Setting the stage for businesslike arts groups

The Galway Town Hall Theatre manages to programme a broad range of activities with financial success, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

"Galway Town Hall Theatre would be typical of multidisciplinary theatres across the country," says managing director Fergal McGrath before explaining why the opposite is true. In the process, he sets out an excellent case for why business and theatre are becoming more symbiotic.

The Town Hall Theatre is an example of a well-run regional theatre. It is normal in managing a broad portfolio of amateur, local professional and touring professional artists across a range of arts disciplines, yet unusual in doing so with a surprising degree of financial success. Located in a town of 72,000 people, the theatre sells more than 100,000 tickets a year.

According to John Hoskins, managing director at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre: "There's been substantial growth over recent years, with additional public funding, European regional development funding and Capital of Culture schemes, and the state of the economy."

He also claims that, more recently, there has been a move away from the huge investment witnessed in sports sponsorship towards sponsorship of the arts.

However, questions are being asked about arts organisations: have they made the best of the good years and how vulnerable is this sector in a slowdown? With an economy that will be increasingly reliant on creativity, the answers to these questions could be very different from what they would have been 20 years ago.

"I try to apply simple principles: product, place, price, promotion. As a starting point, I want good product," McGrath says. This commercialism, he believes, frees producers to get closer to their artistic vision. But managing creative companies always carries this core dilemma: they have to be run commercially before they can be free to create.

A little-known fact to throw into the peculiar commercial/cultural mix that is Galway's theatre scene is that the National University of Ireland, Galway, is one of only three centres globally to specialise in the business applications of theatrical processes.

What that means is that theatre in Galway is more intimately linked to business than in most parts of the world and could be used as a case study of how theatre and business can work together.

Dr Aidan Daly, who heads up the department of marketing at the university and is a director of Jikijela, a Dublin-based company specialising in training for creative organisations, is a specialist in theatre and business.

"The front-of-house roles in service industries are largely drama-based. So my work asks what can be learned from drama about live performance in business," he says, counting doctors, airline cabin staff, fitness centres, beauticians and many more as businesses depending on a good front-of-house presence.

He notes that, in the US, service companies make up 80 per cent of the economy, while in the UK the figure is 74 per cent. In the Republic, it as yet only 65 per cent.

Clearly, the transition of the economy rests in part on more people learning about live performance and doing so in a short space of time.

McGrath emphasises the importance of business training in theatre. "My background is unusual for a venue manager, having worked previously with Druid Theatre Company and before that the Galway Arts Festival," he says. "But I started out at Fyffes during the boom years of the Irish supermarket, which means I brought a sales and marketing approach which was customer-focused, and a belief that audience development is no different from customer development."

The approach clearly helps McGrath achieve his objectives.

Over the past 20 years, Daly has been demonstrating to companies the many principles of acting that are relevant to business - adapting elements such as rehearsal, scripting, performance, body language and costume to business uses.

"High-volume service staff," he contends, "have to be great improvisers."

If this seems diametrically opposed to McGrath's work, then it is surprising to find that McGrath has also pioneered the interaction of theatre and business.

"We had very close working relationships with sponsors of the Galway Arts Festival," says McGrath. "The festival workforce would work on training courses for the multinational companies. The arts need to be more professional and business needs to be more creative."

Behind these converging perspectives lies a fundamental truth. The arts are a vulnerable sector, with many actors out of work for long periods of time. And who would want the reality of a writer's life? Something has to give and it is hoped that this will happen in a positive way.

"What we need are more resources - primarily cash," says McGrath, perhaps the most successful of the regional venue managers. "We can't be totally customer-led; otherwise you'd have no new writers or productions."

If that echoes the arts world's perpetual plea for more handouts, then McGrath's work and that of Daly show that there are intriguing options emerging.

What might be missing is not so much cash as a strategy for capitalising on our strengths: commercial acumen and adaptability.