Live Theatre’s 2024 season launch

Firstly apologies for this article being late. I do appreciate being invited to season launches and aim to give coverage as swiftly as possible, but the unfortunate news about the Vault Festival took precedence. But now there is time to catch up.

Just a reminder before we start that this is not a comprehensive guide to everything covered at the launch – I leave that up to other media outlets. My interest is more with what grabs my attention. Much of this comes down to whims; something the doesn’t get my attention can turn out to be a gem – and very occasionally, something I was convinced was a surefire hit is a let-down. My final of what’s worth watching is always after this has come and gone.

That caveat established, let’s go. There are aspects of all three main plays that grab my attention, then I’ll move on to some other highlights. One unusual observation: after a crowded autumn/winter 2023, there’s a big gap in main stage productions until May 2024, with the three main plays scheduled between then and March 2025. I’m a bit surprised they’ve picked May over March, because the conventional wisdom’s always been that the colder months (except January) tend to sell better than warmer months. Not reading anything into that: just a curiosity.

Now, out of the three main plays, my hot bet is Champion by Ishy Din. He is one of the writers I have the most respect for, and in my opinion, his previous Live play Approaching Empty was very under-rated. Although he predominantly writes characters of Asian descent, the themes are almost always universal and could just as easily be anybody’s story. I was particularly impressed with the characterisation. In a story where everybody uses and betrays those closest to them, you always – with the exception of one character who’s a hardened criminal – understand why each of them felt they were doing the right thing. I also credit him with giving some of the best advice to aspiring writers: in particular, he has spoken a lot of sense about the “big breakthrough” myth which far too much of the new writing ecosystem still subscribes do. Anyway, the subject of the new play? The visit of Mohammed Ali in 1977 to South Shields, although there’s hints that the real subject of the play is a mixed-race family living in South Shields at the time.

The end of Vault Festival: what went wrong?

It is never nice to hear a much-loved arts events is closing for good – but it’s less nice still when it comes out of the blue. There was the bombshell news last year that the owners of the space underneath Waterloo station didn’t want them back again, and the immediate worry was over money. Then the concerns of money grew quieter and focus turned to finding the right replacement venue. A replacement was found. The Vault Festival took on new branding, #SaveVault became #BuildVault, and a big relauch gala was supposed to take place at the end of this month. Surely this was proof more than anything that Vault Festival was home and dry?

But Vault Festival was not home and dry after all. It turned out the original issue of money was their final downfall after all. We don’t know the details, but based on their statement, it looks like it came down one particular funding application that they’d assumed they were going to get. Unfortunately, all of the other funding they were counting on was dependent on this one, and without that, the whole plan fell apart. All relaunch activities are cancelled, the newly-secured space isn’t going ahead, and most of all of the year-round staff are being made redundant. Reading between the lines in this article, it seems that they maybe hadn’t exhausted all options, but they’d run out of energy and are giving up. It’s not completely the end of the enterprise – the year-round space The Glitch that they ran next to the main space is still going ahead, but that’s all. If somebody does managed to rebuild the Vault Festival or something like it, it will have to be good as starting from scratch.

Should we really be worried about AI in the arts?

Credit: Paul Brake, DeviantArt

COMMENT: AI in the arts can never do as good as job as a human, and is only likely to be viable for formulaic and uncreative activities. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people don’t have a problem with any of those things.

Panic! The Terminators are coming! And the Cybermen! And the killer robot dogs from that Black Mirror episode. They’re going to start a nuclear apocalypse and hunt the survivors and go “Exterminate Exterminate” and put you into dystopian computer simulations … but even worse – they’ll take your jobs as artists! It’s even in the next Matrix movie. As the Sentinels gather round Neo’s broken and bleeding body, Agent Smith gloats: “Before I assimilate you, know this, Mr. Anderson: it was I who ruined your career as a screenwriter. I generated the spec script that was chosen instead of yours! I saw to it you abandoned your dreams to work in a call centre. Bwuahahahaha! Bwuahahahahaha! Bwuahahahahahahahahaha!” [Jarring chords. Lightning flashes in background.]

