The Art of Considered Disruption
29/12/22 10:35 Filed in: HfCHall for Cornwall
As an independent regional theatre in a small city on the edge of the UK, the challenge for our business model is many. And, with only a 10% public subsidy with a programme across Cornwall, Hall for Cornwall can rival many urban theatre models. Julien Boast explains how a Considered Disruptive approach works.
My career's mainstay is in Southampton, Coventry and Brighton's regional theatres. The first two cities are edgy, with communities devastated by the Second World War. A half-century later, Arts & Culture, bidding to be Cities of Culture, re-ignited a sense of place. Basil Spence, the modernist architect, built Coventry's new cathedral and Brighton's and Southampton's universities. His public spaces have exquisite attention to detail, with public art and furniture designed to complete the experience. His commissions were learning establishments and seats of worship, and as phoenixes from the ashes, they shaped a placemaking agenda. In driving my belongings from Brighton & Hove over the South Downs towards Cornwall, I came from a place of free thinkers where deep-seated partnerships allowed the city to punch above its weight to be culturally distinctive.
The draw to come to Cornwall was its rich cultural history in performance, which began in the late 14th century with its medieval mystery plays. Before Shakespeare, these scripts survive, written in Latin with Cornish stage directions. On arrival in Cornwall, I sensed a historical legacy that created a distinct sense of cultural place and purpose. The land of Kneehigh, Wildworks and Footsbarn were the pioneers of the UK theatre's physical theatre movement. The expedition I was on was to transition a civic venue with its roots as a village hall into one of the most respected UK Regional Theatres.
Alan Ayckbourn and Philip Headly are esteemed regional theatre stalwarts; with the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Stratford East, they took a long-term view for the re-generation of their place-making in the 1970's 1980s and 1990s to make their venues thrive with focus and longevity with a national gaze. But of course, in the subsidised models of Ayckbourn, Headly and Knight's theatres, for Hall for Cornwall, late to the game in funding, there were low levers of revenue funding available. When I took up the position at Hall for Cornwall, I promised my husband it would be a five-year timeframe, but I later learned that if you make a meaningful organisational change, it takes decades to achieve. In starting my role, my artistic hands were tied.
Many calls were to present my organisation’s vision in the first year. Privately, they were profoundly unsexy. When you don't know an organisation or understand its history, it always seems stupid to grandstand your potential views on a vision. How do you know if they can be delivered? I knew HfC needed a quick commercial fix to gain everyone's confidence. The first steps were to sell more tickets and improve the quality of visiting productions' quality. Using my past career skills, we added a million pounds of box office sales in our first year. It was reasonably straightforward to do this as our audiences have organisational ownership as it belonged to them from the beginning as they marched on mass to save the building.
During the first run of partner meetings, low opinions didn't match our overinflated ego. Our values and output were on another tramline. The charity and venue didn't sit comfortably in the creative landscape to contribute to Cornwall's national and regional artistic ambitions. The building was tired, extremely well used and at odds with the Cornish crown jewels of Tate St Ives or the Eden Project. Hence, it became apparent that a reset must happen. But it wasn't just about a new building. The early organisation evolved from a village hall to a venue without dedicated industry expertise as it grew into its teenage years. Enticing national companies consumed all the earlier regime’s energies in visiting Cornwall. Birmingham Royal Ballet was the first to show their faith in coming to Cornwall and that journey for an audience to be found.
Our future had to have a strategic rethink, with a diverse workforce who is customer-centric and a fleet of foot.
There were two parts to this plan;
In the first ten years, HfC was in and out of funding stabilisation programmes; initially, the task was to research and develop business and cultural growth areas. Our stakeholders' confidence grew as the box-office sales stabilised and created annual surpluses. Two-fold, we needed to find more revenue funds and expand a potential production capacity. Aside from this, an ailing arts-developing charity was at risk of losing its funding. From my ATG time, I was skilled in putting creative alliances together, so I absorbed this organisation into our charity. Whilst joining forces would benefit the arts sector, there was an enormous backlash from public meetings held against me. I've been unpopular, breaking up a couple of models for reinvention, but Cornwall's arts sector on this matter is very affectionate with what we now do.
