There is a question we want to put to this room – and we'd like you to hold it for the next twenty minutes, because everything we’re about to say is, in one way or another, an attempt to answer it.

Theatre has never been more necessary. The science says so. The social evidence says so. Because while we live in a moment when the dominant culture is working, at extraordinary scale and sophistication, to give each of us a personalised, reassuring, endlessly reaffirming version of what we already think, theatre remains one of the spaces that refuses to do that. It asks us to sit with strangers. It can be complex and surprising. It can leave us less certain than when we arrived.

And yet… The frequent theatregoer – the person for whom theatre is a life-habit rather than an occasional destination – is becoming rarer. The education pipeline is narrowing. Communities we want to reach have concluded, without quite articulating it, that this space is not for them.

So here is the question: do the conditions exist for theatre to do the thing that only it can do? And if not, whose job is it to create them?

Before we go further, a confession. We asked AI to help us write this speech. We’re aware of the irony. As it turns out, we had to rewrite it. The AI was patient, thorough, fluent. It never argued back. Which is the opposite of the way we might make or experience theatre.

Theatremaking demands we explore creative tensions. It invites intentional frictions in. While AI can offer perspectives you’d overlooked, there’s a difference between encountering something and being changed by it.

This matters, because something has shifted in the last few years. The people we are trying to reach – the audiences we want to build, the communities we want to serve – are living inside a cultural environment unlike anything that has existed before. They wake up to a feed curated to reflect their existing tastes back at them. They consume music assembled by an algorithm that has learned what they want to hear next.

And now they can have a conversation – a real one, or something that feels indistinguishable from that – with a machine that is infinitely patient, infinitely responsive, and entirely focused on giving them what they want. Or what they think they want.

The headline numbers suggest we are fine. Last year, more than 37 million people attended SOLT and UK Theatre venues. The West End alone drew over 17.6 million people and generated over £1bn in revenue for the first time. For all the sustained pressure on our structural model – something which we at the RSC, like many others, have had to face into recently – ours is not, on the surface, a sector in decline.

But the full picture is more complex. Those headline figures mask something that DCMS’s Participation Survey makes plain: weekly engagement with the arts – among arts-active adults – fell by ten percentage points in the last two years. More people are attending at least once a year, but the frequent theatregoer is becoming rarer.

Strong headline numbers are concealing a thinning of the relationship between audiences and the artform. That is not a crisis of popularity. It is something more insidious: a slow erosion of habit, of the sense that theatre is a regular part of your life rather than an occasional destination.

We have spent years – rightly – dismantling barriers: pricing, geography, the question of who feels welcome. That work matters. But we also have to be honest about the case we’re making for what’s on the other side of those barriers – and why, for too many people, we are still failing to make that case compellingly.

At its best, theatre can be the opposite of the culture of AI.

Theatre is not the large language model, but the small, crafted script, the thing that took years, that someone bled over, that contains specific choices made by specific people about what matters and why.

Theatre is not vast, fluent and statistically averaged, but rooted in precision – the word that lands in the exact silence it requires, the moment of stillness that changes the temperature of the room, the image that stays with you for twenty years.

Theatre does not look backwards to give you an aggregation of existing truths and wisdom, but looks forwards – to future revelations, undiscovered flashes of insight.

When an actor walks onstage, they are making choices in real time, responding to this room, this audience, this quality of attention in the air. A pause extended, a line leant into differently – and the whole evening can be sent somewhere it has never been before.

When Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams walked on stage and spun a coin to decide, in that moment, who would play Mary and who would play Elizabeth, you could feel the atmosphere change. The audience knew that what followed was not fixed, that the emotional centre of the evening had just shifted in real time. The performance would exist only once, in that exact form, for that exact room. That charges the air in a way that no algorithm can.

We should be honest. Not all theatre aspires to this. Some productions are engineered for replication – the reliable delivery of a known emotional experience. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But that’s not the argument we are making.

The case for theatre – its irreplaceability – rests on specificity over scale, risk over repetition, the unknown and unrepeatable moment over the guaranteed one.

Theatre can do something else that AI cannot. Far from giving you more of what you already like, it can place you inside a consciousness not your own – not to confirm what you already think, but to challenge it. The best theatre can unsettle as much as it illuminates, ask questions it refuses to answer, make you feel the weight of a life you have not lived.

