Norwich Puppet Theatre closed its doors on 17th of March. That has hit us hard – with lost revenues of over £46000 and that’s just over the summer. At the same time our costs have not been greatly reduced, and our ability to work in the theatre or anywhere else is severely limited.
We have had some luck. Our team and our creative partners have worked with us to launch a new YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC90yGyJLmL04mep1vCnKm7w. We’d love you to explore that with your family and and discover the fun and accessible children’s creative journeys it offers. Do subscribe and give us your feedback. We also have the funding for Research and Development work for our next major production, Pinocchio, but we think it will be September at the earliest before that can happen, instead of March.
We benefit from a leisure sector business rates holiday, and the associated small business grant. 4 of our people are on furlough whilst 3 continue to work from home, checking our premises regularly for post, always hoping for cheques rather than bills, hygiene and security. The business related grants and the furlough scheme have been gratifyingly straightforward and timely to come through. We also had a grant from the Arts Council Emergency Response Fund, with which we were delighted and without which we would not have survived as long as we are doing. This enables us to make plans for pretty amazing new stuff and different scenarios for an exit strategy.
We thought you might like to join in a conversation about what happens next. Theatres are likely to be a long way down the pike in terms of opening for business and that affects what we plan to run in our lovely theatre in Whitefriars Norwich, on tour in all those other venues and festivals currently wondering about their exit strategies, and with our artistic partners.
We ponder many uncertainties specific to our sector but with many aspects in common with all business settings.
- How and when theatres can reopen
- What will the future rules be for social distancing and hygiene measures for staff artists and audiences
- Which artists will still be creatively productive and economic viable bearing in mind their fragile self-employed patterns of work
- How other venues and festivals manage the backlog of cancelled content alongside what they have booked for 2021-22
- Critically, whether audiences released from lockdown want to visit live performances and creative learning experiences with their children.
We think we have to be agile and fleet of foot and as a smaller business but we still have lead times raising funding and investment in new work and scaling up new online services, and we face a re really significant cash flow threat from projecting how we work with whatever new business models we can make work for us and our creative partners. There are advantages for smaller organisations over larger ones perhaps in terms of scale of financial risks, but weaknesses too in terms of resources and reach of our brands. So have a look at what we are doing on YouTube, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for latest news and offers, and if you have experiences to share with us, do please get in touch with us at [email protected]. Thanks for your interest Nic Hopkins, Chair of Board of Trustees