Kenton Theatre pulled back from the brink after best year to date

THE Kenton Theatre in Henley has recorded its first surplus since facing insolvency two years ago.

The New Street venue had its most successful year to date, bringing in a total revenue of £887,505, an increase of more than £169,000 from the previous year.

This helped to generate a surplus of £5,119 for the year 2024/25, which wound up at the end of August.

Revenue from ticket sales had increased by 25 per cent and bar revenue by 27 per cent with more than £74,000 being received in subscriptions and grants.

Tara MacLeod, chair of trustees, said the result was driven by an overhaul of operations, including finance, staffing marketing and programming.

She said: “It wasn’t a magic wand — it was just really hard work and still is. We have a shared collective vision and strategy for the way we’re working and tackling things.

“We introduced commercial practices, we’ve renewed the board and everybody now has a discipline that they bring to help support the theatre.

“We have a very good understanding of all of the levers now and understand the rhythm of the business very clearly.

“We have put in financial controls as well, so now we have a very tight system of managing the finances. It really has been a team effort.” The latest figures, which were confirmed on Wednesday last week, come two years after the theatre found itself on the brink of insolvency after recording a loss of £189,850 in 2022/23.

Ms MacLeod, who joined the theatre that year, said the severity of the impact of the covid pandemic had not been fully realised until then.

She said the theatre would have gone dark in August, if not for a £100,000 loan from Henley Town Council.

“We would have closed without the town council loan,” Ms MacLeod said. “We had no working cash flow so we couldn’t pay people.

“There wasn’t enough time to go to a bank. There was just no time, so thankfully the council stepped in.”

Ms MacLeod said that the team, led by theatre manager Lottie Pheasant, had worked hard to diversify programming, which saw an immediate increase in ticket sales.

The theatre was traditionally focused on community productions but now allocates 50 per cent of programming to professional productions.

Eight per cent is given over to commercial hires and the remaining 42 per cent is used by community groups, such as the Henley Players and Henley Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society.

A £20,000 grant from the town council also allowed the theatre to subsidise community groups 50 per cent of the hire cost to make it affordable to them.

Ms MacLeod said the programme offers more variety with “something for everyone” but pledged that the theatre would remain a community-focused organisation.

It will continue to balance high-profile headline acts and comedians, to raise the profile of the theatre, and events with local schools and organisations, such as environmental group Greener Henley.

The number of shows has increased and this year the theatre staged 241 performances, up 16 per cent from last year, and sold a total of 35,000 tickets, up from 29,226 the previous year.

Ms MacLeod said: “We’ve invested heavily in audience development. We want to bring in people from other regions, from other towns and villages.

“But we’re a 240-seat theatre, we can’t go beyond that, so one of the challenges for us is developing income when we’re limited by our capacity.”

Over the past two years, the theatre has introduced tight financial controls, outsourced bookkeeping and addressed an historical VAT issue with a long-term payment plan. Successful grant applications and fundraising have also funded refurbishments to the 220-year-old Grade II listed building, which requires demanding upgrades due to its age and size.

In 2022, £90,000 had to be spent to replace the domestic electric system in the building and last year, more than £100,000 of funding was raised for the first two phases of a six-phase project to replace the remaining theatre lighting and replace the boilers with energy-efficient ones.

Ms MacLeod said funding these repairs externally was fundamental to allowing revenue to be invested into theatre operations.

She said: “Our remit is not just to entertain but to also to protect the building, which was bought by the community in 2010, and there is always something that has fallen off.

“The building was built in 1805 — it is a traditional working theatre — we still have the working fly system, where people pull the ropes to do the curtains.

“A lot of the trustees spend a lot of time working on fundraising and grants, capital grants to improve the infrastructure of the building and fundraising so that we can develop other programmes.

“We have been successful and on it goes because all theatres need money. It’s very difficult to make it break even.” Ms MacLeod said that although the financial position is now moving in the right direction, the business remained “tight” on liquidity and needed to keep its foot on the pedal.

Theatre manager Lottie Pheasant, who has run the theatre since 2023, said modernising its website and developing the programme has delivered an increase in ticket sales.

She added that having more than 100 volunteers working front of house has meant being able to have a professional back of house team, needed to grow the business.

Ms Pheasant said: “I joined in the beginning of March and those first months until the end of August, it was a really, really difficult period.

“But now, with a full team, we have been able to achieve the growth at the theatre that we needed. Without it, we weren’t going to be able to save our theatre and grow.

“All of the growth we have seen over the last couple of years has been from having that stable team in place, which just didn’t exist before.”

She added: “We’ve achieved what we set out to achieve and I am really proud of what we’ve done over the last couple of years.”