Here’s a riddle: take two photos of the same theatre, different shows. Why are there only three seats visible in one picture and 300 in the other? A festival-goer with varied taste will attend diverse productions and notice large disparities in audience numbers. Some shows are booked out night after night. Others are attended by five people.
Artists say the factors that determine the success or failure of a production include publicity, artistic merit, funding, subject matter, audience demographics, language barriers and big names.
Success means different things to different artists. Some see it as the number of audience members, while for others success is simply making it to the festival. Some feel that success exists as long as one is trying, and that every action — whether or not it epitomises success in itself — is a step on the road to success.
“Failure is just another way of figuring out how to succeed,” says Kurt Egelhof, writer and performer of For Generations.
Most agree that publicity plays a huge role. “You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one knows it’s there —” says Tim Plewman, an acclaimed performer whose production The Insatiables is part of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival’s Fringe this year.
He adds: “You can have the greatest marketing and posters on every piece of spare ground in the country, but if people don’t like your work —” For Plewman, artistic merit and publicity are the key factors in the success of a production.
Bongani Linda, writer and director of Carrot Sisters, agrees that publicity is essential, but raises several other issues. “There is no such thing as universal humour,” says Linda. “White and black people don’t laugh at the same jokes, they don’t pick it up.”
He claims that the only interests white people have in “black” productions is when it comes to singing and dancing. “They don’t want to see us acting,” he says, “and we can’t always do half-naked dances with muscular, slave-like black men. Talk about straight drama and they don’t want to know.”
Linda says people living in townships don’t attend “black” productions because of poverty. “I call it mahala culture; they always want free tickets because they were used to theatre being done for free at the time of the struggle when it was used for political conscientisation. So white people are not interested and black audiences want free tickets.”
He adds: “As a black production, if we bring in 10 people we are lucky and those 10 people will be from other black productions because we support each other so we don’t have to perform for empty chairs.”
It may be scary and intimidating for some practitioners when they have to perform for five pairs of eyes as opposed to 300, not only due to it being a sign of failure but also because “a sea of faces is a sea of faces”, says Emily Child, performer in Gone Dottie.
Veteran performers Plewman and his fellow cast member, Jonathan Rands — with 60 years of theatre experience between them — have reached a stage where they are now able to enjoy being anxious about audience turn-outs and not knowing what to expect.
With all the different factors that influence a show’s popularity, the foolproof recipe for success remains elusive. “One would be sitting on a gold-mine if they had the secret for what keeps audiences coming back,” says Rands.
This article was first published in Cue, the National Arts Festival newspaper
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