All Change Please

A Practical Guide to Achieving Gender Equality in Theatre

Lucy Kerbel

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780018607
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

'Lucy Kerbel's work has become increasingly pivotal in helping the entire industry raise its game... this illuminating book answers the cynic, informs the impartial, converts the supporter into an activist and equips them all; not in a rallying cry of anger-fuelled idealism, but in a calm, pragmatic and clear-eyed way.' Rufus Norris, Director of the National Theatre, from his Foreword

Theatre needs to change. Everywhere – in its boardrooms, on its stages, throughout its repertoires – it could be so much more successful at reflecting the gender balance of the world it seeks to represent.

This is a book about why change matters, its benefits – artistic, commercial, ethical and social – and how, with everyone's help, we can actually achieve it. From small shifts, such as how you run your meetings, or what's on the shelves of your school library, to rethinking concepts as huge as the art we inherit, how we attribute excellence, and the constraints we unwittingly pass on to the next generation, there are things we can all do to bring about change.

In this book, you'll find provocations to help you consider your current practices and their effects, challenge unconscious biases and identify opportunities for change, plus strategies and tools to help you decide where best to focus your efforts, to convince others why change matters, and to achieve meaningful, lasting success.

Eye-opening, empowering and inspiring, All Change Please is a book for anyone who loves theatre. Whether you make it, teach it, watch it or study it, everyone has their own unique part to play in helping refresh, reshape and re-imagine the industry as truly diverse, equal and inclusive.

'We are the industry. If things will shift it is down to us, all of us, to make that happen. We all need to reflect on how we work, how we think, and how we make choices. That's what will drive the greatest change.'

Since 2011, Lucy Kerbel and her organisation Tonic Theatre have been working with companies and individuals across the theatre industry to support them in achieving greater gender equality in their work and workforces. Her first book, 100 Great Plays for Women, is also published by Nick Hern Books.

1 About
Change

What is it, and how can we achieve it?

About Change

Let’s begin by talking about plastic bags, bicycles, and eating lunch at your desk.

The change that you (yes, you) can make and do make

It may be, that having read my introduction to this book, you were left feeling ‘Okay, that’s all very well-intentioned but, to come back down to earth, how the hell could I realistically change things?’ Perhaps you feel utterly disempowered in regards to your position in theatre or your ability to impact on what feels like the immoveable monolith of inequalities. Alternatively, you might be someone who is in a position of seniority or influence in theatre – you’re absolutely the kind of person who should be driving change – and yet, when you look at your already overwhelming ‘to do’ list, may find yourself thinking: ‘But how the hell am I going to find time to sort out gender equality on top of everything else I have to do?!’

In response to both of these quite understandable concerns I would say that you are never without agency, nor does creating change automatically have to add to your workload, but often simply entails doing things you’re doing already, but in a slightly different way. To take this idea down to a really simplistic level: all of us have a choice over what we choose to watch – what we spend our money on buying tickets for and how we dedicate the time we allocate to watching theatre. We all have the power to vote with our feet and to channel our energies selectively – actively to seek out, engage in, and support work by and about women, as well as that by and about men. Granted, that may feel like a small amount of influence or altered behaviour, but if enough people do it, it sends a powerful message about the type of work audience members want to see to the theatres commissioning, selecting and producing it.

In addition, everybody, whether they are aware of it or not, automatically plays a role in determining the nature of the culture around them. By way of illustration, years ago I did an admin role in a theatre within a team of about six or seven people. At some point, probably because she was going through a busy patch, one member of the department stopped going out for lunch or spending it in the green room. Instead she’d eat a sandwich at her desk and keep working in the meantime. Without any discussion about it, gradually over the next few weeks, the rest of us in the department began regularly eating our lunch at our desks too. The person who’d done it first wasn’t our boss, nor was she more senior than most people in that department and she never looked disapprovingly at anyone who wasn’t eating their lunch at their desk. In fact, she probably hadn’t clocked her actions were something the rest of us were even paying attention to. But very subtly her behaviour affected ours. There was a shift in the culture that she drove by changing her behaviour. By deciding that she was going to start eating her lunch at her desk, something happened to the rest of us and we began to do that too.

Obviously that example is one of negative rather than positive change – because stepping away from your desk for sixty minutes at lunchtime is probably one of the best ways of ensuring you do a good day’s work – and I imagine the person who initiated the desk-eating would be dismayed to know that’s what she had done. But, of course, it can work the opposite way too. Whatever space any of us finds ourselves in, whether that’s a rehearsal room, or an office, or a classroom, there is a culture within that space and by dint of our physical presence there we can impact on and alter that culture. If we are a little thoughtful about how to achieve it, we can do that in a positive way.

It’s also worth pointing out that a person can never be too young to affect change. In 2015 you may have read in the news about sixth-form student Jessy McCabe who, perturbed to start her A-level Music course and find not a single female composer had been included on the syllabus, successfully lobbied Edexcel, the exam board, to add a range of female composers to their specification from the following year. At the age of only seventeen, McCabe initiated a change that will alter what countless music students coming up behind her will have the opportunity to learn about the contribution that women have made to the development of Western music.

