The squeeze on new work & experimentation

Crosses over most with: 2. Erosion of early exposure to theatre; 4. Economic pressure and the breaking of attendance habits; 7. Structural barriers to organisational risk-taking.

I want to start by saying this isn’t a value judgment on commercial work. One of my top three nights at the theatre is watching Legally Blonde starring Claire Sweeney at the Princess Theatre, Torquay. A sentence my sixteen-year-old self never imagined typing.

Commercial shows give people some of their best nights out, connecting people through joy and lifelong memories. These shows are broadly doing well at the moment, and they’re providing vital revenue streams for the industry.

However, an ecosystem requires balance, so I’m focusing here on contemporary work, new writing and experimentation, and why it’s getting harder to make that side work in 2026.

At the heart of this is risk and incentives: who carries the downside, who gets the upside, and what the system quietly rewards.

You can see this dynamic playing out across music, film and TV. When money is tight and attention is fragmented, there’s often a drift towards what feels safer. Audiences take fewer chances. Artists take fewer risks. Venues programme more commercial work because they need to follow the money. It’s understandable, and it’s also self-reinforcing. The more we lean into certainty, the harder it becomes for anything new to break through.

If we want new writing and experimentation to survive, the incentives have to support it. That means sharing the downside more fairly, and making sure success creates upside for everyone involved.

I’ll look at this challenge from three interconnected sides: artists, audiences and venues, as any meaningful set of solutions touches all three.

1. Artists

Who would be a contemporary artist these days? I mean, seriously.

The author Elizabeth Stone said that having a child is like deciding to forever have your heart go walking around outside of your body. Artists are doing this all the time with their ideas. We reward them with impossible funding application processes, limited networks and constant measuring of their work.

Imagine this scenario for a second:

You grow up with a quiet sense you don’t quite fit. Not in a dramatic way, just enough to make you feel slightly out of step. You spend years writing and boiling ideas down, trying to make sense of what’s in your head. It takes time, effort and huge amounts of energy.

Then one day, after a bolt of inspiration, your thoughts start to align. You get that eureka moment you’ve been searching for. You write a play and summon the immense courage to send it to an arts organisation. Miraculously, they don’t think it’s a chaotic mess, and they agree to work with you to bring it to an audience.

You start rehearsing in an old community hall. It’s freezing. You’re not getting paid. You quickly realise the only way this show will see an actual audience is if you begin a Hunger Games-style application process to get some funding. Against all odds, the funding comes through, and your show will play four performances in a studio space in Reading.

You keep rehearsing, with just about enough money to eat. And not only do you have to focus on the work, you’re being asked by the well-meaning venue team for marketing copy, an image that will speak to their audience, and a day of filming where you have to bare your soul on camera, talking in detail about this fragile and confusing play that’s barely come together in the rehearsal room.

Opening night arrives. The house is full. Great. But you’re fully aware that local reviewers could make or break the show. Not only that, your funders are asking you to somehow measure how the audience reacts. Did it move them? Were they engaged the whole time? How many stars out of five will they rate it?

Then the show is a success. The reviews are great. The audience reaction is electric. For a brief moment, you connect with the world and start to feel that maybe what’s in your head isn’t so unusual after all. You want to open up. You want to share everything.

After the run, you talk to the venue about a future life for the show. And you realise the funding was a one-off. There’s no clear pathway. And the only realistic hope of another run is to self-fund. You have to start all over again.

At which point of this almost comically awful process would you give up? Because for most sane people, it’s somewhere near the beginning.

I learned a lovely fact about honeybees. In a honeybee colony, a small number of scouts leave the safety of the hive to search for new sources of food and new places to live. Most trips come back empty. A few discoveries change what the whole colony can do next, and sometimes that’s the difference between survival or collapse.

In my opinion, art functions in a similar way. A few brave people risk everything to reach out into the darkness and attempt to express things we all feel but can’t put our finger on. They make us feel less alone, and discover new ideas that can fundamentally change how we see ourselves and each other. If the system only rewards certainty, the scouting stops, and the ecology becomes dependent on the same familiar ground. The hive dies.