To start a capital project in Cornwall, far from London and not in a city, you need to build a collation of significant funding partners for the journey. It was eventually nine plus ten trusts and foundations. I’ve enjoyed working with three Cornwall Council Chief Executives and three political administrations. For a project to grow in stature, an organisation has to be politically neutral for Arts & Culture to thrive. Enlightened, our Cornish politicians took a long-term view of the population's benefits of having such a venture. I won't say it was easy to get the project funded; I suspect harder than in a metropolitan city. My Cornish Members of Parliament and Leaders of the Council were fundamental to the project's success; they took an active interest in the funding applications, and my Truro MP, Sarah Newton and Cherilyn Mackrory, navigated my project around Westminster. On our journey, every funder encouraged and willed us along every stage of our trip. To get this buy-in, we built the first part of our business model from the ground up to squeeze out everything that a Grade II* listed heritage building can do.
In choosing our architects, a competition was run with thirteen practices bidding to do the work. It was a complete surprise of interest when one flew in from Spain. I remember the day we took the prospective firms around the theatre; Emma Rice had been appointed as The Globe's Artistic Director. I welcomed everyone and looked around the room to a sea of men, with only one woman. There was a rumble in my stomach as I knew that this next project phase would be testosterone-led; as an aside, the construction industry could work much better with more women in their workforce. Burrell Foley Fischer (BFF) was appointed as our architect. They performed the hardest to win. They had an intelligent pitch deeply routed in Cornwall's theatrical traditions and traditions. Their imaginations for us were brave and confident, giving our audience building ownership through melding the past, present and future for their future enjoyment.
Designing the building with the architects was an intensive nine months. The current theatre arena seating configuration was an unsatisfactory experience for everyone. Within BFF's initial sketches, I could see an auditorium which could create a dynamic relationship between the actor and the audience. Earlier, I wrote of Basil Spence; I hadn't told you my love for his work. I realised I missed his buildings a few years into my Cornwall life. They’d been part of my working life in Brighton, Coventry and Southampton. It was when I was working with the team from BFF, through our discussions, I asked for a building that, when entered, gave you a moment to take stock, to gather your thoughts like being in a spiritual place. As you walk into Coventry Cathedral through the glass doors, there are exposed stone; wood picks up the elemental feel of the space - as you traverse on, purposely placed Elizabeth Frink and Graham Sutherland's works of art create your ethereal voyage through the building. My brief to the architects was to take everything out of the building and carefully consider everything to go back into the building. It must be purposefully chosen and be right. Maybe annoyingly for them, I was to be a part of that process.
Our project's second phase was to close the doors in 2018, and the next step of the business plan commenced. Carefully and methodically, we wanted to imagine what our future could be. To that date, the organisation had twenty years of research and development by my predecessors and my team on how a rural theatre can operate in an entrepreneurial and sophisticated modus operandi. From our humble beginnings, the need for survival was born out of necessity. My hunch was that we must take a longer-term view that other new industries will want to use the space; therefore, a degree of flexibility needs to be built, which echoes my Spence theory of a bold space where the people were the stars of the building.
In hindsight, I was to bring to my role not to go native or to repeat what Cornwall does but to create headroom for complimentary new work contributing to the brand Cornwall. While nurturing local companies, keeping channels with the national companies I've worked with was essential. A deep and manful relationship with the RSC, Rambert and Wise Children adds capacity to what we can do on our main stage. In the poorest county in England with low cultural provision, ambition matters. Cornwall deserves access to the best performance and cultural opportunities. I want our role to demonstrate leadership in the staging and production of performing arts and act as a catalyst for the new generation of theatre-goers and creators. Our new plan wants people to see our artistic programme, give more young people a chance to shine on and off the stage, and drive prosperity for our city by creating a new type of open theatre where all are welcome.
