For us the barriers tend to be about scheduling. Sometimes an offer will come quickly and simply cannot be accommodated—often it is a timing issue.
There is also an issue of resource. We cannot take up all the offers that we would like. It is not necessarily a financial resource; it is more about staffing. If we have a big show in Scotland, that is where we deploy our key people, rather than suddenly pulling them out to be in the USA or China. We have access to a large pool of freelancers, but we still need our key people. If a show is internationally a key priority for us, we want the best people working on that.
Funding is an issue, although not necessarily our own funding. Our policy tends to be that we are the National Theatre of Scotland and we try to concentrate our funds on creating work in Scotland. If our work travels, we try to make it self-supporting. That is usually done through fees that we raise from the festivals or theatres that we visit. We receive some help from the Scottish Government international touring fund, which is a fund for the five national companies of £350,000 a year. It tries to distribute the money equally, but we always try to get the lion’s share—sometimes we do; sometimes we do not. It depends on how much we have out and, as Lloyd Anderson said, the question is often whether the British Council in that country is helping the partner that we are going to visit.
The big thing that often prevents shows is not the weekly fee for the actors. A project such as the James plays, which we did in Edinburgh and are planning to tour internationally in 2016, is a huge undertaking. It involves having more than 40 people on the road, which means 40 flights and 40 hotel rooms a night. In a sense, that is a bigger issue than the fees for the actors. We do not even see the money: it is what we call an under-the-line matter for the partners to deal with. We say, “We need really good hotels for 40 people, thank you very much” or “Flights for 40 people, please”. That is one barrier that exists.
With regard to trying to raise money ourselves to help our partnerships, we have in the USA what is called a 501(c)(3) board—National Theatre of Scotland America Inc—which means that we can raise sponsorship and accept fees without tax in the USA. Initially, we did that as a functionary thing to help us to get there and so that our fees were not penalised. As we have done more and more work—to go back to the point about consistency that we started with—we have built up a network of key supporters in the USA. On the board we have somebody from a major whisky company and someone from a finance company with an American name.
In America there is an expression for those on theatre boards: give, get or get off. You are meant to give money, you get money or you get off the board. It is a very different way of operating; the subsidy issue does not exist for boards in the USA. It is a change of culture for us to be working with an American board, where there is an expectation on the members to raise money. We are starting slowly but we are building it up, and I think that it will be a key aspect of future international work for us.
Finally, on the point about Burns suppers and so on, it is interesting that, wherever we go in the world, no matter how contemporary and cutting-edge we think our show is, people always want us to do a Burns supper. We have done them in fantastic places. We have a show called, “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart”, which we perform in a pub. We did the show in Santa Monica, and on the Saturday night, which coincided with Burns night, they said, “Can you not do the show, and do a Burns supper instead?” So we did a Burns supper in 80-degree temperatures in Santa Monica in January. We are always looking for opportunities to do that. [Laughter.]