Red Table Theatre

So, the Hans Christian Andersen project is all cast, contracts signed. I’m working on the translation/adaptations we’ll be using at the moment, we’ve got design meetings this week, it’s all systems go.

The Edinburgh show has just paid out its profits, to actors and investors alike, and we made a profit. We’re going to do it again this Christmas. How do I know? The same people who backed us for our shows up to now are already starting to back us again – these are business people, not theatre professionals. Investors are starting to put money in before we’ve even asked. Lets face it, in this current economic climate, where else are you going to get a 10% return on your money in just a matter of months, with a company that now has a track record of delivering profit on productions through the disciplined use of the model financial systems it has developed.

If you want to invest, please get in touch. If you want to see what’s going on with the Open Book revolution, buy one unit of investment so you can see how it all works behind the scenes – I’d especially encourage fringe theatre companies considering doing this as it’s a great way of getting hands on experience of our systems without the stress of running your own production.

We honestly believe that this model will not only reduce the ‘cap in hand’ attitude that companies have more often than not to take for funding , it allows us to stand on our own two feet as theatre professionals, with a business plan which marks us out as a viable profitable business too.

We’re still as serious and committed about all of this as when we started, if not more so. We’re getting emails from around the country and around the world about this new way of working. Because it works.

Join us. Use our systems and contracts, use our ideas. They’re all there on the website to download. For free.

Why? Because we believe in this.

As always, any emails at all to rafe.beckley@redtabletheatre.com

So, Edinburgh is all wrapped up and we’re already on to the next project. This Christmas, we’ve been invited back by those lovely people at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington to furnish them with their Christmas family show.

In our trademark storytelling style, this Christmas we’ll be bringing Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales to the Pleasance. We’re in early development right now, rolling budgets around, working out production schedules and so on, and I’m going back to the stories and re-reading them, to work out which ones we’ll use. Trouble is, they’re all so good, it’s difficult to make a choice!

Anyway, watch this space, and we’ll keep you updated. One thing we can already say for sure though – the way Open Book Theatre has been working for us so far, on this show we’ll be able to offer even better conditions and contracts for all involved than we have before. It’s an exciting time, so keep checking in…..

rafe.beckley@redtabletheatre.com

Yesterday was the last day. And while the final figures will take a few weeks to come in, here’s a few things that we can say for sure about taking our show to Edinburgh:

We’ll be paying back our investors – and also their 10% return on investment.

Our actors had fair, contractual working conditions including a payment at the beginning of the run, an 8 hour working day including all flyering, promotional work and two shows a day, their days off conformed to the working time directive, we paid their travel to and from Edinburgh and paid for their decent quality accommodation in a beautiful dockside apartment too.

And on top of that, we’ve made a profit, which will be shared out amongst the company as agreed. Exactly how much we don’t know yet, but it’s definitely going to be enough to share out something.

We achieved all this through a combination of the commitment of an amazing company, a great landlord, the incredibly supportive Pleasance Theatre, a bucketload of hard work, and the use of Open Book Theatre practice.

And we did it all without a single fundraiser, gift, funding or any other finance. Our budget was raised entirely from private investors who had enough faith in our business model and our work to back it with their hard cash.

So please – spread the word. We can’t make your theatre show any better. We can’t provide you with cash handouts so you can put on a play because you fancy it. We can’t do the day to day hard work of running a company for you. But we can give anyone – for free – our contracts, our spreadsheets and the lessons we learn as we learn them, so that anyone can use our Open Book Theatre Model. They’re on the website ready to download right now.

It’s going to be interesting to see who’s prepared to open their books from now on, don’t you think? Especially as we’ve just proved for the second time that there’s actually profit to be made in profit share fringe theatre…

As always, any questions to rafe.beckley@redtabletheatre.com

So obviously all of you who have worked the Edinburgh Fringe Festival know and understand the madness that August in Edinburgh is. For those of you that don’t, I thoroughly recommend that you get involved in a show in some way, simply so you can experience how much people put into it – and I don ‘t just mean Red Table. I mean every company that comes here and works its heart out.

