Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh

THE ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE COMPANY, EDINBURGH

Paul Iles also made a study of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company, Edinburgh. This is a history of a resident repertory company, from its founding in 1965 under artistic director Tom Fleming, until 2000. This civic theatre company is evaluated as artistic enterprise, theatre business and public institution. The study is structured in two parts. A two-chapter prolegomena places the company in its historical context from the 1890s, marshalling concepts of management and organisation for a non-profit theatre industry, including the interaction of mission, patronage, resident acting ensembles, artistic directors, boards of directors, theatre managers, play selection procedures, theatregoers, theatre architecture and competition. A number of early theatre companies and policy statements are discussed, such as the London stage societies, Harley Granville Barker’s business plan for the National Theatre of Great Britain, Glasgow Repertory Theatre, the Ulster Literary Theatre, the Alexandra Theatre Birmingham, the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow and the Gateway Theatre, Edinburgh.

Part Two considers the record of the Royal Lyceum in the light of the traditions of these theatres where theatre artists were the nerve centre.  Discussion of the onset of municipal and state subsidy in Scotland is followed by analysis of the Royal Lyceum plays and finance.  Several influences are examined:  the changing impact of the City of Edinburgh Council and Scottish Arts Council on production, the company’s structure as Edinburgh Civic Theatre Trust Limited (1965-1977) – renamed Edinburgh and Lothian Theatre Trust Limited in 1975 –  and then Royal Lyceum Theatre Company Limited (1978 - ), the Little Lyceum studio theatre, a merger and de-merger with the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, corporate sponsorship, partnerships and co-productions, touring, profit-seeking adventures such as a restaurant, and some artistic directors’ cravings for the Royal Lyceum to become the National Theatre of Scotland. 

The study explains how the Company was, for its first twenty years and like its progenitors, artistically accomplished and businesslike, especially under artistic directors Tom Fleming (1927-2010), Clive Perry (1936-2006), Stephen MacDonald (1933-2009), Leslie Lawton and Ian Wooldridge. The study argues that when a decline in the Royal Lyceum fortunes occurred after 1985, this was caused not only by internal inefficiencies but also external influences such as new responsibilities to the funding bodies (that became ‘development agencies’) and, especially, the emergence of a pseudo-profession of arts administration. By 2000, these factors had paralysed the Company’s artistic purpose and achievements. A new business culture triumphed over the art of the theatre.

The Royal Lyceum study draws on primary sources such as the minute books and correspondence of the board of directors, subcommittees and managers, the audited annual accounts, business plans and financial progress statements, and Scottish Arts Council drama committee papers.

This study was supervised by Dr Adrienne Scullion, now James Arnott Professor of Drama, University of Glasgow.

View section on policy and management during Clive Perry’s years as artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh: click here.

View chronology of management, policy, plays and finances 1977-2000: Download Royal Lyceum Theatre Company Survey 1977-2000.

View chapter seven: an assessment of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company 1965-2000: Download Asessment of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company 1965-2000.

