Welcome to The Laughing Audience
The Laughing Audience is a theatre management practice,
often working in collaboration with specialists from other theatre disciplines.
PAUL ILES MPhil MLitt FRSA
The Laughing Audience offers independent advice and assistance on artistic and management policies to drama companies and ‘presenting’ theatres, especially in North Britain. This typically includes identifying and investigating problems and entrepreneurial opportunities, writing strategic business plans and evaluations, making recommendations for appropriate action and helping to implement those suggestions as a change or continuity manager.
The Laughing Audience offers assistance to drama production companies, presenting theatres and local government arts departments, such as:
· External reviews and feasibility studies
· Editorial for programmes, brochures and souvenir publications
· Drafting media releases and speeches
· Programming: from high art to illegitimate, from glamouresque to opera house
· Curating lecture series and talks
· Curriculum development in theatre studies
· Advice on contracts and negotiation
· Theatre and higher education partnerships
· Heritage and theatre archive interpretation
Keep your theatre’s overheads low by outsourcing: all enquiries welcome!
This work is grounded in a combination of hands-on experience of managing theatres and drama companies, teaching, research and work as a board member.
Paul is principal lecturer in arts management, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, associate director of the Georgian Theatre Royal at Richmond, North Yorkshire, a director of Northern Broadsides Theatre Company Limited and Leeds Grand Theatre & Opera House Limited, the company that also governs the City Varieties Music Hall and Hyde Park Picture House.
He was foundation manager & chief executive of the 1,900-seat Edinburgh Festival Theatre where he was executive client for a £22 million refurbishment, extensions and fit-out of the former Empire Theatre, setting up the operating company and selecting the programme. For two terms he was manager of Blackpool Grand Theatre. Before running these presenting theatres, Paul was general manager of producing companies: Nimrod Theatre of Sydney, the State Theatre Company at the Adelaide Festival Centre, North Queensland Theatre Company and the Watermill Theatre, Newbury.
He served nine years as a trustee of The Theatres Trust, the national advisory public body for theatres. Paul was associate director of the Scottish Centre for Cultural Management and Policy at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
Many assignments are undertaken as theatre associate to RGA Consulting, Edinburgh: consultants in hospitality, tourism, the arts and culture.
Let him laugh now, who never laugh’d before;
And he who always laugh’d, laugh now the more.
The emblem of The Laughing Audience theatre management practice is a 1733 print engraved by William Hogarth (1697-1764). Divided into three sections, it depicts two classes of theatregoers, in the side boxes and pit. In the orchestra pit are three musicians. The amorous fops in the box are more refined and distant from the show than the working class audience in the pit, who are enjoying the performance in an unselfconscious manner. Only one miserable person appears to dislike the performance: perhaps he is a critic? The orange girls, the ‘industrious’ characters portrayed in the print, have round faces with long foreheads and delicate noses and were examples of innocence and beauty.
The print was used as a subscription ticket to a larger Hogarth engraving, Southwark Fair, and to his series A Rake's Progress. The theatre, with its candle lighting, downstage-left door and pit rail, closely resembles the intimate Georgian Theatre Royal (built 1788) at Richmond, North Yorkshire. The diverse characters might be seen as a marker for theatres’ socially inclusive ‘audience development’ strategies today.
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ON THEATRICAL MANAGEMENT Mr. Dangle: My power with the Manager is pretty notorious: but is it no credit to have applications from all quarters for my interest? - From Lords to recommend fiddlers, from ladies to get boxes, and from actors to get engagements. Mrs. Dangle: Yes truly, you have contrived to get a share in all the plague and trouble of theatrical property, without the profit, or even the credit of the abuse that attends it. - Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, 1779. When the profession of theatre management is under discussion I would urge contemporary writers for the press to pause, reflect, consider; remember that…we who manage theatres, equally with those who direct affairs of state, are confronted by a condition, not a theory. - David Belasco, The Business of Theatrical Management, 1919. THEATRE MANAGER: If I were to analyse every piece I receive, I should not have the time to present any. A general answer must in general suffice. The judgement of Managers may be fallible; but experience proves that we oftener err in receiving, than in rejecting what is offered...The theatre is a Foundling Hospital for wit - limited indeed - for we can no more take in all that are brought, than the other Foundling Hospital. But we present all attractions in our power. Those that are still-born the publick hears nothing of - of those that are brought to light, many soon expire in convulsions - many may die of the rickets - some, like puppies, have a blind nine days of existence - while others thrive, and prove an honour to their country.
The office of managing a theatre has always had a sort of fascination, and has drawn on for persons, qualified or unqualified, to ruin or prosperity. The attraction seems to lie in the feeling of absolute control, hundreds (and occasionally thousands) of persons being dependent on the will, humours or caprice of the administrator.... In the instance of a really capable man there is the confidence that his powers will ensure him a certain success, while the knowledge of the public taste often tempts him to make the bold coup. There must be fortitude of the highest order, not be daunted or checked by reverse, and which will consider failure in a few ventures as inevitable accidents, which may delay, but must not alter, the larger policy which he is carrying. Disastrous as may be the prospects of the stage, plenty of new candidates for the duty of management are not wanting...We find fresh, eager hands, of the usual bizarre character. - Percy Fitzgerald, ‘The Drury Lane Managers’, essay in Clement Scott, (ed.), The Theatre, Vol. IX, Carson and Comerford, London, 1 January 1887, p.28. There never was, and there never will be, an ideal theatre. The theatre is far too complex and delicate a machine, depending on the harmonious cooperation of too many talents and influences, ever to reach perfection for more than a passing moment. The very greatest theatres at their greatest periods have been severely criticised, not, as a rule, without reason. The reader, we are sure, will not let his craving for what is ideally desirable render him careless of what is practically desirable as an improvement upon existing conditions. And he will not fail to bear in mind, we trust, that it is no magical recipe we are offering, no instant and miraculous cure for all the shortcomings of our theatrical life......
Our millionaires compete with so much rage - John Masefield, Prologue to the opening of Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 1911. Theatre management, like the acting profession, follows a hazardous occupation. Theatre managers cannot, unless they are the Cochrans, expect to participate in the limelight which surrounds the artists. They can, and must, however, share his success and his disappointments, but by employing a discrete and polite contact with the public. And they, like the actor, will be wise to remember that, if one day proves to be a choking gall, the next day may well provide a preserving sweet. - Stewart Cruickshank, The Courier, Magazine of the King’s and Royal Lyceum Theatres, Howard and Wyndham Limited, Edinburgh, 1934. Policy is everything: popular prices, popular plays, personal management and publicity. - Derek Salberg, Manager of the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, 1980. |