That, at least, was the reaction of half the world last year, whilst the other half were marvelling at a new golden age and/or seeing an opportunity to be the next Elon Musk. But reality is swiftly catching up with last year’s hype. There have been some remarkable technological advances: the fact that computers can now understand requests written in English instead of a programme language is impressive enough – the fact that it can create plausible images, text or music in response is incredible. But compared to what a human can do, it’s not that good. At its best, it looks good to people who haven’t wised up its predictability. At its worst, it’s waffle, plagiarism, or both.

Nevertheless, there are some areas where AI output, if not better than human output, is cheaper and easier. For reasons I will go into shortly, it’s been over-hyped, and the technological advances are no more or less dramatic that previous technological advances. Artists adapt and make use of them, and there’s no reason to believe jobs are under threat – not unless we we’re happy to remove all talent and creativity from the artistic process.

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty major caveat. I will explain why shortly. To start with, however, here’s why we shouldn’t need to worry about AI – in theory

No, self-production is not exploitation

COMMENT: There are good reasons to wait for funding before making theatre, and there are good reasons to go ahead without. We should not assume the latter group are doing it wrong,

This is something that’s been festering for a few months that I need to get off to my chest. I make no apology for getting where I am: through productions I did for myself in my own time, and often using my own money. It’s something that, in all probability, I would never have achieved had I waited for somebody else to give the thumbs up. Increasingly, however, I feel like I’m having to fight my corner, and fight the corner of everybody choosing the same route I have.

I’ve always said that if you’ve written a play and you have the means to get it put on – either by yourself or someone you know and trust – you should just go ahead and do it, for various reasons I’ll be listing below. However, I think I was wrong about one thing. I’d assumed that if your project succeeds (meaning good audiences, good reviews or both), professional theatre will beat a path down to our door. That was based on success story anecdotes of comedy transferring to television and radio. But the more I learn about theatre, the more I see a system stacked against self-production. Most theatres like to be involved in developing something from the outset – which locks out successful theatre projects done without their help. Until recently, I’d looked on this as an unfortunate side-effect of programming policies. Now I’m wondering if this kind of exclusion it actually viewed as a good thing.

The reason? They don’t want to reward an exploitative practice. “Exploitation” can mean spending a lot of your own money to put on a play – that’s certainly the case for a lot of Edinburgh Fringe productions, (although there’s way cheaper alternatives). However, it seems to go deeper than that. The very act of doing unpaid work in theatre – even unpaid work you are doing by choice, for your own benefit, doing what you want – appears to be considered exploitative by some. Not a problem in itself, you’re free to ignore that advice. But if theatres close ranks and shut out people who’s created successful productions off their own backs, we do have a problem.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Funding is important. For reasons I don’t have time to go into, I think it is correct that mainstream arts funding should be conditional on paying the people involved in subsidised arts projects (even if it means funding fewer projects). Once funders expect the same of projects they won’t fund, however, it steps into gatekeeping. And the number one excuse used for gatekeeping is telling the people shut out that it’s for their own good. So here is my manifesto for people like me who self-produce. Why we should not apologise for what we’re doing, and why this form of theatre making should not be dismissed by the rest of the theatre world.

The obvious advantage of self-production:

The number one reason to do self-production is so obvious it ought to go without saying. But in a debate where obvious points get overlooked, it needs to be stated.

Self-production GETS THINGS DONE

When there’s something you really really want to get on stage, sometimes the best way to ensure it happens is to just go ahead and do it. If you can pitch your play to a professional company or get a grant or win a playwriting competition, you will probably get a better production. But all of these things take time, there’s no guarantee any of them will work – and if you’re new to this, the chances are slim. If you have the means to do it yourself, the odds of getting a production is more like 100%.

The questions we should be asking about Russell Brand

COMMENT: Russell Brand might be a spent force, but the people who promoted him are still with us. We need to find out soon who kept quiet and why.

Yet again I am writing about yet another sex offences scandal in the performing arts. And I am sick to death of writing about this. If only a fraction of what’s being reported by Dispatches and The Sunday Times is true, it’s horrendous. Russell Brand is denying these allegations, but that hasn’t stopped all the subsequent media discourse talking as if he’s guilty as hell. It certainly doesn’t help his cause that Russell Brand that he has barely addressed the allegations, instead heavily insinuating the whole thing is a conspiracy against him personally.

