Freelancers Make Theatre Work: Meet the theatre freelancers joining together to fight for the future

Freelancers Make Theatre Work: Meet the theatre freelancers joining together to fight for the future – Evening Standard

Theatre’s predicament in the face of the coronavirus pandemic is painfully unique. As the country starts to come out of lockdown, the industry is about to go into its fifth month of total shutdown, with no clear timeline for reopening and a promised government rescue package still yet to emerge. But there‘s another aspect that makes theatre distinct: 70% of its workforce in the UK is made up of freelancers.

From actors, writers and directors to voice coaches, movement directors, lighting designers and stage managers, theatre’s ephemeral nature means it depends on people with an array of skillsets coming together to make a production happen for a set amount of time. Perhaps only classical music is comparable in terms of its set up – and faces a similar crisis. A level of uncertainty about where the next job is coming from is priced into the terrain of being a freelancer, but now the only job going is the fight to stop theatre from meeting a tragic demise (and so far it really doesn’t pay very well).

While theatre buildings fight for their survival, the workforce that brings them to life is endangered too. These symbiotic futures led to the formation last week of Freelancers Make Theatre Work, set up by a group of volunteers to give theatre freelancers a voice, as well as a network and support system. Hazel Holder, a voice and dialect coach, sums it up: “There’s so much to do.”

The newly formed group hopes to strengthen the collective voice of theatre by advocating for itself. “It’s certainly not about factionalism because that’s just absolutely futile – we’re all in it together,” says playwright Beth Steel. “But you know what, buildings are literally firefighting. And they don’t have the manpower to even do anything else at the moment. And we are a force ourselves, we are a massive body, we’re creative human beings, and we can do something too.”

Adele Thomas, an opera and theatre director based in Wales, says the delicate and interdependent ecology means that “if anything is under threat, then the whole industry can’t survive.” The day that theatres shut down, Thomas was in tech rehearsals for Hail Cremation!, a show she was directing for the National Theatre Wales. She and her colleagues began the day wondering if they’d be able to do the show’s full run, their expectations decreasing as the day went on. “By lunchtime we thought, okay maybe we’ll do one show. By the end of the second session we were closed.” It was the perfect example of the range of skills required to make a show – “we had over 150 costumes, two hours of video animation had been made, dancers, peopled learned to roller skate for the show. All of that was gone within a couple of hours.” She does not know what the future of the show will be – she describes it as “like a ghost – it kind of existed, but it doesn’t” – and has had to stop herself from thinking too much about it. “If I did, it would probably break me,” she says.

Although the theatre industry has been dependent on the Treasury’s Job Retention Scheme for furloughing staff and the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) for freelancers, the network urgently wants to convey that these schemes don’t address the particularity of the sector’s needs. Many people working in a self-employed capacity have fallen through the cracks due to the portfolio nature of their careers. “It’s a necessity in our industry for lots of people to take on teaching jobs or other roles,” Thomas says. “A lot of people working on zero-hour contracts for, say, universities, or doing PAYE work, aren’t eligible for SEISS funding. But the organizations that they do PAYE work for haven’t got any obligation to furlough them. So they’re basically destitute, being punished for working really hard. These are tax-paying people – so that is something that urgently needs to be addressed.”

Holder was working on the cast-change of Tina the Musical, the Kiln Theatre’s production of Pass Over and a TV show when the government changed its advice on attending gatherings. “The first six weeks of lockdown, nothing happened in terms of work. And so I did get worried, but then I also reminded myself that I’m someone who will just go a drive a van if I need to. I’m a working class girl, and I don’t have any airs and graces about what I need to do to keep a roof over my head.” Her husband has been furloughed so they have been able to pay their bills, and six weeks in she began to get work from drama schools – although hours as opposed to weeks. “Before I might have had private client work, but of course no one’s got any money,” she says. “If all of these theatres close, then we don’t have enough money to support the ecosystem of theatre. And I think that’s the thing people don’t quite realise, you know, we see famous actors, but actually it takes a village to create anything, ultimately.”

