The Silo shifts to a bigger, hopefully better, theatre next week. Artistic director Shane Bosher talks to Linda Herrick about why the move was essential
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It seems ironic that a play by Roger Hall, this country's number one box-office writer, lost a huge amount of money when the Silo Theatre staged a season of his 70s classic Glide Time at the Maidment Theatre in 2006.
"It's probably the only Roger Hall show in the history of Roger Hall hits that has lost money," laments the Silo's artistic director, Shane Bosher.
Although the public service satire had good reviews - the Herald's Paul Simei-Barton described the cast as superb and engaging - it didn't fly with the Silo's core audience of 25-to 40-year-olds, and the company ended up losing $50,000 on the production.
The loss proved to be one of the catalysts that has led to the Silo's decision to move out of the 100-seat Lower Grey's Ave premises it occupied for a decade.
From next week, the company starts a new lease of life by staging productions at the 186-seat Herald Theatre at The Edge.
Its new business plan is to widen the Silo's audiences, something it was unable to do previously because of the restrictions imposed by its limited space - and the ongoing fall-out from its interest-accruing debt.
"About three years ago, the board and the management team started talking about taking our existing offerings to audiences to a wider market,' says Bosher.
"We began to explore that with touring. In 2005, we took Bash to the Circa, The Women went to Downstage [both in Wellington], we did The Case of Katherine Mansfield at the Herald - that all worked really well.
"Then we made a few decisions but we developed that plan too early. The Boys in the Band went to Wellington and played to about a 60 per cent audience. It didn't make budget and lost $20,000. We programmed Glide Time to subsidise the cost of professional work in the Silo space and we lost $50,000. Admittedly, we were up against the ATC's production of Mum's Choir and the ATC really had that market share.
"The ironic thing is we programmed Glide Time to pay for the production of Take Me Out [by American writer Richard Greenberg], which has 11 actors and huge fit-out costs."
In the end, Take Me Out made a $10,000 profit but it was increasingly clear the Silo was losing room to manoeuvre.
"The work we were staging at the Silo was fantastic and selling out but we weren't able to pay people properly," says Bosher. "We had actors working on anything like $1000 for nine weeks' work, which was pretty revolting.
"Because we had programmed in four to five-week blocks, we couldn't transfer the work anywhere and, even if you were sold out, you were still only making $3000 a night in box office."
In the middle of last year, Bosher and his team looked at the debts - "we weren't even really treading water" - which were compounded by two shows which had done poorly, Dying City, which he describes as "probably the most depressing play ever written", about the fall-out after September 11, and Lobby Hero, whose failure still puzzles him.
In balance, the rest of the programme at the Silo was near capacity, with The Real Thing running at 97 per cent over seven weeks and The Mystery of Irma Vep a 100 per cent success which left many would-be punters frustrated, unable to buy tickets.
With Creative New Zealand offering the theatre $250,000 funding a year, Bosher says the agency had been saying during the past few years that the Silo model was no longer viable.
An admission that help was needed came in the nick of time for Bosher, who has been with the company for eight years.
"I was going to leave in 2005," he says. "Then Jennifer Ward-Lealand [the actress and one of the Silo's long-term supporters] said, 'Don't let all this hard work be for nothing. Stay and begin to enjoy what's been created.' When I decided to stay, it got harder in terms of making ends meet. I was thinking that last year was going to be my last."
"I got asked to apply for an associate director job at the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney. I applied and didn't get it - they said after being an artistic director you can't go and live under someone else's rule. At the same time, we were starting to explore all this stuff."
Bosher describes the relationship with The Edge as "symbiotic".
"We remain independent, we create the portfolio of programmes. From The Edge's perspective, they will enable us to get our business model in place and feed into audience development.
"We recognise we have got the art right and have had it right for quite some time but, because of the nature of being in that space, we haven't been able to get our business right.
"Our core audience is an audience The Edge doesn't have or have a way of growing.
"So with us having that audience, we can take them on a journey that feeds into The Edge's International Arts programme and that kind of stuff."
Bosher acknowledges that the Herald Theatre, with its steep seating arrangement, is less than perfect. But at least it has air -conditioning, unlike the old Silo's intolerable sweatbox conditions.
Those who saw Michael Hurst and Oliver Driver's quick-change performances in December's Irma Vep can only marvel that they didn't melt away. Bosher reveals that by the end of the season, their heavy fabric costumes stank to high heaven.
"The Herald Theatre has its flaws," he says. "But we are doing things to that room to ensure we provide as much of the Silo experience as we can. For Rabbit, we are taking four rows out of the front and building it right up and putting the audience on three sides.
"The relationship between the actors and the audience won't be so vertiginous. There are talks to pull the seating block out altogether but it is early days yet."
Good news too for the Silo faithful. The Herald Theatre foyer bar is being revamped right now to bring more of the "Silo experience" to the fans who like to have a drink before, midway and after the shows.
Silo lays bare an agenda of bunny rabbits and betrayal
Last year, Silo staged 10 productions; this year the number has been reduced to five plus the addition of touring shows, longer slots and a possible presence at the Edinburgh Festival.
The year's schedule opens next week with Rabbit, by Nina Raine, starring Claire Chitham, Dean O'Gorman, Jodie Rimmer and Edwin Wright. In May, Silo and the Large Group collaborate on The Threepenny Opera, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.
Michael Hurst directs and stars in a cast that will see 27 people on the Maidment Theatre stage, including musicians.
Harold Pinter's Betrayal will follow, the first staging in Auckland of his reverse-time drama about a marriage breakdown since 1980.
The Silo and artistic director Shane Bosher then take a couple of months off to plan for next year, returning with their smash hit of last year, Bare, by Toa Fraser, which will be accompanied by a broad education programme.
Bare will also tour to Hamilton's Fuel Festival, the Fortune in Dunedin and Circa in Wellington.
The Case of Katherine Mansfield, a critical and box-office success for the Silo when it was staged in 2006, is also being revived, again starring Danielle Cormack, for the Fuel Festival.
Bosher is hopeful the play will go on to the Edinburgh Festival.
He says Cormack's schedule is "ridiculously busy"; she stars in the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll in April-May.
The year ends with The Little Dog Laughed, by Douglas Carter Beane.
A huge hit in New York in 2006, Little Dog is about a tough-as-nails actors' agent doing everything she can to stop her gay rising star from coming out. Alison Bruce will play the agent.
