A funding crisis?
Is “crisis” too emotive a word to describe the developments of the last week? I think not. To lose substantial amounts from both the Lottery Grants for the Arts programme and ACE’s regular grant-in-aid to finance the quite clearly poorly thought-out Olympics 2012 is a major blow, especially at a time when - as theatres up and down the country have discovered in recent weeks - local authorities are also strapped for cash and are having to reduce spending across the board.
It’s true that the government has done better for the arts than the previous Tory administration but, as Glenda Jackson said recently in a House of Commons debate, “We should not have to make the same old argument every decade or so that [theatre] must be invested in by the state.” In fact, she described theatre funding in the UK as being “entirely shocking and utterly disgraceful”.
What is most worrying about the cuts is the effect they will have on new work and the smaller companies. ACE has already said that it will not cut all its clients equally. It’s likely, in fact, that the biggies (like the National, RSC, ROH and so on) will be kept at their current level, which means the proverbial “double whammy” for the smaller companies, for it is they which will be most hit by the reduction in the Lottery money available.
Now I love going to the RSC and the National, and it is only right that these centres of excellence should be supported to the hilt by government, but if a pyramid doesn’t have firm foundations, it’s going to collapse PDQ, and it is the small companies, those which take risks and experiment, those which, even with grant aid, live from hand to mouth, which are the foundations.
Take, for example, Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theatre. Now they’re part of the mainstream (whilst still preserving their individual creative approach to theatre), but they got there by struggling in exactly the way the small companies which stand to lose their funding are doing now. Do the Olympics mean that we’re going to lose a generation of Kneehighs? If so, frankly they aren’t worth it!