I’m guessing the data you were looking at is the Westfields Impact spreadsheet. Yes, some shows are always going to do better than others but look at the figures for the ‘populist’ shows. “Importance of Being Earnest” did £17k less business than could have been expected and “Henceforward” by Alan Ayckbourn took £21k less than other comedies in the same slot. A comparison on a more even field is to compare the two previous Shakespeare’s (Dream and R&J) in the same slot as “As You Like It” and you get a short fall of £45k. If you include Macbeth you get -£51k. Now you either like Shakespeare or you don’t but when three Shakespeare plays have an average of £128k and the next one takes £77k then something is going on that can’t be blamed on programming. The trend was down, regardless of the type of show.

However, banter aside, your points are all very valiant and well made but it still doesn’t alter the fact that the organisation was living beyond it’s means, already in dire straights financially and one opening season aside, chasing a hugely ambitious artistic vision. Without very close supervision, this mix of risks can soon run out of control and this situation smacks of this all over.

Chasing national reviews and plaudits is all very well but surely the theatre should first and foremost concentrate on the needs and entertainment of people on it’s own doorstep?

I understand it will have been difficult working on a building site, but had some of these risks been minimised somewhat, particularly I would argue on the programming side, then the theatre would not now be in administration.

This appears to be borne out in your own data which I’ve just looked at on the DP website, which although almost impenetratibly presented, seems to indicate that the populist shows did well, and challenging shows did markedly less well.

I’m not a statistician, but it would appear to me to suggest that there was an audience that was willing to attend, but not take a risk - which would have told me something I would have listened to in my future choices.

Seems to me that ACE and DCC came to similar conclusions.

(And just before I’m accused of being a pygmy of any variety by some quarters, I am all for theatre pushing boundaries, just not at the expense of the organisations who deliver them…)

As I’ve said before, I share your concerns about the Derby Live model - it does seem remarkably thin on detail at the moment which is why I’m reserving judgement until Messrs Ibbeson and Meakin put some flesh on their grand boasts of last week.

I see your glorious leader is in the press again today defending Hebden and Edwards. Now they are educated intelligent men and I flatter myself that I’m not stupid, yet I truly cannot begin to comprehend what the hold they have over he and Hall can be.

Should you and your heart of hearts succeed in the miracle you seek then might I suggest the opening production be a version of The Emperors New Clothes?

I wish you well on Monday, truly I do! With a new exec team in place it could be an even better ride than my Mustang and your MX-5 combined.

By my reckoning Karen directed 8 shows out of the 40 since she arrived five and a half years ago. This is probably less time in the rehearsal room than most Chief Executives spend on the golf course. When she was in rehearsals then Stephen Edwards took on the responsibility of dealing with the day to day matters of running the organisation. It wasn’t as if she was miles away. She was always available at short notice to deal with any matters that required her attention. The concept of there being a third person on the Executive team goes back to the Mark Clements / David Edwards era so it wasn’t at all suprising that an Executive Director post was created, particularly when so much of the executive teams (as well as senior management team) time was spent dealing with the fallout from the building and road works surrounding the theatre. You are probably reading too much in to the apparently short tenure of the Exec Dir. The individual concerned had worked for the Playhouse for many years in a variety of roles and, whilst I cannot speak on their behalf, is just have likely to have been ready for a change of scenery as any other reason for leaving that you may be implying.

The level of debt (as in that on the creditors list) isn’t quite what is seems. For example, it includes Advanced Ticket sales of £285,157. All that has to happen to clear that debt is for the shows to be put on so the people who bought the tickets get what they paid for. There is about £136,000 of grants advanced by ACE & DCC. Wait until the due date falls and that debt disappears too. Taking these and a few other anomlous figures I reckon I can knock half a million off the figure simply by being allowed to continue to trade. The rules on tax reclaims and VAT refunds have always baffled me but there is probably some saving in there as well.

Your right, £40k would not have paid off the remaining creditors. But it would have meant the theatre could continue to trade and the income from Treasure Island and the following shows would have been sufficient, especially in light of the hugely improved attendance figures immediately following the completion of Westfields.

Having recently parted with my Mazda MX-5 for a family friendly Mondeo I share your pain.

I agree it looks like a new model was needed. The aim of the Recovery Plan was exactly that and much progress was made but the plan was ambushed by external factors and not allowed to be completed. Ironically, going into administration and the appointment of a new board gave us a golden opportunity to come up with a radical new model which is what we presented to the Arts Council. Unfortunately, it seems they didn’t even read the business plan. Highlights of that plan include reduced reliance on public subsidy, a new structure to the organisation taking the best benefits of tax breaks (which Charities don’t get) and VAT exemption (which charities do get) and making transparent financial management a whole lot easier, a new Chief Executive, an amateur theatre festival, a childrens summer show, no reliance on advanced ticket sales and the setting up of an endowment to support the theatre in times of crisis.

You say that the council probably can’t run a producing theatre. What worries me is that they don’t seem to be proposing they even try (maybe a good thing). So far their plan seems to consist of saying “we now have five indoor venues to program and there will be some produced work in there somewhere”. They have not given any detail on how this work is to be produced and a theatre in which produced work is presented is not the same as a producing theatre - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t take huge skill to choose a play, employ a director and designers, cast some actors, get the set built and mount a show. But to do this and make it consistently excellent (ACEs current buzzword), innovative, exciting and engaging, and then to build upon that and improve and learn for the next one, all whilst running a building and worrying about “the roof leaking or the drains getting blocked and am I complying with health & safety legislation, and the Disability Discrimination Act and the Working Time Directive and the seats need replacing and the chef got drunk and attacked the patrons with a meat cleaver and so on” is actually quite difficult.