We used the time to seek out brave new thinkers. Rita Clifton, the global branding expert and Jon Moon, the communicator, gave clarity and impact. Patrick Lencioni and Jill Robinson from TRG Arts focussed on our business acumen to gain an advantage in seeking out the right people to work with us and to shape the values of how we want to live our daily lives. From this, we're a tight-knit, dedicated team who are tenacious in delivering what we do. With half of Cornwall's households on our database, hardly anyone in the county hasn't met us, so there's a deep-seated trust in Hall for Cornwall.
We built this theatre during Covid, which helped and hindered us. The pandemic made people rethink, and we witnessed people return to Cornwall quicker than they usually do. It was probably 10 or 20 years earlier, partly because they wanted to bring up their families here. As we re-opened our new front doors, experienced box office operators, technical managers and front-of-house staff were now working for us to deliver a brilliant customer experience. In creating this new workforce, we've pulled Cornwall's best expertise from the hospitality and administrative sectors.
Our programme outside the stage is expansive and expensive but sometimes little understood in the public sector except amongst those with whom we work. We realised that our new and revised offer needed to address that and explain what we do. We would rethink our public-facing approach to create the following five unique brands.
History and Heritage is a programme of work which tells the story of our building which has evolved over 175 years and has always been at the heart of Truro's civic life. Along with our new auditorium, the Cornwall Playhouse, our own production company Cornwall Playhouse Productions. Get Creative and Husa will provide cultural education, talent development and workspaces for the creative industries. With these programmes, we'll significantly build Cornwall's cultural appetite. Our new building can flourish artistically and culturally for our future operating model. It will co-exist and be supported by strategic hospitality and commercial programme. Our new physical arrangements can effectively allow more investment in the artistic development of contemporary music, dance and drama programmes on the stage. The reach and quality of our education and local talent programmes and activities must be developed. The surpluses created or granted income we bring in will need to be funded.
So if we fast forward to 2022, we're an independent regional theatre on the number one touring circuit based in the centre of one of the smallest cities in the UK with a population of 21,000 and in a large county whose population of 566,000 provides one of the lowest population densities per km² in England. A similar urban theatre ecology can draw from a population between 1m to 4m. Despite that, we rival many urban theatre models with one of the UK's broadest socioeconomic splits of theatre-goers. We've helped build the county's economic resilience by feeding the local economy £16m a year.
We're a small company that punches above its weight and plans to continue. Within our DNA, we're cultural entrepreneurs always seeking new alliances and wanting to help other organisations flourish. We describe our approach as powered by 'considered disruptive innovation', which allows us to create new products and services within an existing market or new markets by creating, refining, reengineering or optimising brand new offers. Our creative industries workspace venture attached to our venue is the first based in a rural, regional theatre.
The draw to come to Cornwall was its rich cultural history in performance, which began in the late 14th century with its medieval mystery plays. Before Shakespeare, these scripts survive, written in Latin with Cornish stage directions. On arrival in Cornwall, I sensed a historical legacy that created a distinct sense of cultural place and purpose. The land of Kneehigh, Wildworks and Footsbarn were the pioneers of the UK theatre's physical theatre movement. The expedition I was on was to transition a civic venue with its roots as a village hall into one of the most respected UK Regional Theatres.
Alan Ayckbourn and Philip Headly are esteemed regional theatre stalwarts; with the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Stratford East, they took a long-term view for the re-generation of their place-making in the 1970's 1980s and 1990s to make their venues thrive with focus and longevity with a national gaze. But of course, in the subsidised models of Ayckbourn, Headly and Knight's theatres, for Hall for Cornwall, late to the game in funding, there were low levers of revenue funding available. When I took up the position at Hall for Cornwall, I promised my husband it would be a five-year timeframe, but I later learned that if you make a meaningful organisational change, it takes decades to achieve. In starting my role, my artistic hands were tied.
Many calls were to present my organisation’s vision in the first year. Privately, they were profoundly unsexy. When you don't know an organisation or understand its history, it always seems stupid to grandstand your potential views on a vision. How do you know if they can be delivered? I knew HfC needed a quick commercial fix to gain everyone's confidence. The first steps were to sell more tickets and improve the quality of visiting productions' quality. Using my past career skills, we added a million pounds of box office sales in our first year. It was reasonably straightforward to do this as our audiences have organisational ownership as it belonged to them from the beginning as they marched on mass to save the building.
