Arifa Akbar: Rafaella, how would you describe Sap and what led you to write it?
Rafaella Marcus: It’s very loosely based on the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo. It is essentially about a person with power who pursues a person with little to no power and she finds escape through transformation. I was coming at it as someone who has been a director of new writing and a dramaturg for much longer than they’ve been a writer. I started it a long time ago but convinced myself that I couldn’t write it because it’s much easier to exist in one box than multiple boxes in this industry. Then I thought “I won’t see if it has any legs unless I see it in front of people.” So before I could chicken out I put it in for Vault festival. I didn’t expect them to take it but when they did I thought: “Now I really have to finish writing it.”
AA: Ellie, as Sap’s producer, how was the partnership formed?
Ellie Keel: Jessica Lazar, the play’s director, was the linchpin. Her brilliant theatre company, Atticist, ran an open call-out for scripts. Despite running a new writing prize myself [the Women’s prize for playwriting], that is run on open submissions, I sometimes doubt the capacity of small theatre companies to manage callouts. If you’re going to do it, you do have to read all the scripts and get back to people, in my view, but Jessica is very thorough. Having said I would have nothing to do with [their callout], one of Jess’s producing partners rang me up and said “Would you change your mind if we show you something really good that’s come in?” I grumpily said OK. They sent me Raf’s play and I could tell it was something Jess and I could work on very fruitfully.
AA: You both collaborated on an audio drama series, Written on the Waves, during the pandemic …
EK: We commissioned Raf because I knew of Sap and couldn’t take it to Edinburgh that year. I wanted to keep the flames of our collaboration burning.
RM: I love audio drama. Everything else had shut down, we were locked in our own homes, we couldn’t share space with each other. I thought: “Is there a way of creating ‘liveness’ when we’re all separate?”
EK: I learned so much about theatre producing with that series. Audio has to work a bit harder to reach people. We had to be really careful of what we commissioned and the development process on each of those pieces, because at every stage it could lose its resonance. I was much more on point than I had ever been in the hurlyburly of producing fringe theatre. I had more time and focus.
AA: Has it got harder to be in the industry, post-pandemic?
EK: Yes and no. Theatre doesn’t feel like a very sensible career at the moment. It’s very hard to make any kind of reasonable living. There is still great encouragement and compassion in some areas of the industry, but you feel like you’re coming up against hurdles all the time.Programming is really hard and by that I mean getting the plays on in theatres. I find the deals I’m offered are completely unworkable. I don’t understand why the standard deal is 60/40 in the visiting producer’s favour. To me it should be 80/20. If you’re an independent producer, going into a national portfolio organisation that’s got a lot of core funding, that’s got a fundraising team, that’s got a bar – for them to take 40% of your box office and being made to fight or grovel to get the extra 10% – I’m sort of like, “Well, you didn’t bear any of the costs of making this”. The deals have to change, in my view.
I feel that we will see the effects of it as the years roll on: less adventurous new writing being produced. And we will see that the people who can afford to be doing this are subsidised individuals. I can afford to be doing it because of factors that are not related to the income I receive from theatre, and that’s ridiculous.
RM: I know it’s been said before but I don’t think I ever want to stop saying it: there’s been enormous pressure on freelancers.
I completely agree with what Ellie says about programming. I don’t remember it ever feeling this difficult. But the thing that I’m finding across the board is that footfall is down. If the audiences aren’t coming, then the knock-on effect is that programming gets more circumspect. It doesn’t take risks. Ultimately that falls on the shoulders of freelancers within the industry.
I have been in several meetings recently with theatres who have expressed an interest in my work and those conversations have come down to me being asked “Do you have a great producer we could co-produce with?” or “Do you have connections with other theatres we could co-produce with?” or “Do you have a celebrity who you have a good relationship with?”
There’s a vicious circle because if you tend towards safer programming, you actually double down on the audience that you already have. You’re going with what’s tried and tested. You are de facto not inviting new people.
AA: Have either of you thought of leaving?
RM: Yeah, because of where I am in my life. I got married recently, am thinking about having a family, and it gets to a point where you feel you love this job so much because when theatre is good there’s nothing else like it. But I do want to be able to live.
I have accidentally built this lifeline of writing so it’s something that I am able to take into other mediums within a creative industry. I work other jobs so I can exist in this industry, where there are not enough jobs for the number of people who want to be in it, essentially.
AA: And you, Ellie?
EK: Yes, I have thought that on a couple of occasions. Then the pandemic came and I sat down to write a novel that I would definitely not have written for many years, if ever, as a way of livening things up a bit. I was very lucky with the agent and the deal that I got, and that has given me a degree of security without which I might have left, or at least done things very differently.
AA: We recently heard that Vault festival is looking for a new home. What do you both feel about that, given Sap started there?
EK: Vault festival is really important because there’s a number of different deals on offer, you can keep quite a lot of the box office in some cases, you can set the ticket prices yourself. You feel like you’re in control. It goes on for weeks and weeks and you find that things sell out. The two most successful and ambitious pieces of new writing I’ve produced, Collapsible and Sap, outside of the Women’s prize for playwriting, both started there. They were invaluably nourished and galvanised by Vault.
RM: It’s a place where you can get work on and try it out. It’s not real if it’s not out in the world. Fifteen years ago, you could do a two-hander for £10k, which is not nothing, but it’s an amount of money that you could find from somewhere. Now, if you’re looking at doing a full run with a two-hander in a good fringe theatre, you’re looking at £25k lowest, from my experience.
There is a tough truth with theatre and art in general that it has never been able to wash its own face, or exist as a purely commercial venture. It has actually always required more money going into it than will come out. So art must be subsidised to exist, which means that decisions to cut government funding for art are ideological.
EK: The Women’s prize for playwriting survives on philanthropy. The majority of our funding comes from donations. That shows me there are many people who’ve come up through the ranks in theatre who have money – much more than they will ever need. If you know how to reach them, and know how to ask, you can get really sizable donations. Ian McKellen has given the prize £65,000 through schemes that he and ATG have set up to disperse the profits from his one-man show and other work. These schemes are easy to apply for.
There should be more schemes into which wealthy actors, producers and directors can easily pay a percentage of their earnings, to be redistributed. If they want to have a hand in deciding where it goes, that’s fine. If not, I’ll happily run it. We need to have formalised ways of redistributing this kind of money. The other thing I would make compulsory, if I could, is that every company with profits above a certain threshold has to do some arts patronage.
Sap tours the UK from 16 March until 27 May
