Roz Laws looks at a scheme which could lure bigger audiences to theatres.
It started as a way for impoverished theatre-goers to see shows for free.
Now the idea is turning into a scheme that’s being nominated for awards and talked about by cabinet ministers in keynote speeches.
It’s called Theatre Ninjas, and one of the driving forces behind it is Rajiv Nathwani, who’s achieved an impressive amount for a 23-year-old.
He is about to join the board of the Birmingham Rep and is on a BBC fast-track scheme to become a director.
Theatre Ninjas is in its early stages at the moment but this spare-time project could become a massive global business. Successfully trialled at the Edinburgh Festival last summer, it’s an app and website, which allows people to learn of a limited number of last-minute free tickets for shows.
It provides links to reviews and to maps showing where the venues are, plus a code word. People will turn up at the box office and use the code word to claim their free tickets on a first come, first served basis. One of the advantages of the scheme for theatres is that it means shows don’t play to half-empty venues, but it also boosts sales.
“We discovered that, once people had made the effort to get to a theatre, if the free tickets had all gone they invariably bought seats anyway,” explains Nathwani, who’s from Walsall. “And if they saw the show for free, they’d be more inclined to return another time and tell their friends about it.
“They’d also spend money in the theatre by buying drinks, for example.”
Theatre Ninjas was founded by 10 friends, all drama students at Manchester University.
“We couldn’t afford to go to the theatre, so we took advantage of an Arts Council scheme which offered free theatre tickets for anyone under 26,” says Nathwani, who studied English literature and drama. You could book six tickets for a performance but you could only book once at some theatres. One of us would get six tickets and offer the other five to the rest of the group, then next time one of them would make the booking.
“We set up a Facebook page to make it easier to distribute the tickets. We invited people to join and that group slowly grew, but the Arts Council scheme is to close at the end of March, so we had to think of another way to get free tickets. We bounced some ideas around, and using a smart phone is what jumped out at us as a way of finding out about free tickets.”
Theatre Ninjas was hastily put into practice after the group won a £1,000 grant from the youth arts charity Ideas Tap. The app was downloaded more than 3,500 times during the Edinburgh Festival and 186 shows signed up to the scheme, giving away an average of 750 tickets a day.
A survey revealed that 78 per cent of users said it had introduced them to venues they had never been to before.
The app was so successful in Edinburgh that it was nominated for a GaGa and listed as one of the Ideas Of The Year in awards run by Culture Sparks in Scotland. They will be running it again this summer, then hope to widen the scope of Theatre Ninjas to include London, then theatres throughout Britain and even abroad.
