6 1GT Friday December 11 2020 | the times
I
t’s only a small squall at the
National Theatre, but it suggests
a much bigger storm looming
on the horizon. This week Tom
David Hughes, a stage director,
claimed that when the National
recently streamed online its
2015 production of the children’s
show I Want My Hat Back — on
which he had worked as staff director
(someone who helps the main director
by rehearsing small scenes and
understudies) — he wasn’t told about
the streaming, nor paid an extra fee.
That seems a minor oversight on
the National’s part, since other
production staff and cast members
were paid streaming fees. So why
write about it? The answer is that
the story is emblematic of a general
unease, bordering on anger in some
quarters, about the whole issue of
how performing organisations are
embracing the brave new world of
online streaming.
And, particularly, how they are
grappling with the political imperative
(it really is — it comes directly from
the culture secretary and his acolytes)
to “monetise their digital content”.
Which, in plain English, means
persuading online audiences to pay
to see shows just as if they were
attending the live event.
Some context here. It’s hard to recall
now, but only a year ago streaming
was barely a twinkle in the eye of
anybody running an arts organisation.
Some pioneering souls, generally
regarded as borderline obsessives,
banged on about how the internet
was the future for the arts. To the vast
majority of performing organisations,
however, the notion of streaming
shows directly into people’s homes
seemed like a complicated way of
losing lots of money.
Covid changed everything. Too
slowly at first, but then in a panicky
rush, performing groups cut off from
live audiences by lockdown realised
that the only way to reach their
punters — and to justify the bailout,
£1.57 billion, cajoled out of government
— was through the internet.
And when those companies quickest
out of the blocks started picking up
viewers not just in Blackburn and
Basingstoke, but Brisbane and
Baltimore too, the trickle turned into
a flood. Worldwide fame was suddenly
a tantalising possibility. The LondonJames Corden in
One Man, Two
Guvnors, staged in
2011, streamed in 2020charging, they screw up the
marketplace for smaller outfits that
need to charge. Alastair Whatley,
the founder of the touring Original
Theatre Company, which this year has
streamed several productions on
shoestring budgets (reaching 10,000-
plus people in 27 countries), speaks
candidly about how his sales
plummeted when the National
Theatre released some of its biggest
hits free online, and his relief that the
National is now charging for its
streamed products.
The situation is even more galling
in opera. One week into the March
lockdown the mighty Metropolitan
Opera in New York (which has a huge
archive of filmed operas) decided to
stream, free of charge, a different
opera each night. It is still doing so.
“Peter Gelb [the Met’s general
manager] isn’t paying his orchestra or
chorus, or putting on live shows, yet
he’s flooding the global online marketThe whole
move
on to
YouTube
was a
disaster in
many ways
Philharmonic Orchestra was
astonished to find that half the viewers
for its online concerts lived in the US.
Today you would struggle to find
a British performing company that
hasn’t started streaming. I would
never argue that Covid has been a
good thing in any respect, but it has
undoubtedly accelerated the arts
world’s embrace of the internet,
maybe by five years.
That said, three big mistakes have
been made. The first is that too many
shows were, and still are, given away
free of charge. “The whole move on
to YouTube was a disaster in many
ways,” says Susannah Simons, the
editorial director of Marquee TV, a
leading arts streaming company. “It
sends out the wrong message to the
public, that the arts are free, when
companies are desperate for revenue.”
It does more than that. When
well-endowed national companies put
their back catalogues online withoutRichard Morrison the arts column
and making it very difficult for anyone
else to sell a streamed opera,” says one
top British opera singer. And it is hard
to see how this strategy helps even the
Met itself plan a sustainable future.
That’s the first mistake. The
second is that, perhaps inadvertently
given the hand-to-mouth scramble
to survive this year, performing
organisations have sometimes put
material online without seeking
approval from, or offering extra
payment to, those involved in the
original show.
Some argue that this is perfectly
legit. “We pay people well to perform
in our shows,” says Richard Mantle,
the general director of Opera North
in Leeds, which netted 2,500 paying
punters in one weekend with its
recent production of Kurt Weill’s The
Seven Deadly Sins. “Why should the
performers then get more just because
we’re reaching audiences on a
different platform?”
Others maintain that companies
should at least be offering their
performers and crew a percentage
of the money made from streaming.
“But that would be like the scene
in Shakespeare in Love where the
impresario promises the actors a share
of the profits, knowing full well there
are never any profits,” Whatley says.
Which brings us to the third big
mistake: the misconception that
streaming is, or could be, a significant
source of income for hard-pressed
companies coming out of the
wreckage of 2020. It isn’t, and won’t
be for ages, if ever. Even Netflix is
still £15 billion in debt. Most arts
organisations will be lucky to recoup
the costs of streaming. And those costs
will invariably rise as the marketplace
becomes ever more crowded and
punters expect higher and higher
production standards.
That’s not to say that streaming
shouldn’t be done. It has hugely
increased the numbers regularly
enjoying the arts, and there is reason
to hope that many of those new
converts will be enticed to live shows
as the pandemic abates. If, however,
you hear a government minister
arguing that “monetising digital
content” has the potential to
supplement or even replace public
subsidy in the arts economy, you will
have every right to deliver a sardonic
one-word response. Bollocks.One show, two platforms — can streaming work for arts companies?
JOHAN PERSSON