Emily Malen Interview: How Customers Influence Theatre Royal Access Work
Title
Emily Malen Interview: How Customers Influence Theatre Royal Access Work
Date
17 January 2019
Description
Oral history interview with Emily Malen, Front of House Manager and Access Development for the Theatre Royal since 2005.
What's the story?
Born in Leicester in 1982, Emily Malen came to the Theatre Royal in 2005 through Loughborough University’s Graduate Gateway Scheme.
She was originally placed within the education team, but gradually worked her way up the organisation to become Front of House Manager.
Of her many achievements Emily has also significantly developed the access work at the venue, ensuring the Theatre Royal is genuinely open to everyone.
In this interview, Emily passionately describes how her work develops simply by listening to customers and responding to their needs, recounting an experience with ‘Molly’, a customer with two different access needs.
At the minute, a project that we’re working on is, if people are hard of hearing, or have hearing aids, we have a system in place that we’re looking at reviewing, but actually it does work, it’s just that we’ve realised equipment in hearing aids, the technology now can expand and develop so quickly. But what if I roll back maybe twelve months ago, there was a customer sat in our auditorium and she was quite upset because she couldn’t …. it wasn’t working for her. She was sat in an area of our auditorium that actually that signal didn’t hit, but she had some sight, so wanted to sit on the front row and she was also hard of hearing so it was quite interesting that we were aware that there are various different access needs, but it’s when someone has two access needs, it’s how we can make our services work for that, so it could be it could work for her if she was only hard of hearing, it could work for her if she was only partially sighted or blind, but she was presenting us with a situation where she said “I’ve got both and I have this access need and I couldn’t fully access the show from where I wanted to sit in the auditorium”.
But it’s brilliant how this works because there’s a lady called Margaret in Front of House, she was on duty that day and actually it was through Margaret feeding that back to me on her show report and also in person and also an email just saying “There’s a lady in the auditorium, she’s called Molly and she’s got some ideas, but she also wants to feed back about her experience”. A bad person may have just ignored that and done nothing, but I contacted Molly and just said “Just tell me about your experience and let me know your thoughts” and through that she actually told about me some amazing piece of equipment that we’ve actually spread the word about ourselves. It’s basically personal stereo headphones, but for someone who uses hearing aids. They’re called Connevans. They are like ear hooks, so they hook behind someone’s ear, that what we found was that actually answered an access problem we were experiencing, that if she plugged those in like a personal stereo into an access piece of equipment we have here that broadcasts the show, she could connect and hear some services’ audio description that are working for people who are blind and partially sighted, but they would also sync up with her hearing aids.
And now and only yesterday we had another group of five people that we were explaining this … We’re calling it almost a new discovery for us, but the customers don’t even know about it and actually some equipment people in theatre. We’re advising, I think it was Everyman & Playhouse in Liverpool only the other day. They were emailing us going “Ooh, I think you’ve found something out, can you tell us about it”. And it’s all about that networking and spreading good practice. But that only stemmed from that customer, not in a way of complaining, but making her thoughts known and us actioning on it and it would be very sad to think if ever there was customers who had thoughts and an organisation didn’t listen to them because from that one evening and that experience and from Margaret telling me, and me contacting Molly, it’s just opened a whole new world and may actually solve a lot of problems we had with the system, which we’re exploring at the moment. So from that, that’s a beautiful way that it’s lovely that customers can actually impart that information and they’re our best resource sometimes. If you don’t listen to them, they’ve got so much knowledge amongst them, they’re your gold dust, so it’s brilliant.
She was originally placed within the education team, but gradually worked her way up the organisation to become Front of House Manager.
Of her many achievements Emily has also significantly developed the access work at the venue, ensuring the Theatre Royal is genuinely open to everyone.
In this interview, Emily passionately describes how her work develops simply by listening to customers and responding to their needs, recounting an experience with ‘Molly’, a customer with two different access needs.
At the minute, a project that we’re working on is, if people are hard of hearing, or have hearing aids, we have a system in place that we’re looking at reviewing, but actually it does work, it’s just that we’ve realised equipment in hearing aids, the technology now can expand and develop so quickly. But what if I roll back maybe twelve months ago, there was a customer sat in our auditorium and she was quite upset because she couldn’t …. it wasn’t working for her. She was sat in an area of our auditorium that actually that signal didn’t hit, but she had some sight, so wanted to sit on the front row and she was also hard of hearing so it was quite interesting that we were aware that there are various different access needs, but it’s when someone has two access needs, it’s how we can make our services work for that, so it could be it could work for her if she was only hard of hearing, it could work for her if she was only partially sighted or blind, but she was presenting us with a situation where she said “I’ve got both and I have this access need and I couldn’t fully access the show from where I wanted to sit in the auditorium”.
But it’s brilliant how this works because there’s a lady called Margaret in Front of House, she was on duty that day and actually it was through Margaret feeding that back to me on her show report and also in person and also an email just saying “There’s a lady in the auditorium, she’s called Molly and she’s got some ideas, but she also wants to feed back about her experience”. A bad person may have just ignored that and done nothing, but I contacted Molly and just said “Just tell me about your experience and let me know your thoughts” and through that she actually told about me some amazing piece of equipment that we’ve actually spread the word about ourselves. It’s basically personal stereo headphones, but for someone who uses hearing aids. They’re called Connevans. They are like ear hooks, so they hook behind someone’s ear, that what we found was that actually answered an access problem we were experiencing, that if she plugged those in like a personal stereo into an access piece of equipment we have here that broadcasts the show, she could connect and hear some services’ audio description that are working for people who are blind and partially sighted, but they would also sync up with her hearing aids.
And now and only yesterday we had another group of five people that we were explaining this … We’re calling it almost a new discovery for us, but the customers don’t even know about it and actually some equipment people in theatre. We’re advising, I think it was Everyman & Playhouse in Liverpool only the other day. They were emailing us going “Ooh, I think you’ve found something out, can you tell us about it”. And it’s all about that networking and spreading good practice. But that only stemmed from that customer, not in a way of complaining, but making her thoughts known and us actioning on it and it would be very sad to think if ever there was customers who had thoughts and an organisation didn’t listen to them because from that one evening and that experience and from Margaret telling me, and me contacting Molly, it’s just opened a whole new world and may actually solve a lot of problems we had with the system, which we’re exploring at the moment. So from that, that’s a beautiful way that it’s lovely that customers can actually impart that information and they’re our best resource sometimes. If you don’t listen to them, they’ve got so much knowledge amongst them, they’re your gold dust, so it’s brilliant.
Type
Oral Interview
Location of item
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Rights
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Contributor
Interviewers: Liz MacKenzie & Julia Holmes
Transcriber: David Chilton
Transcriber: David Chilton
