run the book – a job giving lighting and sound cues, usually done by a stage manager – during Rice’s early rehearsals. “We’ve got this reduced pool of people we’re operating with now,” he says. “The technical stage manager we had on the tour graduated last year, and that’s not a role you’d ordinarily offer to a graduate.” Casting has also been difficult, he adds, because actors are less sure about being able to “manage their own safety” while on tour.
He highlights that people across the industry have been seeking employment elsewhere in recent times; even his own former agent now helps people with credit-card debt. He describes a “critical shortage of personnel” that has left companies such as ATC struggling to fill roles that prior to 2020 were oversubscribed.
Then there is the looming threat of cuts. As for all national portfolio organisations, the next funding round is high on Xia’s agenda, and he strikes a cautious tone. “We know there are these cuts coming down the line, so the big question at this point is whether we’re going to be able to match our ambitions.”
Q&A
What was your first non-theatre job?
My uncle used to run a recruitment agency and I did some work for him; I remember doing map reading for drivers in the pre-satnav world. Then I started DJing and doing lots of random jobs. Earlier this year, I was a Eurovision jury member.
What was your first theatre job?
The first time I got paid in the arts was as an actor in a short film by Armando Iannucci, which was part of a series called Tube Tales in 1999. He told me recently it was also his directorial debut.
What is your next job?
I’m taking some time away from ATC to direct Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen as part of the Roundhouse season at Edinburgh, and Hey Duggee for Kenny Wax Family Entertainment.
What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Lots of things. Primarily, that the playing field is profoundly unequal.
Who or what is your biggest influence?
Injustice. In my childhood, my mum often told me that life isn’t fair, so I have that programmed into me: I look for injustice.
What is your best advice for auditions?
Do the homework, make bold choices and be ready to change them.
If you hadn’t been a theatre director, what would you have done?
I would probably have continued on my DJing path, or perhaps been an artist in another discipline. Or maybe a drama teacher.
Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
I normally wear a suit to press nights, which in a way is a form of armour.
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He is particularly exercised about the government-led requirement that Arts Council England reduce London funding, by £24 million a year between 2023 and 2026, as part of which non-building-based organisations are being asked to relocate outside the capital. “For me, this indicates little understanding of how touring organisations work,” says Xia.
“Although our office is in London, the majority of our work is beyond the M25. All this will do is remove a bunch of companies. We have reasons to be where we
are, not least the fact we live here, we have families here.”
He is also worried about the potential stress of “having to continue what we’re doing but with much less cash”, and if there are cuts to be made, he feels that bigger organisations in “large, shiny buildings” should bear the brunt. “There are IT departments that get more funding than ATC,” he adds. ATC currently receives just over £200,000 annually from the Arts Council.
As someone who has worked his entire career in and around the subsidised sector – notably at Theatre Royal Stratford East, which he joined aged 11 and where he will return next year to direct Dave Harris’ Tambo and Bones, and at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, where he was associate artistic director for three years – he says a loss of ATC’s NPO status would involve a “complete reimagining”.
More immediately, he has other projects to distract him. He’s directing Marcelo Dos Santos’ Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen, starring Samuel Barnett as a comedian who “hides behind his microphone”, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Then, he’ll get a taste of the commercial side of the industry when he adapts and directs CBeebies gem Hey Duggee for a 24-venue UK tour from December, a prospect he describes as a “joy”. Whatever comes next in these uncertain times, it doesn’t feel as if Xia is in danger of slowing down.
So what of those original aspirations for ATC? “I think we’ve successfully baked our values into the company. The dream now is to start landing those commissioned plays. Fundamentally I want to continue doing what ATC has always done, which is discover great stories from around the world and bring them here. But it feels like we can redefine what ‘international’ means – I want to look beyond the borders of white, Western Europe.”
CV Matthew Xia
Born: 1982, Leytonstone
Training: Regional Theatre Young Director Scheme
Landmark productions:
•I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Theatre Royal Stratford East (2010)
• Blue/Orange, Young Vic, London (2016)
• Into the Woods, Royal Exchange, Manchester (2015)
• Wish List, Royal Exchange (2016); Royal Court, London (2017)
• Eden, Hampstead Theatre (2019)
• Amsterdam, Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond (2019)
• The Wiz, Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester (2021)
• Rice, Actors Touring Company (2022)
Awards:
• Genesis Future Directors Award (2013)
• Manchester Theatre award for best studio production for Wish List (2017)
• Honorary doctorate from University of the Arts London (2019)
Agent: Maeve Bolger, the Agency
Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen is at Roundabout at Summerhall from August 3-28 (edfringe.com); Hey Duggee’s 24-venue tour starts in December and runs until summer 2023 (heyduggee.com/live-show/tour-dates); Tambo and Bones will run at Theatre Royal Stratford East from June 16-July 15, 2023 (stratfordeast.com/whats-on)
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