Treading the boards: Insight and the National Theatre

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What comes to mind when you think of British theatre? Do you think of Amadeus’ fictional rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, or the History Boys’ school drama set in a Sheffield grammar? How about the creation of Frankenstein’s monster, the farce of One Man, Two Guvnors or Shakespearean classics such as Othello and Hamlet? All those plays have either debuted or starred at the National Theatre (NT).

With its current base on London’s South Bank, the NT came into life 61 years ago, inaugurated by Sir Laurence Olivier, its director for the first decade. In the years since, the NT has gained a strong reputation for its artistic output, which survives into the modern day. However, there has long been tension between artistic fulfilment and commercial sensibilities, as with any artistic organisation.

Nicholas Hytner, director of the NT between 2003 and 2015, wrote in his book Balancing Acts about the challenge of navigating those two seemingly polar opposites: art and business: “You start with a vision and you deliver a compromise. You want a play to be challenging, ambitious, nuanced and complicated. You also want it to sell tickets.”

On a surface level, it might seem that research would have trouble straddling that seemingly insurmountable divide between generating money and developing theatre. However, that is simply not the case. “Broadly and historically, the NT is an incredibly data-rich organisation, to a point where lots of ears are open for how best to shape the future of the organisation, knowing that data and insights form a core part of that [future] – it’s an incredibly receptive place,” says head of data and insight Alex Wheatley.

The first act

Wheatley joined the NT in 2021, having previously worked at Kantar. The pandemic underlined how important insight was to the organisation; the insight function tracked how customers’ opinions and behaviours changed around returning to the theatre post-lockdown, and more general shifts in attitudes to socialising throughout the pandemic and later on.

The pandemic also led to growth in other forms of theatre consumption. National Theatre at Home, the NT’s streaming service, finished the 2021/22 financial year with 52 titles available and 358,587 hours of theatre watched by audiences worldwide. The NT launched the platform on 1 December 2020 after it spotted significantly increased demand for recorded theatre performances on its media channels during the first UK Covid-19 lockdown.

The trend towards digital consumption of the arts has remained significant, with UK government figures showing ‘digital arts’ accounted for 28% of total arts engagement in 2022/23, a 1% increase from the previous year. This is coupled with a broader return to the theatre, with NT South Bank in-person audiences rising above 2019 figures in 2022. “There is a plethora of new insights available on our audience and our engagement, and a whole new digital platform to explore and build reach,” says Wheatley.

It’s not just online either – the NT also broadcasts its plays in cinemas and on television. For example, its 2020 production of Romeo & Juliet ran on Sky Arts and PBS in the US, with a combined audience of 900,000, as well as screening in almost 300 cinemas across the UK.

Wheatley balances several different data sources in his research, including analytics from the NT’s own ticketing platform and regular surveys with South Bank attendees to get feedback on performances. The NT has its own ticketing platform with analytics, as well as regular surveys with South Bank attendees to get feedback on performances. Each method of distributing NT content – film, talks, education in schools and universities, streaming and the South Bank stages – feed into the data team’s work.

“We have lots of disparate data sources, so I have to get my hands very dirty in terms of thinking how to connect those sources, and how to build a holistic picture and single view of quite complicated interactions,” Wheatley explains.

The organisation also regularly commissions research to look at people who do not engage with the NT. “There’s a risk that when we have such a vocal, engaged audience, we put too much emphasis on those loud voices and don’t provide the space to do the research with the people who aren’t interacting with us, and where those gaps are,” Wheatley adds. This has been particularly important as a worldwide pandemic that curtailed social interaction morphed into a cost-of-living crisis.

Wheatley joined the NT in the height of the pandemic and said “from an insight perspective, it was like being thrown in the deep end”. Data has been used to shape the organisation’s response to crises, such as the decision to launch its home-streaming platform. “There’s lots of information,” Wheatley adds. “It’s about taking a deep breath, stepping back, going back to the basics of insight and remembering that everything is means-to-an-end to explain and understand things.

“If you ask the question ‘why hasn’t someone booked tickets to this show?’, it’s not as simple as whether they liked the show; it’s not as simple as whether tickets and seats were available; it’s not as simple as how they were feeling – it is a culmination of everything.”

The changes in theatre-going behaviour in the past few years have fed into a wide programme of research broadly focused on the NT’s audiences, their engagement with the organisation, and how the NT defines, segments and connects with theatregoers. As a result of that work, the organisation recently trialled 6.30pm start times at the South Bank (see boxout) to keep up to date with changing customer needs and behaviours.

Wheatley recognises that some substantial changes in consumer behaviour have remained long after social distancing rules faded away. To take one example, booking data from the NT shows that people’s approach to buying tickets has changed since 2020, with many opting to book much closer to the date they attend the theatre than they did before. “It is such an interesting and challenging period,” Wheatley says. “We have so many competing factors. Whether someone buys a ticket to see a show is not just about how expensive that ticket is, and our competitive set is not just West End theatres – our competitive set is also going to the cinema or sitting in and watching Netflix. We have to remember we can think holistically about how we can be pertinent in those moments when people have those ‘need states’.

“My duty is to drive the voice of the consumer more broadly, rather than focus on specifics, as you then end up focusing on a small group, or a small market. My angle is to think about what else a person could book and who our competition is.”

For art’s sake?

The scale and breadth of the work carried out by the data and insight function at the NT has to take into account the organisation’s funding model, which combines money from sources such as the government, ticket sales, commercial revenue and philanthropic donations, with the NT having status as a charity with royal patronage. This can mean having to work around resource constraints.

“We are a registered charity and we have to give back. That means, while I am used to seeing insights functions for a brand of this scale having large teams and large amounts of investment, we have to be more agile, entrepreneurial, and prioritise and think creatively,” Wheatley says. It also means working with other NT teams, such as the learning department covering schools and communities, development, audience and marketing, and digital, all with their own goals and aims, and all of which manage data.

His job is akin to a conductor: gathering and disseminating data held in different parts of the organisation to create a unified whole.
Wheatley’s ambition is to bring everyone at the NT together with the same holistic view. For this reason, he has been working to help colleagues more effectively share insight between departments. “I want us to be in a place where all of our data sets can be combined, we can take a holistic view of everything we do and democratise it across the organisation. I am never going to have a team of 50 people doing this, so I have to embed it in the ways of working. There’s a big appetite for that.”

Wheatley says that his role is to catalyse staff in other NT departments to carry out research and examine data to support their work and decision-making. “The best heads of data and insights functions in client organisations do well when it doesn’t look like the research comes from them,” Wheatley adds. “The research looks like it is coming from the people who need it, and they are there to make sure it grows and is used by the organisation in a meaningful way. It means that, ultimately, the actions are driven by the people who care.”

But can the insights department at the NT navigate the tension between commercial necessities, audience needs, nurturing talent and the creative process? “This place wholeheartedly realises the creative process is carried by everyone,” Wheatley states.

“We are made to feel we are the theatre-makers. This is a factory that creates that work, and everyone plays a role in that. We are at this wonderful point where we can have our cake and eat it – we can achieve recognition and commercial factors. We are very fortunate to be in that position. At its core, this organisation realises that the National Theatre is more than just an artistic expression or a heritage piece putting productions on for the national record – it is a place that should be for everyone, and we do our best to ensure and drive that.”