If disaster strikes in the theatre, an understudy replaces a leading actor, sometimes even during the interval. Audiences adapt and occasionally a star is born. Yet performers, on stage or screen, are still seen as the last people who should be asking for flexible working. Instead they are expected to give their all, until their all gives in.
Now, calls to allow job-sharing among casts, as well as for members of the backstage crew, are growing louder, in an attempt to make entertainment a better working environment. Leading the campaign are many new mothers, who argue there is no real reason why the burden of long hours and late evenings cannot be borne by two pairs of shoulders.
“People are really responding to this. The idea of sharing is now really hitting a nerve,” said the actor Naomi Sheldon, who has been splitting the role of Adrianna in the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of The Comedy of Errors at the Barbican in London with fellow actor Hedydd Dylan.
“I was quite tentative about it all,” said Sheldon, “but the whole thing has been an absolute dream.”
Dylan played the role of a pregnant Adrianna in Stratford upon Avon and on tour. She then shared the part with Sheldon, before stepping down in November before the birth of her son.
“I was nervous at first about how Hedydd would feel about the arrangement,” recalls Sheldon. “But having been an understudy to Hayley Atwell before, I knew that whatever my own take on the role might be, I needed to fit in.
“This was not a production I had helped to shape, so I made sure I knew where I had to be to hit my marks on the stage.
“Luckily for me, Hedydd turned out to be a class act,” added Sheldon.
When the play’s director, Phillip Breen, learned Dylan was pregnant, he decided to make her character pregnant to match, allowing the actor to stay in the role throughout the run at Stratford upon Avon and on tour.
“It worked rather well,” said Breen. “It raises the stakes between Adrianna and Antipholus of Ephesus and accounts for some of the complexities in their relationship, but also, ultimately, their great bond, too. It also gives an added dimension to the family reunion at the end.”
Sheldon found the tight stage choreography and strict discipline on a production she describes as a “slick farce” helped her find her way, as she navigated her arrival in the cast. It soon became clear, though, that she could not just copy Dylan’s comic techniques.
“We are very different creatures,” she said. “Hedydd is tall and elegant, with a lot of natural status on stage, while I’m shorter and have an erratic energy about me. Some of the cast have described it by saying that Hedydd’s portrayal of Adrianna is “like a lolloping greyhound” where as I am “more of a persistent terrier”. So, even if I’d wanted to do a version of Hedydd’s performance, I wouldn’t have been able.”
Sheldon took over the role full-time last month after Dylan left ahead of the birth of her son. As a new parent of a baby girl and boy, Sheldon said she “never would’ve believed I would be able to play a demanding lead role at the RSC at this stage”, adding: “And when my babies were small, while we were sharing, I was able to spend the first half of the week at home with my babies.”
“I felt proud that other actresses in a similar position might be encouraged and inspired by my experience and hopefully feel less frightened of the prospect of juggling an acting career and having a baby,” Dylan told the Observer.
The RSC was following in the footsteps of Chichester Festival Theatre, which allowed the central role of Nellie Forbush in the musical South Pacific to be shared by the actors Gina Beck and Alex Young in the summer.
Beck, who played the Rodgers and Hammerstein role until late August, said then she hoped the theatre’s “trailblazing attitude” would spread across the industry: “When carrying my first child I became unemployable and was unpaid for six months because I looked, well … pregnant.”
Among other performers pushing for better working practices for families is the actor Romola Garai. Garai, who has just written and directed the horror film Amulet, out next month, remains determined to campaign for more production companies in theatre, film and television to let cast and crew share their workloads.
Speaking to the Observer a few years ago, Garai said: “The liberal industries are seen as so lefty, but that masks the unbelievable backwardness of our employment practices – it’s terrible for carers and parents. I recently asked for a four-day week for the first time and I was laughed at.”
Championing these arguments is the organisation Raising Films, which offers screen industry employers a checklist of tools to improve hiring practices. “It’s tough out there for independent producers putting teams together, but we’re facing such a massive skills shortage that we do need to be thinking of better ways to bring in and retain talent,” said Raising Films’ co-founder Nicky Bentham, a producer at Neon Films. “Not every role or every production is going to suit a job sharing scenario, but I think there’s probably more room for it than people might suspect.”
Raising Films also runs a website that links workers to job sharing schemes, including the Media Parents, the union Bectu’s TakeTwo, and Share My Telly Job (SMTJ), set up by Louise Patel in 2015.
Patel argues that inflexibility in television production means talented people leave the industry, or get stuck in roles below their skill level. It is a sadly limited attitude, she believes, in contrast with entertainment’s premium on creative thinking. Job sharing, Raising Films contends, also helps avoid the burnout that can hamper a career, and it builds in holiday cover for anxious employers.
SMTJ’s co-director, Michelle Reynolds, compares a good job share to a marriage. “Trust and communication are key, as inevitably there will come a day when your job share partner makes a decision you do not agree with. You have to have a level of respect for that person to see their choice as equally valid.”
SMTJ, Reynolds explains, was born out of frustration at the struggle to get back to work following the birth of children. The campaign was spurred on by reports of the huge drop-out rate of women working in television production. As a result, this year they created The Time Project, which is an industrywide way of recording hours for everyone working off-screen in British TV.
“There is a myth that people who want to work flexibly are less committed to the job than their full-time counterparts. To that we say, no one will want the job share to succeed more than the job sharers themselves, as it is their key to staying in the career they love,” said Reynolds.