P.S. Did you see “Passing Places” in Autumn 2000? It was a play about a road trip to Scotland in a Lada Riva.

Kit - I admire your never say die attitude, but even you in your heart of hearts must know that the game is up. As for the rest of your well made points you clearly have more knowledge than I of the internal workings of the building yet there are a number of points which still don’t make sense to me.

I acknowledge that there is no reason that roles cannot be blurred in all sorts of organisations but somewhere the buck has to stop and the person this stops with must have covered all the bases. Karen is/was clearly more interested in the artistic side of the business than the administrative and there’s nothing wrong with that (in fact there may be an awful lot right with it) but only if she has someone looking after administrative affairs whilst she’s in a rehearsal room, and at that someone has the authority to deliver. The fact that there was an Exec Director appointed for a short period sort of implies that this was at least acknowledged but the fact that the person lasted less than a year in post speaks a great deal too.

As for the recovery money, you make some fair points but it also begs another question - if the recovery money was used to pay off the seemly complex matrix of existing depts and loans, then how can the company now be looking at anything like the level of debt that it currently has - even when allowing for the factors you point out.

£40k may have allieviated the cash flow but wouldn’t have solved the underlying problem of debt and the business operating beyond its means.

I had a Mustang car once which I thought was the business. However it was prone to breaking down and every now and then it needed a few hundered here and a few hundred there (which I couldn’t afford) to get it going again. I did this for a few years until I totted up what I’d spent on the car and realised that I was just firefighting and that the longer term solution was to replace it with a more efficient if slightly less exciting model.

I appreciate that the council in all probability cannot run a producing theatre, but I also think that it was time for a new model and that’s what drove DCC and ACE to take the action they did.

Civic control is a particularly outdated model for cultural provision and I hope that this Derby Live idea is a short term plan to create some stablity before creating something more sustainable for the long term. I just hope that given that we can’t afford a Mercedes, we at least end up with a high spec Mondeo - although it is also true that council arts strategies are far more reknowned for producing Lada Riva’s.

Joyce, you say that the new board are out of the picture. I can assure we may be dead but we are not buried. A lot could happen in 5 days. How long have DCC been planning this bombshell? Who knows, but at the press conference to announce “Derby Live” they let it slip they had been thinking about this for a couple of years.

Akram Khan & The National Ballet of China had already been programmed by Derby Playhouse in conjunction with Derby Dance so the City Council have a right bloody cheek in claiming credit for it themselves.

I cannot say why accounts have not been posted with the Charities Commission; I wasn’t a member of the old board and since the end of November that action would have to be taken by the Administrators. However, I can assure you that the assertion that the board was not receiving financial information is untrue. Following a number of leaks to the press of sensitive commercial information, the board was very careful about whom had access to such information.

The old board had two senior accountants (the chair and the treasurer) with vast experience of managing businesses with turnovers measured in hundreds of millions and even billions of pounds. Do you really believe that the wool could be pulled over their eyes or that they would have allowed the business to be financially mismanaged, thereby tarnishing their own reputations?

Why is it a problem for the Chief Executive and Artistic Director to have a cross over in what they do? Look at how the Royal National Theatre do it. Between Annie Castledine leaving and Mark Clements arriving, David Edwards acted as Artistic Director as well as Chief Executive. This crossover and sharing of roles really isn’t as unusual as you think. Having said all that, I don’t believe Karen ever relinquished the ultimate responsibility of being the Chief Executive.

So where did that extra 1.6 (or was it 1.4?) million pounds go? I don’t have all the figures in front of me but I will have a go. There was a Stabilisation Grant which paid off a loan from the City Council dating back to the early 1990’s. That was a couple of hundred grand. Then there was about 100K spent on Arts Council consultants (Playhouse had no choice here; jobs for the boys?) Some more went to pay off some of the debts incurred pre-2002. A big chunk went on vital capital works (remodelling the offices to replace condemned wiring and make them Disability Discrimination Act compliant, new security systems, new box office system). Another big chunk on redundancies (due partly to restructuring and partly to the dark period during capital works). The repayment of another loan which helped pay for the front of house refurbishment. And finally cashflow support during the dark period that was precipitated by the fact it is a bit difficult to produce theatre when you have a f***ing huge pile driver 10 yards away hammering morning, noon and night. So in fact, the vast majority of plans were carried through. However, the Recovery Plan was written before the impact of the building work became apparent and ACE and DCC weren’t terribly helpful in accomodating modifications to the plan. The benefits of some aspects of the plan were always going to take some time to be realised, but we were not allowed to reach the end of the plan period.

Let me re-iterate. If DCC had forwarded 40K of its grant then the cashflow dip would have been avoided and the income from Treasure Island and the Spring season would have paid the suppliers and kept the theatre in business. If ACE had re-instated its annual grant then the theatre could have come out of administration, paid off the creditors in full and had sufficient working capital to continue. The auditors agreed, the administrators agreed and a high street bank agreed.