Plea to the industry from a returning theatreworker – this month in Your Views

I trained as a stage manager at Guildhall and worked at the Royal Opera House, the Royal Albert Hall and on musical and opera productions in regional theatre here and abroad. At 40, I stepped away to raise my daughter. I am 50 now. My daughter is grown. I want to come back. I cannot find a door.

I wrote to my membership body a few weeks ago asking two very modest questions. Which tier of membership suits a returner with old credits and no recent ones? Could someone spare me half an hour for a sanity check? I did not ask for work. I did not ask for charity. I asked for a conversation. I have not had a reply.

That silence is not personal. It is structural. And it points to a problem that The Stage has already covered: our industry is bleeding experienced people and refusing to acknowledge that some of them would very much like to come back.

Consider what is on the record. The most recent SOLT and UK Theatre skills shortages research, published last year with Gatsby Charitable Foundation funding, found that shortages are prevalent across all offstage technical roles – especially among sound, lighting and automation technicians – and that Covid caused many to leave the sector altogether, or move to film and TV where pay and conditions are better.

In 2023, stage manager Anna-Maria Casson made the case for job shares as a way of keeping experienced stage managers from leaving the industry. She is right. But job shares only help people who are still in the room, not those of us who left and would now like to come back.

What is striking is what the industry has decided to do about returners. Nothing. Every serious intervention I can find is aimed at people aged under 25.

Meanwhile, in almost every other sector with a skills gap, the quiet revolution of the past decade has been the returner programme. Finance, law, tech, engineering and the civil service all run structured schemes. Theatre does not.

A returner programme for theatre would not be complicated. A short, paid placement. A mentor. An honest assessment of what has changed at the desk since we were last on the book. A membership tier that recognises prior experience without pretending nothing has moved on. This is not radical.

So here is my ask, to SOLT, UK Theatre, the Stage Management Association, BECTU, Equity, the big producing houses, and anyone reading this who has the power to commission a pilot: please look at us.

We are not asking you to reinvent the industry. We are asking you to please build one small door. I’ll walk through it and, I promise, I won’t be the only one.

Fernando Pinho
Email supplied

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