A CHRONOLOGY OF NEW WRITING AT THE ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE COMPANY, EDINBURGH: PLAYWRIGHTS WHOSE WORK HAS BEEN PREMIERED, NEW TRANSLATIONS AND ADAPTATIONS, 1977-2000
1977-1978	These Were My Means (Jim Tyrell), A Fistful of East End (Howard Purdie), Play Donkey (Stewart Conn).
1978-1979	Mary (Ian Brown), Navigator in the Seventh Circle (Leonard Maguire), The Brink (Atholl Hay), All Ayre and Fire (Stephen MacDonald and the company). New translations/adaptations: A Mackintosh Experience (John Cairney, et al., after Charles Rennie Mackintosh), Kipling’s Jungle Book (Stephen MacDonald, after Rudyard Kipling), Billy Budd (Stewart Conn and Stephen MacDonald, after Herman Melville).
1979-1980	The Peter Pan Man (Jon Plowman). New translations/adaptations: An Enemy of the People (Henrik Ibsen, trans. Tom Gallacher), Crime and Punishment (F.D. Dostoyevsky, adapt. Alan Brown).
1980-1981	Blackfriars Wynd (Donald Campbell), The Quartet (Ronald Mavor). New translation: A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen, 1879, trans. Tom Gallacher).
1981-1982	Herman (Stewart Conn).
1982-1983	No new plays, adaptations or translations.
1983-1984	Time Present (Tom Gallacher).
1984-1985	No new plays. New translations/adaptations: The Master Builder (Henrik Ibsen, trans. Lindsay Galloway), Confessions of a Justified Sinner (James Hogg, adapt. Stuart Paterson).
1985-1986	No new plays. New adaptation: Treasure Island (Laurie Ventry, after R.L.Stevenson)
1986-1987	Mr Government (Stuart Paterson), The Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon (Andrew Dallmeyer), Words Beyond Words and Monologues (Tom McGrath, et al). New translations/adaptation: Tartuffe (Liz Lochhead, after Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière).
1987-1988	Beauty and the Beast (Stuart Paterson).
1988-1989	Pursuits (Tom McGrath), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (Liz Lochhead, co-production with Communicado Theatre), A Wee Home from Home (Frank McConnell), Cubist Blues (David Kane), By the Pool (Stewart Conn), Words Beyond Words (workshop programme, Tom McGrath, et al).
1989-1990	Cinderella (Stuart Paterson). New translations/adaptations: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière, trans. Hector Macmillan), The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov, version by Stuart Paterson, from trans. Steven and Alla Main), The House of Bernarda Alba (Federico Garcia Lorca, trans. John Clifford).
1990-1991	No new plays, adaptations or translations.
1991-1992	Shinda, The Magic Ape (Stuart Paterson).
1992-1993	No new plays, adaptations or translations.
1993-1994	No new plays, adaptations or translations.
1994-1995	No new plays. New adaptations: Mongrel’s Heart (Michael Bulgakov, adapt. The Heart of a Dog, Stephen Mulrine). Kidnapped (Tom McGrath, after R.L.Stevenson).
1995-1996	The Gowk Storm (Colin MacDonald, after Nancy Brysson Morrison).
1996-1997	Montrose (Robert Forrest).
1997-1998	Hansel and Gretel (Stuart Paterson).
1998-1999	Clay Bull (Stewart Conn), Britannia Rules (Liz Lochhead). New translations/adaptations: A Stranger Came Ashore (Fiona McGarry, after Molly Hunter, for Edinburgh International Children’s Festival), Life is a Dream (Pedro de la Barca Calderón, trans. John Clifford, for EIF).
1999-2000	Stiff! (Forbes Masson, co-production with Diva Productions and Tron Theatre).
2000-2001	No new plays. New translations/adaptations: Three Sisters (Anton Chekhov, adapt. Liz Lochhead), Phaedra (Edwin Morgan, after Jean Racine).

The Royal Lyceum study was by research and thesis at the University of Glasgow Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.

 

From the Conclusion, Chapter Eight:

This study set out to research the artistic, business and institutional history of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company and to consider the circumstances that might explain its recent administrative and financial embarrassments. An overview of the artistic policies, management and economics of the repertory movement provided useful perspectives for the description and evaluation of the Edinburgh company.

Many factors operated to propagate the first repertory companies. These included a conjunction between the emergence of the ‘new drama’ in the 1890s and its promotion by the London stage societies; a reaction by theatre-makers against the organisation of commercial London and touring theatre with its star system and long-runs, in favour of ensemble acting; and the entrance of new leadership in the form of farsighted private patronage and the powerful new figure of the director. Enlightened though many actor-managers were, their business was their personal property, and their policy was their own policy; the profits or losses belonged to them or their private investors and not to the community. With serious repertory, the community, through the ‘voluntary’ capital of a board of directors, would have ownership of a theatre company and hence participate in theatrical management. Therefore, the criteria by which a theatre might judge policies, play selections and results changed. Through a sample of repertory theatres, a new interplay of mission, money and management circumstances was observed; the companies’ adoption of the limited company for governance and conversion from a proprietary firm to the non-profit form gave them the apparatus to work towards local ownership and participation.

