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As a writer from Hull, applying for a position on the board of Middle Child was an easy decision. Middle Child played a monumental part in my own career as a writer – of course I’d want to give back in any way I could.

It was in 2019, when I had just lost the Hull heat of the prestigious Roundhouse poetry slam, that I first encountered Middle Child. They reached out to me in a moment of defeat.

Little did I know, the artistic director of Middle Child was in the audience that night and saw something in my poetry. Paul Smith requested my contact details from the organisers and then emailed me with a paid writing retreat opportunity.

Why am I telling you this? Because it speaks to where Middle Child’s heart is—with the underdogs. The people who don’t necessarily succeed first time around. The person whose voice trembles on stage. The performance poet who may still have to read from the page. Those who have something important to say and just need a little help saying it.

If you are interested in theatre, writing, and most importantly, the development of people, why wouldn’t you want to be a small part of a theatre company that actively makes a positive difference to their local city?

Anti-Racist, queer-friendly and compassion driven: Middle Child has made waves in Hull and inspired many budding playwrights, poets, and writers — me included.

But what does it mean to take on the responsibility of Young Trustee?

As a young trustee, you are a part of the board of Middle Child – a charity and Arts Council England national portfolio organisation (NPO).

It is an unpaid position, but you will be offered free tickets to incredible shows, food and drink will be provided on board meeting days and your travel will be reimbursed too.

All they want from you is a few hours every few months to attend board meetings, which you can do virtually if need be, and your insight, both professional and personal. They will give you board meeting dates several months in advance so you can book time off work if need be.

The only reason I am stepping down from this position is because I am starting my career in teaching, so will be unavailable during school hours in the work week and thus less able to make it to board meetings.

This is something to keep in mind before applying for the trustee position—the board meetings are where important decisions are made in running the company, so make sure your job and work/life balance is flexible enough to attend.

What if I don’t have much to contribute? I’m just a student!

If I’m honest, as a young trustee, I was mildly intimidated at my first board meeting. I felt I didn’t have a huge amount of industry knowledge to make a massive difference to the proceedings and discussions.

If you’re a young person who is relatively new to theatre, this may well be one of the reasons who are putting off applying for the position. To that I say: do it anyways! Apply! Especially if you come from a marginalised background like me!

Even though I didn’t have a lot of knowledge around accounting or avenues of fundraising, I did have my lived experience around being a disabled, brown, queer person. A diverse board is important and can help an NPO like Middle Child reach demographics it might not have.

I distinctly remember having a conversation about the problematic term ‘BAME’ and the move towards discussing the inclusion of alternative terms like ‘Global Majority’. It’s a small thing, but an important conversation to have.

Similarly, as a transmasculine person, playing a small part in the production of a show like Modest — which showcased some of the UK’s best drag kings — was incredibly inspiring and exposed me to new possibilities for queer theatre.

Everyone on the board is friendly and understanding — they are not expecting you to be an expert on all things theatre and business; they just want you to be present and contribute any way you can, even if it’s in a small way.

The benefits of learning the mechanics of it all

I was never all that clued up on what goes on behind the scenes of running a theatre company — spoiler alert: a lot! However the board offered me valuable insight into fundraising targets, operating reserves, and the importance of spreadsheets.

I learnt about the way funding has changed over the years, the intricacies of applying for Arts Council applications and how to deal with deficits and surpluses.

As a Middle Child trustee, you begin to have a much deeper understanding around the dips and troughs of finances in the theatre scene and how to navigate alternative avenues of investment.

I learnt about efficient fundraising and how it is much more difficult to secure money from trusts and foundations, as opposed to working alongside your local city council.

In the board meetings, you also get clear insight into budget breakdowns and you can have a say in how much is set aside in productions, salaries, artist development.

You see the steps the company is taking in terms of inclusivity, for example, how they have contacted transport organisations to sponsor and provide travel to shows, or creating an Acting Gym that gives actors a space to try out new material and exercise their skills.

The trustee position allows you exclusive access to the behind the scenes of Middle Child and if you are still young and don’t have lots of experience in creative industries, it’s certainly a good one for the CV.

Being on a board exposes you to different areas of expertise and allows you to build your network with various industry professionals—all of whom you can learn immense amounts from.

• See the recruitment page for Middle Child trustees. Applications close on Tuesday 7 November.

Audience development manager, Jamie Potter, shares some of the headline results from our recent Hull audience survey and what it means for Middle Child as a company

A few weeks ago we invited Hull audiences to take a survey about our work and theatre in general, to help us plan for future activity. We hoped that 100 people would respond and you smashed that, with 181 responses.

We have some headline insights to share below, but first of all thank you to everybody who took the time to complete a survey.

Monitoring and evaluation, that wonderful term of jargon, is the least sexy part of theatre. It’s often laborious and usually a buzzkill for those on the receiving end, but it can also be invaluable.

Already, the results from this survey are helping to shape some of our plans, just as your response to our world cup survey last year gave us the confidence to shift the dates of our 2022 Christmas show. So again, thank you.

The results

Those 181 responses were across four ever-so-slightly different versions of the survey: one for people who have seen both our panto and new writing work; one for people who have only seen panto; one for people who have only seen our new writing and one for people who have never seen any of our work.

