Passing the baton

One of my highlights of 2024 was winning the Big Ideas competition at The Stage's Future of Theatre conference — an annual, day-long gathering of theatre professionals from around the UK. This year, the day was bookended with keynotes from Rosemary Squire (co-founder of both ATG and Trafalgar Entertainment) and Indhu Rubasingham (the director and joint chief of the National Theatre), and in between featured panels on topics from creative ways of financing theatre to free speech. (The free speech panel was, for me, the runaway hit of the day.)

Among all that, the Big Ideas competition invites people from across the country to present their five-minute pitch for how to change the industry for the better, and at the end of the day the assembled delegates vote on the best one. As last year's winner, I was invited back to present this year's award, to Rob Myles, who won for his proposal to devolve theatre funding to a series of regional "national theatres" across the UK. (It was an excellent pitch.)

As part of the award presentation, I was also asked to say a few words about what's happened with my big idea since last year. Here's the text of my remarks:

Hello everyone. My name is Andrew Ladd. As Matt said, I was the winner of last year’s competition, for my proposal that UK theatres should start sharing their sales figures openly, in the same way that many other creative industries do — and, in fact, in the same way theatres already do on Broadway. My pitch was that this would increase innovation and diversity, by giving producers more information to assess risk and audience appetite, and to better budget their productions.

I have to say, winning the competition last year was such a lovely experience, and I’m not just saying that because everyone from the Stage is standing right here. The outpouring of support I got afterwards, both at the conference and online, really gave me cause for hope. It seemed like I’d tapped into something that a lot of people really wanted.

So I scheduled calls. I connected with and messaged people. I published a follow-up article in the Stage setting out my case for a wider audience. The staff at the Stage talked to people on my behalf and put me in touch with others.

But… I’m sad to report that a year later, I haven’t made a whole lot of progress.

I don’t say this with any bitterness or defeatism. And I’m certainly not trying to rain on the parade for this year’s winner. On the contrary, I think there’s a really important lesson here that will help this year’s winner succeed where I haven’t.

I believed that a shared repository of sales figures would only work if the industry’s biggest players were on board, because they have the biggest stores of data. And unfortunately, the industry’s biggest players simply weren’t interested. I heard it again and again, including from SOLT itself: it’s not something SOLT members want. When I published my follow-up article in the Stage, a certain well-known producer left me a comment on it telling me my idea was a bad one.

I don’t know where all that resistance came from, or why SOLT members might feel that way. You’d have to ask them. But because I’d pinned my hopes on them, when they weren’t interested, I didn’t really have anything to fall back on.

In the meantime, though, something else was happening. If you were here last year, you might remember that my idea only very narrowly beat out Chloe Sharland’s, which was an online marketplace where theatre companies can buy and re-sell props, costumes, and other equipment.

I bring up Chloe because, thanks to last year’s conference, her idea also got a lot of attention, and she pushed forward with it guns blazing. You can now visit the website for the marketplace she proposed at everythingtheatrical.com and join the waiting list – last I heard, the platform is due to launch this year.

And in retrospect, I should have done what Chloe did, and started smaller. Because if I was standing here this year with a solid, startup platform of my own, filled with willing participants, and evidence it was helping them make better, more financially viable work, that would be a much better result, for everyone.

So, to this year’s winner, and to this year’s runners up: though you can’t yet learn from anyone else’s sales figures, I hope you’ll learn from my mistakes, and from the success of Everything Theatrical. Big ideas are incredibly important. But when all you have is an idea, it’s so easy for well known producers to leave comments in the Stage saying, oh, it’ll never work.

When you have an actual thing that does work, even on a tiny scale, it’s a very different conversation. So take your big ideas and run with them however you can. Even ATG was just Rosemary and Howard once. The biggest ideas, and the biggest successes, sometimes start with the smallest of steps. And I’m sure everyone here is eager to see what steps this year’s winner will take first.