Kate Collins Interview: Competing with Cinema and other Commercial Pressures
Title
Kate Collins Interview: Competing with Cinema and other Commercial Pressures
Date
21 January 2019
Description
Oral history interview with Kate Collins, Operations Director for the Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall.
What's the story?
Having worked at theatres in Wolverhampton and Sheffield, Kate Collins started work at the Theatre Royal in 2001 as Front of House Manager.
As Operations Director for the venue, she now occupies a senior role, overseeing what she has described as “everything that doesn’t happen on the stage”. This includes managing front of house, security and cleaning teams, as well as involvement in conferences and events.
In this interview Kate talks about the changes she has seen during her time at the Theatre Royal, including the rise of social media and financial constraints, meaning a more commercially driven Theatre Royal.
Kate also makes a really interesting point about how the rise of incredible special effects in cinema has caused audiences to expect similar spectacle on the stage, resulting in more expensive shows.
Well, I think lots of things are changing: social media, because everything is so immediate. That’s done wonders as well because obviously you can’t think of it as a negative thing, you’ve got to think of it as a positive thing because it’s about us getting our message out to people as well as people coming to us to say they didn’t like something, or they did like something. So the technology aspect of that is very different now. Just the way you have to have a brand now. It has to be one voice, so it’s very difficult: you can’t have one person saying this about something and somebody else saying it in a slightly different way. It needs to be all the same thing otherwise the message gets a bit confused. So that’s changed hugely.
I think financial constraints are very different now as well. Obviously we’re Nottingham City Council owned and perhaps the level of support that we get from them has changed now, so we have to be more financially astute and perhaps a little bit more commercial than in previous years we have ever had to be. I’m not saying we’ve never been commercial, but somehow the balance has shifted a little bit and it’s not about just going “Oh, we’ll put on this lovely show”, because we know it’ll be good for the community, or it’ll appeal to this group. You’ve got to think well, we can put on this lovely show, but we’ve also got to worry about whether it’s going to make us any money and whether we’re going to be able to afford the staff out of all of it, the financial incomings and outgoings that we have to spend.
And shows themselves have become so much more expensive now as well because, again, it all comes back to the customer expectation of what they’re seeing. You’ve got these fabulous films, CGI, all those things that films can do that you can’t do on the stage and obviously we have to try and compete with that a little bit because if you go and see a film, just across the road we’ve got a 14 auditorium cinema and obviously we want people to come to us as well and you’ve got to try and make what’s on the stage as exciting as it could possibly be in the film over there. I know it’s different because it’s “live” versus the film world, but people that have never been to theatre before and they only know cinema, then obviously there is that element of trying to persuade people to come here by giving them something they want. So producers and promoters have had to do shows and even if they’re shows that have been around for a long time, they’re now trying to make them more technically fabulous than perhaps they would have been 20 or 30 years ago.
As Operations Director for the venue, she now occupies a senior role, overseeing what she has described as “everything that doesn’t happen on the stage”. This includes managing front of house, security and cleaning teams, as well as involvement in conferences and events.
In this interview Kate talks about the changes she has seen during her time at the Theatre Royal, including the rise of social media and financial constraints, meaning a more commercially driven Theatre Royal.
Kate also makes a really interesting point about how the rise of incredible special effects in cinema has caused audiences to expect similar spectacle on the stage, resulting in more expensive shows.
Well, I think lots of things are changing: social media, because everything is so immediate. That’s done wonders as well because obviously you can’t think of it as a negative thing, you’ve got to think of it as a positive thing because it’s about us getting our message out to people as well as people coming to us to say they didn’t like something, or they did like something. So the technology aspect of that is very different now. Just the way you have to have a brand now. It has to be one voice, so it’s very difficult: you can’t have one person saying this about something and somebody else saying it in a slightly different way. It needs to be all the same thing otherwise the message gets a bit confused. So that’s changed hugely.
I think financial constraints are very different now as well. Obviously we’re Nottingham City Council owned and perhaps the level of support that we get from them has changed now, so we have to be more financially astute and perhaps a little bit more commercial than in previous years we have ever had to be. I’m not saying we’ve never been commercial, but somehow the balance has shifted a little bit and it’s not about just going “Oh, we’ll put on this lovely show”, because we know it’ll be good for the community, or it’ll appeal to this group. You’ve got to think well, we can put on this lovely show, but we’ve also got to worry about whether it’s going to make us any money and whether we’re going to be able to afford the staff out of all of it, the financial incomings and outgoings that we have to spend.
And shows themselves have become so much more expensive now as well because, again, it all comes back to the customer expectation of what they’re seeing. You’ve got these fabulous films, CGI, all those things that films can do that you can’t do on the stage and obviously we have to try and compete with that a little bit because if you go and see a film, just across the road we’ve got a 14 auditorium cinema and obviously we want people to come to us as well and you’ve got to try and make what’s on the stage as exciting as it could possibly be in the film over there. I know it’s different because it’s “live” versus the film world, but people that have never been to theatre before and they only know cinema, then obviously there is that element of trying to persuade people to come here by giving them something they want. So producers and promoters have had to do shows and even if they’re shows that have been around for a long time, they’re now trying to make them more technically fabulous than perhaps they would have been 20 or 30 years ago.
Type
Oral interview
Location of item
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Rights
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Contributor
Interviewers: Stephen Bray & Liz Mackenzie
Transcriber: David Chilton
Transcriber: David Chilton