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Steel, who was named Most Promising Playwright at the 2014 Evening Standard Theatre Awards, was due to have her latest play The House of Shades on at the Almeida Theatre in May with Anne-Marie Duff in the lead role. Its run has now been indefinitely postponed. “I’d felt so anxious and fraught for the weeks previous to that going, ‘Oh my God, how is this situation escalating?’ That actually, when the announcement came and Rupert [Goold, the Almeida’s artistic director] called me, it felt like a relief to just go, okay a decision has been made and it’s out of my control.”

The Almeida has made its commitment to the play clear to Steel, and she has been helped financially due to being the National Theatre’s writer-in-residence this year, which has paid her a monthly wage (although the post only lasts until September.) But she explains that a playwright’s income is hugely dependent on the work being staged. A commission is generally about £3,000 upfront with another small sum sometimes paid when the work is handed in, but the real earning comes when the production goes on and the writer takes a percentage of the box office. “So for someone like myself at this time, I didn’t have a play on last year, I didn’t have a play on the previous year – I was having a play on in May. And therefore your whole year’s money – or, in my case, three year’s money – disappears.”

The prospect of theatres closing down is already real – Nuffield Southampton Theatres was the first to go into administration in May, but without help 70% will be closed by Christmas. Cameron Mackintosh and Nimax Theatres have already entered into consultations over redundancies, and a report last week said the creative industries stand to lose £74bn and 400,000 jobs. The dawning reality feels apocalyptic.

“I don’t know a single artistic director that’s not doing seven days a week glued to phones and Zoom meetings for 16 hours a day, campaigning and lobbying. We have had theatres already close. So it’s about ensuring as many as possible don’t,” says Steel. “We know there’s going to be unemployment in our sector. We know there’s going to be unemployment across the country. It’s not about pleading a special case. But it is saying, we can’t open up at all. And, actually, what we’re looking at is decimation.”

Fears that the current crisis will cause some people to leave the industry are well-founded – as Steel, who worked as a waitress for years before success as a writer, explains that not everyone can afford to financially sit it out. “I’ve already spoken to a couple of people from working class backgrounds and they’re going back home – up north – because they can’t afford to stay. Class isn’t high on the arts agenda anyway, it rarely gets a seat at the table, and my fear is it’s going to be the big thing that’s staring us in the face but will be ignored.”

Thomas, too, speaks of “the mountains I’ve had to climb” to get from a working class background to making shows at the Royal Opera House. “It’s heartbreaking because you can’t shake the feeling that, everything you’ve worked for… to think ‘Oh my god it could all be washed away’ is really heartbreaking.” Holder has already reconciled herself to the idea of working partially outside of theatre over the next few years while the industry gets back on its feet. She, too, has fears about how the lens of representation could be narrowed. “There may be some theatres that decide they want to play it safe, and they want a famous face, and generally those famous faces are white,” she says.

The future is hard to predict – Thomas says “there are some signs of work on the horizon, people making noises about socially distanced work,” but that the perpetual uncertainty leaves artists hamstrung. “It’s a very strange situation to be making art or trying to respond artistically when you don’t know what the parameters are going to be.”

The situation may seem helpless, but my conversations with Steel, Holder and Thomas are marked by optimism and an energetic sense of urgency. They are also full of a palpable passion for the artform itself. It’s that knowledge – that we, the UK, are so good at theatre and the arts – that makes the current situation so hard to stomach. Theatre generated £1.28bn in ticket revenue in 2018. “It’s the one thing that is made here and done here and that we export around the world – then surely there should be some protection of that,” says Steel.

The overriding feeling: that this dark moment can be engineered into something good. “I have to have hope that actually when we come out the other side, things will be brighter,” says Holder, “and we have had our seat at the table, we have been heard, and we have been able to make positive changes to the structures that existed before this.”

Find out more about Freelancers Make Theatre Work at freelancersmaketheatrework.com

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