There are two main drivers of Argyll’s Walking Theatre Company and each of them makes the company unusual and possibly unique in Scotland:

• creating interactive outdoor performances owned alike by performers and audience and that parents can come to with young children without being ostracised
• testing the ability of a performance company to earn its keep without public subsidy

When the Dixon-Spain family came to live in Argyll, Sadie Dixon-Spain wanted to put her expertise in professional theatre to good use and she wanted to be able to go to performances as a member of the audience.

The mother of two young daughters, she learned that this last ambition was all but impossible. Children put up with boredom less tolerantly than do adults. It takes a lot to hold their attention. Their imaginations quickly offer them other things to entertain their curiosity. They generally want to be active, not passive. These characteristics add up to what is regarded as anti-social behaviour in the hushed cathedrals of art where the greatest heresy is the rumour of clothing created by sleight of hand. Something had to be done.

Sadie Dixon-Spain was moved by Argyll’s powerful physical presence, complex cultural heritage and clan feuds and with the germ of an idea of a different form of theatre, perhaps related to promenade performance but outdoors and moving beyond that towards a new fluidity and responsiveness.

She also wanted to explore developing performances that would challenge and entertain and that people would commission, value and pay to see.

Out of this came The Walking Theatre Company (TWTC), which sees itself as ‘a mobile destination’. Now three years old, with an established repertoire, a standing pool of seven professional actors – currently auditioning for a further four, award wins and nominations and some challenging engagements with Scotland’s First Minister, it has a surprising business record.

In its first year TWTC ran on an 80% funding to 20% revenue performance. In its second year this pattern became one of 50% funding and 50% revenue. And in this, its third year, it seems set to produce a performance of 20% funding to 80% revenue.

TWTC’s winning the Best Potential for 2009 Award in the ForArgyll 2008 Awards looks like very astute judgement on the part of its massive vote.

How is this possible? What’s the business model? Are they working for nothing and on a profit share?

Well, this financial performance is possible because of an energetic commitment to earning a living through an art that breathes ogygen and doesn’t suffer from altitude sickness. This has bred a business model based on offering a stable product list for sale and with customised and bespoke options, depending on the buyer’s budget. And no, they don’t work for nothing. They work on Equity rates and their adopted payment model of using the rate-per-performance option means that where actors do three performances a week they earn more than the Equity minimum weekly rate.

How does the company pull this off? The answer again is through a strict business analysis. The overheads and the production costs of theatre are famously crippling – although again there are ways of reducing these, other than TWTC’s, that a creative business brain could find.

Anyway, TWTC’s answer has been to develop a performance form which is free of the burden of premises and many of the production costs of traditional ‘theatre’ shows. It puts its major financial commitment behind the frontline element that ensures success or failure – the actors.

It works in outdoor and public places. Each member of the audience is registered. The group is always accompanied by a qualified First-Aider. As they arrive, members of the audience are met by the actors – in character – who immediately make them, usually literally, a part of the performance and build into this the necessary safety checks on appropriate footwear and clothing.

What then happens might be a rapid-fire Macbeth in evocative surroundings of buildings and landscape. It might be one of the company’s specialisms – an original drama created from local history and played in its own place; or a performance specifically for children like The White Rabbit’s Treasure Hunt (from Alice in Wonderland). The company’s mantra for charging for children’s performances is: ‘Well behaved adults come free’.

The circumstances of such performances can create astonishing challenges and strange rewards. TWTC once played Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a gale-driven rainstorm.

The business energy of the company is perhaps best exemplified by an occasion when Forestry Commission Scotland offered the company more funding. The response was: ‘Don’t give us money. Buy our product’. They did – a lot of it and are planning to buy more.

This approach develops all partners in the enterprise. It engages Forestry Commission Scotland directly with the value of site specific performance and the added value it brings to the forest experience. It builds entirely different relationships between people and forests, bringing action, imagination, emotion, narrative, light, shade and shadow into play – and play could not be a more appropriate word.

And it develops the skills range of the performers in ways many of them could never have envisaged. These are mainly actors with backgrounds in traditional professional theatre.

• But here are no dressing rooms – the company travels light with its props literally on its back in rucksacks.
• Here are no follow spots to give you prominence – you have to create that for yourself in sheer performance power.
• Here are no obvious entrances and exits to codify your actions for the audience – in this context the actor must conjure the entirety of character and surroundings
• Here is no passive and invisible audience at a safe distance – they are present, active, in your face, even subversive.

TWTC is building more responsive, more flexible and more highly skilled performers for theatre and for Argyll.

The company adds to its revenue by extending its product menu into corporate media training (for which it has won significantly positive responses) and fun events for the hotel and tourist sector – like its own variety of murder mystery – Spying Tonight.

This is a grounded, eyes-open company which daily reminds itself: ‘I am a business’. ‘I am selling something’. Much of the arts and cultural sector could learn well from taking this attidude to itself and adapting it for its own circumstances.

Oh – we mentioned ‘some challenging engagements with the First Minister’. What was that about?

Well, on the first such occasion, the company was doing its Macbeth-on-speed as the entertainment at a pretty couth reception. Two guards were required to ‘arrest’ a character. Lady Macbeth approached a fellow who looked the part and required him to seize the culprit. The chosen one was holding a glass of champagne. Lady Macbeth took it from him and handed it briskly to his companion saying: ‘Here. Make yourself useful’.  As a non-politicised newcomer, Lady M did not then know that her chosen ‘minder’ was the then Scottish Secretary cum Defence Minister, Des Browne – nor that the one commanded to make himself useful was Alex Salmond.

The First Minister took it in gleeful part and, present at a later performance, took on the role of Banquo himself.

The first of the three photographs above shows the founders of The Walking Theatre Company, Sadie Dixon-Spain and Liam Calgie. The second is a scene from Prospero’s Walk, on a day that produced one of the company’s tempestuous Tempests. The final shot shows Sadie Dixon-Spain with First Minister, Alex Salmond and Campbell Hughes. All photographs have been supplied by TWTC with its permission for their reproduction here.