Britain clamps down on fringe and profit share theatre.

Helen Brett I’ve been following this thread with great interest and I can see merit in most of the viewpoints expressed. It is virtually impossible to have a profitable production unless it is subsidised. Even then success is not guaranteed. So what do you do? Lie down and moan? Put all your energy into politicking and applying for grants? When you get knocked back, do you let yourself fall into the wasteful spiral of resentment and envy? Hang around waiting for Godot with a big purse? In the meantime let the creative drive wither to nothing? Or do you get up and do something for yourself? That is what a lot of people are doing - actors, writers, producers – in the theatrical grey area which is not quite amateur, not quite professional. Here in Perth, this area is often more hardworking and energetic than the funded theatre sector because it has to be in order to survive. Australians love a battler and this might be why independent theatre is often better supported by audiences, than the heavily subsidised theatre. I suspect that some of the difficulty Equity experiences in trying to deal with the grey area is that so much of it is generated from within, ie their own members coming together to create theatre which is never going to come near being able to provide even the national minimum wage for those involved. I speak as a writer/producer who, along with Gordon MacNish, runs Pocket Theatre, a writers’ theatre, in N Fremantle. Three writers are involved in each production, usually each delivering an original one act play. The actors, normally professional or semi professional, are engaged by the writers/directors. Neither Gordon nor I take any money whatsoever for the time we spend producing the show. Costs are kept to a minimum and after each production we study the accounts to see if there’s any cost we could shave off or eliminate next time. What is left after paying costs is divided in three and the writers in turn allocate an equal share to the actors to help towards their costs. We stress this is not a wage. We know that the cake will never be big enough to pay anything remotely like a wage to the actors or writers. Anyway it's more of a cup cake and, in a poor season, a cup cake that fails to rise. Thankfully our last season was a cup cake that did rise! Stalin allegedly said that imposing communism on Poland was like trying to put a saddle on a cow. He struggled and he succeeded for a time but it all came apart in 1989 after decades of being undermined from within. Equity is in a difficult situation, on the one hand aiming to achieve minimum rates for its members, on the other, knowing that there won’t be enough work for everyone at that wage. The punters only want to see so many shows and they only want to pay out so much money at the door.