— read write play

With perfect timing, the Chicago theatrosphere is also talking about free theatre tickets. And – unlike the UK’s top-down, centralising, money-to-venues-already-getting-money approach – this scheme depends on companies opting in.

Here’s Kris Vire:

Theater companies, in my understanding, choose to opt in and choose how many tickets at which performances they want to give away. Audiences get a free sample, giving up nothing more than their email addresses and anonymous demographic information. And, if TCG’s numbers from other cities can be trusted, that exchange results in a significant return: one-third of Free Night patrons return to the same theater to buy tickets or subscriptions within the year.Even better is this: TCG, and particularly its executive director Teresa Eyring and its house magazine, American Theatre, have been criticized in many corners of the theatrosphere in recent months for only representing the interests and outlooks of its members, our country’s big-box regional institutions—the Goodmans, Guthries, Intimans and South Coast Reps of the world—and not reflecting the realities of the smaller theaters that make up the vast majorities, in offerings if not in budgets, of most of our cities’ theater scenes.

So, because there’s an open door policy, it’s equally open to companies of all sizes and flavours. In contrast, the UK scheme reflects existing hierarchies of money and approval: financial support to venues – not companies or productions – which already have the tacit support of state funding.

And there’s the major difference: the companies involved in the Free Night of Theater are choosing to make blocks of free tickets available for their October shows, rather than being subsidised (or persuaded, or bribed) by a funding body.

So, free theatre tickets. Thoughts in no particular order:

1) More people seeing theatre is good, not least for people who make theatre. At the very least, it will subsidise Monday night takings, when even people who like theatre prefer to stay at home.

2) The logic is presumably this: if they like it, they might come back with their wallets. One problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that good (thoughtful, informed, responsive) decisions have already been made about the kind of theatre being staged.

3) Underpinning that is the realisation that a handful of free tickets on a Monday is going to have near-to-zero impact on the artistic direction of any venue (and it’s “major subsidised venues,” not companies or productions that get the money.)

The eligible venues all have – for better and worse – their own taste in the work that they commission, produce or book, taste that has implicitly or explicitly been given the seal of approval by the bodies that fund them.

4) In other words, when you offer free tickets at established bricks-and-mortar venues (who already have local or Arts Council funding) you are not promoting theatre in general, but a particular kind of theatre. Not necessarily good or bad theatre, but a very definite subset of British performance.

5) The reason that some people think theatre is uninteresting, elitist or otherwise irrelevant might have something to do with the perception of that subset. And I use the term “perception” advisedly because we’re also dealing with an overall cultural picture of theatre, as much as any work in any given venue.

6) How many smaller companies (who have no interest in or appeal to the eligible venues) or theatre works could you support for the same amount of money?

7) Sure, the scheme might encourage people to take a low-cost or no-cost risk on a particular production, and/or on the whole experience of going to see live performance. Provided they do so on a Monday when no-one else wants to go.

8 ) Should we be subsidising transport to theatre across the UK, as in the London area? Or child-care for families who want to go? If we assume that most people aren’t violently opposed to the idea of going to the theatre, what apart from the cost of tickets are the impediments to a good night out?