Becca Gibbs

Transcript

David: Hi Becca, thanks for joining us. I wonder if you could start by just introducing yourself and telling us where you’re based.

Becca: Absolutely. I am Becca Gibbs and I am the creative producer of Spinning Wheel Theatre, and we are based in Suffolk in East Anglia.

David: I wonder if you could tell us how you started producing?

Becca: Well, I started working in theatre by – I trained as a stage manager at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and worked as a stage manager for the best part of ten years, mainly in London. I did some work for the RSC. I worked in the West End and I – without sounding big-headed – I kind of hit my career goals quite quickly and then sort of felt like I didn’t really have anywhere to go, or nowhere that I particularly wanted to go. So I took a bit of a career break and did an MA in Applied Theatre. And from that I then started doing quite a lot of outreach work and work with disadvantaged groups and young people. And I met Amy – who is my business partner now at Spinning Wheel – and our colleague Becky, who we set the company up with but has since gone a different path. And the three of us were doing lots of things, like youth theatre shows, and we thought – ooh, wouldn’t this be fun if we had a go at doing a show, just us, with real actors and see what happens? So we did, and it was all right. We had a budget of two grand and now got paid very well. It was all profit share. And it wasn’t the most fabulous piece of work, but it wasn’t half bad! And because of some funding that we’d received, we had to set ourselves up as a company and registered with Companies House. So we sort of became a company. We sort of became Spinning Wheel completely by accident and because we’ve done that, we thought, well, we’d better do another show and another show and then we set up a youth theatre and then we did a community project. And the company will be ten years old next year. And for the last five years, it’s been mine and Amy’s full time job. 

David: Brilliant. That sounds strangely familiar, that necessity is the mother of invention. That somehow you just have to kind of go with it and trust that you’re making the right decisions.

Becca: Yeah, it was completely, I don’t think I really had in my head at any point ‘I think I want to be a producer’. And in fact, actually I’d – when I was a stage manager – I’d done a bit of work on the side as a sort of production assistant for Sonia Friedman and I thought – ooh, I don’t know, I’m not sure about this. This doesn’t feel like the right job for me at all. But I work now very differently to how that sort of commercial sector works. It’s very collaborative and much more artistic, I think. But yeah…all complete accident. 

David: Happy accidents, hopefully! Now that you’ve been doing this job of the producer for ten years, how do you actually describe what you do to people and how do you define the role of the producer? 

Becca: I think as a producer who almost exclusively works for my own company – so sort of company founder and producer – there’s no end to the responsibility that you have. So to a non-theatre person, I would – when they say, you know, so what do you do? – I sort of say, ‘oh, I just sort of make it all happen.’ And that sort of sums it up really, I suppose, because I’d say the majority of my work is fundraising and finance. I spend a lot more time with spreadsheets than I ever thought I would. 

But I’m lucky that Amy, our artistic director and I, work really collaboratively and so it’s not that she comes to me with a project and says ‘I want to do this show, make it happen’. We will have a discussion about what audience do we want to target this time? What work do we want to do? Why do we want to do it? And we have our mantra of, ‘Why this? Why now? Why here?’ Which is what every show has to have a decent answer to those three questions. 

Our mission as a company is to create innovative productions and creative opportunities for rural communities. So it is, you know, one minute I’ll be doing a spreadsheet or having a meeting with the Arts Council, and then during the tech rehearsals, I might be taking up a hem or repainting a bit of scenery because we’re a small team. So we all do a bit of everything and that is why it’s the right job for me, because I get bored quite easily. And I have…from working in theatre for nearly 20 years, I’ve got lots of different skills and I like using all of them. So, you know, I do enjoy a bit of costume maintenance or a bit of prop making, but I also like being able to walk away and go and hide in an office and do busy and important things on a computer. 

David: Yeah, it’s good to have that office hiding place occasionally!

Becca: Definitely! Sometimes you just want to shut the door on the cast and be like, ‘go away I’m too important to talk to you!’

David: ‘I’m the producer now!’ 

Very good, very good. So can you tell me a little bit about some of the projects you’ve done with Spinning Wheel and in particular ones that you feel like you, kind of, learned the most from? Ones that have sort of set the direction of the company?

Becca: We did a production of A Christmas Carol, and it was our first, sort of, it was the first show that we wrote – or Amy wrote – and it was…we did it and it was really good. I mean, it sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet, but it was, it was great! And it got really good reviews. The venues loved it, audiences loved it. And we had a fantastic cast and it just it really felt like us. And, we were, you know, doing lots of patting ourselves on the back about how we’d really hit our stride. And so we decided that our next show would be something completely different…Big lesson learned!

In retrospect, we have no idea what we were thinking. But instead of doing a sort of, we call it – ‘it’s magical’ – is the thing that we try and get into our show. It’s little, you know, little boxes that open that have a light in and it’s, we tried to sort of really draw the audience. We want the audience to lean into it, to sort of physically lean into the work. And we like to have this little dusting of magic over our shows. And A Christmas Carol was a family show, which we hadn’t done before, and we really liked that. So our next show, we did an adaptation of The Life of Casanova. No magic. It was when we wrote it and when we read the script, it felt like it was quite grown up. Or it was obviously quite an adult show. A fair amount of, sort of, sex and quite raunchy. And we were aiming it at an audience of, sort of, twenty-five to forty year olds – who were not our audience. Had never been our audience before. 

