Guest Blog: Profit, Promotions and Paper Towels: Phil Bartlett on His Varied Role as Artistic Director of The Hope Theatre

If I had to choose one word to describe the role of artistic director of a pub theatre, the adjective that immediately springs to mind is: varied!

That’s certainly been my experience at the Hope Theatre, at least. The Hope is a fifty-seat black-box theatre on the first floor of the Hope and Anchor pub in Islington. The pub has been an iconic venue for punk and rock gigs since the 1970s, with bands including The Clash, Joy Division and Dire Straits all having played the atmospheric basement, and almost 10 years ago the upstairs dining area was converted into an intimate theatre space.

Since then, we’ve presented an eclectic and sometimes award-winning programme of theatre, usually seven nights a week. The Hope’s slogan is ‘the little theatre with big ideas’, and we’ve always encouraged companies to think big about what’s possible in our small performance space. As with most pub theatres, however, the venue operates using a very small team of freelancers, and as a result the artistic director role involves many responsibilities that would be handled by other departments in a larger organisation.

Take this morning, for example. My day officially started with a meeting at 10am with a young company who want to bring their new play to the theatre this autumn. Before then, however, I had a couple of urgent tasks to complete – we’re almost out of paper towels for the pub bathrooms, so an order had to be placed pronto, and the poster designs for some July productions needed finishing. Invoices for our Box Office staff had to be processed, the budget for the next in-house production wanted updating, and if I could squeeze it in, I knew I should get some more social media posts out to promote it too. It was also on my mind that I promised to test out the speakers in the theatre at some point (one of them has been playing up), and that we must be running low on black theatre paint for the floor, so a stock check is overdue.

There’s far more to the role than simply choosing which plays to put on, then, and not all parts of the job are glamorous – but they’re important in ensuring the theatre continues to operate successfully within the parameters of our tight finances. The Hope is proud to have been the first Off-West-End venue to open with an agreement in place with Equity, to ensure all actors and stage management are paid a legal wage. Rising costs in many areas of the business, however, put us in a challenging position to ensure the books are balanced – especially because our main source of income is ticket sales, and we know many audience members are also feeling the pinch.
 

Pub theatres have often operated on very fine profit-loss margins, however, and the occasional headache in working out how to pay for everything is easily offset by the joys that come from enabling early-career and experimental companies present their work professionally. That 10am meeting? The show sounds like it’s going to be great – and when I popped upstairs to check the black paint situation, I heard one of the songs from our in-house gig-theatre production Snakehead being rehearsed, and I got goosebumps. Being artistic director of a pub theatre? A varied role, yes, but also frequently a brilliant one.

Spaces like The Hope are vital entry-points to the industry, and many performers and creatives who start out in pub theatre have gone on to have long and successful careers. Support fringe theatre by seeing as much work as possible – we’d love to see you at Snakehead, our exhilarating re-examination of the Medusa myth.

Though if you’re at The Hope this week, please go easy on the paper towels, the new order isn’t arriving until the weekend…

Snakehead is at the Hope Theatre 6 – 24 June