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New AudiencesDateline: 12th February, 2006I have observed two interesting things about young people and theatre this week. On Wednesday I was at the Customs House in South Shields to see Green Beans, part of the February Drama Festival. About ten or so minutes into the play, there was the sound of many feet clumping down the steps of the circle. Glancing up I saw a whole crowd of fourteen/fifteen year olds taking their seats. Why on earth, I wondered, were they being allowed in if they were so late? At the interval I discovered that, in fact, they were a school party from some twenty or so miles away and they were late because their coach was delayed. They actually had seats in the stalls but the staff decided it would cause the least fuss if they were allowed into the circle which was otherwise empty. (It's a very small circle, by the way, and is only used when the house is full.) They were offered the chance to move to their proper seats after the interval but decided to remain where they were. They were carrying notebooks and were making drawings of the set and notes about the play, so they chose to do so where they would not distract anyone else. I was impressed by that, but I was also a little shocked to learn from one of the theatre staff that theysaid they had never been in a theatre before and they were absolutely bowled over by the experience. On Thursday night I was at a local school watching a production of Return to the Forbidden Planet, directed by a good friend who is a drama teacher there. I was interested by the reaction of the other kids in the audience. They were riveted: there was no shuffling (and I can tell you - those school hall seats are not comfortable!), no whispering, just a fierce concentration interrupted only by laughter and applause where appropriate. I have seen less well-behaved (and responsive) adult audiences. For a start, all these kids had their mobiles switched off: Richard Griffiths would have been delighted! In my last two years as a teacher, one of the worst behaved and aggressive kids in the school took to turning up to rehearsals for my shows. Could he watch? Stifling my immediate response and with a nod from my MD in whose form he was, I agreed. He sat entranced. And he turned up to every performance. He's still doing it for the shows put on by my successor. He's in year 11 (coming up to 16) and sits as entranced as he did at 11. We talk about the need to develop new audiences (the Arts Council even has a website devoted to the topic) and we encourage theatre companies to perform in non-theatrical spaces (such as the Nottinghamshire Stages initiative), but, whilst these may raise the interest, what happens next? Is there a theatre nearby which is affordable? If our newly enthused young person or adult has to travel ten, fifteen or even twenty miles and then pay anywhere between £10 and £30 for a ticket, have we not raised expectations only to shatter them? Now I am not suggesting that theatres are profiteering by charging unjustifiably high prices. They aren't. I am a trustee of a funded professional theatre and I know the struggle we have to make ends meet: there is no way we could reduce our ticket prices further, for we keep them as low as we possibly can. Theatres are costly to maintain and are labour-intensive to run. Actors, directors and all the others involved in productions have to be paid, and Lord knows Equity minimum is well below the £431 which the was median weekly pay for full-time employees in the UK in November 2005. And let's be honest: paying as much as Equity minimum is not as common as it should be! I don't know what the answer is. Some kind of subsidy for ticket sales for certain income or age groups, perhaps? How that would work - if indeed it could be worked - I have no idea. Nor, for that matter, do I know where the money might come from. But it is something we'll have to out our minds to if we want our new audiences initiatives to have more than a short-term effect.
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