The National Theatre ‘can’t rely on big hits to break even’

THEY have helped the National Theatre record healthy profits in recent years and reach new audiences at a time when the industry is reeling from huge funding cuts.

But the theatre has revealed it is planning for a new future that does not rely on West End hits such as War Horse and One Man, Two Guv’nors to balance the books.

Directors admitted they had become “very reliant” on income from hugely successful commercial transfers, which can run for years and generate millions of pounds.

While such success stories provide much-needed profits for the National Theatre (NT), it is virtually impossible to predict which plays may or may not prove commercially viable.

The NT annual review, published this month, shows a £13.9million drop in box office income from West End and UK touring productions following last year’s closure of the phenomenally successful War Horse, which ran in the West End for eight years.

Another popular West End transfer, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, also closed in June.

The NT said earnings from commercial transfers had helped offset the 24 per cent cut in the Arts Council England funding it has received since 2010-11, but described such income streams as “very uncertain”.

Lisa Burger, its executive director, told The Stage: “We’ve been talking about this for a little while, that the NT had become very reliant on commercial transfers to make the books balance, and we could see that wasn’t going to last forever.

“We needed to reduce our reliance on commercial income so that going forward we could treat that income as windfall... [not] write it into the budget so that it’s paying for basic wages and salaries.”

She said that the NT had tried to turn its financial model around, with a push to increase fundraising, income from front-of-house trading, NT Live and the box office at the South Bank.

‘The NT had become very reliant on commercial transfers ... we could see that wasn’t going to last forever’