Producing more producers

By Rafia Hussain

“There’s not enough producers” – I cannot tell you how often I hear this phrase.

It’s even more dire when we think about the number of producers of colour. There is a spattering of training programmes out there but it seems it’s only scratching the surface. While I personally always budget for a junior producer role on my own projects, this only impacts a small number of people, so when the late Abdul Shayek and Helen Jeffreys got in touch with me back in autumn 2022 about working with Tara Theatre and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (Central) to tackle this problem, I jumped at the opportunity to put our heads together to think about how we could do something more strategic at a national level. 

We decided many heads were better than a handful, so we held an initial Roundtable discussion at Tara Theatre with invited colleagues in the industry. Together with a cohort of early career producers of colour and a number of colleagues in the industry, we had a discussion about the state of play.

We began to imagine the steps we needed to take. The Roundtable discussion was facilitated by Jessica Bowles (Course Leader MA/MFA Creative Producing) and recorded for note-taking.

After lunch, the early career producers stayed behind for a closed workshop facilitated by Josette Bushell-Mingo (Principal at Central) to discuss the thoughts generated from the conversation from the morning and input ideas from their point of view as early career producers ‘on the ground.’

It became clear that in order to address the problem, first we needed evidence it exists – thankfully Central had the perfect fund we could apply to that is designed to fund research that will have a policy impact. The application we submitted was successful and so we began on ‘Phase 2.’ I have never done any ‘proper’ research before but thankfully Tom Six (Reader in Politics and Performance) was on hand to work with me closely on this. 

We designed a survey that we disseminated across England, and I made a concerted effort to reach producers of colour. As will not be a surprise to anyone, they were all really quick and efficient at completing it, we had 180+ responses (a pretty decent sample size as the original target was 100). The producers were representative of every region, career stage and type of producing (exec, participation, shows, artist development). I also conducted interviews with a number of producers to dig a bit deeper into the data we were getting from the survey. There is little research out there on producers, so this was exciting new territory for me, and the results are interesting. We looked at how people get into producing and the barriers they face and asked for recommendations on what could be done. We held a focus group in autumn 2023 (again freelancers were paid to take part and travel was covered), to imagine what the solution would look like, designed by and for producers.

We are now putting the finishing touches to the report, which will be released soon, so keep your eyes peeled for future Producer Gathering newsletters. I think it will be an interesting read for the sector and anyone who cares about making the sector more diverse and representative. I hope you think so, too.