Drama training in crisis
Last year, in a game changing moment for theatre in the area, our company signed a 24 year lease on our current home at Greenwich Theatre (which is owned by Greenwich Council).
Finally, after years of insecurity, we are able to look to the future – but I can’t imagine what the industry will look like two decades from now, when the company next comes to negotiate a lease.
Over the years that I have run the company, there have been regular high profile campaigns to save struggling venues around the country, to reverse falling funding for artists and touring companies, to survive the potentially catastrophic pandemic and, maybe more recently, to place audience accessibility at the heart of venue planning.
However, whilst this sounds far reaching (and whilst each of those priorities are clearly crucial to the theatre ecology), they are all linked to just one phase in the process of theatre making – the presentation of a show in a venue to an audience – and there are currently major challenges being felt at a much earlier stage in the process.
Writing in The Stage recently, departing chair of leading drama school LAMDA Shaun Woodward set out the stark financial difficulties that are currently being faced by drama schools – the very institutions that populate our industry with talent.
His feature came in the wake of other high profile industry announcements. In early January, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (whose alumni include Olivia Colman and Daniel Day Lewis) announced it was closing its undergraduate teaching programme due to financial pressures. Then later that same month, Sidcup-based Rose Bruford posted annual accounts showing a loss of over £350,000, while the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama is reportedly making redundancies.
The pressures facing drama schools are manifold, and collectively they are proving too much for many organisations to manage. Woodward wrote, “It doesn’t add up because it can’t. Capping student fees, the impact of inflation for the past three years on staff costs, escalating estate repair bills, restrictions to international student visas, coupled with cuts in grants and, for some, falling applications because training is considered unaffordable, all conspire to cause untold damage to the institutions, thereby putting into crisis the funding and training of the next generation of talent.”
If we are to reverse this trend, central government needs to partner with the industry to make sweeping changes. First we need a health check of the whole ecology, from drama provision in primary and secondary schools to the financial security of drama schools and universities teaching drama, to the economic barriers facing many from considering drama tuition, to the economic ability of venues and producers to take programming risks and support artists as they emerge from training.
Then, as with any health check (and this is the hard bit) we need the commitment from government to administer treatment where necessary. Funding directly linked to industry outreach in schools, accessible to all. High profile grant support for students to both help those who need it and to prevent the perception that drama school is an unattainable route for many. Mitigation against increases in national insurance costs (which at LAMDA have added £180,000 per year to their running costs). Financial links fostered between developers and drama schools to subsidise estate maintenance. Bridging routes for actors from graduation to employment and supported showcase opportunities for graduates to target agents and casting directors. Financial incentives, akin to theatre tax relief, to encourage producers to employ actors in their first year out of drama school. All of this and more.
Without the hard questions being asked and answered, without an understanding that actor training needs as much support as the production of theatre and the development of audiences, in two decades time as Greenwich Theatre’s lease runs its course, we and our partner venues all around the country could very quickly find our stages empty.
Photo: Students of Rose Bruford in performance at Greenwich Theatre. Photo credit: Steve Gregson
