British Theatre Guide Blog

Although an Arts Council England spokesman denied it, there is no doubt that Genista McIntosh’s review of ACE’s latest funding round was prompted by the furore which it sparked. Indeed Alan Davey said in February that he would bring in an “external eye” to take a look at what could be learned and Baroness McIntosh is that eye.

He said then, “This is the first time that the arts council, as a single body, has led a single, integrated investment strategy for our regularly funded organisations. As a learning organisation it is important we now review that process in detail, establish what worked well and what improvements can be made next time. An external perspective on this is vital.”

As a member of the House of Lords (she is a Labour life peer) who has worked in senior positions at the RSC, the National and the Royal Opera House, as well as being a former Principal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she is well qualified to do the job and has the political clout not to be ignored.  Her previous review pulled no punches in her assessment of the relationship between ACE and the DCMS and she expressed concern about the disbanding of the Arts Panels, although she did accept the reasoning behind it.

This disbanding is a move which has come back to haunt the organisation, as many of us thought it would at the time.  If peer review (which is what some commentators have called McIntosh’s task) is appropriate for ACE, then it is surely appropriate for its clients.  One suspects that, had the arts panels or something similar existed over the past few months, then certainly some of the more stupid initial mistakes (the cutting of the grant to the Bush, for example) would never have been made.

The reaction of ACE to the anger that was unleashed bore all the signs of bureaucrats rushing to cover their arses and the comment of the spokesman, that it had always intended to conduct a review of the funding process, reinforces that interpretation.

Bureaucracy and the arts don’t sit well together.  Bureaucrats like things neat and tidy, with boxes that can be ticked and priorities that can be itemised and met, but the arts simply don’t work that way.  Trying to straitjacket the arts thus leads to the sort of thing that we saw from “Soviet Realism” - although even there the greatest artists managed to make fools of the aparatchiks.

One hopes that Baroness McIntosh will show that the pursuit of excellence demanded by Brian McMaster’s report cannot be successful if it is weighed down by the dead hand of bureaucracy and that Alan Davey will learn from the mistakes of his predecessor and let the Council be arts-  rather than admin-led, and that it is truly a “learning organisation”.

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.