British Theatre Guide Blog

Today is the last day for those organisations affected by the ACE cuts to submit their appeals.  From now on, it’s up to Arts Council.

Or is it?  We’ve reached a situation where both sides are so entrenched that it seems unlikely that anyone will budge.  OK, ACE may make a few concessions - the Bush, for example - but for it to do anything else than to inker with its plans would be to admit it is wrong and there is nothing bureaucrats hate more than admitting to error. 

Some organisations have already accepted the situation - they’re the ones we haven’t heard from - but most are firm in the opposition and some will go ahead with plans for a legal challenge. But if that happens ACE has already said that, when it wins as it is sure it will, it will claim costs, thus making the organisation which it has already deprived of funds pay out more.  Whilst that is undoubtedly legally correct, it would be another PR own goal.

The relationship between ACE and its clients, especially in the theatre world, has never been worse, and even though there are undoubtedly some of its decisions which are perfectly justified, nothing short of stopping the cuts and going through a much more transparent process will restore confidence.  But that would be to admit it was wrong, and that seems highly unlikely, to say the least.

Time for adjudication!  Time, in fact, for culture secretary James Purnell to step in and sort out the mess.  For him not to do so would be a gross dereliction of duty.  He is responsible for the health of the cultural sector and the paymaster of ACE.  He has a duty to both sides in the dispute and it is also incumbent upon him, as a minister of the crown, to ensure that the workings of government and of government-funded quangos are transparent and fair. If he fails to intervene, he will lose all credibility in the eyes of the arts world, and with an Arts Council and a minister lacking the respect and trust of the sector, the arts in England will be in a very parlous state indeed.

Over to you, minister!

What a breath of fresh air Brian McMaster’s Review is! (See our summary)  The title says it all really: Supporting excellence in the arts - from measurement to judgement. 

For far too long the arts have been weighed down under tons of  priorities and targets which must be met to get funding. The quality of the work - McMaster’s excellence - has been forgotten in the indecent haste to follow slavishly every government “initiative” (access, diversity, inclusion, etc. etc. etc.)  and to set “measurable” targets (”How many people will take part?” or  ”How many target groups will be reached?” rather than “Is it good?”). 

Now McMaster, with the support - God bless him! - of Culture Secretary James Purnell, had redressed the balance and is proposing putting the pursuit of artistic excellence at the centre - a place from which it should never, ever have been moved.  It says much about the organisation’s utter lack of understanding of what the arts are about that ACE has allowed itself to be led down the social engineering/target setting road with nary a squeak of protest.

“It is,” Purnell said in his introduction to the Review, “time to trust our artists and our organisations to do what they do best - to create the most excellent work they can - and to strive for what is new and exciting, rather than what is safe and comfortable. To do this we must free artists and cultural organisations from outdated structures and burdensome targets, which can act as millstones around the neck of creativity.”

If I had an order paper, I would wave it in the air and shout, “Hear, hear!”

One is tempted to wonder if the bureaucrats in Great Peter Street knew what McMaster was going to say - and how could they not?  He is, after all, a member of the Council of ACE) - and decided to rush their “reforms” through before his Review was published.  If so, they miscalculated badly. 

They cannot (surely? If they did, why go ahead?) have foreseen the furore their proposals would cause. Protests not just from the affected organisations but from theatregoers, Equity, the Theatres Trust, theatre journalists, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all have now been added to by the Conservative Party. Tory culture minister Ed Vaizey said today, making a very pertinent point,  “It is astonishing that the Arts Council was allowed to proceed with cuts before the publication of the McMaster Report.”

He went on to say, “It is completely unacceptable to carry out the biggest cull of arts organisations in history in just six weeks. With the current chief executive leaving in a month, the head of the London arts council already gone, and the new chief executive on holiday in Mexico, arts organisations are entitled to ask who is making these decisions.”

And, we might add, deciding on the timing. 

ACE must cancel the cuts, reinstate the status quo for the time being, give those companies which are genuinely not achieving the chance to put things right, and revisit its whole method of deciding upon who gets what on the basis laid down by McMaster.  If that means we have to wait another year for any changes, so be it. 

And for goodness sake, let’s have some genuine artists at the core of the funding decision making rather than bean-counting, target-setting, social-engineering bureaucrats.