During the first run of partner meetings, low opinions didn't match our overinflated ego. Our values and output were on another tramline. The charity and venue didn't sit comfortably in the creative landscape to contribute to Cornwall's national and regional artistic ambitions. The building was tired, extremely well used and at odds with the Cornish crown jewels of Tate St Ives or the Eden Project. Hence, it became apparent that a reset must happen. But it wasn't just about a new building. The early organisation evolved from a village hall to a venue without dedicated industry expertise as it grew into its teenage years. Enticing national companies consumed all the earlier regime’s energies in visiting Cornwall. Birmingham Royal Ballet was the first to show their faith in coming to Cornwall and that journey for an audience to be found.
Our future had to have a strategic rethink, with a diverse workforce who is customer-centric and a fleet of foot.
There were two parts to this plan;
- Forge Partnerships committed to delivering a ten-year business plan.
- With a dynamic workforce, build and open a new theatre.
In the first ten years, HfC was in and out of funding stabilisation programmes; initially, the task was to research and develop business and cultural growth areas. Our stakeholders' confidence grew as the box-office sales stabilised and created annual surpluses. Two-fold, we needed to find more revenue funds and expand a potential production capacity. Aside from this, an ailing arts-developing charity was at risk of losing its funding. From my ATG time, I was skilled in putting creative alliances together, so I absorbed this organisation into our charity. Whilst joining forces would benefit the arts sector, there was an enormous backlash from public meetings held against me. I've been unpopular, breaking up a couple of models for reinvention, but Cornwall's arts sector on this matter is very affectionate with what we now do.
To start a capital project in Cornwall, far from London and not in a city, you need to build a collation of significant funding partners for the journey. It was eventually nine plus ten trusts and foundations. I’ve enjoyed working with three Cornwall Council Chief Executives and three political administrations. For a project to grow in stature, an organisation has to be politically neutral for Arts & Culture to thrive. Enlightened, our Cornish politicians took a long-term view of the population's benefits of having such a venture. I won't say it was easy to get the project funded; I suspect harder than in a metropolitan city. My Cornish Members of Parliament and Leaders of the Council were fundamental to the project's success; they took an active interest in the funding applications, and my Truro MP, Sarah Newton and Cherilyn Mackrory, navigated my project around Westminster. On our journey, every funder encouraged and willed us along every stage of our trip. To get this buy-in, we built the first part of our business model from the ground up to squeeze out everything that a Grade II* listed heritage building can do.
In choosing our architects, a competition was run with thirteen practices bidding to do the work. It was a complete surprise of interest when one flew in from Spain. I remember the day we took the prospective firms around the theatre; Emma Rice had been appointed as The Globe's Artistic Director. I welcomed everyone and looked around the room to a sea of men, with only one woman. There was a rumble in my stomach as I knew that this next project phase would be testosterone-led; as an aside, the construction industry could work much better with more women in their workforce. Burrell Foley Fischer (BFF) was appointed as our architect. They performed the hardest to win. They had an intelligent pitch deeply routed in Cornwall's theatrical traditions and traditions. Their imaginations for us were brave and confident, giving our audience building ownership through melding the past, present and future for their future enjoyment.
Designing the building with the architects was an intensive nine months. The current theatre arena seating configuration was an unsatisfactory experience for everyone. Within BFF's initial sketches, I could see an auditorium which could create a dynamic relationship between the actor and the audience. Earlier, I wrote of Basil Spence; I hadn't told you my love for his work. I realised I missed his buildings a few years into my Cornwall life. They’d been part of my working life in Brighton, Coventry and Southampton. It was when I was working with the team from BFF, through our discussions, I asked for a building that, when entered, gave you a moment to take stock, to gather your thoughts like being in a spiritual place. As you walk into Coventry Cathedral through the glass doors, there are exposed stone; wood picks up the elemental feel of the space - as you traverse on, purposely placed Elizabeth Frink and Graham Sutherland's works of art create your ethereal voyage through the building. My brief to the architects was to take everything out of the building and carefully consider everything to go back into the building. It must be purposefully chosen and be right. Maybe annoyingly for them, I was to be a part of that process.
