Theatre Poster Design & Why We’re Persisting With Print
Theatre attendance in the UK rose in 2016, but the figures show plainly that the almighty musical is increasingly stealing the show. In London, attendance at musicals topped 8 million, dropping to 4.1m for ‘Plays’ and just over 2 million, for the inevitable ‘Other’, a category encompassing everything from dance to opera and something called entertainment (which could cover everything from live comedy to burlesque). Now, the wisdom of grouping Christmas panto and Michael Macintyre with Royal Ballet and Grimeborn into ‘Other’ may be questionable, but you can’t deny that they all need as big an audience as they can get. And that’s where the art of theatre poster design comes in.
A good poster designer is important whether you’re a nationally acclaimed theatre or a theatre pub. But for production companies and theatres unused to digital advertising and media buys, the role is especially valuable. While everyone is battling it out on Ads Manager, you can still get attention on the street. Simply put, your poster design, is still an invaluable calling card for your performance.
But how do you know a good theatre poster design when you see it? Can you judge it by the same standards as other adverts?
In principle, of course, the same qualities of ‘good design’ apply to any ad. Thus, a poster should be attention-grabbing yet informative, emotive yet organized, etc etc. Yes, but there’s more:, any design for performance has to be slightly discomfiting. You should look at that poster and get a frisson.
Live performance is, to be basic about it, immediate. There’s no cinema screen or timeframe between you and what you’re seeing, hearing, feeling. You’re paying to be in a room with a live performance and you don’t know quite what’s going to happen to your emotions. This is the element that good theatre posters express, alongside the essence of the particular interpretation they’re selling. And this is what sets the best ones apart from other ads, be they for film or fashion.
On the other hand, as with fashion, a great theatre poster contributes to the aura of the performance and even the venue. A good example of this is the Welsh National Opera poster for Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. The designer has taken everyone’s most vivid image of the heroine and simply overlaid the WNO’s visual identity using a Howard Hodgkin visceral slash across her throat. It’s clear and gripping, and hints that the production won’t be run of the mill, even if we all know the ending.
Just as importantly, production companies must use poster design to open themselves up to new audiences. In this sense, design is especially useful for opera companies (to combat a somewhat staid image) and for new writing (to break down resistance to the unknown).
OperaUpClose staged a 1960s-set, feminist take on Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Arcola Theatre, London. The opera poster design had to express the contrast between Pushkin’s original story (girl meets boy, boy rejects girl, boy gets into fight and kills someone, girl takes boy back) and this iteration, rewritten for 21st century appetites (girl is independent, successful, and refuses to take boy back). At the same time (and this goes for all posters advertising events) the venue had to be recognizable. People may forget the listed dates, but they can always look up the venue online. Finally, we had to get across that sense of ‘what next?’.
The high-contrast colour scheme combined with the grid structure helps draw attention and looks suitably retro without being forced. Two versions of the poster, featuring male and female protagonists, make it clear that this is a love story of some sort, and that it involves some twists and turns.
Of course, digital ads play an increasingly valuable role in ticketing terms. But OLGA is an agency that began exclusively digital, and has taken an perverse trajectory from most other agencies by moving increasingly into the tangible., So it’s worth reminding ourselves of the power of print posters.
The most obvious one is their size. Your average bus stop poster (or 6-sheet) is 1200mm x 1800mm, compared with 50px x 50px for the smallest mobile gif (of course, people still need to take their eyes off their phones every once in a while to see them). Compared with, for example, a digital Time Out ad, theatre posters are big. And graphically, they give you room not only to play with images and text, but also to find the balance (or imbalance) achievable with empty space, whereas digital ads tend to involve a struggle to squeeze in all the necessary information, leaving clean design out in the cold.
Next advantage: location. Public transport has been a boon to marketers for over 50 years, and with good reason. There will come a time at which you raise your eyes from the mobile in order to go up the stairs or go through the sliding doors. You may even have to stare at the nearest wall so as not to have to make eye contact with that guy in the green beanie who always gets in the same carriage. In other words, you are captive in most places where theatre posters are to be found.
And, of course, immediacy. Hands up if, due to ad blockers or simple saturation, you now consider yourself digitally ad-blind. There’s no scrolling past a physical poster (strolling’s another matter), and a really good theatre poster is simply a pleasure to look at. Not to be a big softy, but look at the examples below and tell me they don’t give something back. Even if it’s just a frisson.
