I’m  Ed Collier, one of the Co-ADs of China Plate Theatre, we’ve toured work nationally and internationally from one handers to musicals, from village halls to main houses. I love touring.

As some of you may know, China Plate runs a producer training programme called The Optimists – at its heart is the belief that one of the key values / attributes / skills of a producer is to nurture a culture of optimism. With optimism we can imagine a brighter future, create change.

So with Optimism in mind,  I thought I’d paint a picture of an imaginary piece of work that we will be touring in 2029, 5 years from now and in the next round of NPO funding. I’m afraid it’s a bit dense with info so bear with me!

We’re now in 2029…

I’m  Ed Collier, one of the Co-ADs of China Plate Theatre, we’ve toured work nationally and internationally from one handers to musicals, from village halls to main houses. I love touring and today I’d like to tell you about a piece that we’re recently finished work on…

This piece came from groundwork that we started to build back in 2025 when we embarked on a new embedded co-creation programme based in North Birmingham. We spent a year getting to know the communities of the area through a series of engagement activities, and a mini festival of theatre which took place in schools and community hubs. Alongside this, we hosted producer inspiration and training events, seeking out people in those communities who want to make stuff happen.

The following year 2026, one of the people we met signed up for The Optimists. Through that programme, they refined an idea that they had that reflected a local experience.

This was exciting, authentic, resonant and we felt we could support them to make it happen. Formalising an Associate Producer relationship with them, China Plate stepped in to offer mentorship, exec producing, infrastructure and fundraising support to build a realisable plan around the idea, all the time reinforcing the now Associate Producer’s relationship to the piece, its audiences and building their skillset.

We brokered a relationship with a regional venue and a regional charitable trust who committed small cash contributions which unlocked Arts Council Project Grant funding, turned around in 6 weeks through their impressive new funding platform Gratify which I think we can all agree has transformed how we all work and lowered blood pressure across the sector. This phase, live through 2027enabled us to develop the idea, building the creative community needed to realise it as well as testing it with the community the idea arose from all the while building the future audience for the finished piece.

It was clear from the exceptional response that it had that this was an idea that could resonate with communities up and down the country, united by their shared experience of the themes of the piece.

Working through the established touring networks, we identified the venues for whom this piece felt a best fit, inviting them to this development phase, to see the work, to meet the artists involved and develop the idea.

The plan to make this piece had touring at its heart. Making and touring were inseparable. As were its community roots and wide audience potential. Through 2027 and into 2028, 5 regional theatres came on board and China Plate worked with the Associate Producer to refine the plan in discussion with Arts Council England who turned round an application in 10 weeks ensuring that we could meet marketing and recruitment plans in a strategic fashion. Throwing exclusion zones to the wind, each venue worked locally to create a micro touring network with the impetus and connections to generate a week of activity in community venues in each town it went to, before culminating in a final performance in their theatres where the word of mouth as well as local press and a social media storm from each performance that week sold it out and created an exceptional atmosphere and bought new audiences to them for the first time.

There was a real, shared understanding of risk which was underpinned by the strong demand we had built over time for our work in each region and the exceptional relationships each venue had with its stakeholders. Deals all featured minimum guarantees and a nifty formula worked to spread the cost and upside of each week across the different community space and the theatre so all benefited for the build in profile and sales across each week.

The team loved touring. The set and stage management team toured in electric vans with the cast all on super reliable trains. Everyone stayed in welcoming, yet discrete digs, all locally vetted and approved. At each venue they were greeted by the leadership team and everyone knew their headshots, names and pronouns would all be on the board at stage door or on the welcome board in the school / community hall reception. We worked to the very best principles of sustainability outlined through the now completely routine Theatre Green Book guidelines which underpinned all of our production and touring decisions.

In the first week, a swathe of broadsheet press reviewers travelled to Birmingham to review, knowing that their readers were hungry for live performance that meant something.

Throughout the process our audience aims framework has held the partners and stakeholders to our agreed plan, facilitating shared learning across the making and touring of the piece to maximise our reach and impact. The data set from the evaluation of the team, venues and audiences points to the ongoing impact it might have when we roll it out further both helping us to evaluate the work and influence future industry community and social stakeholders and funders. It has enabled us to measure change and evidence the impact that was achieved.

This formerly emerging associate producers’ next piece is midscale – for audiences of 400-600, it’s a 6 hander with music… weekly, it would break even selling around 2,000 tickets. Once an impossible leap, with the support of Touring Together, our newly established midscale touring and making network, the partnerships, infrastructure, and regional community connections are already in place – we’re now working on opening that piece in 2031.

Back to 2024…

This is ambitious, it requires joined up thinking and long term strategies, it requires producers, funders, makers, community organisers and the theatre infrastructure to pull together in the same direction – but it is all achievable!

It’s a grand and maybe over long statement but I believe that touring theatre can create change and in a small way make the world a better place. To make this work we need to value the existing infrastructure, understand the balance of risk, invest long term in relationships, ideas, communities, artists and workforce, develop new infrastructure and ensure a fluidity in how we operate.

Lets change the world one tour at a time!