on which I could work as a Director. I can't afford to be a Director [in theatre] because the pay is so terrible. The rate is so terrible that I have to find a way to subsidise my life if I want to direct theatre. I got the [part time] job because I was standing in the supermarket and I couldn't afford kirby grips. I'm standing looking at the kirby grips at the end of the aisle, and I realised that I didn't have an extra £2.70 to buy a big packet of kirby grips, and I thought - I need to get a job. My rate for my salaried job works out around £150 to £200 per day. But there’s a pension, there’s flexibility, there’s continuity, there’s a degree of predictability. The thing I really value isn't the money, the thing I really value is the flexibility - I never have to negotiate to go off and do a creative project. I went through a kind of financial audit of myself in 2016-17. That was the point where I was discovering that [working in] theatre was unsustainable. I've discovered that it's more viable financially for me to get paid to workshop with people and advise, so, there is a consultancy level of work that's opened up for me. I love to design workshops; it's an easy way for me to do stuff I really enjoy doing. For that kind of work, if it's my intellectual property and I’m going to deliver that kind of service, I’m £900 per day. When it’s an arts organisation that makes the noise of not being well funded, I will do anything up to halving that. And when it’s bundles of work for outside organisations, I work in bundles of £5k. So when people ask me to
work with them I start from: £5k gets you about 20 days work. And I kind of work it from there - and I often recommend that if you can’t make it work inside the 20 days I have available then you could hire an assistant - £600 a week won’t work for me, but it might work for someone who's coming out of drama college who wants to work as my assistant. There's a principle thing: I don't work for pricks. I don’t work for people that I know are sexist or are sex offenders, or with organisations that support sex offenders. I don't work with organisations that’ve got fucking anything to do with the Brexit festival. Like, I just have a whole list. And that's absolutely to do with the fact that I have another function that I fulfill in my sector, [which is that] I'm an activist, and I am a voice around the ways that women and those who do not get given access to the sector are treated. That creates a whole landscape of its own, which is rarely talked about - what is fundamental is that I'll only do principled work. In 2017 I had what was, for somebody at my stage, the Willy Wonka golden ticket. It was a big commission from [a Scottish Theatre] to write and direct a mainstage play with a big stonking budget. And my [play] that had been in development for two and a half years got to do a Scottish tour going around the country. All in all I made £18k that year. And £9k of that was for writing the play. So £18k, and that had taken three years all in - two years prep and the year we made it. And in the two years of development I’d maybe had another £4k in small development funding, so say £22k for three