Theatre 2021: David Greig on… regional producing theatre

Let’s be honest, the situation for regional theatres is dire. Producing theatres across the UK have suffered a catastrophic loss of income and, with no discernible timeline for reopening, most are in a desperate fight for survival. Some are holding on in the hope that help will come from government. Others simply cannot afford to wait and are forced into action now to avoid administration.

It seems insensitive even to think about the future when, as I write, my team at Edinburgh Lyceum are facing large-scale redundancies as we reduce the company to a size small enough to be commensurate with our grant income: a heartbeat team to take us through the crisis to a point when we can reopen our theatre, bring employment back and start to make plays again.

Even then, the situation will be precarious. We face low box-office returns as audiences recover their theatregoing habit. We’ll have limited cash reserves to make work and we face the risk of further disease spikes or lockdowns. Even an optimistic analysis suggests it will be at least three years before we recover the levels of revenue we reached in 2019.

It’s not as if things were financially easy before. Most regional producing theatres have faced years of standstill grants and local authority cuts. Yet, somehow, with a mixture of co-productions, ingenuity, flexible ticket pricing, donations and Christmas shows, we have survived, and not only that, we were doing great work. The stories of success are numerous but Covid-19, the joyless bug, crushed show after show after show.

‘A city theatre should provide space for joy and tragedy, the profane and the sacred’

As we look around and survey the wreckage, one thing is clear. The theatre world of March 16 has gone and every day that we spend fighting to preserve it is a day we are not facing the future and asking ourselves the key question: what comes next?

One side effect of standstill funding has been that, for years, our artistic and creative spirit has been chained to the revenue-generating machines of the main houses. Feeding those great beasts has dictated the nature of our work, shaped our appetite for risk and discouraged us from seeking new audiences.

Could there be an opportunity for us in this swift and strange eviction? Without our buildings we will have to find new ways of reaching an audience. We can work online using audio and video technology to tell new stories and deliver them to people directly. We can return to the deep roots of theatre with work outdoors – in the local park, off the back of lorries and in football stadiums.

We can focus time and attention on local artists, makers, companies and projects. Freed from the urgent need to produce a show next week, our teams can spend time developing plays and projects that might not neatly fit into the categories we have become used to.

Lastly, we can empower our creative learning and engagement teams. When parents are struggling with home schooling, when loneliness and isolation is almost as dangerous an epidemic as Covid, and when young people are desperate to explore ideas and debate, we can be a place for making connections. We can bring people together.