Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.

Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.

Missed context - Because you’re not a full-time employee (even if you’re working 5 days a week) you may not be included on all-hands emails, announcements and so on and so you always have to work hard to gain the full context of a client. Tightly scripting a performance doesn’t leave room for new contexts to emerge during the performance. Instead there should always be room for new context to emerge and get integrated into the performance in real-time. Missed feedback - It’s not uncommon as a consultant to be the most proficient powerpoint user in the org (or at least your portion of the org). This has benefits but it also has the unintended consequence of making everything you touch look “finished”. And finished work gets very different feedback from people than raw materials and thinking. So sometimes it’s important to un-design and un-polish your work, to invite people onto the stage to co-create the performance - this way you ensure that you get the appropriate feedback.

“thinking on your feet” is about the balance between deflecting decisions for further analysis and providing the answer there and then.

learning to provide an answer that you believe in but leaves room for revision later is key. The real game that’s being played here is not one of being right or wrong - it’s the executive asking two questions at once - firstly “how much do you know?” and secondly “can you improv?” to understand how useful you’re going to be in the theatre of work.

There’s a fine line between reacting to a situation in the room and bullshitting. As a consultant this is especially hard to avoid. Your default mode of operating is the liminal space between industries, businesses and markets. A few times a year I’m forced to learn something new from scratch. This forces us to work in spaces where we’re often the least knowledgeable about a specific business (even if we are experts in the industry… And sometimes we’re experts at a discipline but neither knowledgeable about the business or the industry).