Once we got the show in front of an audience, the first night, people laughed all the way through it and we hadn’t realised it was funny. And we’d had a little bit of a difficult time with some of the cast and there was some personality clashes. And it was going in a direction that we hadn’t really planned it to go in, and it all got a bit sort of ‘Carry On’. Our audiences really enjoyed it, but it wasn’t our style at all and we’d had a pretty miserable time, really. And so once we debriefed it, we just thought that was the biggest lesson, is that we’d gone – great, we’re doing this wonderful thing that we really love and is going really well – and then suddenly we just did a complete 180 and did something different. So that really taught us that actually the thing that we like doing is a kind of family show. And we are really passionate about working with young people and getting young people into the theatre. 

Yeah, so that’s kind of, that was our big lesson, was to really focus on something that’s actually quite a strength. And so all of our shows since have been, sort of, more family, based on a novel. So we’ve done The Secret Garden, Velveteen Rabbit. The most recent show was The Velveteen Rabbit. And that’s, yeah, its really got us into the swing of looking at, you know, a family show can have a really diverse audience because it can be something like A Christmas Carol, which is really sort of twelve-plus, or it can be Velveteen Rabbit, which is three-plus. So there’s, that the audience for that one has been a lot of, kind of, pre-schoolers and grandparents. Which has been really nice. Which has been really, yeah. It’s been a lovely learning curve, I think. To realise that, yeah, we’ve got this massive strength that we didn’t think we’d ever have. But raunchy, sexy shows aren’t really what our audience want and aren’t really what we want to do either. 

David: So I was wondering if you could you tell me a little bit about the kind of particular challenges and rewards of working in rural communities. 

Becca: Well, the biggest challenge for us is the venues because – I mean, there’s the practical consideration – so we will do a mixture on a normal tour. We’ll do a mixture of small theatres, arts centres and village halls, community centres, that kind of stuff. And the village halls and community centres are often managed by a little team of very dedicated local volunteers who are very passionate about their venue. And that is, that’s great. And that means that you’ve got, you know, dedicated people who will go knock on Mrs. Miggins door and say ‘you must buy a ticket for the Spinning Wheel show.’ You know, that’s fantastic and marketing stuff is really great. It always, what it calls for is an enormous amount of diplomacy and quite a lot of ego-boosting and general best behaviour and massaging. And they’re always very proud of their village hall and the roof they’ve just had done and all that kind of stuff. And I think with any volunteers, if you’re using volunteers, they take a huge amount of management and they really need your time and your love, and that sometimes just feels like the absolute last thing that you’ve got time for. And we have the same. We sometimes use volunteers for marketing and distributing print and stuff. And, you know, you can’t just say, ‘OK, here’s these five thousand flyers and off you go to Lowestoft and stick them in all the cafes or whatever.’ You have to, we always try and do a meal at the end of each tour and that kind of stuff to really give them some love. 

And we have a little gaggle of venues now who are, we always kind of, really blow the horn for us and are really supportive of what we do and like to just keep in touch even when there’s not a show happening. You know, at the start of the whole COVID thing, we had lots of emails from venues kind of going ‘ooh I hope you guys are okay,’ and all that kind of stuff, which is really nice. But I mean, the biggest, I suppose one of the big challenges of being a small company is – we don’t do it so much now – but in the early days, Amy and I would go out on the road with the shows every night and it was always a…we’d always budget for a stage manager, and then when we had to cut the budgets. So it would be the first thing to go because I’m a trained stage manager. So I would stage manage the shows. And so Amy would come out on tour and she’d quite often be making the tea and coffee in the interval. And she would be listening to audience members, you know, say how great the show was and how aren’t the…there’s always the thing about, ‘oh I don’t know how they learn all those lines, how do they remember them all?’ And, obviously at the end of the show, the cast would be around an audience. We’d go and talk to them and, you know, be all fangirly on them. 

And Amy always tells the story of when someone came up to her and said, ‘are you involved with the company? Did they just let you just come and make the tea?’ And she wanted to say, ‘no, I bloody wrote it and I’m the artistic director!’ But she sort of went ‘…yeah, aren’t they great?’ 

David: How have you adapted your work through the COVID crisis? Has it taught you anything new about what it is to be a producer?

Becca: Initially felt really devastating. We were…when dear old Boris made his backhanded announcement of ‘don’t go to the theatre,’ we were two days away from starting rehearsals for a tour. Which obviously we had to cancel and we felt quite bereft about that and panicked as well, because our income was suddenly gone for who knew how long it was going to be. But we have had some positives come out of it. So we were also, we would normally run a summer school for young people in August and which we weren’t able to do. So we ran a sort of digital online type summer school. We didn’t have anywhere near as much of an uptake as we would have had for an in-person one. But we learnt a lot through doing it. And the people who did do it had a really good time and learnt some new skills and we learnt new skills.

