Stronger relationships

Having spent the past two years establishing house as a programming network across south east England, we are now working with the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation on a three-year programme called 'greenhouse', testing new ways for venues and theatre-makers to work together. Our hunch is that this will help to build stronger relationships between the work that is made and the people it is made for.

The ambition is to make better use of the latent generosity, knowledge and resources that sit within the region’s venues and to help theatre-makers develop a keener understanding of their audiences. As always, the challenge is to create bold, contemporary work with integrity and imagination. We believe that the best way of meeting that challenge is to make contributing to the theatre-making process a more everyday occurance for audiences and, in return, for theatre-makers to respond, creating curiosity on both sides and connecting people.

Work cannot just be made and toured from our major cities − it needs to be made in every corner of the country

During the 1940s, Compass was established to take theatre to communities the length and breadth of the country. It would tour in a theatre made from 18 lorries linked together to create a ‘blue box’. Much of the work was from the classic repertory canon and many of the communities that it toured to went on to build civic theatres, partly in response to the demand for local provision. There was something noble in those efforts – a kind of missionary model in which art is taken out to the people from our centres of excellence. And there is still room for that model. The National Rural Touring Forum and I are currently involved in a conversation with the National Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre about the possibility of touring work from their stages into village halls. I like the mischief of it.

But work cannot just be made and toured from our major cities − it needs to be made in every corner of the country. This is not an argument for local work about local things for local people, but that the stories we are telling on our stages should reflect the breadth and diversity of the people we want to see in our theatres listening to them. And that the people of, say, Louth in Lincolnshire have more in common with the people of Camrose in Canada than they do with many of the people of London or Barcelona. So it is possible to make work that is both provincial and international.

And that is what greenhouse has set as its central mission. We want to better connect the ambitions of artists with those of programmers working purposefully to fill their theatres across the region, so that each informs the thinking of the other. We will be investing in ten partnerships a year which test an idea that will potentially lead to the creation of popular, contemporary theatre and nurture the curiosity of its audience.

Much of this is not new, nor is it the only approach. But we know that there exists a generosity, expertise and audience within the presenting venues of the country that we should make better use of. We know that if an audience connects with the making of the work they are more likely to champion and support it − and with arts funding increasingly under pressure, our audiences are our best advocates. And we know that we should constantly try to reinvent.

I believe that if theatre is to sustain its purpose, potency and popularity, it needs to strengthen its relationship with audiences, wherever they are.

"You can tell the health of a community by the stories it tells to itself."

Gavin Stride is Director of Farnham Maltings and house.
housetheatre.org.uk
farnhammaltings.com