Theatre 1: Two Huge Lessons for Business?

I’ve been given the great opportunity to work in a theatre again, eighteen years after I last stepped foot in one as a creative participant rather than an audience member. It has been wonderful.

On one level, the project was a teambuilding one. Richard Jacobs of Yes asked me to help him out with a client who wanted to explore their corporate values, and in so doing, develop the work-related skills of collaboration and innovation. No big news there. Companies come together on off-sites every week of the year with such intentions. They could have abseiled down a cliff together, or built a raft out of twigs and lemon peel and sailed across a river. But Richard persuaded them that they could just as well generate some healthy anxiety by coming together on Day 1, knowing that 28 hours later, by the end of Day 2, they would be performing - having devised it, written it and (for those who did not want to ‘act’) learnt the complementary skills of stage management, lighting design and so on - a complete one hour play for a specially invited audience of friends and family. And all this in a real theatre, the Unicorn.

On another, personal, level, this has been a journey for me. I came into the business world from theatre, and, here I am, about to take a sabbatical from business, apparently coming full circle. Back to the stage. Back to the magical place.

When I was writing How to Make Work Fun! I went to the States to talk with a man who had written a similar book over there. It transpired that as well as being a ‘fun consultant’ CW Metcalf also had begun in the theatre (and along the way played Bozo the clown in Happy Days - a character I cannot recall but who almost certainly was the spitting image of Crusty the Clown from The Simpsons). Anyhow, CW told me that he thought all business people should have some experience working in the theatre, for two reasons:

(i) that, without any exhortation or theory or coaching to be that way, theatre is inherently a team activity. The guy on stage doing a soliloquy from Hamlet knows that he is no more important or necessary than the guy hidden away in the darkness at the back of the theatre with his hand on the lighting controls.

(ii) that there is nothing in business that - despite its bluster and macho will-power and long-hours-work-hard-get-the-job-done effort - is akin to the extraordinary energy or spirit that kicks in in the final days before curtain up, and transforms a rag bag of doubting actors and suddenly new props and gaffer-taped scenery into The Performance.

This energy is known and has passed into the collective consciousness as the cliché It Will Be All Right On The Night, but I assure you, the phrase doesn’t do the experience justice. And as I stand here in the darkness of the wings at the Unicorn Theatre, I am remembering its power. It is like being held, and lifted…