In September 2000, Jo Weston, then chief executive of Arts Council Wales, resigned, following uproar in the Welsh arts world over a string of proposals which showed that the organisation was totally out of touch with the sector it was supposed to serve.  In a feature article at that time, the BTG said, “The organisation has so badly misjudged the mood of the arts community in Wales and has acted with such arrogance that its position and that of Weston have become almost untenable. Hence … Weston’s resignation.”

Some six years later the Welsh Assembly Government - and, in particular, the then Culture Minister Alun Pugh - made the same mistake, in the process sacking the very popular Geraint Talfan Davies as chair of the Arts Council of Wales.  The proposals were defeated in the Assembly and, after a “decent” interval, Alun Pugh lost his job.

If we don’t learn from history, then we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, as Arts Council England is in the process of finding out at the moment.  Chief exec Peter Hewitt won’t be forced to resign because he’s going anyway after ten years at the helm, but the organisation is bound to suffer.

Enough press releases to destroy a small forest, protesting websites springing up all over the place, a petition of no confidence on the government’s e-petitions website, a threat of legal action because of the allegation that ACE is not following its own procedures, a hastily-arranged public meeting between Hewitt and members of Equity, and that’s probably the tip of the iceberg, as I suspect there’s an awful lot more going on behind the scenes.

ACE officers I have spoken to (not for publication) are very much on the defensive, stressing that these are just proposals and they may not be implemented.  “They have the right to put their case and be listened to,” one told me.  Tell that to the staff of the Drill Hall who have already lost their jobs!

Now I am willing to admit that probably a few of the organisations which are to be cut are not really delivering as they should, but have they been told this and given the help they need to put things right, which is what ACE’s own guidelines say should happen?

What is obvious, however, is that this is a PR disaster of major proportions which suggests that ACE, like ACW in 2000 and WAG two years ago, is totally out of touch with its constituency and the major fall-out will be, as the e-petition suggests, a loss of confidence in ACE.

In that Power to the People! article mentioned above, we wrote, “In 1997, this site carried five feature articles which were intensely critical of ACE. There were three in 1998, one last year and none so far in 2000. Why? Have I stopped writing critical pieces because I have become softer? No. It’s because ACE has changed radically, become more responsive and in touch with the reality of the arts world, and that change was forced upon it by pressure from the English arts community.”

It’s drifted away again, though, and one of the reasons is that the influence of practitioners has declined and that of administrators has increased.  ACE has adopted the management ethos and quality has been replaced by quantity (of the number of “priority” boxes ticked) as the major yardstick in making funding decisions.

Since this was written a few hours ago, we have received news of the meeting between Equity members and Peter Hewitt at the Young Vic at which the 500 or so members present passed a vote of no confidence in ACE.  Peter Hewitt responded by saying, “”We do not feel they (those present) are representative of the theatre community as a whole and most certainly not the wider arts community.”  He went on to say that it must be remembered that 75% of RFOs are getting an inflation or above increase.

Oh dear!  Another gigantic PR error!  Does he really think that everyone else will adopt an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude?  Surely he can’t be that dumb?  Almost 200 organisations have been cut without warning, without adequate explanation and given only a few weeks to respond: the rest are more likely to think “It could be us next time” than to dismiss the cuts as irrelevant to them.  And this has happened at a time when ACE has actually got more money than expected from central government!

This kind of comment only illustrates how divorced from the reality of the arts world ACE has become.  It’s as well that Hewitt is going, for if he were staying the chances of ACE recovering the trust of the theatre world, at any rate, would be nil.

One hopes that the furore which has erupted over what has been called the most bloody cull in Arts Council history will teach ACE a much needed lesson and that new chief exec Alan Davey will be able to get the arts world behind him and his organisation again so they can work together for the good of the arts in England rather than being at each others’ throats.

So, the Bush is the latest to announce that it faces having its grant cut - by 37.5% - not because of concerns about the quality of its productions but because it is too small as it only has 80 seats. 

No mention of the numerous West End transfers and tours which have originated there over the years (Elling and Whipping It Up last year, for example), nor of the major theatrical figures - writers, actors, directors - who have started their careers there.  No, it’s all down to size, the number of bums it is able to put on seats.

