Unbelievable!
In an interview in the Telegraph (see a summary here) in which he tells how the row over the Arts Council’s finding decisions have affected him, Sir Christopher Fraying, chair of ACE, “likened the process of deciding to cut or stop funding for some organisations to weeding a garden.”
I consulted two dictionaries. One said that a weed is “any useless, troublesome plant” and the other described it as “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants”.
Is this how he thinks of companies like Compass, Quicksilver, Red Shift or London Bubble, or theatres like the Chester Gateway? One has to be kind and assume that he just picked a poor analogy, but even so it is so typical of the attitude of ACE throughout: dismissive of and arrogant towards anyone who objects to their plans.
And this was in an interview in which he laments that “people have treated me like a leper” and “people have said some horrible things.”
Oh poor you, Sir Christopher! People should just accept that it is OK for you - behind closed doors, without providing adequate time for reply and without prior warning - to destroy or at least put at risk the work to which they have dedicated their lives.
Talking about Nick Hytner’s “bollocks” comment, he admits to feeling “raw” and said, “The National Theatre is a beneficiary of this redistribution” and “I can completely understand organisations that are dispossessed getting angry” which rather tends to suggest he thinks that Hytner should shut up and be grateful - sort of You’re alright, Nick: forget about the rest.
He says, “I am the first chairman of the Arts Council since the 1950s to work in the arts world. It’s a plus and it’s a minus. The plus is, I hope, I understand a bit about the arts. The minus is I know a lot of these people.”
He may know them, but he certainly doesn’t understand them. He doesn’t understand, as Sam West pointed out at that Equity meeting, that the big theatres and companies depend on the smaller ones because that’s where new actors, writers and everyone else in theatre learn their art. It’s a pyramid: take away bits in the middle or at the bottom and the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
He told the Telegraph that Arts Council was “staffed by dedicated professionals and that actors did not have a monopoly on caring about the arts.” One must ask: professional in what?
Since Nicholas de Jongh said that it is time for Arts Council to go, others have taken up the cry. I happen to believe that an arts council is the best way of delivering public funding to the arts (although not the Arts Council as presently constituted) and Frayling’s mixture of whinging and bluster is not going to change my mind - nor anyone else’s, I suspect.