Chasing the Audience
an Institute of Ideas debate at the Fringe Club, Edinburgh
10 August 2000

Brendan O'Neill

The Institute Of Ideas' Culture Wars debates at the Fringe Club kicked off with Chasing the Audience, a debate on whether the audience is best served by art which attends to its own needs or art which attends to the needs of the audience itself.

With the increasing emphasis on catering to audience desires, the perceived needs of the audience today have become absolutely central to arts and arts policy. The Institute of Ideas set out to scrutinise this trend and ask whether the newfound interest in the audience is egalitarian or just plain patronising.

Benjamin Twist, a freelance theatre director, started the debate by arguing that there was actually nothing new in arts institutions devoting energy and attention to the needs of their audience. 'The arts needs audiences', he pointed out. 'If a theatre fails to bring in an audience, then it is a failure as a theatre.' He held up the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds as a good example of an institution which knows how to draw in audiences - not just by showing plays but also by organising sleep-overs when people's homes were snowed in, teaching people sign language, and a variety of other community-based activities. For Twist, the search for 'new audiences' was a good thing, which could keep theatres and arts institutions alive.

But Neil Cooper, writer and critic for The Times, The Herald and other papers, had some concerns. He argued that so-called 'new audiences' are often patronised by second-rate productions, because if the concern is just with getting socially excluded and isolated people in, then the work on show can sometimes suffer. Cooper argued that rather than putting on plays and shows which we think will reach out to a 'new audience', we should trust people's ability to cope with difficult ideas and challenging work.

For Deirdre Malynn, general manager of the Cochrane Theatre in London, the question was 'which audience?'. She argued that there were a number of audiences, all of whom had distinct needs. Alex Linklater, deputy arts editor at the London Evening Standard, talked up the importance of the audience, arguing that performers do not know if their work is any good until it is submitted to an audience. In other words, audiences define art.

All of the speakers agreed that audiences are important - without them, art cannot exist. But there was debate about what the audience represented and whether its needs should come first. The discussion from the floor teased this question out, with one contributor arguing that it represents a step-down for arts institutions to suddenly be having sleepless nights about whether they are giving the audience what it wants: what happened to arts institutions having the confidence in their work to believe that it would generate its own audience and would reveal to them something inspiring and meaningful?