What on earth is going on at ACE?  Has quality ceased to be a criterion for grants?  Some companies which have been threatened with cuts say that they have never had a representative from the regional office at any of their productions, so how can the quality of their work be judged?

The answer, of course, is that it can’t be.  And it is hardly surprising because the number of arts specialists at ACE, regionally certainly but most particularly in Great Peter Street, is smaller than ever before.  More and more ACE staff are admin or management types.  I am reminded of something I was told by a hospital consultant a few years ago.  Financial pressures were forcing him to cancel non-urgent surgery and treatments but there was nonetheless enough money for a revamp of the boardroom which cost in excess of £10,000.

In an article on the Stage website, published today, Ian Herbert, who used to edit Theatre Record, compares ACE as it is now and as it was in 1997.  It makes for very illuminating reading.  Arts Council, he says, “makes policy, a month before (Brian) McMaster tells us what it is, by sending out unexplained dismissal notices to a list it will not disclose.”  It’s an article everyone who is concerned about theatre should read - and be scared by!

Also in the last couple of days, Peter Hewitt, who is stepping down as ACE’s chief exec, has defended the cuts and the short time given for appeal by saying that it will “enable us to get the best value for our audiences from our investments over the full term of the three-year funding cycle.”

As anyone who has worked in local government (where it has been a sacred cow for some time) will tell you, “best value” is a matter of ticking boxes and meeting “priorities”, priorities which are far too often set not by the people on the ground who have to deliver but by the administrators who like things which are quantifiable - not “was this a good play?” but “did it increase the audience by a measurable percentage?” - or even by central government - does it, for example, promote inclusiveness?

In an article which I wrote back in 1999 which touched on funding issues, I quoted the then president of the TMA, Barbara Matthews, who said something which is just as true (if not more so) now as it was then: “Theatres must have the freedom and confidence to experiment with work of quality - to do what they do best rather than operate within a bureaucratic nightmare.”

When will they ever learn?

A guid new year tae ane and a’ and mony may ye see.

When you get to my age (and I shall become what used to be called an old age pensioner - now more kindly referred to as a senior citizen - in April), there is a tendency to look back rather than forward at this time of year and, of course, we’ve been doing that on the BTG with our Reviews of the Year from various parts of the UK, so I am going to try to avoid that trap and look forward.

One thing I am sure of - well, as sure as you can be of anything: perhaps one should add deo volente - is that the BTG will continue to grow. At the moment we have over 9,300 pages online and that number increases by 30 or 40 a week.  We also have around forty reviewers/correspondents, although inevitably some are more active than others. 

I have to admit that certain sections of the site have been neglected of late and so my first New Year resolution is to revive or revitalise those sections which have not been maintained as well as they should have been.

I also resolve to update this blog more often: why have it if you don’t use it?  There’s no way it can be a daily thing - there are, after all, a limited number of hours in the day - but resolution no. 2 is to make an entry once a week.

On a more personal level - although it does affect the BTG - my third resolution is to organise my time better.  I’m pretty certain I am not the only person in the world making that particular resolution!  One of the most difficult aspects of freelance life to come to terms with is dealing with the totally unstructured nature of one’s day.  When you’re working for someone else, you have set hours and a set amount of work to get through in that time, but when you’re freelancing and your own boss, it is so easy to slip into a kind of mañana attitude.  The trouble is, when mañana comes, it gets pretty hectic!

And the fourth resolution?  To try and keep the other three, which , if I succeed, will probably be a first!

Anyway, a very happy and healthy New Year to you all.

If you haven’t read our story about changes in the British Council’s culture department, I’d read it now.  You won’t believe it!

The arts panels, with names like Visual Arts, Theatre and so on, are to be replaced by groups which bear the titles Progressive Facilitation, Market Intelligence Network, Knowledge Transfer Function and Modern Pioneer.

Yer what!?

What the hell does that mean? And I have to confess that when I first read this I did not say “hell”, so I’ll not ask to be forgiven for the strength of my language as it has been toned down more than considerably.

Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? you may ask.  But no, this is the kind of language that bureaucrats invent to make people think they actually have something to offer and boost their own egos.  “If we use impenetrable jargon,” the theory goes, “people will think we are very clever.”  It’s management-speak gone mad, so perhaps after all the lunatics have taken over.