Our project's second phase was to close the doors in 2018, and the next step of the business plan commenced. Carefully and methodically, we wanted to imagine what our future could be. To that date, the organisation had twenty years of research and development by my predecessors and my team on how a rural theatre can operate in an entrepreneurial and sophisticated modus operandi. From our humble beginnings, the need for survival was born out of necessity. My hunch was that we must take a longer-term view that other new industries will want to use the space; therefore, a degree of flexibility needs to be built, which echoes my Spence theory of a bold space where the people were the stars of the building.
In hindsight, I was to bring to my role not to go native or to repeat what Cornwall does but to create headroom for complimentary new work contributing to the brand Cornwall. While nurturing local companies, keeping channels with the national companies I've worked with was essential. A deep and manful relationship with the RSC, Rambert and Wise Children adds capacity to what we can do on our main stage. In the poorest county in England with low cultural provision, ambition matters. Cornwall deserves access to the best performance and cultural opportunities. I want our role to demonstrate leadership in the staging and production of performing arts and act as a catalyst for the new generation of theatre-goers and creators. Our new plan wants people to see our artistic programme, give more young people a chance to shine on and off the stage, and drive prosperity for our city by creating a new type of open theatre where all are welcome.
We used the time to seek out brave new thinkers. Rita Clifton, the global branding expert and Jon Moon, the communicator, gave clarity and impact. Patrick Lencioni and Jill Robinson from TRG Arts focussed on our business acumen to gain an advantage in seeking out the right people to work with us and to shape the values of how we want to live our daily lives. From this, we're a tight-knit, dedicated team who are tenacious in delivering what we do. With half of Cornwall's households on our database, hardly anyone in the county hasn't met us, so there's a deep-seated trust in Hall for Cornwall.
We built this theatre during Covid, which helped and hindered us. The pandemic made people rethink, and we witnessed people return to Cornwall quicker than they usually do. It was probably 10 or 20 years earlier, partly because they wanted to bring up their families here. As we re-opened our new front doors, experienced box office operators, technical managers and front-of-house staff were now working for us to deliver a brilliant customer experience. In creating this new workforce, we've pulled Cornwall's best expertise from the hospitality and administrative sectors.
Our programme outside the stage is expansive and expensive but sometimes little understood in the public sector except amongst those with whom we work. We realised that our new and revised offer needed to address that and explain what we do. We would rethink our public-facing approach to create the following five unique brands.
History and Heritage is a programme of work which tells the story of our building which has evolved over 175 years and has always been at the heart of Truro's civic life. Along with our new auditorium, the Cornwall Playhouse, our own production company Cornwall Playhouse Productions. Get Creative and Husa will provide cultural education, talent development and workspaces for the creative industries. With these programmes, we'll significantly build Cornwall's cultural appetite. Our new building can flourish artistically and culturally for our future operating model. It will co-exist and be supported by strategic hospitality and commercial programme. Our new physical arrangements can effectively allow more investment in the artistic development of contemporary music, dance and drama programmes on the stage. The reach and quality of our education and local talent programmes and activities must be developed. The surpluses created or granted income we bring in will need to be funded.
So if we fast forward to 2022, we're an independent regional theatre on the number one touring circuit based in the centre of one of the smallest cities in the UK with a population of 21,000 and in a large county whose population of 566,000 provides one of the lowest population densities per km² in England. A similar urban theatre ecology can draw from a population between 1m to 4m. Despite that, we rival many urban theatre models with one of the UK's broadest socioeconomic splits of theatre-goers. We've helped build the county's economic resilience by feeding the local economy £16m a year.
We're a small company that punches above its weight and plans to continue. Within our DNA, we're cultural entrepreneurs always seeking new alliances and wanting to help other organisations flourish. We describe our approach as powered by 'considered disruptive innovation', which allows us to create new products and services within an existing market or new markets by creating, refining, reengineering or optimising brand new offers. Our creative industries workspace venture attached to our venue is the first based in a rural, regional theatre.