But I’m not that interested in pointing the finger at Russell Brand. Whatever happens, Russell Brand is a spent force. If he’s guilty of criminality, he must face the severe consequences demanded by the law, but regardless, nobody is going to leave him to his own devices in a film or TV studio again. However, the culture that allowed sex offenders to operate unchecked in the noughties is still there. A lot of people are blaming this on the popular culture of the noughties, as if the decline of lad mags and laddish comedy means this sort of thing wouldn’t happen now. That is breathtakingly naive. Russell Brand was lionised by the arts and media world long after those things went out of fashion. And this same arts and media world is already manoeuvring to gloss over this and make it Somebody Else’s Fault.

Let’s imagine, however, the arts and media world actually wants to learn lessons this time. Let’s imagine they’re serious about making sure wrongdoers and their enablers are held to accounts, and – more importantly – they want to do everything they can do make sure this never happens again. We can’t draw up an action plan straight away, because there’s a lot of thing we still don’t know, and a lot of difficult questions with no easy answer. What we can do is think about what questions are the right ones to ask. Here, in my opinion, are the ones I think need asking, in a rough order I think we should be asking them:

[Footnote: One thing I’m not going to be covering here is help and support we offer to victims, except to say that of course we should, that goes without saying. Beyond that, I have nothing new to say about that which isn’t already being said elsewhere.]

1: Is Russell Brand guilty, and if so, what is he guilty of?

It’s tempting to skip this step and move straight on to the baying mobs – but if we are to have a sensible discussion, it’s better that we take a step back and consider what the case against Brand actually is before discussing what to do about it. As we saw with Kevin Spacey, well-intentioned discussions about safety can be be derailed if it depends on details that can’t be proven later. There are currently two main arguments circulating about Russell Brand’s guilt or innocence: once is that the women must be telling the truth because there’s no reason to make up these claims; the other is that the women can’t be trusted because they’re only coming forward now. Both arguments are wrong. We are not mind readers, we have no way of knowing the motives of people making complaints, and it’s pointless to speculate. The real discussion is a far drier and unsensational one on evidence: what can actually be verified?

12 ways the short terms lets ban might affect Edinburgh and Edinburgh Fringe

All right, let’s turn attention to this one. There’s still legal tusslings going on, but it looks like next year will be the first Edinburgh Fringe whilst a ban on short-term lets is in place. This has a lot of support from within Edinburgh, and to be fair, there are good reasons to be in favour. Such is the demand for accommodation in Edinburgh, buying to let is a lucrative business. It is even viable to charge a piss-taking rent for August and leave the property empty another eleven months. But every property rented out this way is one home less for someone who lives in Edinburgh. And Edinburgh home prices are stupidly high. It is quite understandable that Edinburgh locals would put this ahead of how this affects the Edinburgh Fringe.

But what effect will this have on the Edinburgh Fringe? One important clarification is that it’s not an outright ban on all lets; renting out your own home is considered to be legitimate. But how will that rule pan out? How will everything pan out? Will Edinburgh Fringe really lose out? Will Edinburgh really gain? The simplistic model is of supply and demand: if demand remains the same and supply decreases, prices go up – in this case, from what’s already a very high base. But is this simplistic model correct? Here, just for fun, are twelve different scenarios of how this might pan out.

1: All goes to plan

The Scottish Government and Edinburgh City Council confound their critics. The housing market is brought under control, but the adverse impact feared on Edinburgh Fringe and its performers is much less than feared. Even the staunchest critics within Edinburgh Fringe circles now accept this is an improvement.

Send your talent scouts to Brighton Fringe

COMMENT: There is still no end in sight to the crisis that prices people out of Edinburgh Fringe. If the arts industry cares about this, it should end the culture of Edinburgh being the only place to make it big.

As we head into Edinburgh Fringe 2023, we can expect the debate on affordability to flare up again. The one bit of good news is – after all the expectations of this coming – we are not back into runaway growth. Yet. And the one thing we’ve all agreed us that runaway growth is bad, and the #1 reason is the effect on accommodation prices. There’s only a finite amount of accommodation in one city, and when there’s more people wanting rooms than rooms available, you can charge whatever people are prepared to pay. This got a lot worse last year, with a possible cause being landlords chasing losses from 2020 and 2021 and realising they could get away with charging piss-taking amount. (And, of course, there’s the related issue of people in Edinburgh not having anywhere in to live because of all the houses bought up for the August rental market.) Next year, it looks like there’ll be a ban on short-term lets, but no-one seems to know what effect that will have on performers.