“What do I do at the British Council?  Well, I deal with Knowledge Transfer Function.  It’s very demanding, you know.  What, you think it means us telling people things?  No, not at all.  It’s much more complex than that! Dear me, yes.  Why, there’s a whole committee of us to deal with it.  Mind you, I hope I might be able to move into Progressive Facilitation next.  Now that’s where it’s really at!”

It would be funny if it wasn’t so stupid - and frightening.  There used to be  committes which dealt with each individual art form and those committees were helped by advisory panels of experts in their fields who gave their time and expertise free of charge to enable the Council to show the best of British art of every kind to the rest of the world.  The British Council had a superb reputation both here and abroad for the work that it did in getting the word out to the world that Britain’s artists have a huge amount to offer.  It could speak with authority and was listened to.

Director of arts Venu Dhupa said the council is consulting on how to improve its impact, make better use of its networks and enhance transparency.  They’ve got a bloody brilliant way of going about it - get rid of the experts and hide behind meaningless jargon.

There’s been a lot of bad news recently: theatres closing (Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree last week) and this week withdrawal of grants from the very troubled Derby Playhouse, the National Student Drama Festival and the Northcott in Exeter and a major cut in the grant to Eastern Angles.

In terms of funding, we can probably expect more of the same in the weeks to come as Arts Council England’s regional offices decide their funding priorities for another three years.  Inevitably there will be uproar, protests and petitions.  Jobs will be lost and local people up in arms.  And what will make it harder to bear is the fact that the arts fared much better than expected in the Comprehensive Spending Review.  “If you’ve got more money, why should we be cut?” will be the cry. 

And it is a very understandable cry, but it would be a mistake to lump all the cuts and closures together  If we are honest - and that can sometimes be hard to be if you are involved - there are times when grant cuts are justifiable.  If a company or theatre is not reaching the standards expected and other unfunded groups in a region are, it surely makes sense to move the what is after all a limited amount of money to where it will do most good.  It’s hard on those who are employed in the affected organisations and also on their loyal audiences, but there are winners as well as losers.  It’s not as if the money is vanishing.

But ACE is a bureaucratic organisation and bureaucratic organisations can make mistakes, so their decisions must be carefully scrutinised to make sure they are soundly based.  And the decision making process must be totally transparent.  What are the criteria against which the affected organisations are being judged and how fairly are they being applied?  How well do the officers really know the organisation and its work?  How often have they visited? How often have they attended board meetings?  Is the decision made on the basis of a thorough direct knowledge of the theatre/company or is it founded on paper?  And if there is sufficient concern for an organisation to be in danger of losing its grant aid, have those concerns been raised with it and has it been given time to respond?  If the concerns appear for the first time in the letter detailing the proposed cut, then any organisation so affected is entitled to protest loud and long - and to be heard.

This kind of redistribution of grant aid is inevitable and probably in the long run healthy for theatre, but it must be done properly.  If it isn’t, then the guilty heads at ACE should roll - after all, they are dealing with the livelihoods of other people.  It is appropriate at Christmas time to insist on strict adherence to the dictum that what is sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander.

John Tusa’s Arts Taskforce has recommended that Arts Council England’s major Regularly Funded Organisations (ROFs), such as the RSC, the National and the Royal Opera House, should be funded directly by the DCMS, following the lead  given by the Scottish Parliament.

That’s the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and now the Tories in Westminster who want to extend their power over yet another aspect of national life.

Since Jenny Lee set up the Arts Council of Great Britain in the late forties, the arms length funding principle has been central and it must remain so.  For the government to fund directly is a very dangerous road to go along.  We may feel that (should they get into power) David Cameron and the 2007 Conservative Party would not abuse their position by putting political pressure on these organisations, but who can speak for future governments of whatever stamp?

Nick Hytner puts it very well in a statment to The Stage: “I have worked for continental opera companies whose funding comes direct from government. Bluntly, it comes with far more political interference and baggage than ours does. The arts council adds value to the national companies. There’s a productive two-way dialogue between us. Splitting us off would cause more bureaucracy and would waste time.”