We’ve learned some interesting lessons already here, even before we’ve post-mortemed the show. We’ve learned that in this instance, actors aren’t really interested in logging in and looking at the spreadsheets or sales figures. What they do seem to love is a twice daily shout about how many seats we’ve sold, and what the daily target is. It’s immediate, it works, and so I have a feeling we might make a verbal daily update part of the process in future. Then those who are interested can always log on and look at the spreadsheet breakdowns at their leisure.

The other lesson is twofold. Firstly, we think we’ve got the actors contracts right now, at least for the moment. Our actors at company meetings are feeding back that they’re having fun, that they’re not overworked, and that they feel the conditions they are working under are good (especially when compared to some of their colleagues on other shows, who seem to be being treated in a slightly different manner).

Secondly, though, we’ve made a big mistake on production team contracts. The demands of production here are such that the production team have more to do, and we’re burning out, having to structure in time away from the show and production issues even though there is work to be done. For those of you that are following this, and hopefully playing around with the Open Book model, here’s a heads up. We’re looking good for the way we treat our actors. We now need to focus on the working conditions we contractually give to our production teams and ourselves. How to do that? We don’t know yet. We’ll get back to you when we’ve had some sleep….

As always, any questions to rafe.beckley@redtabletheatre.com

Ok, so here we are: show up and running, ticket sales coming in, realising that the production work is even more challenging than we thought. Partly that’s just the way the festival is, and you have to exploit every opportunity to push your show into the limelight. However, it’s also rendered more challenging by the use of our contracts.

We knew when we began that by using contracts, and specifically ones very close to the Equity fringe contract, that we were making extra work for ourselves, and reducing the amount of time that we could send actors out marketing the show, for example.

It’s a pain in the backside, I’m not going to lie. The production team are working many more hours than we would otherwise making sure that we honour the working conditions as stipulated in our contracts. I say this so that you have the opportunity to see that there are two sides to this coin, and by running Open Book, you are commiting yourselves to a higher workload, at least initially.

It’s worth it. When the actors are out marketing and flyering the show, they are fresh and upbeat. The quality of the show is consistently high, and we have even had our first celebrity guest in the form of Shappi Khorsandi, who was kind enough to tweet her opinion of the show whilst standing out in the rain directly afterwards.

It’s hard work – harder than Edinburgh normally is – but it’s open, honest and ethical. And I’m finding that very satisfying.

As always, I’m available on rafe.beckley@redtabletheatre.com for any thoughts, opinions or questions you may have.

Rafe

We’ve got to the stage where we’re ready to go to Edinburgh with the show, and I’ve noticed a couple of things that are interesting about the way actors seem to be interacting with the Open Book Theatre movement.

Firstly, I know the actors are looking at the figures as we go along, but they all seem to look at different parts of the figures – some seem to like the spreadsheets, some the sales reports that we get daily from the Pleasance (which, if you can, I thoroughly recommend that you get venues to supply you with).

Secondly, the easiest and most effective way to talk about sales in the morning before rehearsals start seems to be to concentrate on total seats sold, and how much that constitutes as a percentage of breakeven. I rather suspect that this latter point is rather important. Announcing daily how tickets are selling and the percentage of break even they represent is providing a great feeling as we begin the day’s rehearsals. It’s an easy figure to understand, and not everyone looks at the figures every night or morning before they come to work. I’ve noticed this time round that we seem to have at least one conversation about sales and profit every day later in the day regarding sales and profits.

I think it’s going to be interesting to see how this continual updating of sales figures affects the actors flyering at Edinburgh. Certainly experience of the festival tells me that after about a week many actors marketing their shows start to become much more subdued with their sales pitches to the public. I have a feeling that in our case, we might just have a highly motivated team of marketeer actors.

I’ll let you know how that goes. As always, questions and comments are more than welcome…

We’ve pretty much done the first week of what is a two week rehearsal period this time around, and so I shan’t bore you all with how rehearsals are going, except to say that everything’s going well, with the usual positive feedback from the performers on the Open Book Management process.

