Production risk assessment

It takes a lot of effort to organise the production of a play, especially when you, s a company are taking your adaptation of an original play, to a venue. There can be conditions and restrictions imposed on the production for example by the licensing of the play and the venue itself. In this case we also have to consider The Brighton Fringe Festival and Shoreham Shakespeare Festival as they run the event and ultimately decide what they want to showcase at their venues.

Referring to the licensing of the play, normally you can get into a lot of trouble with the licence holder if you miss out a number of lines or interpret the play in a different way to which the owner is happy with. The owners can go to the extreme of suing the company responsible for the misinterpretation of the play if they feel necessary. In our case The Tempest is by William Shakespeare who passed away hundreds of years ago. If the artist wants to pass the licensing of their work onto someone else or a company, then they can (much like Walt Disney.) However, Shakespeare died before this became possible as licensing laws were not in place in the Elizabethan period. This means that with the Tempest, we have the ability to chop and change as much of the play as we like, without any legal obligations. This is not a worry for us.

Following this, comes venue restrictions and conditions. We did not advertise or make any tickets for our performance at the Shoreham Shakespeare Festival as the venue is in the town centre. We performed on a Saturday morning, which is peak time for any town to be busy with locals doing their shopping. If we were to advertise this as a performance and sell a significant number of tickets, the issue would be that the town would become too busy and not all audience members would be bale to see our performance. The crowd gathered round our performance space in an intimate manor as we had not set up a small area for this reason. Therefore, we did not need to sell any additional tickets for this performance.

Performing at the Brighton Open Air Theatre (BOAT) was a different story. E had to think about different potential restrictions regarding this venue. A conversation was had between our company’s organiser, Kim Sheldon and the BOAT owner, Anne-Marie Williams which saw Anne-Marie check if we had sold any additional tickets for the show as the BrightonFringe website that she was selling the tickets on, had sold out. BOAT is a site specific venue however has seating, mocking that of an Ancient Greek theatre. This limits the amount of audience members able to watch the performance. This would not be an issue say if the performance were in a field as this is a fully open space with no number restrictions (within reason of course.) Therefore, number of tickets sold was a restriction for us. As the solution, we made sure that the number of independent tickets we sold as a company, were kept to an absolute minimum.

Another possible restriction for us as actors when performing at the BOAT is the Astro turf flooring. We have to be considerate of what set we bring to the venue eg- is there any chance it could permanently mark or damage the flooring? We are bringing a large wooden and paper Mache tree as the main feature of our set. We will be painting it so to avoid any unnecessary damage, w Weill have to make sure the tree is painted way before the show day so that it is fully dry in time and can not cause any damage to the flooring or the surroundings.

Moving on finally to the content of what you are bringing to the event. You must Erne that the work, play in this case, that you are presenting at the venue, is appropriate to the event theme and that they are happy with what you are showing. You must think about your audience’s age appropriateness to the content and what the event are actually advertising will be at the showings.

Luckily with the Shoreham Shakespeare festival, it is in the name. The audience who turn up to see our Tempest adaptation are fully prepared and know they are watching a Shakespeare convention therefore all content will be based around his work. The Tempest fully qualifies for this criteria.

However, differing from this, the Brighton Fringe Festival is a celebration of the country’s art forms and hosts many different medias such as plays, dance performances, puppetry, singing workshops and the list goes on. Unlike Shoreham, Brighton Fringe do not dedicate their showings toShakespeare. Because of this we had to consider factors. Firstly, you must remember that the age of the audience members may vary so to ensure no one is offended, we could write on the poster or indirectly suggest that our play is not appropriate for vey young children as they may find it difficult to sit and concentrate on a Shakespearian play for over an hour without becoming a distraction. Secondly, the Fringe is all about new and old artistic ideas so we have put a odeon twist on the Tempest, which will hopefully make it appealing both to die hard Shakespeare lovers by being true to the origins of the play however we added singing and dance elements into the show where fitting to give it more of a modern day, contemporary style which will attract the younger audiences.