Appendix

The box-office appeal of new plays in Scots – some reflections

François Grin, writing in 2003, observed:

The discourses extolling the importance of ‘languages’ and ‘diversity’ on the one hand, and of ‘economic activity’ or ‘prosperity’ on the other hand, have a history in which mutual estrangement and distrust dominate. […] In recent years, however, what was a fairly clear ideological divide has begun to fade away. On the one hand, advocates of small languages have decided (in large part for well-advised strategic reasons), that they would no longer concede to their opponents what amounted to a quasi-monopoly on modernist discourse. Staking a claim on modernity, on behalf of minority languages, logically implied insisting that economic development could very well take place through the medium of these languages, or even be enhanced by using them.1

Grin’s observation chimes well, from the perspective a respected economist with an interest in cultural economies, with one made to me on a number of occasions since the 1970s. Then, both Chris Parr and Stephen MacDonald, Artistic Directors of, respectively, Edinburgh’s Traverse and Royal Lyceum Theatres, remarked that, if they presented a new Scots-language play, they would anticipate a box-office take ten percent higher than for a new play in English presented in the same programme slot. Bill Findlay reinforces their point when he says

Allen Wright commented in 1977 that ’a few years ago, theatre directors used to argue that Scottish plays did not attract audiences but that generalisation was demolished by the success’2 of plays by Bill Bryden, Hector MacMillan, and others.3

This view was further endorsed during the 1990s in separate discussions with a number of artistic directors, including Joan Knight of Perth Theatre, Ken Alexander of the , Philip Howard of the , Kenny Ireland of the and Mark Thomson of the Brunton Theatre. In September 2006, the then senior managers of Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Nikki Axford, Chief Executive, and John Durnin, Artistic Director, made a complementary point in separate interviews. They had considered the 246 Appendix impact of a Noel Coward play on their theatre’s box-office over the previous two decades. They chose his work as exemplary of English- language drama that is generally popular and attractive to audiences. Their box-office research had found that such a play would generate an average seventy percent attendance in English regional theatre. The Pitlochry experience, however, over the same period was of a consistent sixty percent box-office result, ten percent lower than the average if the same play were produced in England. Obviously such observations by theatre professionals, however senior and experienced, are subject to a number of methodological problems. First of all, it is nigh impossible to calculate in a scientifically satisfactory manner the actual effect of the language of performance on the impact of a new play – or at least no satisfactory way of measuring this has, to my knowledge, so far been devised. Secondly, how can one establish, to provide a control for comparison, the probable box-office income of a play that is not performed at all in a specific slot when the Scots-language one is? One can hypothesise – after all that is what any artistic director does in the programming process, measuring the impact, in her or his professional judgement, of one play against another until the choice, seen in that artistic and professional judgement as most likely to optimise box-office, is selected. Thirdly, this programming process is complicated by the need in most scheduling practices to balance the programme across genres, areas of interest and controversy, the developmental, innovative and experimental needs of both the form and individual artists, and, not least, the often hidden, but quite critical, issue of cast availability. Optimisation of programming is not the same as maximisation of income. Fourthly, casting of particular performers can have a strong box-office impact so that, sad as it may be to a playwright, there are cases where if, say, a Judi Dench or Elaine C. Smith is in a play – any play – its chances of selling out are good, whatever its content or language. Finally, how can it be demonstrated that the ten percent difference noted by professional managers and observers (and ten percent is, of course, a rough estimate rather than a precise calculation) is the result of language of performance and not those other factors, like casting choice, already referred to? A range of variables clearly affect the box-office performance of plays, quite apart from the nature of the play itself, let alone the language in which it is written.