Should theatres continue to be in receipt of public money if they only play safe? As funding gets tighter, there is an argument which says that it’s only those venues that are taking risks and developing adventurous work that should get Arts Council funding. It’s easy to look at theatres that regularly enjoy enormous success and be impressed by what they do, but if a theatre is not having some failures, maybe it is not taking enough risks.

Failure is an inevitable part of risk-taking, and you discover things along the way. There’s the famous story in which Thomas Edison, shortly before succeeding with an invention, was asked what it felt like to fail in his endeavour. “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work,” he replied. Maybe some of those 10,000 ways had applications elsewhere, just as the things that don’t work during the R&D of a play, or in the rehearsal room, or even on stage, might turn out to be just right in another show or context.

But of course, failure and success and risk-taking all mean different things in different places and different contexts, too. What is risky for Salisbury Playhouse might seem safe as houses for the Royal Court or the Bush. Even within a single programme, there are likely to be differing levels of risk: take the Almeida, where American Psycho with Matt Smith in the lead is clearly less of a box office risk than Mr Burns, even though they might attract a similar crowd.

One of the things that worries those who run venues is how much risk an audience is prepared to take. It leads to timidity, when actually the opposite is required: the way to grow an audience is to take more risks. And the real danger is that, through the fear of alienating an old audience, you fail to nurture a new one. There is always another audience out there, if you are prepared to find them and entice them in.

Back in 2008, Arts Council England (ACE) announced that it was withdrawing funding (since restored) from the Northcott in Exeter, as it had “the wrong kind of audience”. I don’t think there is ever a wrong kind of audience, just the audience that you’ve already got and should love, and the untapped audience that you are not yet serving. To reach the latter doesn’t mean dumping the former, but rather making sure, through programming, outreach, ticket offers and other initiatives, that you have the widest and most diverse audience possible. An audience that is up for being challenged and surprised and that, when it comes down to it, probably won’t like everything it sees.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to Alistair McDowall’s brilliant and bruising Pomona at the Orange Tree, a production that has not only attracted some rave reviews but also a great deal of online comment regarding the audience at the Richmond theatre. Some of the comment comes pretty close to supporting the idea that there is a wrong kind of audience.

Yes, in recent years, the traditional Orange Tree audience has been more used to seeing George Eliot adaptations than sharp, contemporary new writing, but that’s not to say that, while some might be discomfited by what they see, others may get a taste for it if they try it. Of course there’s a risk that some audience members will just drift away, but others will be invigorated by what they see. In fact, there is no such thing as “an audience”; only a collection of individuals sitting in a shared space.

One of the cunning things about Paul Miller’s first season at the Orange Tree is that there are different journeys through his programme: McDowall and Alice Birch for some; George Bernard Shaw and DH Lawrence for others. And in the middle, there will be people who want both, or who may discover something that they never expected to like, or might never have tried if it hadn’t been programmed. No theatre taking risks is going to please all of the people all of the time.

So it worries me when the suggestion arises that some audiences are more valuable than others; that the Orange Tree’s established audience isn’t worth as much as the younger, cooler crowd that the theatre is starting to attract with canny marketing – including £10 tickets for the under-30s. On the night I went to see Pomona, it was thrilling to see how diverse the audience was, with OAPs sitting cheek by jowl with teenagers. That’s how it should be, because the world is full of different people, and a theatre that only serves a particular constituency – whether that’s older, affluent people or the cool, hip crowd – is a theatre that isn’t really taking risks, and isn’t serving its whole community.