Tim Cornwell: So how do you find bums for 3,200 seats?

SCOTLAND’S capital is over-served in its theatres out of Festival time, which is a blessing we should all grab with both hands, but a bit of a challenge for those who run them.

Duncan Hendry, since 2004 chief executive of Aberdeen Performing Arts, was named the boss of Edinburgh’s Festival and King’s Theatres this week, to take over in April. Running two major venues in the festival city is hardly a poisoned chalice, but he’ll have to find bums for 3,200 seats.

Hendry has 20 years working the nuts and bolts of the theatre trade and has apparently done a sterling job in the Silver City.

A little bit of number-crunching points to his achievements in his current job, but also to what he faces here. In a city of under 500,000 people, his theatres’ immediate competitor for audiences is the Edinburgh Playhouse. It is a 3,000-seat behemoth, served by the Ambassador’s Theatre Group.

This weekend’s show in the Playhouse is We Will Rock You, the musical of the rock band Queen. In Aberdeen, the show sold one million tickets at His Majesty’s Theatre, Hendry’s biggest venue. In Edinburgh, it’s in a rival house.

At Aberdeen Performing Arts, Hendry has run the HMT, with near 1,500 seats, the Music Hall, about another 1,000, and two spaces at the Lemon Tree, with 550 places for a standing gig in its lounge and 160 seats in its upstairs studio.

To his credit, he took on the Lemon Tree after it went bust, bringing it into the APA, which under his tenure is said to have gone from a money-losing, council-run outfit to an independently run charitable trust that balances its books.

Five record-breaking pantos on the trot – vital to a big theatre like the HMT – have seen this year’s Aberdeen panto also break the £1 million sales barrier for the first time.

Hendry pushed theatrical ambition by producing new work from the His Majesty’s, including Sunset Song, which came to the Fringe, and Silver Darlings, an adaptation of another celebrated Scottish literary epic, set in the early days of the herring fisheries. He commissioned a new play about Piper Alpha for the Lemon Tree.

Aberdeen has less than half Edinburgh’s population. But APA was effectively the only game in town. The Festival City Theatres Trust in Edinburgh operates on the same model, a charitable trust that gets council funding, but it has rivals large and small.

Crowded in the Festival, in the year the King’s and Festival Theatres compete for audiences with the Queen’s Hall and the Usher Hall, and with the Assembly Rooms also available after its make-over. Then there’s the Lyceum Theatre, two spaces at the Traverse Theatre, not to mention the am-dram offerings at the Church Hill, among other venues.

The FCT in Edinburgh had a turn-over of £6.6m in 2010-11, with council funding of £793,377, and the then-Scottish Arts Council grant of £125,000. The Edinburgh council figure dropped to £769,576 for 2011-12 – a hefty fall, after inflation.

At APA, Hendry drew a formidable £9.76m turnover, with the local authority subsidy of £1,090,000 across the three venues and £235,000 SAC support.

Hendry’s predecessor, John Stalker, left his post at short notice last year. Stalker complained of inflation erosion of his grant over a number of years, forcing redundancies, but 2010-11 was not a good year for sales – across the industry, apparently – and the council was banging the war drums, not for the first time. Pat Weller, interim chief executive since July, will formally step down at the end of January 2012.

Finding a way – any way– of boosting audiences, from within Edinburgh or the surrounding catchment area, such as the Borders, Fife, or Dundee, is one constant conundrum. My personal bugbear has long been that summer punters who come to the festival city in July can’t find a theatre that’s open for a taste of the Edinburgh flavour, but they’re all tied up with festival prep.

Hendry, like Stalker, will have to call the shots on balancing surefire populist sellers with more challenging fare, and hope he calls it right on picking the hits and missing the turkeys. There’s Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet, which the Festival Theatre was redesigned to host.

One boost: The King’s is closing after the panto ends on 22 January for a £3m refit. It reopens for the Festival in August.

The show will go on, but there are no easy answers on getting the audiences through the doors.