Almost Healthy: The Patient Ambition of Victoria Theatre
Examining the Constitution of Our Dauntless Stage Companies
woRds And imAges by siMon oGden
The theatre arts are a tough sell to contemporary audiences. For Victoria’s long-serving stage companies, the past two years have jeopardized revenue from even their most loyal supporters. But live performances are finally back. As are audiences, both bare-faced and masked. The industry can now return its attention to the eternal challenge: getting butts in seats.
What does the term theatre evoke for you? Corseted, fainty women being menaced by puffy-sleeved actors—nay, thespians—with rapiers and densely olde language? Unless you were among those daydreamy few seeking asylum from the militancy of high school by puckishly hopping around drama class, you likely share this perception.
And this is why our local theatre industry is working against two critical marketing obstacles: the long tail of its antiquarian image, and its audiences’ past experiences with hammy plays (à la Waiting for Guffman).
What unites us, the zealots who seek out that exalted communion between audience and performer, is that we were all lucky enough to experience one show, or one moment within a show, that articulated a private conviction so perfectly that it made us feel less alone.
It’s a sharply visceral connection, a naked mirror, and it’s why the form has remained essentially unchanged for so long. For a company to get that good, to be able to siphon that power, it must work at its craft for ages, with unflagging love and repetition.
Theatre SKAM has been producing original staged and site-specific work in and around Victoria since its first show in January 1995. Matthew Payne, artistic and managing producer (and the “M” in SKAM, as one of the founding members, along with Sarah Donald, Karen Turner, and Amiel Gladstone), was once interrogated about his work by a parent of one of his son’s classmates: “I don’t quite get it—you guys memorize lines, and whole scenes, and then you pretend to be other people, and I come and watch you do that? I just don’t get it.” Presumably, this young dad has had some experience with TV and movies, so what’s so puzzling about live storytelling?
“It’s the live part of it that some people don’t get,” continued Payne. “But for those of us who are in it, it’s the live part that is the essential piece of the puzzle.” Tolerance for discomfort is a necessary trait of the dedicated theatregoer, and a requirement for making art that takes risks, but it’s potentially limiting if you’re looking to convince someone to add theatre as a staple in their entertainment diet.
Because let’s face it: audiences will watch a hundred bad movies and come back for more. But there’s something uniquely awkward and off-putting about being in the same room as the performers when they’re disappointing you.
Theatre companies with larger budgets and subscriber/donor bases can combat this unease by staging venerated works and sourcing strong performers from outside Victoria. Fernwood’s Belfry Theatre, a local theatre stalwart since 1976, has built a dedicated following and reputation for consistent quality in this way.
But the smaller houses staging riskier, lesser-known works spend years building trust in their taste and value. If all goes well, they’ll earn a steady trickle of box-office revenue, with sabre-edge margins. (All our established local companies are not-for-profit charitable organizations, relying on local and national arts grants and tax exemptions to keep their curtains up.)
Clayton Jevne founded Theatre Inconnu in 1978, and as artistic director still sprightly introduces each show at their little black-box space in Fernwood, tucked under the shadow of the Belfry Theatre’s towering steeple. The company’s mandate is to “present challenging theatre in an intimate space.”
“We’ve tried extensively over the years to convince patrons of the more commercial and ‘safe’ theatres in Victoria that they should try us out,” Jevne says. “They might just find that what we present is more accessible than they think.” Asked how Inconnu navigated the pandemic, he said, “Our average audience has stayed virtually the same since the beginning: averaging about 30 people a show. We have always kept our ticket prices at par or below what movies charge, so we haven’t lost audience size due to unaffordable ticket prices.”
Some local companies, including Inconnu and 36-year-old festival presenter Intrepid Theatre, aired pay-per-view performances in the early days of COVID. But filmed theatre is a pale shadow, denying the form’s fundamental component of intimacy, with production values far lower than the streaming shows we’ve grown accustomed to.
Theatre SKAM’s response to the Great Shutdown befits a company known for springing random acts of theatre on unsuspecting pedestrians along the Galloping Goose: they built a stage on the back of a flatbed and offered pop-up plays delivered to front yards. DoorDash for storytelling, if you will. Intrepid switched to cabaret seating for last year’s Fringe to accommodate distancing requirements and started an artist-residency program at its studio space. Artistic director Sean Guist reported that, despite a corresponding 50 percent reduction in the number of Fringe shows last August, the same percentage of audience was in attendance as previous years.
All the long-running Vic theatre companies used the biggest arrow in their quivers to survive the pandemic, pulling out the creativity that has kept them in business these many years.
They also had a bit of help from the Canada Performing Arts Workers Resilience Fund, which provided a shot of short-term government assistance for indie arts orgs. Seats are getting filled again, but the spectre of the pandemic lingers: I went to a recent performance of Theatre Inconnu’s staging of the Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs addiction musical The Black Rider, and the mask tally was roughly 50 percent, with no discernable friction from either camp.
Asked about the current health of Victoria’s theatre landscape, Matt Payne says, “The same as it’s ever been: perpetually almost healthy.” According to Payne, the largest marketing hurdle right now is that there are no theatre reviewers at any of the main publications anymore. Without critical, nuanced reporting on the strengths and weaknesses of new shows—established or developing, traditional or avant-garde—theatre loses a main artery to the city’s consciousness, relying ever more heavily on audience word of mouth, which can quickly become a closed loop.
Fledgling companies suffer the most from lack of exposure, and many burn brightly and all too briefly as they learn how hard it is to sell an experience that so many people think they don’t need or want.
But for those Victoria companies who have stuck it out for years, possessed of a clear vision and a need to express themselves publicly, the secret to audience-building lies in that very tenacity. Clayton Jevne says that Inconnu has in the past tried all sorts of marketing angles: in-your-face display ads, full window displays, large-scale fundraisers, flyering and postering the town, off-season family-friendly events.
“These have all had zero impact on the average number of theatregoers to our regular season. Growing audience size seems to be a futile effort, and we enjoy knowing that the number of appreciative patrons we have is likely to stay stable. We’ve come to accept that bigger isn’t necessarily better,” says Jevne.
It’s an achingly slow payoff but a marvelous ambition to turn the theatre-curious into fans, nurturing them into your audience base. Creating a healthy theatre ecosystem like Victoria’s primarily comes down to patience and durability. Sean Guist once asked an atypically senior audience member what brought her to one of Intrepid’s festivals. “I like challenging theatre,” she replied. “My taste hasn’t changed, you know, only my age.”
