Convener: Andrew Piper
Participants:
Emily Hodgson, Sian Rees, Adam Milford, Aliki (?), and others who joined later
Summary of
discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:
The short answer to this question was: no. An actor on
Equity minimum working on a year’s contract in the West End (among the best of
the Equity minimum rates) will earn significantly less than the average London
wage. Most actors do not work on 12 month contracts, but are contracted
on a production-by-production basis for a few weeks or months at a time. This
means that doing other work – either related (tv, voiceover, corporate
training) or unrelated (temp jobs, bar work, box office/ushering) – was
essential. Significantly, this is still true as the actor gets older and more
experienced.
When working on a non-creative job our sense of
ourselves as artists (or even jobbing actors) fades very quickly. We felt that
it was important to have creative projects of our own during these periods –
not just developing & maintaining skills - but that when most of our
energies were taken up with trying to find temp work to pay the bills, these
were hard to maintain. In addition, as actors we have to make ourselves
available for paid acting work, and this will almost always compromise the
commitment we can make to personal projects.
Unpaid theatre work makes this task even harder.
Sometimes this is about feeding the soul, or increasing our exposure to the
industry, but committing to these projects is always a gamble as often they
turn out to be neither artistically satisfying nor a successful showcase. This
is especially frustrating on projects when the actors are the only ones not
getting any money. Some of the actors said that they no longer worked for no
money, out of principal; they would work for low wages when they recognized the
artistic worth and the low budgets, but never for no money at all.
Often we are urged to create our own work, which some
do very successfully, but others hated having to turn themselves into
entrepreneurs when that was neither their skill nor their interest. Also, while
one-person plays are very portable, one of the things we love about acting (and
which makes us better actors) is working with other actors.
Acting isn’t a luxury or a hobby for us – it’s what we
need to do. Just because we enjoy it
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get paid!
Most of the actors in the group said that they
hankered for ensemble companies – longer contracts to cover multiple
productions - perhaps including some development work for new writing. This
would give us:
- a greater degree of financial security
- the chance to develop longer-term artistic relationships
- a chance to develop as artists
- a more-deeply engrained sense of ourselves as valued collaborators rather than disposable commodities, hired & let go several times a year. (or not hired at all!)
We noted the high drop-out rate of actors from the
profession. One statistic mentioned (unverified) was 50% after 5 years, 75%
after 10. While this could be seen in some ways as necessary, Darwinian
wastage, the reasons for this wastage often have nothing to do with an actor’s
talent for doing good work. How can the industry do more to support talented
artists who perhaps lack the self-promotion skills that many, less talented
artists may have in spades? Do you want an industry where the primary skillset
of the artists is self-promotion?
As actors we often accept the low-status position that
the industry tends to keep us in: don’t call us, we’ll call you. We
contemplated whether it is healthy to be constantly trying to ingratiate
ourselves with the gatekeepers to good, paid work. (And the gatekeepers are
getting ever more restrictive in who they will even consider for audition). For
our own mental and artistic health, some of us felt that we needed to focus
more on being the kind of artist we want to be and let that attract others to
us. But this is not easy for an actor, who needs to be part of a company in
order to practice his/her art.
We discussed recent news articles about the dominance
of public school and/or Oxbridge educated actors, and while we acknowledged
that there were advantages they had which were not available to us – wealthy
parents to subsidise their living arrangements, ready-made networks of
influential family and friends – there was something we could aim to emulate,
which was their confidence and sense of entitlement. (Note we use the word
‘entitlement’ not to foster resentment that we do not have the career we want,
but to express a sense that we absolutely belong, that we approach directors
with a confidence that we can be great in that part, but that if he/she does
not want to cast us then that does not diminish our ‘star quality’ and we will
find another home for it). Bitterness and resentment at inequality will not
help us either as artists or as actors wanting work.
“This is me. You may like it. You may not. But this is
me.”
Convener’s coda:
The fact that we are all agreed that earning a living
from theatre alone is impossible – primarily because the wages are not enough
to sustain between short-term contracts – has significant implications for any
theatre-makers who use actors in their work. If actors are low-status commodities
to pick up when needed and put down as soon as a project ends then they cannot
develop as artists, and theatremakers will struggle to find people with the
skills to bring their work to life. We need to find ways of developing
longer-term relationships (and, where possible, contracts) that means that
creative talents can be nurtured and developed, at the same time as earning a
living.