Edinburgh Fringe is not being taken over by Etonians with trust funds – mots of the people taking part are finding accommodation a real struggle. One example I have in mind was Triptych Theatre, who had a lot of success with Vermin. I remember, after first seeing this at last year’s Brighton Fringe, how worried Benny, Sally and Michael were about finding somewhere affordable. In the end, they found somewhere expensive-but-as-bad-as-it-might-have-been, and thanks to the success of Vermin (plus a second show that also did rather well) they managed to break even. But this is at the upper end of outcomes: breaking even. An average run would have been a big loss, a bad run would have been horrendous.

So why are people doing this when the financial prospects are so poor? Yes, I know many of us find a fringe fun, but nobody thinks fun compensates for a 10K loss. I’m increasingly coming to the view that people are doing this because they think they have no choice. For many people, Edinburgh Fringe is the only place you have a chance of being noticed, you only chance of moving on to the next step of your career. Indeed, this is how Tryptich Theatre got their their run at the Arcola Theatre. I think it’s fantastic that Edinburgh Fringe gives artists the chance to make it, whilst the rest of the time (pretty much) only those who get the nod are permitted a chance to prove themselves, and I will fight tooth and nail all attempts to bring gatekeeping into the Edinburgh Fringe. But it’s a staggeringly unfair deal. Nobody should be expected to risk five-figure sums in the hope of being accepted as a proper theatre-maker.

The strange death of The Warren

With Brighton Fringe now in full flow, now is good time to catch up on a big topic I’ve been meaning to go to in detail. This year, the big addition to Brighton Fringe has been Caravanseria, which I now understand is being heavily promoted as focal point of the whole fringe. But the appearance of this venue comes against a very ugly backdrop. Two years ago, there was a very similar venue known as The Warren, which for the best part of the decade was the de facto focus of the entire festival. Now, the venue is gone for good, and – based on the feedback I’ve heard from numerous participants and venue staff – not missed in the slightest.

And for those who’ve followed the story of The Warren from the start, there is only one question: how could this success story possibly go so wrong?

One reason I have been slow to write this up is that I have had difficulty getting conclusive information on the record. There were some very serious allegations levelled against The Warren, and I was reluctant to repeat some of the more serious allegations – even in the context of just allegations – in a way that could be damaging to the venue or the people in charge. However, The Warren is now in liquidation, and nothing I say now is going to make much difference. I am, nonetheless, taking care to distinguish between what is only alleged and what is verified. Should anybody with to state anything on the record – either in defence of The Warren or against it – I will revise this account accordingly.

After much thought, I’ve decided the best way to report this is to go through the saga in chronological order. And in order to appreciate the true magnitude of this saga, we must start by going back to the start. And I hope, by going through a blow by blow account, how sorry I am that it came to this.

2005 – 2014: From humble beginnings

Say what you like about what Otherplace Productions and The Warren had become, but their origin story was a phenomenal success. Whatever venue managers might say now about their ambitions, few wouldn’t snap up the chance to go on the trajectory The Warren did in the early days.

First of all, a fringe history lesson. The Brighton Fringe you see today is a very different fringe from the one that existed at the start of the last decade. For all but the most seasoned veterans, there hasn’t been an Edinburgh Fringe in history where you could turn up to the Scottish Capital without noticing there’s a fringe on. And yet in the early 2010s you could visit Brighton in May and completely fail to notice Brighton Fringe was on. In those days, it was little more than an offshoot of Brighton Festival, with the two festivals sharing a box office. The only place that looks remotely similar to an Edinburgh Fringe experience was Spiegeltent*. Other than that, it was a collection of ad-hoc spaces, almost all a single performance space.

*: Not the Spiegeltent we know today, a different Spiegeltent. But that’s another story.

The launch of The Laurels’ 2023 season

Skip to The Exchange.

A month ago I was invited to the press launch of Live Theatre’s season. Now it’s the turn of The Laurels in Whitley Bay.