What sits underneath all of this is that artists are not the only ones taking risks. New work only has a future if audiences can take a chance too, and if venues can back uncertainty long enough for the work to find its shape.

2. Audiences

Audiences take a different kind of risk. It’s not only taste. It’s money, time, and the fear of a wasted evening. When tickets and travel are expensive, and people have less slack in their week, choosing something unfamiliar can feel like a bigger gamble.

And it’s competing with the simplest alternative: staying in. When Netflix is one click away, the bar for leaving the house rises. A recognisable title reduces uncertainty. A clear genre makes it easier to picture the night. A familiar name makes it easier to persuade friends.

There’s also a social risk. If you’re the one choosing the show, you’re staking your taste, and other people’s evening, on it. A safe pick avoids awkwardness. An unfamiliar title can feel like a bigger leap, especially if you’re bringing someone who doesn’t go often.

New writing often asks people to buy in before it’s widely validated. It asks them to trust a theatre, trust an artist, and trust their own instincts. That’s a real ask. If we want more people to take that risk, we have to reduce the friction and help them feel confident about what they’re walking into.

3. Venues

Venues take risks too, but theirs are more structural. Rising fixed costs, tight reserves, and stretched teams mean that one underperforming show can have consequences far beyond that week. In that context, choosing work with clearer demand signals is often the sensible option, even when the artistic ambition is strong.

It’s also a question of balance and cashflow. Familiar work can subsidise risk elsewhere, smooth out the peaks and troughs, and bring in the volume that keeps the wider model working. A fuller house doesn’t just help the box office. It can drive secondary spend, membership and individual giving, and it keeps audiences in the habit of coming back. When overall volume drops, those benefits shrink too, and the pressure to prioritise certainty rises again.

New work is harder to predict. It can be slower to sell, harder to describe, and more dependent on the right room, the right run length, and the right level of support. When the margin for error shrinks, experimentation is often the first thing to be quietly reduced, not because people have stopped caring, but because the system is set up to prioritise certainty.

Potential solutions

A lot of great work is already happening in all of these areas, led by brilliant artists, producers and venues. None of what follows is new in isolation. What I’m arguing for is a more joined-up set of choices that connect the three sides, so the risk is shared and the incentives line up.

We’re also in a different moment. Some of the conditions that supported growth in past decades feel less reliable now, and we can’t assume the old patterns of abundance will return on their own. That means building a response that’s designed for tighter margins and higher uncertainty.

Funding matters. More of it would help. But this piece is about something slightly different: even with the resources we have, the incentives can still push risk into the wrong places and then punish people for taking it. Better alignment doesn’t solve the funding gap, but it can stop us burning energy in isolation, and it can make the risk we do take more likely to build over time.

To stop this feeling like a long list, here’s the connecting thread. This is one strategy with three linked moves:

1) Make the first step easier
New writing will always involve uncertainty, but it shouldn’t feel like you’re asking artists, audiences and venues to take a punt in the dark. That’s about work-in-progress models, better framing, and curation that helps people choose.

2) Share the downside more fairly
When a miss can knock an organisation off course, risk becomes irrational. That’s about scaling the work to the demand, shaping support, and making risk a deliberate, protected choice rather than an accident.

3) Make success create a next step
This is where things often fall down. A show can connect and still hit a wall after four performances. That’s about planning what happens if it works, building pathways across venues, and aligning funded and commercial support so growth is possible.

If you only did three things, I’d start here:

• Protect a small risk budget (money, time, marketing capacity, leadership attention)

• Improve framing and curation so audiences can choose confidently

• Agree next steps in advance for work that connects

The points below are practical examples that sit under those three moves.

Artists

1) Create clear next steps beyond the first run
Create clearer second and third steps so a strong debut is not followed by a dead end. This could be pre-agreed options for a longer run, a follow-on slot in another venue, or a structured network that exists specifically to carry work forward. It also means planning step two before opening night, not after closing night.