At a time when alternative facts are offered as hard truths, that capacity to hold multiple perspectives at once, and think your own way through them, may be one of the most urgent things theatre can do.

And theatre doesn't just work on us individually. It works on us together.

Researchers at University College London found that the heartbeats of strangers in the same theatre were synchronising – speeding up together, slowing down together. A 2024 University of Bristol study confirmed this in peer-reviewed research across ten performances: significant heart-rate synchrony, higher during the live show than outside it. This is not metaphor. It is measurable. In a room full of strangers, watching something live, your body is doing something it does not do alone and does not do watching a screen. You are literally beating in time with the people around you.

The effects extend beyond the room.

In 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, a study of the decline in social connection in America. He argued that since the 1950s, the ties binding us – civic clubs, shared rituals, the habit of doing things together – had steadily unravelled. People were becoming more physically proximate and more socially isolated at the same time. In 2000, it felt like a warning. Twenty-five years later, with smartphones, algorithmic culture, and the atomisation accelerated by a global pandemic, it reads like a diagnosis.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been tracking lives since 1938. Its central finding is simple: the single most consistent predictor of health and happiness is not wealth or status or physical fitness. It is the quality of human connection.

What theatre offers us – the room of strangers who laugh together, weep together, whose hearts beat together – is precisely the kind of encounter the science says we need the most. Over 3,500 studies reviewed by Professor Daisy Fancourt for DCMS found evidence robust enough to inform policy decisions for the arts supporting social cohesion, as well as wellbeing in children and young people.

The RSC’s own Rapid Evidence Reviews, co-commissioned with the Cultural Learning Alliance and due to be launched next month at the Houses of Parliament, draw on nearly 1,200 studies and show consistent findings, including substantial health and wellbeing gains, cognitive benefits and strong evidence that the arts foster social connection.

What Putnam observed declining, what Harvard confirmed we need, and what these evidence reviews show the arts can provide – these are not separate arguments. They are the same argument.

Theatre, at its best, is an engine for rebuilding exactly the social fabric that fifty years of atomisation has frayed. We should make that case with confidence, not caveats.

And yet we are still making it extraordinarily hard for people to have that experience. However confidently we articulate theatre’s value, we have built a system that serves those inside it extremely well – and continues to struggle to reach anyone else. Not through wilful intent. Through a set of accumulated structural choices – to do with curriculum, funding, the stories we tell – whose consequences are now visible in the data.

We want to talk about four barriers: cost, geography, education and belonging.

Cost. Real-terms ticket prices have actually fallen since 2019, by 5.3% in the West End and 9.8% regionally. It is theatres that have absorbed inflation rather than passed it on. But the ticket price is only part of the cost of an evening – transport, food, perhaps childcare. Their cumulative weight is felt acutely in a cost-of-living crisis every time someone decides whether to get up off the sofa and come to the theatre.

Geography. Jennie Lee’s founding proposition – that everyone should have access to arts and culture where they live, not as privilege but as public good – remains unmet. As touring costs rise, fewer productions travel, runs are shorter, and the map of where work reaches is contracting. As the research published by the Arts Council a fortnight ago reveals, the number of plays touring England has fallen 64% since 2019. The communities losing out are overwhelmingly those already under served. This requires a coherent, national response – shared data, shared targets, genuine collaboration across institutional and artform silos. The aspirations behind the Arts Council’s new Touring Service are admirable. We hope it proves the much-needed step towards addressing these challenges.

Education. This barrier carries the longest consequences of all, because it shapes the independent theatregoing audience of twenty years from now. There has been a 42% decline in arts GCSE entries since 2010. Arts subjects have halved as a share of all GCSEs. 41% of state schools no longer enter any pupils for Drama GCSE. The English Baccalaureate, which excluded arts subjects entirely, drove this decline systematically, and a decade and a half of underfunding has compounded it. The RSC's own three-year research study, Time to Listen, drew on 5,500 responses from young people. Students understood exactly what was happening: they valued the open-ended thinking their arts learning gave them, and were confused about why the adults in their lives were dismissing it. We are still living with the consequences of that dismissal.

There is one signal of hope: the Government has committed to scrapping the EBacc and restoring arts as a curriculum entitlement. That matters. But it will take years to reverse a fifteen-year structural decline. The consultation on including arts subjects in Progress 8 closes in six days. If you haven’t responded, please do.

