by Gary Hills

A decade ago, I was co-director of Theatre Factory, a promotion and production company based in Brussels. The idea was essentially to bring British theatre to the capital of Europe, a polyglot city with English as a lingua franca. With the professional theatre split strictly along French and Flemish lines, the only English-language theatre was – and still is – produced by amateur community groups.

If I may say, our track record was impressive. We were fortunate to work with some fantastic companies including Out of Joint, Theatr Clwyd, Actors Touring Company, Hoipolloi, Third Angel and the RSC. Linda Marlowe astonished audiences with her Berkoff’s Women and Gareth Armstrong served up a steaming Shylock.

We worked on a festival of new English-language writing that included work by Mark Ravenhill, Conor McPherson and Forced Entertainment and also organized a week of performances by Merseyside-based companies to launch the Liverpool City of Culture bid at the European Parliament.

My experience of working at Theatre Factory gave me the necessary insights into the realities of touring abroad, not just for the visiting companies but from the point of view of the local promoter. You can get the work right, the audiences right, the marketing right and make the relationships worthwhile and enduring but, as with most things, the ultimate assessment has to be based on whether it can work financially.

Despite the artistic successes and some long-lasting relationships that I still enjoy, we found it almost impossible to make the process financially viable – the costs simply outweighed the income. This was despite support from The British Council and some corporate sponsorship. Ultimately though, we could only charge a maximum ticket price in a country where generous subsidy means cheap theatre tickets.

So where’s all this heading? It’s certainly not a dissection of our particular business model but the experience has led me to believe that it’s important to try to gain an understanding of any financial constraints that a potential buyer of work may have. Some festivals and bigger venues may be generously funded to co-produce work or buy in shows, others could be treading a finer line.

Talking to promoters at Caravan 2010, it became clear that there is now more of an appetite for sharing financial information and budgets. In my day, a company could quote a set performance fee plus transport, accommodation and per diems and I could either accept it or not.

Now, it’s not so much about negotiating a price as reaching a mutually acceptable and respectful deal where both parties can win and neither try to make excessive profit at the expense of the other. I believe that anyone involved in international work would benefit from developing a holistic understanding of the costs involved of touring abroad for both parties as well as the potential for income.

It’s essentially a grown-up way of doing business in a harsher economic climate though that’s not to say that artists shouldn’t be seeking to make a good financial deal. They may just need to be more open about how they arrive at the money and view it more as a mutually beneficial relationship than a straight buyer-seller transaction.

As for me, I still have an eye on opportunities for presenting British work in Brussels. The gap in the market remains and no-one else has tried to fill it. That may tell me all I need to know but I’d need to investigate radical ways of financing it in a more inventive and complex way than relying on ticket income alone.