By new writing we mean a new script, that has never been produced. No Shakespeare or Churchill here. Not that there’s no place for that kind of work, it’s just not what we do as a company.

Now, onto the sexiest bit of the least sexy bit of theatre: what you said.

Behaviour

People are going out less frequently in the past 12 months compared to the previous year, especially our audiences who only come to panto. That’s unsurprising, given the ongoing cost-of-living (horrible phrase) crisis.¹

As it happens, sales for Red Riding Hood continue at the same pace as Robin Hood did last year. While we may be cutting back on nights out elsewhere, people still want to celebrate those big occasions, like Christmas. It does however pose a challenge for theatre makers away from the draw of Pattie Breadcake.

Middle Child style

We were particularly keen to know what people who have seen our work before enjoy the most about our style. At this point we’d like to say thank you especially for all of the additional comments about your favourite Middle Child productions. These are really useful for us to understand exactly what makes a good night out for our audiences.

Back to the stats and for people who have only seen our panto, live music (93%), liveness (89%) and a local cast (86%) are the most appealing elements of our panto. When looking at respondents who have seen new writing, or new writing and panto, a majority consider “a new script” (68%) and “challenging subject matter” (52%) somewhat or very important. Similarly, 96% of new writing fans agree or strongly agree that they “like to take risks and would aim to see a play where the content or style is new to me.”

That’s validation of our mission to creating work not is not only a good night out, but which centres big ideas, working towards a world where anybody’s story can be told and heard. As theatre continues to adjust to the impact of covid, we will nail our new writing and good night out colours to the mast.

To our surprise, only 3% of people who have seen our new writing work consider large sets somewhat or very important, and only 9% consider large (six or more) casts somewhat or very important.

Our most recent shows, such as Modest and There Should Be Unicorns, were both “mid-scale”, featuring larger casts and more complicated sets. While these were huge successes for us and we are proud of what they achieved, mid-scale work is also expensive and complicated to make. Expensive mainly.

As Middle Child and the wider industry grapple with higher costs and overstretched budgets, it’s interesting that our audiences don’t see mid-scale work as vital to our identity as a company, despite loving the shows we have created at this level.

Access

Firstly, I need to hold my hands up to making a pig’s ear of this question. The intention was to understand demand for certain offers, rather than the value people place on each. I also forgot to include wheelchair access, as we always ensure this as a given and have done for many years now. When we next run this survey, we’ll make sure to improve that question.

Despite that error we were still able to find out that performers using microphones was the offer most people thought somewhat or very important (46%), followed by afternoon shows (41%) and relaxed performances (37%).

We remain committed as a company to providing BSL interpretation (26% thought somewhat or very important) for all our pantomimes and major productions, while literary manager Matthew May has now undertaken training in audio description, which will be integrated at every pantomime performance this Christmas.

Reviews and feedback

Audiences place more value on positive feedback from other audience members, including those they don’t know, than four or five-star reviews.²

Whether there should be more reviews, to engage in critical debate around a show and to document work for future generations, is another question entirely.

Marketing

Our email and Facebook page are the most popular channels that we manage, in terms of where people have heard about our activity in the past year. Meanwhile word of mouth and Facebook are the most popular non-Middle Child channels.³

Word of mouth is always by far the most popular in our post-show surveys too, reflecting the importance of feedback in the previous point. One of the best ways you can support our work as an audience member then is to tell anybody who will listen to come see our work.

Ticketing

£15-19 is the median ideal price for a standard ticket for a two-hour play, as chosen by 46% of respondents. This also happens to be what we charged for Modest back in May and for Red Riding Hood, coming up this Christmas.

Finding the balance between making theatre affordable and covering our costs is always tricky, so it’s reassuring to know that we are on the right lines with that.

We also continue to make performances financially accessible through things like pay what you decide shows, solidarity tickets and partnerships with local community groups and funders to offer free tickets.

Development

There is a strong appetite to see work-in-progress theatre, especially among new writing audiences, where 92% agree or strongly agree they would like to see some.

This is already proving the case with our Out Loud scratch night: 75% of audiences who attended Casino and 67% who attended 1988 and Shit Life Crisis did not work in the arts.

What next?

We continue to dig into the results further and bear them in mind as we start work on Red Riding Hood and our big show for next year Baby, He Loves You, as well as longer-term thinking. This includes future big show commissions and an exciting new writing programme coming next summer, which we’ll have more details about next month.

We are confident that as that work unfolds, you will be able to join the dots between this survey and the shows we stage in the future, so thank you once again for sharing your feedback.

Footnotes

1. 46% of all respondents said they are going out less frequently to some degree, compared with 28% going out about the same amount and 25% going out more frequently to some degree. For people who’ve only attended panto, the figure going out less frequently to some degree is 51%.
2. 32% of all respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am more likely to want to see a Middle Child show if I read a four or five-star review of it first”; whereas 70% of all respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am more likely to want to see a Middle Child show if I read/hear a positive response to it from another audience member that I know.”
3. 70% of respondents who have seen our work have heard about us through our email and 68% through our Facebook page. 57% of respondents who have seen our work have heard about us through word of mouth and 52% through other Facebook sources.