For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a new play. It's been the usual long journey of drafts, development meetings, notes, and more drafts. But recently, something happened within that process that felt worth reflecting on. Not because the incident itself is unique, but because it speaks to something happening across the UK theatre sector more broadly.
In short: I was asked, more than once, to reduce my contracted royalty in order to “help” get the production on.
I said no. Eventually, the request was withdrawn. But the experience stayed with me.
And I think we need to talk about why requests like this are becoming more common; and why they quietly set damaging precedents for artists...
A royalty isn’t a favour. It’s a wage.
A writer’s royalty is not an optional extra, a generous bonus, or a flexible pot of goodwill. It’s the mechanism through which writers are paid when their work reaches an audience. It’s part of the basic structure of how writing is valued.
When a theatre asks a writer to lower that (especially late in the process) they’re not just making a practical budget query. They’re signalling something more troubling:
That the artist’s income is the most movable part of the equation.
That the artist’s contribution is the first potential cut.
That the burden of financial instability should fall on the person with the least security.
And that is not a neutral request. It becomes a precedent, whether anyone acknowledges it or not.
UK theatre is under incredible pressure, but that pressure is not distributed fairly.
Theatres are struggling: funding cuts, rising costs, shrinking audiences. All of this is real. But the way those pressures play out internally tells a different story. The financial strain rarely spreads evenly. It falls, again and again, on freelancers.
We’re asked to take fee cuts, do extra work for the same rate, squeeze deadlines, be flexible, be grateful, be accommodating - all in the name of helping the show go on.
But helping the show go on should not mean the artist goes without. This is not collective sacrifice. It is structural inequity wearing the mask of teamwork.
And here’s the important nuance: there were plenty of reasons I wanted to say yes.
If I’m honest, part of me instinctively wanted to agree. That impulse is familiar to most artists I know. You love the project. You’ve poured years into it. You don’t want to risk losing the opportunity or being labelled “difficult.” You tell yourself that maybe saying yes now will build goodwill, lead to future work, strengthen the relationship. You’re deeply invested and don’t want the whole thing to fall apart when it’s so close to happening.
There’s also the reality that visibility, momentum, and having your work on a stage can feel as vital as the fee itself. And for many (especially those from less financially cushioned backgrounds) there’s a learned guilt that creeps in whenever you insist on being paid properly: as if needing the money is somehow gauche, or as if protecting your own livelihood is a kind of betrayal of the art.
So yes: I had all the same impulses anyone else might. None of those feelings are weaknesses. None of them are naïve. They are the entirely rational responses of a freelancer navigating a sector where precarity is the norm. And that’s precisely why this kind of request is so fraught; because theatres know, even unconsciously, that artists often feel compelled to say yes for reasons that have nothing to do with fairness.
Which is why institutions should think twice before making the request at all.
The emotional impact is real (even when everyone is “being nice.”)
What struck me wasn’t just the request itself, but the doubt it quietly planted.
It made me ask questions I don’t think any writer should have to ask:
Is my work seen as worth less than other production costs? Why was my labour the easiest thing to reduce? Is this a comment on the value of what I’ve written?
Is it wrong to expect to be paid fairly? Am I a greedy guts?
These questions are corrosive, and if I hadn’t been kicking around this industry for what now feels like a millennium, they could have sunk much deeper. Many artists carry a constant low-grade guilt for even asking to be paid properly. We’ve been trained to feel like the villain for holding the most basic boundaries.
But the problem is not the artist who says no. The problem is a system in which saying no feels risky, and saying yes feels compulsory.
If the sector wants to survive, the burden cannot keep falling on the artist.
What became clear to me is that no theatre can patch a budget hole by asking a writer (or indeed any freelancer) to absorb the cost through their own income. It’s simply not a sustainable model. In practice, it amounts to a slow, quiet erosion of the very people the industry relies on.
And the truth is, theatres know this. Everyone does. There isn’t some easy, utopian fix waiting in the wings; we all understand how hard it is out there, how thin the margins are.
But even in that reality, there has to be a line. Contracts need to be honoured. Budgets need to be realistic from the outset. Whatever impossible mathematics theatres are being forced to do, the solution cannot be to treat the artist’s fee as the contingency fund. Once you start normalising that, you don’t just lose goodwill. You lose people.
Because at the end of the day, if the people who make the work can no longer afford to remain in the sector, then the sector itself becomes hollow. Even more stuffed full of richkids who can afford to subsidise themselves. There is no theatre without the artists who constitute it. And if they disappear, then no amount of institutional survival will mean very much.
I held my boundary. But I shouldn’t have been asked to.
And that, really, is the heart of it. This isn’t about one conversation, or one play, or one theatre. It’s about a pattern.
When institutions treat the artist’s fee as the most elastic part of a budget, they erode the very foundation on which new work stands. If we want a theatre ecology that is vibrant, diverse, and sustainable, then respecting the value of artistic labour cannot be optional.
It has to be non-negotiable.
Ben x
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