2) Normalise work-in-progress models
Borrowing from stand-up, elevate scratch-style performances where artists can try ideas in front of an audience, iterate quickly, and learn what lands. Make the expectations explicit: unfinished work, lower ticket prices, and feedback designed to support development rather than judgement. Map the potential route from scratch to a programmed run early.

3) Provide shaping support without flattening the work
For work that can’t be shared with a live audience at the beginning, pair artists with mentors, dramaturgs, and experienced directors or producers who can help shape structure and clarity. The aim is to strengthen craft and confidence while protecting what is distinctive about the piece. Support needs to start early, not once the work is already in the window.

4) Practical peer support for the business side
Set up peer networks that help artists navigate producers, rights, royalties, touring, budgets, and the next-stage conversations. This reduces the number of promising shows that stall simply because the business pathway is opaque. Make it accessible without another application process.

The next piece is audiences. If the first step still feels like a gamble, it's hard to convince people to attend.

Audiences

5) Reduce the perceived risk of trying something unfamiliar
Use low-stakes routes in: previews, bring-a-friend offers, small bundles designed for curiosity, and short-run samplers. The goal is to make it easier for someone to take a chance without feeling they are gambling with their one free evening. Make the try-something-new route the easiest offer to understand and buy.

6) Make new work easier to understand before booking
Improve framing in plain language. Not over-explaining, but helping people picture the experience. Clear genre cues, confident descriptions, and honest signposting make unfamiliar work feel less like a bigger leap than it needs to. Describe the night, not just the theme.

7) Turn first-time bravery into repeat behaviour
Build simple pathways that reward returning: curated mini-series, follow-on recommendations after the show, and clear prompts that make the second booking feel easier than the first. The goal is habit and trust over time, so unfamiliar titles start to feel like part of an ongoing relationship with the theatre, not a fresh gamble every time.

And then venues. Without protected capacity and a plan for what happens next, good work still stalls.

Venues

8) Match the work to the right scale through real market sizing
Look at demand up front and place work in the right room, for the right run length, with a cost base it can realistically support. Define success in ways that support slow growth, rather than forcing every piece to behave like a mainstage commercial product. Scale the room to the work, not the work to the room.

9) Plan the future life of the show from the beginning
Build tighter networks between theatres of different scales so future life is considered early: where the show can go next, what version of it tours, what needs to change as scale increases. Build the pathway into commissioning, not into hope.

10) Build bridges between funded and commercial ecology
Create joint commissioning and producing models where the funded world supports early risk and R&D, and the commercial world supports packaging, touring, marketing capability, and scaling when there is evidence of demand. Align incentives so both sides benefit when a piece grows. Agree triggers up front for when support shifts from development to scale.

11) Underwrite experimentation explicitly
Agree a small, named risk budget in advance (money, time, marketing capacity, and leadership attention) so new work is not competing with everything else in an ad hoc way. Make the trade-off intentional rather than accidental. Write it down, protect it when budgets tighten, and treat it as part of the model.

What’s at stake

This is a tall order. It asks people to take risk in a moment when risk feels more expensive than ever. But the alternative is a slow narrowing. Fewer chances taken, fewer discoveries made, fewer new stories becoming part of the shared culture.

If chronic pain lasts long enough, it can become habituated. We learn to live around it, even though it’s still there in the background. We adjust expectations and accept less, because the alternative feels unrealistic. Part of me thinks we’ve done something similar with contemporary theatre. We’ve adapted to conditions that make risk feel irrational, and over time that starts to look like inevitability.

But if we care about what theatre can do at its most vital, we should take this seriously and be clear about what’s at stake here. The job is to protect the conditions where new work can be made, seen, and carried forward. Not as a nice-to-have, but as part of what keeps the hive going.

If commercial work is theatre’s beating heart, new writing is its soul.