The Conservatives have not said that they will accept the report’s recommendations (although the only thing they have definitely said they will not accept is taking sport out of the DCMS) but this is the first time that a major political party has mooted the abandonment of the arms length principle in England and it is a dangerous sign.  Already ACE is subject to government pressure to write its (the government’s) priorities into its funding decisions: once can imagine how much pressure will be put on the national ROFs if they come under direct government control.

This is very worrying.

So details of the Comprehensive Spending Review have now been revealed and the Arts have fared better than expected.  We were warned that the best we could expect was an increase in line with inflation but standstill funding and even a 5% cut were suggested as possibilities.  Indeed, the general feeling was that standstill was the best we could expect and government sources were mentioning a possible 5% cut in order to make standstill funding (which is, of course, essentially a cut in real terms) seem attractive.

But no, we have an increase in line with inflation  over the next three years in the funding to the DCMS and now the culture secretary has announced that the grant in aid which the Arts Council will receive will increase, over the three year period of the CSP’s life, of 1.1% above inflation.  That’s £28m over three years.

But let’s not get too celebratory too soon.  We still have the Cultural Olympiad to pay for, which means that ACE will not have all that money to spend as they wish.  Quite properly, the department has said that free entrance to museums and galleries will be protected, so spending there will increase by at least the rate of inflation, so the amount available for theatre will not be as much as first impressions may suggest.

It is still going to be a very tough period for theatre companies.  We have yet to learn how ACE will allocate its money: will RFOs (Regularly Funded Organisations) get a full inflationary increase?  If they do, then the amount available for the Grants for the Arts scheme, which is essentially project funding, will be reduced.

It’s a tough call.  Is it more important to fund ACE’s big clients or emerging companies which are asking for a lot less money?  I’m a trustee of a RFO, so obviously I want its grant to continue at as high a level as possible, but I’m also the artistic director of a company that depends on Grants for the Arts to be able to deliver our projects.  How can I choose between them?  How can ACE choose between them?  If both deliver the goods, how can one be called more important than the other?

One thing is sure: there are going to be some theatre organisations which are unhappy, but probably fewer than we feared would be the case.

Because (s)he can’t do right for doing wrong.

This week I’ve had complaints about reviews on the BTG from two people.  One complained that the reviewer had done such a detailed study of the play that he (the complainant) now didn’t need to see the play and so was annoyed.  Another (dealing with another play and another reviewer) complained that the critic was too critical and that such critics are killing the development of new writing by making adverse comments.

As a responsible editor - of course! - I went back to the reviews in question and looked at them again.  The first was an enthusiastic review of a very complex piece and it needed the exposition to make the review comprehensible and, as for the second, I contacted the reviewer who simply said that it was a bad piece of writing and a poor performance and that was the general consensus on press night.

Meanwhile I had an email about one of my own reviews, thanking me for being so positive.  All I’d done was say what my reactions to the play and the performances were, which is all I - and every other critic - ever do.  Still, I am human (although there are some whose work I have reviewed who don’t think so) and it is nice to be thanked for doing your job.

But the whole business shows the ambivalent relationship between critics, their subjects and even their readers. Some time ago I had an email from a reader who was annoyed that one of our reviewers had given a very positive review to a play which he (the reader) hated.  This particular character even suggested that there is a deliberate conspiracy in the theatre world to pretend that the playwright in question (who is one of our leading writers, but I shall go no further than that in revealing his identity) is good when he is, the reader suggested, without any talent at all.

All a critic can do is detail his/her own reaction to a play or performance.  In the case of those critics who, for example, write for the major nationals and for websites such as the BTG, their reactions are informed by a long history of theatre-going and/or professional involvement.  These critics probably see more productions in a month than the average reader sees in a year, so inevitably their reactions are going to be affected by that accumulation of experience.

Many - in fact, seventeen - BTG reviewers are actively involved professionally in theatre as actors, directors or writers.  Some have been so for a very long time - in my own case, for more than fifty years.  In some cases our backgrounds are in classical and in others in new and experimental theatre.

Does this sort of background make for better or worse critics?  I would suggest better.  The wider the experience against which to assess a piece, the better the assessment can be.   But it does mean that our reactions are likely to differ from those of audience members who have less experience.  However in the majority of cases the critics tend to agree in their general assessment of a piece, which does say something - but nothing whatsoever to do with any conspiracy to build up or damn a writer/director/actor!