Ticket bought, you arrive at the theatre, or in the case of the Edinburgh Fringe the room/shipping container/tent/elevator* that passes for a performance venue. You settle back in your seat as the lights go down and the production begins… but have you ever wondered what goes into bringing a play to the stage, or a piece of new writing to the Fringe?
Here, Elsa Strachan, co-founder of Milk + Mallet Theatre Company and director of I Dreamt You Differently, a new play by the company’s co-founder Abbey Gillett, reflects on the business side of show-business and the pressures that an audience never sees.
‘If we stop investing in artist development… we lose stories and opportunities to reach new communities‘
“Let me lose,” Mariella, a struggling singer-songwriter, cries it into the ether. It’s my favourite line in Abbey Gillett’s play, I Dreamt You Differently. Abbey’s line was rattling around my head whilst writing what felt like my 250th funding application.
‘It feels like a strange thing to ask for; in the arts, we’ve built a mythology around perseverance. From La La Land to X-Factor sob-stories, we romanticise struggle to the point that it is viewed as a necessity. What we don’t talk about is how the struggle itself is becoming the thing that breaks people. More and more, I’m seeing theatre-workers leave the industry.
‘Just recently, a friend told me she was leaving theatre and taking a job in finance, “It’s just unsustainable,” she said. And last year, a study found one third of theatre-makers under-35 considering leaving the industry. The strange thing is, this isn’t often treated as a concern. One of the most common pieces of career advice I hear is, if you stick around long enough, people will drop out and opportunities will become more available. Maybe that’s supposed to be reassuring. I’m not sure it is.
‘As I pressed send on the funding application that had taken me tens of hours of unpaid work to complete, I found myself wondering, do I really want success to be measured by my ability to tolerate instability for longer than everyone else? It feels as though we’ve accepted theatre is so competitive that people dropping out is inevitable, necessary even. But if we genuinely believe in the value of the arts, why would we want fewer theatre-makers? Surely the goal should be more theatre, reaching more audiences.
That’s why I find it frustrating when conversations about the arts focus solely on artists. The real value of theatre lies in what it gives the people who experience it. Growing up on a farm in Aberdeenshire, I didn’t see theatre until I was 14, when I saw Kieran Hurley’s Rantin. I’ll never forget sitting in a room full of strangers, all sharing the same story at the same time. As a young girl who had lived a fairly sheltered rural life, it gave me a new way of understanding the country I grew up in and my place within it. That collective imagination is what made me fall in love with theatre.
Building a career in theatre often feels opaque, less like climbing a ladder and more like being trapped in a Harry Potter-esque room full of doors. You wander around knocking on them, hoping one might open whilst suspecting there are others you’ve never even been told about. The people behind those doors aren’t villains, but when opportunities become scarce, gatekeeping becomes more powerful. It shapes not only who gets to make theatre but what kind of work gets made.
When you finally get an opportunity, there is pressure to make work that feels commercially reliable and likely to be reviewed well – when theatre becomes smaller, safer and more commercial, audiences have fewer chances to discover work that surprises them or simply makes them feel seen.
‘If we stop investing in artist development, we don’t just lose artists. We lose stories and opportunities for theatre to reach new communities. When Mariella says, “Let me lose,” she’s really asking for permission to try. That’s permission the entire industry could benefit from. It was this exact conversation that convinced Abbey and I to take I Dreamt You Differently to the Edinburgh Fringe, because perhaps the first person who needs to give an artist permission to fail, is the artist themselves.’
I Dreamt You Differently runs at C Arts: Roman Eagle Lodge from 5-30 August.
Details and tickets HERE