What I have found interesting this week is that people rehearsing in other studios where we are also seem to know about this way of working, and keep accosting me with cups of tea, hoping to grab five minutes and find out a little more detail than there has been in the media. Also, it seems that industry websites are starting the odd topic of discussion on their notice boards, which is great news.

As a result of the RADA workshop, the Directors Guild of Great Britain has set up a working party to see how the concept can be applied to low/no budget films. That’s an ongoing process at the moment, and any film makers out there are interested please drop an email to us, which we’ll gladly pass on to the Guild.

As always, any questions at all, just drop us a line on rafe.beckley@redtabletheatre.com

Well, we’ve been busy in pre-production for our Edinburgh run of the Just So Stories, but today marks another little milestone in the mission to bring Open Book Management to the fringe and beyond.

Today, with lashings of help from both the Directors Guild of Great Britain and the Mackintosh Foundation, we get the opportunity to give a structured, three hour session on how to run an open book theatre or film operation to the industry.

We’ve spent a good amount of time preparing it, and because of the support we’ve been given, we have been able to offer the afternoon for free. We’re pretty sure there are going to be interesting questions, things we’ve not thought of yet, and hopefully some thoughts for even better solutions to some of the challenges we all face.

We’re still aware, though, that there is a prime opportunity to share this with pretty much the whole of the fringe world when we go to Edinburgh this summer. So if anyone knows of a venue there we can use for a few hours during the festival, we’d be more than happy to run this same session again there during August. And again, we’ll do our bit for free. Because we believe in this.

More to come, so watch this space…..

Red Table is taking The Just So Stories to Edinburgh. We’re currently looking for investors in the production.

Here’s how it works:

When we put on a show, the production budget is divided into units of £100 each. We then sell these units to investors – who can each buy as many or as few as they please – and the money received is used to fund the production.

After the books are closed, income to the production is returned to the investors until such time as they have received their investment back in full together with a 10% return on their investment (ROI).

For our last production of The Just So Stories this Easter at the Pleasance Theatre, each investor received their money back together with a 10% ROI within five months – a return you’re not likely to see anywhere else any time soon.

This production was so successful that we’re taking it to the Edinburgh Festival this August, to The Green in the Pleasance Courtyard, where The Just So Stories will be performing twice a day.

If you’d like to know more about investing in The Just So Stories, send an email to info@redtabletheatre.com and we’ll send you an Investor’s Information Pack.

Late post this week I’m afraid, for last week.

We’re getting the hang of doing the spreadsheets and making them available daily, sometimes more if anything big happens, and the cast are taking a big interest now. Just this last week I knew that because one of the cast pointed out to me that the spreadsheet figures hadn’t changed since the previous day (I copied the prievious day’s figures in by mistake). What does that mean? It’s working! The actors are actively interested in the financial side of the business.

It’s moving along. We have good pre-sales, and actors are actively seeking out more fliers from us so they can play their part to keep the figures going upwards.

My big concern is this – stage management. I’ll blog about this later, but it’s causing big problems. We tech today (It’s Monday morning 7am as I write this) and I have no Stage Manager still. Not an insurmountable problem, Cat and I will cover it internally if we have to. But the truth of the situation is this: the Drama Schools have spent the last few years churning out technical theatre practitioners in the same way they churn out actors. I predict pretty soon that, like it is for actors, the jobs (particularly for those at the beginning of their backstage careers) will be so thin on the ground that you’ll have to start working for free, or preferable for profit share, to gain experience.

Traditionally over the last decade or so, the technician/SM in a small 50 or 60 seater gets ten or fifteen quid a show. I’m afraid those days are coming to a close, and I’d like to help you brace yourselves for it. Because it’s not very nice. I know. I used to be an actor.

I’m hoping to talk to BECTU so at least we can be prepared as an industry for this happening, and work out how to handle it for all you black-clad geniuses.

As always, any comments below, or to rafe.beckley@redtabletheatre.com.