And just as someone can never be too junior to affect change, neither can anyone be too senior to make way for it. When a sixth-form student picked up on and flagged an inequality that the powers that be at Edexcel either hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t considered important enough to address, they had the humility and sense to recognise that the work they did – compiling a list of composers to be studied by students – could be done in a slightly different way in future so that it included women as well as men. Perhaps the articulacy of Jessy McCabe, not to mention the opinions of the four thousand people who signed her online petition, made them realise that this change to their specification was needed in order to ensure it would be relevant to and appropriate for the young people engaging with it.

We all have the capacity to create change. Sometimes the first step towards doing so is simply recognising that fact.

Small actions can create big changes

Creating change can be a full-time job. But it can also be an activity that – if done smartly – can be effective and yet not dominate your day-to-day existence. That’s because sometimes putting things into place that instigate just tiny changes in the behaviour that you and the people around you exhibit can lead to impressive levels of change.

I’m writing this not long after the introduction of the plastic carrier-bag tax. In October 2015, the UK government, following the lead of other countries, made it compulsory for retailers above a certain size to charge customers a minimum of five pence per plastic carrier bag rather than giving them away for free, as the overwhelming majority had previously done. The law was designed to reduce the number of harmful plastic bags going into landfill every year and reduce the resources used in producing and transporting them. Within six months of the law being introduced, the government reported that carrier-bag use had dropped by a phenomenal 85 per cent.

I find this fascinating as an example of change in action because the shift it required of the public – shelling out five pence to receive a plastic bag rather than getting one for free – was so small and yet the impact it appears to have had within the first few months is so big. I think in many ways this isn’t because of the money entailed – a five-pence coin is the sort you might lose into the lining of your purse without missing it and represents a tiny percentage of the cost of most shopping trips – but rather because it has created a mechanism whereby a moment of thought has been inserted into an everyday process where previously there wasn’t one. It used to be that we would get to the front of the queue and automatically be handed or pick up a plastic bag. Since the introduction of the tax, however, an additional step has been added to that process: the cashier or self-service till now asks us whether we need a bag.

It’s a tiny moment and yet has created a whole range of changes in how we think, feel and behave: now the onus is on us to request a bag rather than automatically receiving one. That’s introduced a transactional nature to how we think about plastic bags and has changed how we view them as objects – it has flagged that there is an environmental (as well as monetary) cost to our use of them and has altered their status in the eyes of the public from seemingly benign and immaterial, to being of consequence, something further underlined by the government’s interest in and imposition of a tax on them. It’s possibly made the idea of wastefully using lots of them feel a bit embarrassing to us, or has given us the opportunity to feel all warm and fuzzy when we decline new bags. And it’s also led to many retailers providing higher-quality carrier bags, ones that are properly reusable, rather than already torn and splitting by the time you get your shopping home.

It’s worth saying that the plastic-bag tax, while positive, of course hardly begins to make a dent in regards to landfill or climate change. Until we’re all thinking about how much we consume: where it was grown or produced, how it travelled to our supermarkets and high streets, how it is packaged and what its lifespan is, worrying about the bag we carry it home in is, if not immaterial, rather far from the nub of the issue. And yet the introduction of the plastic-bag tax remains an example of positive change. It has demonstrated that the public will, if the mechanism for change is right, accept and even embrace doing things differently. It is an early step, which will hopefully be followed by many more, towards making us all more responsible for the things we buy and use.

Change can seem like a daunting thing to affect, as though it needs huge power and clout and energy to be successful. But it doesn’t. Sometimes it just needs something as seemingly inconsequential as the introduction of a five-pence charge – and crucially the insertion of a moment when customers pause and make a decision rather than remaining on autopilot. This is enough to make others rethink how they feel towards something so commonplace they almost don’t see its significance or the level of individual agency they have in relation to it.

Marginal gains

Sometimes change can be seismic and sweeping. It happens abruptly and definitively as a result of one large event, like an earthquake or a financial crash hitting a country and changing everything in its wake. More often, though, change happens incrementally, the result of a series of motivating factors which combine to produce a bigger effect.

As we saw with plastic bags, small changes can make a big difference. Where things get really exciting is when a large number of different types of small change are simultaneously enacted, meaning that, cumulatively, an even broader shift happens. This is an approach to achieving change that’s sometimes described as marginal gains. It was covered a lot in the press in regards to the success of the British Cycling team at the London 2012 Olympics. That year the squad won a greater number of medals than predicted and part of this success was attributed to the fact that the performance director, Sir David Brailsford, oversaw the implementation of an approach that functioned around the idea of marginal gains. By simultaneously making a number of very small shifts to the cyclists’ behaviour before and during races, the fractional increase in speed that each of these shifts led to – perhaps a millisecond here or a millisecond there – combined to give the cyclists an advantage of a few seconds’ lead; enough to push them over the line in advance of their competitors.