Out of all the venues in the north-east, there can be little doubt that The Laurels was the big winner of 2022. This is thanks in a large part to the success of Gerry and Sewell. Plays that have references to local football teams have a track record of selling well, and Jonathan Tulloch’s book The Season Ticket is an excellent story in its own right, but I don’t think even Jamie and Steve predicted just how successful this was going to be. I’ve spoken very highly of this play before (indeed it won 2022’s Best North-East Fringe Production and Best Individual Performance from me), but at the end of the day, it’s not what I or any other reviewer thinks that counts, but mass appeal to an audience. A sold out run and a hastily-programme encore run is as good as you get.

And, of course, they’ve now secured a run at Live Theatre. Before we get carried away, we should remember that no theatre succeeds in the long-run as a one-hit wonder. The worst mistake the Laurels could make right now would be – fittingly enough – to rest on their laurels. What it does mean in that they’re going into 2023 on a position of strength.

There were quite a lot of things covered in the launch. As usual, I’m not going to do a comprehensive write-up here – I’ll leave it to other publications to do that – and instead concentrate on things that got my attention.

16 films and plays I find objectionable (that no-one else seems to have a problem with)

Pocahogwash: Disney’s amazingly untrue story about a brave young Native American princess who single-handedly threw out the evil forest-destroying British, before welcoming in the the wise all-American settlers, who later stole their land and massacred them. Probably starring Jeremy Irons or Alan Rickman as the evil British captain, Captain Evil.

Following straight on from my Roald Dahl piece, where I said I didn’t see what the problem was with the text that had been changed, and earlier pieces such as my reaction to Puppetgate, where I wasn’t offended, you might be asking: “Okay, is there anything you have a problem with?” The main reason I stay out of the usual cycles of outrage is that I have better things to do. I treat material I might object to the same as material that’s not to my tastes in general – I don’t have to watch it, and nine times out of ten it’s obvious it’s going to be like that from the publicity. You have a much stronger case standing up to censorship of things you do like if you respect other people’s rights to watch things you don’t.

But there are nevertheless things I think overstep the line. For example, I wrote at length about Music (or, as I like to describe it, the shit version of Rain Man), and I could go on forever joining in dogpiles. But I’d rather challenge things that aren’t getting attention. With some of society obsessed with the pettiest micromanagement of some popular works, I can only look at other works and ask: why aren’t people up in arms about that? Some problems are things I wouldn’t expect most people to notice; other times, it’s issues commonly talked about – why does this one get a free pass? And top of the list is so blatant, there’s only one reason I can see to tolerate it, which is rank hypocrisy. But we’ll get to that alter.

So, the rules. Some of the things in this list I personally consider objectionable. Other things I think are unfair to other groups of people. In the latter case, I’ve done a bit of cursory research to see if the people concerned also have a problem – if not, I let it go. It pisses me of no-end when self-righteous arseholes decree what neurodivergent people are offended by without asking us, so I have no intention of getting offended on other people’s behalf. The other rule is it’s got to be something that isn’t facing widespread criticism. Otherwise, it’s joining in dogpiles.

And to be clear: I don’t want any of these cancelled. Offence alone is never a valid reason for censorship. The usual tactic used by Mary Whitehouse-wannabes is to conflate offensive with harmful, but nine times out of ten it’s nothing that can’t be solved with the “off” button. Some at the end start to overstep that line, but not enough to overcome my support for freedom of speech.

So here we go. Prepare to have your favourite films, movies and plays ruined.

16. I Dreamed a Dream

I have nothing against Susan Boyle or Elaine C. Smith – but there’s no escaping the awful hypocrisy surrounding of the people responsible for the sudden rise to fame. I’ve written about this before, but the fairy story constructing around Susan Boyle is a textbook example of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Why was the country so surprised that a woman who wasn’t conventionally attractive and behaved a bit odd turned out to be quite good at singing? Because for years Britian’s Got talent – with the full backing of ITV and the entire press – has been systemically pedalling the narrative that anyone looks a bit funny is talentless. All they did was express surprise that some defied the stereotype they created in the first place. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Cowell and Co had a change of heart after Susan Boyle’s performance. They did not – right afterwards it was back to business as usual. (A similar gesture with Lost Voice Guy many years later does not compensate for this either.)