This is the BBC.

In this edition of the bottom line, we're discussing the business of theatre.

Hits and misses, profits and losses.

Hello and welcome to the programme.

If there is one industry at which Britain can truly be said to be a world leader, it is theatre.

It's a billion pound a year business.

In fact, it's more than a billion, and that's just the box office. But let me drill down into that billion

pound box office figure with two other statistics. 19 million tickets were sold last year for

43,000 performances. Now, while those numbers sound big, they do imply that most people in this country

simply didn't go to the theatre at all. Is that because it's poorly attuned to popular taste? Is it

because it's an expensive service to offer inevitably? Or is it just bound to be a niche taste?

Well, we'll analyse the economics of the theatre industry today, spanning

as it does, the commercial and the subsidised, the international export sector in London,

aimed often at tourists, and the local and regional theatres that form an important part

of our national cultural experience. With me, three guests from theatres with very different business models

who can tell us about how the business works.

And let's take a few moments to meet them.

Rachel Tackley is executive director of Chichester Festival Theatre.

And Rachel, just give us the shape of Chichester Festival Theatre,

because it's really theatres, isn't it?

Yeah, we've got two theatres. One is a big theatre and it's got 1,300 seats and the other is a smaller theatre which has got 320 seats.

And the kind of things you do? So, of course, the big space, we have to do big, popular shows. We've got 1,300 tickets a night to sell eight times a week. We do big musicals. We do big plays. We opened our season with Alan Bennett, with 40 years on. So big, you know, big things that people really want to see. And then the smaller space is much more of an experimental space where we can take risks and have a bit of fun. We opened our season there with Carolinian Change, which was a big musical in a small space. We have a real diversity. So you span the whole works to some extent. Now, if I asked you the turnover of your business, I mean, how big? What is the annual income of Chichester Festival Theatre? Last year was 16 million. 16 million quid. Okay. And how much of that is from box office? How much subsidy do you get?

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