A non-profit company brought tension between voluntary local boards and incoming professional artistic directors. The new theatre leaders were as iron-willed as the actor-managers, but without having personal money at risk, their considerations could be swayed more by the art of the theatre, although they had to balance the opinions of the board with those of artists and theatregoers.  The relationship of a company to its theatre – whether rented, owned or purpose-built – was another key factor, as was, for most, the inescapable competition with existing touring theatres. The intention of the first repertory theatres was to become permanent companies that aimed towards public service, but in the absence of working capital or the underpinning of public subsidy, most companies – unless they received private patronage – resembled the profit-seeking theatres from which they sought release. They lurched rapidly between success and failure because the box-office was the principal factor in determining survival; they were therefore forced to temper their selections of new plays towards safer risks from the London stage. In their artistic policies, many non-profit repertory companies came to resemble, and often had to compete with, a second, privately-owned and profit-seeking repertory stratum; at the same time, theatregoers could enjoy the benefits of this new competition. Before the onset of public subsidy, all companies dealt with government through legislative interventions, but the non-profit variety anticipated the extra conduct of subsidy negotiations by forming a new management association. By 1945, the organisational system for today’s repertory companies had been consolidated; there was a growing perception of a non-profit theatre company as an institution. Several companies now had a momentum and reputation to maintain.  They sustained and protected this through the process of theatre-making and advertising, allowing the plays and productions to speak for themselves, without seeing much need for further public explanation or ‘added value’. These methods were supported by skilful and industrious management which, through my analysis of company finances, confirmed that they assigned most resources to the artists.  

In the longer term, this system had advantages and disadvantages. With continuity of membership, boards acquired intimate knowledge of theatrical management, which helped the progenitor companies to endure independently of the personality of a foundational artistic director. For the most part, they struggled to resolve the inherent ambiguities of play selection; contests of responsibility between board and artistic director were ongoing.     After the Second World War, when the companies attracted small municipal subsidies to augment their equally small state grants – and thereby progress to longer runs and improved rehearsal conditions – the surviving non-profit repertory companies were able to cultivate a higher degree of theatregoer loyalty from their communities; the public benefited from the long-term policies, whilst many actors and the small staffs derived continuity of employment from their managements’ stability and good husbandry.

In many ways, the progenitor companies enshrined the characteristics and expectations of the system for theatre management that was inherited by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in 1965. This study demonstrated that, even with the immediate and continuing receipt of proportionately large subsidies and a new accountability to new stakeholders, the repertory ‘ideal’ of the late nineteenth-century worked well at Edinburgh for twenty years. Until the 1980s, the presumptions of the local authority and the Scottish Arts Council were similar to those of the company; they trusted the Royal Lyceum’s board and management and they judged the company by an orderly balance of artistic and financial performance.  

Given that the company’s relative autonomy and expenditure profile changed markedly after 1985, so against the inherited system must now be set any disadvantages. The biggest danger for a permanent company was to become too institutionalised. In the scale of repertory, the Royal Lyceum was, from the outset, a large theatre company and the risk was that, through its expansionist ambitions in 1975, it would lose sight of its civic and local responsibility to Edinburgh.  After a decade of artistic accomplishment and financial stability, it was in danger of becoming too big. With an unprecedented doubling in Scottish Arts Council and local government subsidy in that year – which was unmatched by increases in box-office receipts – the company was poised to become a Scottish national theatre. However, local government reform intervened to curtail the aspiration. With hindsight, it may now be seen that the shake-up of the company’s transition to a second non-profit firm acted to keep at bay the albatross of administration that had already infected other companies, especially those in England. The pace of reorganisation in 1977, with the appointment of a new artistic director and his adjustments to policy, amounted to an almost totally new management. By starting again from scratch, the Royal Lyceum lost continuity but this prevented it from adopting the proportionately larger administration that the first company would surely have done sooner. During several months’ closure of the main house for refurbishment, the transition kept the company sensitive to its real priorities. Then, after eight years’ and two artistic directors, the accelerated growth  of arts administration over the old ways of theatre management worked towards the obsolescence of the simple and economical practice of a ‘vertical’ management structure of small teams communicating easily with everybody.

From 1985, the company had to accommodate the new concerns of the funding bodies and government. Many issues in theatrical management became bound to the skill with which the company managed these competing values. The Royal Lyceum management was preoccupied with a crisis of legitimacy; its response was to delegate tasks to many new managers in a ‘horizontal’ hierarchy. Although this new structure was similar to mutations in the genuine business world, the costs meant that the company could no longer function within the repertory ‘ideal’ of a theatre where artists were the nerve centre. By 2000, so much of the company’s workload was to do with servicing the funding bodies’ abstract, idealistic and extraneous new management values that when grant income totalled £1,165,485, an astounding £1,288,919 of company expenditure was allocated to administrative wages and overheads. The prediction by John Pick (in The Theatre Industry: subsidy, profit and the search for new audiences, 1985) that the costs of managing the grants would exceed their worth was essentially correct. Grants paid to the company were supposed to be for the benefit of theatregoers and the artists; the repercussions of arts administration are a mockery of efficient theatrical management.

