What do theatre audiences want?

At Paines Plough's symposium on the future of small-scale touring in Manchester last week, Vikki Heywood, the former executive director of the RSC, said that there had been a time when she and others had been keen to organise large meetings of RSC audiences in Stratford and London and simply ask them what they wanted. The meetings never took place, because fear intervened. What if the audience wanted something that the RSC's artistic team did not want to give them? It was just too scary.

It points up those old-style attitudes that perceive the audience as something of a problem that needs to be solved. Theatre needs audiences and spends a great deal of time trying to gather data on them (data that, as one conference speaker pointed out, largely tells you what they did in the past but is not necessarily a good predictor of what they might do in the future). Yet it's a relationship that is often fraught with difficulties, suspicion and a lack of trust. In fact it often doesn't feel like a relationship at all; more of a marriage of convenience.

Some like Howard Barker don't care if the audience listens or not. In contrast, David Mamet has suggested that for a writer learning about theatre "the audience (before it leaves the theatre and puts on – as do you or I – its wise, critical hat) is the only judge. If the audience members didn't laugh, it wasn't funny. If they didn't gasp, it wasn't surprising. If they did not sit forward in their seats it is not suspenseful."

Maybe we can take Mamet's idea further. If despite all the theatre marketing, social and otherwise, the audience don't turn up at the appointed time on the appointed night, could it be that they are simply not interested in what we are doing? Or merely that there is something more interesting on the telly? Nobody has a right to an audience: they have to be wooed, looked after and cherished. Often it feels as if in theatre we want an audience, but only on our terms. Maybe we should trust them more, rather than getting anxious that all they will demand are nationwide productions of We Will Rock You. Maybe we should stop seeing them as the audience and start seeing them as collaborators.

Maybe it's the false divide between artists and audiences that is creating the problem. Maybe it's the term "artist" itself that is off-putting, as if artists are some breed apart from the rest of the human race. Alison Pilling at the Leeds-based Culturevulture blog suggests that the labels are unhelpful because many people are audiences some of the time and artists some of the time too. Next Wednesday Culturevulture is holding a meeting for audiences in Leeds so they can have their say. It sounds fun. There will be games.

Really hearing the audience and discovering what they want is crucial. The most interesting companies and buildings understand that as they move from making theatre for audiences and increasingly making theatre with audiences, so the lines between the two are blurred. At Contact in Manchester the theatre's users – many of them young people – are increasingly becoming its programmers. The audience has the power not just to say what they want but to deliver it. As Contact's Matt Fenton says, it changes the entire dynamic of the top-down institution run by a single artistic director (often a white, middle-class man).

So let's stop being scared about asking the audience what they want. If we really listen hard, maybe we will find out a great deal and completely for free. Then maybe, one day when we really trust each other, we could go further, and rather than funding buildings we could give the money to the audiences who could then decide how to spend arts provision in their community. Now that would be really scary.