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%.
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