Lastly, belonging. This is the hardest barrier, because we helped to build it. When people who don't attend the arts are asked why, the two most common answers in the DCMS survey are not cost, time or geography. They are “I’m not interested” and “no reason in particular”. These sound like apathy. They aren’t. They are the answers of people who have made a quiet, perhaps unconscious, conclusion: this wasn’t made for me; this isn’t mine.

That conclusion doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. It accumulates – from a thousand signals sent by institutions like ours over many years, about whose stories get told. We can see the consequences in the data: in the lack of working-class representation in the sector; in the fall in self-identifying disabled people from 12% of NPO audiences in 2018 to 8% in 2023; in the shrinking pipeline of new voices and the decline in theatres receiving open submissions.The stories being told are drawn from a narrowing range of experience – and audiences notice, even when they can’t name what they’re noticing.

Belonging can’t be fixed downstream. It can’t be engineered by access, outreach or subsidy – vital as all of those are. It’s created in the room, by the work itself, by whether someone can look at the stage and think “I didn’t know anyone else felt that”, by the moment that takes your breath away.

We have been working on these challenges for years. In many places, that work has made a real difference. But the difficult truth is that the overall picture has not shifted as much as we might have hoped. The harder question – the one we have been slower to ask – is not how to bring new audiences to existing work, but how to make work that already belongs to them.

Theatre shouldn’t be a destination people are persuaded to visit. It should be a home they already have. That is not a political argument. It is an artistic one. And it is also, as the data shows, an existential one.

And yet belonging is not only a creative failure. It is also a structural one. And here there may be something to learn from unlikely places.

Consider the sectors that are actually growing in this age of endless choice and personalisation – gyms, Parkrun, gaming communities, music festivals. They aren’t competing with theatre on the same terms. But they demonstrate something about belonging, habit and commitment that theatre often struggles to match. They reduce uncertainty. They make their value visible upfront, and build community around a regular, repeatable experience. They create belonging through the act of showing up – not before it.

Theatre asks most people to start from scratch each time – to commit time, money and attention – without always making clear what they will receive in return. This isn’t about theatre becoming Parkrun. It’s about learning what those models understand about habit, community and visible value – and applying those lessons in ways that preserve what is irreplaceable about theatre.

We know from our research with Baker Richards that frequency builds confidence, and confidence builds curiosity. The path to adventurous theatregoing runs through the habit of going at all. But building that habit is precisely where theatre’s greatest strength becomes its hardest problem. Unrepeatability is what charges the air. It is also what makes it harder to promise consistency, to turn into the kind of regular, low-friction commitment that builds a community over time.

If we just keep asking how we get more people to come to what we already do, we will keep getting the same answer. And the risk in that loop is that we lean further into what we know works well at the moment, and optimise for the familiar at the expense of the unexpected, the lightning flash of inspiration that lodges in the collective imagination – the hip hop musical about a US Founding Father; the moment a fully grown Joey emerges from the darkness; the moment that a playful dance to Radiohead’s “There, There” suddenly shifts everything we understand about Hamlet and Ophelia, and somewhere in a room of people who came in through Radiohead there are those who leave with their views of Shakespeare and theatre reframed.

We want to leave you with two questions - neither of which we have settled answers to, but which we think this sector needs to work through together.

The first is about the case. We have the evidence. We have the science. Are we making the argument loudly enough, clearly enough, and to the right people? Or are we still speaking primarily to ourselves?

The second is about the model. We know how to build attendance. We are less sure we know how to build belonging. And that uncertainty, after decades of effort, is something we should be honest about. Is the model the problem? Or is it the work? Or both?

Let’s return to Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams spinning the coin. There’s something neat about it as a metaphor. The coin is in the air. We lean in, uncertain. But that moment didn’t happen by accident. It was created – by two performers, a director, a playwright, a building, an audience willing to show up for something they couldn’t predict.

The future of theatre isn’t the coin in the air. It’s the hands that set that coin spinning. And those hands belong to us – in the decisions we make, the stories we tell, the community we build for those who don’t yet know that theatre is theirs.

We began by asking whether the conditions exist for theatre to do the thing that only it can do. The honest answer is: not yet. Not fully. Not for everyone.

But the conditions are not fixed. They are made – by the choices we make, the arguments we hold, the work we choose to create. The hands that can set the coin spinning are in this room.

So let's get to work.

Thank you.  

This keynote speech was delivered by Andrew Leveson, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey at The Stage's Future of Theatre Conference 2026.

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