How did Brailsford work out what these small shifts to behaviour should be? He spent time looking at the many reasons that the squad was not performing to its maximum capacity, both during training and when racing, even if each of these on their own would make just a marginal difference to their times. So, for instance, he found that over any period of training and competing, a number of days, not many but some, were lost when members of the team would come down with common colds or bugs. So he instructed them to become far more conscientious about washing their hands on a regular basis to minimise their chances of picking up germs and becoming ill that way. He requested all cyclists to take their own pillows in their luggage when travelling away from home for training or competitions, finding an unfamiliar pillow was among the things most likely to prevent his team getting a full and good night’s sleep. He implemented a system whereby press interviews conducted track-side immediately after a race were done while the cyclist continued to pedal on a static mounted bike, thereby ensuring their muscles didn’t seize up in the ten or so minutes standing around waiting for the interview to begin, something that could, just fractionally, affect their performance the next day. Individually, any one of these behavioural shifts might seem too tiny to make a real difference. But in combination with one another, and many others, they did.

If we think about the idea of incremental marginal gains in regards to gender equality in the theatre industry, there’s a similar impact that could be made where a series of small and apparently inconsequential acts – when performed together by a very wide group of people – could collectively change the way that the industry works. It may be that you’re massively fired up and you decide that no, the kind of change you want to lead is fundamental and seismic – the equivalent of an earthquake – and that’s great. But equally, if you finish this book feeling that you’re going to initiate the equivalent of regular hand-washing or a five-pence charge in your behaviour – and that of the people you come into contact with – that is positive and important too. And of course there’s nothing to stop you following that up with some bigger and more confident steps further down the line if you find those initial ones invigorating.

The importance of taking bite-sized chunks

In mentioning some of these examples, I’m not being so naive as to suggest that gender inequalities can be remedied totally – or even markedly – by a series of small incremental shifts. What is ultimately needed is something that in scale, depth and complexity far outstrips the theatrical equivalent of taking your own pillow to a hotel with you. But the principle of focusing on small things, of being specific, and of recognising that a vast range of steps and actions are required to achieve a bigger goal, is a sound one. The business-speak way of phrasing this would be to ensure the actions we commit to are SMART: those that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-based.

One of the things which, in my experience, I’ve most commonly seen preventing people who would like to make change from actually getting on and doing it, is that the scale of the problem, or indeed the sheer size of their aspiration for what they would like to achieve in its place, seems so big that they become paralysed. They simply don’t know how to attack something of that scale.

But there’s no reason why, because we want to achieve change, we should go about it any differently to how we get anything else done. If, for instance, we were all to spend our entire working lives focused relentlessly on the big picture of what we have to achieve – whether that’s running a drama department, excelling at our A levels, or production-managing a string of shows – we’d never get anything done. We’d probably be utterly overwhelmed and so instead we spend the majority of our time focusing on the individual steps we must take to achieve our bigger goals – marking one set of essays, attending one lesson, leading one production meeting – while sporadically checking in with the bigger picture so we don’t drift off track.

We do this because we recognise there’s a difference between knowing what is important to us and identifying how we’re going to achieve it. Imagine it’s the day of an actor’s opening performance in a new role. Undoubtedly they want to give a good performance. If, however, you were to ask that actor what they were going to focus on before curtain-up and they simply said ‘Being good tonight’, that would be rather vague and meaningless. Instead, most actors would probably break that desire to be good down into a series of discrete actions: I’m going to run through my lines during the day; I’m going to arrive at the theatre with plenty of time to spare so I’m not feeling flustered; I’m going to avoid eating anything heavy or overdosing on caffeine before the performance; I’m going to warm up fully; I’m going to take some time to focus my mind before my first entrance. These individual achievable actions should, provided the actor has taken a similarly targeted approach to rehearsals, be far better tools in carrying them several steps closer to achieving their aspiration to be good on stage than simply visualising the end result they want.

The same is true with creating change regarding gender equality in theatre. If, following similar lines to our actor example, a literary manager said their goal was to ‘ensure gender equality in terms of how my theatre commissions and programmes plays’, that needs to be broken down into a series of smaller, more targeted goals which, when accumulated, could get that literary manager closer to the overall super-objective they have identified. For example: I’m going to start requesting that all unsolicited scripts are submitted anonymously so I don’t make assumptions based on my perceived gender of the writer; I’m going to ensure our reading panel is gender-balanced; I’m going to think about how the script meetings can be chaired by me so that the views expressed by the female readers are listened to and given as great a level of consideration as the men’s; I’m going to allot time in my schedule to seek out and read more historical work by women than I have to date.

In this way, by taking one step at a time, change that can feel mind-bogglingly big to begin with can, over time, be achieved. All of us, regardless of our role or level of seniority in theatre, can pursue a thought process like this. We should give ourselves permission to see change as a string of separate, achievable actions we can pursue, rather than one single Herculean task, and then enjoy cracking on with it.

Why Bother?

Nothing I’ve said ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Rufus Norris
• Introduction
• About this book
• 1. About Change
• 2. About Theatre
• 3. About You
• Get Involved
• Acknowledgements
• About Tonic
• About the Author
• Copyright Information