Jo Caird: Who’s the Boss in British Theatre?

These systems each have their pros and cons, but leaving aside the question of which makes for better
theatre, it’s worth noting that the business of bringing a piece of work to the stage is not
just a matter of a balancing out the creative impulses and artistic
interests of a director and writer. In British theatre (I’ll leave further discussion of the European scene to those better informed about it than I), the producer also plays a hugely important role.

Last
week, just as I was starting to mull over this issue, I came across
an interview with the Russian film-maker, Alexander Sokurov, who has
just released a new film version of Goethe’s Faust.
The interviewer, Geoffrey Macnab, concludes the article with an
analysis of the British film industry that I think is useful here:

“The
UK industry is producer-led, not director-led. Its idea of a perfect
film-maker is of a solid craftsman who can tell a story: a Tom Hooper
(director of The King’s Speech), not a
Sokurov… When artists themselves have moved into the film arena, as
Steve McQueen has done so memorably with Hunger
and Shame and Sam Taylor-Wood with Nowhere
Boy, they have made narrative films. Meanwhile,
experimental work is kept out of the mainstream.”

Theatre
and film are very different beasts, in terms of scale of budgets, how
funding is sourced, and distribution and legacy of the end product,
but I’d argue that when it comes to the way power is balanced between
director and producer, at least in the West End and as far as number
one touring shows are concerned, the industries are comparable.

It is
the likes of Cameron Mackintosh, Sonia Friedman, Nica Burns and Bill
Kenwright who call the shots because they are the ones with the cash.
It is then up to trusted directors to try to make an artistic success of the
show, using all the different elements they have been supplied with
by the producer. Sometimes this system works brilliantly, and
sometimes it works less well (I’m sure you can all think of plenty of examples of each), but it’s certainly the case that
without a handful of major player producers, the West End would be a
very different place.

One
of the most interesting indicators of the strength of the producer’s
position in the West End is when the producer’s name eclipses that of
the director altogether in the collective consciousness, as with
long-running shows such as Phantom of the Opera
and Blood Brothers. Your average punter would
probably be able to identify these shows as produced by Mackintosh
and Kenwright respectively, but I doubt the name of their original
directors (Hal Prince and Bob Tomson) would be on the tip of most people’s tongues.

The situation is by no means as dire as that in the film industry
(returning to the conclusion Macnab reaches in his Sokurov piece); it
would be disingenuous to say that in British theatre “experimental
work is kept out of the mainstream”. As I’ve noted in previous posts, the theatre diet of mainstream audiences has been spiced up by elements of interactive practice, puppetry, devised work, etc, but it strikes me as a shame that the producer-led system that reigns supreme in the West End and large-scale touring has created a
climate in which risk-taking is virtually impossible and therefore
rarely seen.

We may call our theatre ‘writer-led’, but when it really comes down to it, the producer is boss.