Leslie Lawton (fourth Artistic Director: 1979-1984), Paul Iles and Richard Findlay (Vice Chairman) at a gala event to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company, 15th January 2006.

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 2001

I am indebted to my supervisor, Dr Adrienne Scullion for her help, encouragement and inspiration, and to others in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, including Professor Jan McDonald and, at the Scottish Theatre Archive, Elizabeth Watson. I also thank Judith Harriman of Computing Services for her patient instruction.  In the course of researching this study, most primary sources were found at the Royal Lyceum Theatre and in the following collections: the Edinburgh Room, City of Edinburgh Central Library and the Scottish Arts Council Collection. I particularly thank Dr Michael Shea, chairman of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company Limited, for permission to study the minute books, reports and correspondence. Ruth Butterworth, Derek Kennedy and other uncomplaining members of the theatre staff were always cooperative. I thank many former members of the company for the time they spent answering questions, most especially Steven Gale, the assistant artistic director with whom I spoke on a near-daily basis during autumn 2000 and who was patient enough to check many of the facts and my blending in Chapter Six.  Clive Perry, Stephen MacDonald and Leslie Lawton, former artistic directors, kindly offered many insights on the company’s policy and practice (as well as other repertory theatres that they have led) and I was also fortunate to discuss business issues with Ruari MacNeill and Roger Spence, former general managers, and Brian Loudon, a former theatre manager. Gerry Mulgrew, artistic director of Communicado Theatre, took the time to recollect his company’s association with the Royal Lyceum. Sir John Drummond, former festival director of the Edinburgh International Festival, was equally candid.   I also thank other former members of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company: the playwrights Ian Brown, Donald Campbell and Stewart Conn, the board members Dr Angus Calder and Lorne Boswell (who lent their papers) and Philip Oppenheim, the theatre’s architects Dr Ian Appleton and Sir James Dunbar-Nasmith, the actors James Cairncross and Andrew Byatt, and the theatre critics Joy Hendry and Mark Fisher. When interviewed, many people who were or are employed by the company asked not to be quoted directly; for consistency, I therefore decided not to cite any recollections as direct evidence, except where their reports are documented in the company’s records. Two long-standing subscribing theatregoers, John Stephenson and Peter Napier, lent almost complete collections of Royal Lyceum programmes from which I was able to reconstruct or check the play-lists, and they kindly offered perceptions of the company under each artistic director.

Outwith the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company, I thank John Faulkner and Anna Stapleton, former drama directors of the Scottish Arts Council and the current head of drama, David Taylor, as well as Guilio Romano, who runs their help desk and who provided statistical information. Staff at other Scottish repertory theatres obliged me with access to their portions of a database for theatre attendance that is maintained by the Department of Arts Policy and Management at the City University, London. This is provided for the Theatrical Management Association, whose executive officer, David Emerson, was, like Michael Quine, helpful to me on several occasions. Anthony Field, formerly finance director, and Dennis Andrews, once deputy drama director at the Arts Council of Great Britain, discussed the emergence of arts administration training in the 1970s. I am also grateful to many other repertorists, whether artistic directors or managers or both: the late Stephen Barry, the late Sheila Harborth, the late Sharman Weir, the late Elizabeth Sweeting, Giles Havergal, Ruth Mackenzie, Bill Johnston, Hazel Vincent Wallace, Colin George, Brian Debnam, Max Roberts, Jude Kelly and Maggie Saxon. 

The theatre historian David F. Cheshire was a mine of information and enthusiasm about early repertory and the bibliographer John Cavanagh lent several books on the English repertory companies cited in this study. I also acknowledge the help of Linda Prue, Douglas Brown, Christopher Bowen, David Williams, Robert Breckman, Pelham McMahon, Pam Brooks, Laurence Harbottle, Peter Booth, Tamara Malcolm, Peter Tod, John Godfrey, Dr Richard Foulkes, Dr David Wilmore, Dr Claire Cochrane, Peter Sarah, Iain Mackintosh, Peter Cadley, David Boyd, William Emonds and Anne McCluskey. Geoffrey West kindly assisted with proofreading, but errors are of course my responsibility.