“One Small Step” And The Audience That Will Bring Your Work To Life

When David Hastings’ play ONE SMALL STEP was taken up to the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival this month - the festival’s most respected venue -  the outlook was quite pragmatic: take the show up there, expect a financial loss but gather thy reviews and hope they harvest into eyeballs and cash in the form of a UK tour of the play over the next year - something that might not even be possible without an Edinburgh premiere and the prestige that can garner.

So when Scotlands’ main national newspaper gave it a 5 star review last week  - one of only 8 of the 598 plays they’ve reviewed at the festival this year - hopes and expectations were raised a notch for the Oxford Playhouse team who brought the production up there.

Since Sunday, when the review was released, audiences that began at 20 and plateaued at 40 suddenly spiked sharply to a full house (122 seats) and haven’t relented since.

David Hastings, the author of the play and a friend of mine sent me an email:

“Audiences are going mad for it… it’s not the  play anymore which is exciting, it’s the audience. The atmosphere is extraordinary. I said to our producer, ‘We created it, The Scotsman discovered it, and Edinburgh audiences own it.’ - reality next week.”.

Whereas with the smaller audiences, ONE SMALL STEP was receiving a wholesome, happy applause, now they’re getting standing ovations for every show.

It’s interesting. In the next post, we’ll be looking at the film BLACK GOLD - an independent social-issue driven documentary that began life as something that no funders would sniff at and resulted in becoming a film whose success was so powerful that the audience, in taking it for their own, were almost too powerful and the demand almost too strong for the filmmakers to keep up with.

In both cases, I’d say it’s a classic case of the audience being the element that really breathes life into something clearly worthy but that, without their attention and investment, essentially fails. The upside is that when opportunities for audience succeed, alchemy takes hold. In the case of ONE SMALL STEP, as also in the case of BLACK GOLD, success breeds success - and without some kind of kismet, it’s uncertain how, when or whether history might repeat itself.

HOW AUDIENCE KEEPS A PIECE OF WORK BREATHING
John Cleese famously said that a person can only laugh continuously for about 40 minutes - beyond that, physically, it’s too tiring. When you have a large audience, you have more people laughing at more points and that keeps things simmering in the moments between the big  jokes. The accumulative effect is that the whole thing is funnier and the content is denser because the audience essentially carries much of the creators burden.

I’m sure this translates across genres - audiences, at different points, feeling the drama or thrill etc… - basically playing tag in building the mood that’s being reached for. It’s a phenomenon begun by the creator and brought alive by the spectator. It’s not interactivity but interdependence.

So it’s the audiences for BLACK GOLD and ONE SMALL STEP who are both, in their own way, bringing the content to life. Without this process either project would have been stunted. You can make the strongest piece in the world  - and both of these were quality projects - but even if you do so, if you don’t have the best audience in the world for that piece, it’s never going to reach it’s full potential and its very channels of communication will be muddied.

- It might get born but it’ll never become fully grown.

SO, WHAT ABOUT ACCESS?
With both projects, they were brought to their audience potential with the help of very powerful brands.

ONE SMALL STEP got taken on by the Oxford Playhouse, helping them gain access to The Assembly Rooms, making it far more easy to get any kind of review from The Scotsman at all. It had been given 5 star reviews from publications earlier on in the festival but those just kept the audience ticking over at 40 - it was The Scotsman review that blew the roof off. With BLACK GOLD, it was getting into Sundance and using that platform to communicate the right message with the right weight and be able to be heard by the right people.

Luckily - or perhaps cleverly -  each project was very compatible with the brands that supported them. But not everyone has access to these type of brands and nor is every piece of worthy work suited to them.

LEAVE YOUR THOUGHTS AND IDEAS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION
So, what can you do if these options aren’t available to you? What can we learn from how branding works in building audience to find some parallel for people doing it themselves?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts and ideas around this and will explore it in more detail in a later post. As I said, our next post looks at the story of the film BLACK GOLD and speaks a lot to the ideas of straddling mainstream and alternative paths to audience. It sees how that can be levered to the optimum degree and takes a look at the implications this has for the film and the filmmaker.