26 Sep A Sense of Direction – Leading Theatre Through Crisis
How do you lead a theatre – a production, or a building, or a company – through a crisis? In recent years, the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have made that a question that every director has had to answer. Paul Miller, outgoing artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre, has had to come up with more answers than most during his nine-year tenure at the Richmond venue.
“It is a soft old cliché, but it really does help having great people around you,” Miller says, when asked about the essentials of surviving challenging times. “I think you need to develop an inner resilience, too, which is actually very difficult. Running a theatre is really tough in lots of really complicated ways. It is complex and draining. You have to find whatever is resilient inside you and hold onto it.”
Miller took over as artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre in 2014. On his very first day in post, he had a scheduled call with Arts Council England in which he was told that the theatre was losing its status as a National Portfolio Organisation – and annual ACE funding of over £380,000 with it. It was not, he says, the ideal opening to his artistic directorship.
“We had to face the future without that income and work out how to continue to operate as an independent producing theatre in London without that annual funding, which is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off,” Miller says. “I couldn’t help feeling like it was a vote of no confidence in me personally, too, even though it wasn’t quite like that.”
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Miller weathered that storm, though. The theatre slimmed down to a smaller core team, turned to its membership and to local businesses and foundations for support, and kept its doors open without compromising its producing plans at all. Shows like Pomona, An Octoroon, While The Sun Shines and Candida were all successes, both critically and commercially. Then, the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, and the Orange Tree Theatre’s box office income dropped to nothing.
“It felt like déjà vu,” Miller says. “Just when we had worked out a very good business model that let us do what we wanted to do with things consistently adding up, making theatre became illegal. That was a pretty terrifying few months, when nobody in British theatre knew what the hell was going to happen, and we all wondered whether we would survive. It was very, very bleak.”
Again, though, Miller managed to steer his theatre to survival. It was, he says, a case of “holding our nerve” and relying on the theatre’s reserves and the furlough scheme until government help came in the shape of a “substantial” grant from the Culture Recovery Fund. The Orange Tree Theatre stayed solvent, stayed busy, and did not make any redundancies. “We’re very proud of that,” says Miller.
Now, as Miller prepares to direct his last production while in charge of the theatre – his staging of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms And The Man opens in November – he is grappling with yet another challenge. Soaring inflation and rising energy costs have driven the costs of producing theatre skywards, while the cost-of-living crisis is having a simultaneous impact on audience numbers.
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Miller will shepherd his theatre through this crisis, just as he shepherded it through its loss of NPO funding in 2014 and through the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The recently announced government support to assist businesses with their energy costs will help “staunch the bleeding”, he says, while innovative ticket offers – an entire-season bundle, for example – should preserve audiences.
“Beyond that, it is pretty much a case of bracing for impact,” Miller continues. “To be honest, everything here is done on such an incredibly tight budget anyway, so there are very few costs that we can cut. We don’t do expensive things. We lean into everyone’s creativity instead. We are hoping that we can just take the strain for a bit, and that things will come out right at the end.”
There are lessons to be learned from Miller’s experiences navigating the Orange Tree Theatre through the ups and downs of the last few years, tips that can apply to all theatremakers. On a business level, building a healthy and diverse range of funders is essential, as is continuing to think innovatively about how to stage shows and sell tickets. On a personal level, ensuring that you are surrounded by reliable people and developing emotional resilience is vital, too.
Ultimately, though, says Miller, artistic directors should expect and prepare for their jobs to be stressful and challenging. He will hand over the reins in Richmond to Tom Littler, currently artistic director of Jermyn Street Theatre, at the end of the year, and is looking forward to what comes next.
“I’m going to take a pause to reflect and recharge first,” he says. “After that, I don’t have any concrete plans. It has been nine years since I was appointed artistic director here, and I think from that point onwards, there has not been a waking hour, and probably not a sleeping hour either, that I have not thought about the theatre.”
ENDS
‘A Sense of Direction’ is written by Fergus Morgan.
Image credit: Richard Davenport