And I think the thing that I’m finding really interesting at the moment, I think because we in this funny point at the moment where we feel like – well, certainly I feel like there’s a real light at the end of the tunnel with all this talk about vaccine any second – is that half the world sort of seems to think this whole thing will be over by Easter and then there’s a whole other side of people who are going ‘nah, this is going to be, this is not, it’s not going to be that quick or, you know, it’s still going to rumble on,’ and so we are, I’m normally berating myself for not planning far enough in advance. I just I can’t quite seem to get ahead of myself, you know. Really I’d like to be planning 18 months ahead. I’d like to be putting in that Arts Council application in June for something to happen, you know, the following Christmas, and I can’t ever quite seem to get on top of it. And now its the opposite. Now I’m trying to plan something to happen in March, and I don’t know if I can and I don’t know if I should. And I’m sort of going ahead anyway and I just put in an Arts Council application, which now might be completely irrelevant because it totally full of ‘how we make this whole thing COVID-secure, and please give us extra money so that we can do a show outside, which now we might not need to do because we might all be able to snuggle up next to each other in a theatre.’

The downside of it – not that there’s really an upside of it – but the downside of it is, it’s made me realise how vulnerable we are as artists and as a company. And actually, I think in the past I felt like our security is sort of in the hands of the audience and whether they buy tickets and now it feels more like our fate is in the hands, partly of funders and partly of venues, because their decisions are, you know, we’ve had difficulty getting funding because the blimmin’ funders aren’t taking applications. It’s not even that we’re getting turned down. It’s that we can’t apply because they’ve made the decision on my behalf that theatre can’t happen. So therefore they can’t give out any funding. So all of my amazing thinking-out-of-the-box thoughts are not doable because there’s no money to help us. And venues have, lots of venues have said ‘we’re just not opening. No, we don’t want to hear about an idea that you have. We’re not opening. We’ve furloughed our staff.’ Which is great, the furlough scheme is fantastic if you are able to apply for it. And if you are a company where you can’t apply for it and you need to keep working, it’s not so helpful.

We had some fantastic mentoring a few years ago from a company called Little Earthquake who are based in the Midlands. And we’d just finished a tour and we’d had a bit of an issue with one of the venues. And I explained this to Gareth, our artistic director, what happened. And my feeling had always been, we are, we are…the venue is in charge, essentially, you know. They have…they hold the power. And he (Gareth) said ‘it sounds to me like this particular venue don’t share your values, so don’t talk to them.’ And then followed on a conversation about how that artist and venue relationship really needs to be a partnership. No one’s in…they need us as much as we need them. Which is absolutely true. And I think that has shown that. I know that we do a lot of work with the Marina in Lowestoft, and I know that they are, they have companies who are, who are pulling out of bookings for the whole of next Spring. So they’ve got this big empty programme and there’s nothing they can do about it. If a company doesn’t want to tour or can’t tour then they can’t just pull bookings out of their, out of the air. 

And so I hope maybe that this scenario will make both sides realise that we are all in it together and that, you know, it’s a two-way street and that no one, you know, no one holds the power. The artists need venues and the venues need artists. And yeah, to really get this industry back working, I’d like to think that, that can be much more of a partnership where it isn’t always. 

David: Yeah completely. So if you could give one piece of advice to your younger producing self, what would it be? 

Becca: I’m going to cheat and do two if that’s ok? My first piece is a really practical one, which is to give yourself defined work hours just because you work from home doesn’t mean that the day can start whenever you fancy and can also end whenever you fancy. In the early days, I just rolled out of bed whenever I fancied and then worked till midnight if I needed to. And that’s not good for anyone’s mental health. 

Now I have a really set, you know, on the days, I work part-time. On the days when I work, I’m at my desk by half nine, I take a lunch break, I finish at five. That does sound like quite a short day – it’s because I have a child. But, and you know, if I need to catch up and do some work in the evening, then I will. But its, I schedule my work days as a workday and try not to do too much. I’ll just quickly do my Tesco list online. You know, that kind of stuff which I found anyway snuck very easily into my day. And definitely having an hour, having that time, that time you know you’re going to shut the computer and walk away, I think it’s really important. 

And then I think the other piece is to really trust your gut. There is no one way of how to produce a show and your instinct is really important. And lots of people will give you lots of advice, as I have just done and I’m currently doing. And you don’t always have to listen to it because if you listen to every piece of advice you’ve given, you’ll go nuts. And whereas actually you probably really know the answer. And if you feel like something’s right, then it probably is right. And if you feel like it’s wrong, it definitely is wrong. 

David: That’s great advice. I can totally relate to that feeling that actually a lot of the time I think with theatre, you’re creating events that you want to go to. And if you don’t want to go to it, it’s probably that nobody else will want to go to it either. So having that kind of gut-trained gut instinct I think is is great. So, thank you so much for your time today Becca. It’s been really delightful talking to you and hearing about your experience and of working in the industry. And…

Becca: Thank you. 

David: Yeah, and I’m going to stop recording now!