In Good Company - A manual for producing independent theatre by Lyn Wallis. Currency Press 2005. $32.95 illustrated paperback.
Lyn Wallis was artistic director of The Jigsaw Company here in Canberra for 4 years in the '90s, and was largely instrumental in taking Jigsaw beyond its original theatre-in-education format to include young adult theatre, so successfully followed up by recent director Greg Lissaman.
Wallis went on to become Downstairs Theatre Director at Belvoir St, Sydney, where she set up the mentoring program, B Sharp, for Company B. She has observed and assisted the development of independent ("indie") theatre alongside the "world of fully-paid professional theatre [where] an artistic director would have for each production a full complement of designers, a production manager, a rehearsal room, a season stage manager (and maybe ASM), a costume co-ordinator" while the employing company "would very likely have an in-house marketing and publicity department and graphic designer, and would act as overall producer of the work, under the watchful eye of a general manager or administrator".
"The independent situation is rarely so richly resourced!", she writes, but small companies still need to cover all the producing responsibilities - and her book tells you how to do it. Written in a direct, sometimes even blunt, conversational style, In Good Company is a really useful book for what Wallis calls "collaborators" in Canberra's multitude of small independent theatre groups. Wallis describes it as a "practical guide for producers of small-scale professional, co-operative and amateur theatre", and that's exactly what it is.
For example, it gives you all the websites you need, to find out everything you've always known you needed to know but maybe never knew how to find.
I want to add drama teachers to the list of must-readers. The book is both full of information teachers need to put on public performances, but it is also a model for teachers to use. Wallis describes typical small company structures which can clarify how to set up a school student group as a production company, both to take the load off an individual teacher's shoulders and to teach the students about theatre in the real world.
And what is the real world of Canberra theatre? It's jam-packed full of small-scale professional, co-operative and amateur theatre. Some have lasted, it seems, forever - Canberra Repertory, for example - but many others are short-lived. There was Theatre ACT, Fortune Theatre, Canberra Theatre Company, which were the forerunners of The Street Theatre.
Looking over the reviews I've written in the past 10 years, I re-discovered names like Culturally Innovative Arts (remember David Branson?), Company Skylark, Elbow Theatre, Eureka!, BITS Theatre, WildWood Theatre, Women on a Shoestring and other fully professional outfits. When I began counting groups like those run by former students of colleges and universities, individuals, amateurs who sometimes employ a professional director and a host of other combinations, I found a total of about 70.
Full Tilt, New Erektions, Hidden Corners, Bohemian Productions, Paradox Theatre, Odd Productions, Free-Rain, Aberrant Genotype Productions - the mind boggles at the variety.
For a new company, begin with clarifying how your group will work. Write a Letter of Agreement between everyone involved, even if you remain an informal company. Inc or not to Inc? is an important question: "incorporation vs incarceration", says Wallis.
How independent do you want to be, or what can you gain from being associated with a venue which may provide box-office facilities, publicity, technical staff and other services in a "curated season". This is the direction The Street Theatre went in the days when several professional companies realised that doing everything separately, in effect in competition with each other, was counter-productive. Better to work co-operatively in The Season at The Street, so that funding applications had a firmer base, and costs such as publicity and ticketing could be shared.
What's the best way of managing the rehearsal and performance periods, covering your insurance and other legal requirements, setting up an Australian Business Number (ABN) and GST arrangements, handling the media, getting copyright right? Everything is answered in this almost pocket-sized book. "The more task-specific people you can build into your team the better, but most companies don't need (and don't have!) a dozen people to get a small-scale production up and running" and Wallis explains different options with real-life examples.
My advice is to read the book from cover to cover first, to get the big picture. Then go back and tab the pages with the particular bits of information you need. That's my only gripe. I would like a double-page spread at the beginning or the end with a complete flow chart from first meeting, through planning, administrative and legal set-up, funding and publicity, rehearsal, venue arrangements, production week, performance season, project completion and on-going arrangements.
Each twist and turn in the chart of the company's affairs could be flagged with the page number where you can follow through the details. Then the book would be just about perfect. And it may well save many theatre collaborators much angst, and even extend their - theatrical - lives.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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