British Theatre Guide Blog

…if you like, but my reaction to the DCMS’ latest brainchild, the UK City of Culture, is one of sheer disbelief that the government thinks it can pull the wool over our eyes yet again.

For those who haven’t read our news story,  the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is inviting bids from local authorities throughout the UK to become the first “City of Culture” in 2013. Culture secretary Ben Bradshaw said that the idea is to celebrate and boost the profile of the arts outside London.

But - and this is a somewhat large “but” - there’s no money in it.  Councils are being invited to go through a three stage bidding process, which will involve a very large amount of staff time and almost certainly the employment of consultants (never a cheap thing to do), and for what? The right to use the City of Culture logo, that’s what!  Oh yes, and the Turner and Stirling Prizes will relocate to the chosen city for that year, as might the BBC Sports Personality of the Year.  And  the BBC and Channel 4 will be showing an interest in what’s happening - which as (supposedly) public service broadcasters they should be doing anyway.

But, says Ben Bradshaw, the cachet of holding the title will attract loads of private and business sponsorship and funding.

The government is so mired in spin that they must have been taking lessons from the Whirling Dervishes.   They’ve taken millions away from the arts throughout the country for the London Olympics and are replacing it with the use of a logo for one city or conurbation for one year.

We know - of course we know, who is so removed from reality that they wouldn’t? - that  public money is going to be very tight for many years to come.  We know, too, that, despite the protestations of politicians of all parties, the arts are going to have suffer their share of the cuts.  We accept it because we know that we are in the worst recession for a very long time and the government, like so many others throughout the world, are trying to get us out of it by huge public sending (which involves huge public borrowing as well as “quantative easing”, aka devaluation).  The public is not as stupid as the government obviously believes us to be, so we can accept that, for the preservation of jobs and the skills of the workforce, spending ourselves out of the recession is worth trying.

Why, then, do they persist in trying to con us?  The City of Culture prize is not like the European Capital of Culture which came with huge amounts of European funding, which went not just to winners Liverpool but to all those cities which put in a bid.  Essentially they are doing nothing but are trying to seem as though they are.

The City of Culture scheme is not the DCMS and, through them, the government supporting the arts, culture and creativity, but an attempt to make us believe that the government is supporting the arts, culture and creativity.  It’s spin - again!

In the BTG Newsletter on Sunday (14th June), I wrote:

“A Night Less Ordinary” is a new initiative, launched lst December by Arts Council and the DCMS, to offer free theatre tickets to young people under the age of 26. Funding was given to theatres across the country which applied to join the scheme, ranging from £10,00 to £30,00 to £50,000. The scheme will run for two years and 618,000 tickets will be given away.

I was talking recently to the Marketing Manager of a participating theatre who told me that 200 tickets have been applied for since the theatre began the scheme but only 20 of the ticket holders actually turned up. “When we offer cut-price tickets, more or less everyone who buys them turns up,” he told me, “but free tickets clearly aren’t valued and anything from bad weather to ‘I’m feeling a bit tired’ will put them off.”

It would be interesting to know whether this has happened across the country. It’s early days, of course, but I have to confess that I’m not surprised. And on this showing the scheme certainly won’t succeed in its aim of getting the notoriously difficult to attract 18- 26 age range into the theatre.

In fact I have since heard from elsewhere that this is not uncommon. One correspondent - not referring to this particular scheme - wrote, “We used to negotiate batches of free tickets for disadvantaged groups – elderly people or young people in care etc.  After a while, we realised that people did not value free tickets, and often would not turn up to collect them.   We then started to charge £1 for the tickets.    We  found that people not only took up the offer, they were much more likely to  turn up on the night.     The small charge gave people a “stake” in the event – they were having to pay something, so they would not take the ticket unless they were serious.  Even a 50p charge had a positive effect.”

Actually, that’s fairly elementary psychology, I think.  I wonder whether the 20 mentioned above who did turn up would have been likely to go to the theatre anyway and were delighted to be able to go for free.  It seems a strong possibility.

However A Night Less Ordinary is a two-year pilot scheme.  It will be interesting to see the final results - and I would be very interested to hear from other theatres about their experience of it to date.

Surely there is no one in the theatre world so naive as to think that it would escape the effects of the recession?  There is always the hope (and, in some quarters, firm belief) that in times of trouble people will spend on escape from reality viatheatre, but I suspect that is more wishful thinking than reality.  It is true that, at the mment, box office receipts seem to be standing up well but these are early days and the recession, we are told, will be long and difficult - and it’s the worst  since the depression of the thirties.

We’ve been hearing recently that people may be beginning to try to save and that, certainly, they are spending much more carefully.  I also hear that cinema box office takings are already down.  I suspect that film-going is more of an impulse thing than theatre-going - “I’m fed up: let’s got to the pictures tonight” - but where, in situations like this, cinema leads the way, theatre will almost inevitably follow.

However, as this week’s announcement from Arts Council England makes clear, even if theatre box office remains resilient, there is every chance that next week’s budget statement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer will begin the process of clawing back already committed monies in an attempt to minimise the effects of the massive bail-outs to the banks and other industries.

ACE - sensibly - is preparing for the possibility of cuts of 1.5, 2.5 or 3 per cent (the latter representing £14m) in 2010/2011 and working out ways of preserving grant-in-aid to Regularly Funded Organisations. Which is, of course, what one would expect.  However that would mean that new projects will either not get funded at all or will get much less than might otherwise be expected.

Presumably the Lottery-funded Grants for the Arts programme will not be affected - unless, of course, the Lottery itself experiences a fall in the numbers participating - although I would not discount the possibility of the Lottery being again “raided” for the 2012 Olympics.

But the main problem is that funding for 2011/2012 will be part of the next Comprehensive Spending Review and even if (Hmmm…) we are out of the recession by the second half of 2010 when the CSR is due, there will still be massive public debt to pay off, so the Treasury will almost certainly take the (reduced by whatever percentage) settlement for 2010/2011 as the baseline.  It should have been £467m but could be as low as £454m - unless (God forbid) ACE is being too optimistic.

The arts are going to be hit.  There is no doubt about that.  It is only the severity of that hit and the amount of time it lasts which are in question.  We must just hope that the cuts will be smaller and their duration shorter than our fears, but we would do well not to bury our heads in the sand and think that all will be well.  It won’t.

A report in The Stage tells us that ATG has cancelled a musical - Houdini the Musical - that had been booked into the Regent Theatre, Stoke, because the actors were not being paid but employed on the basis that, if the show had a life beyond the Stoke run, they would receive a full wage for that.  The TMA agreed that the arrangement was unacceptable and Equity pointed out that the whole affair could fall foul of employment legislation.

It seemed absolutely right and I found myself nodding in agreement.  However I decided to do a bit more checking and discovered that the company behind the production is, in fact, run by very young actors, not long out of drama school, and, they say, this is the only way they could do this new musical on which they are so keen.

Then I began to think.  On Friday evening I went to see a new play written by a friend of mine in a new venue.  It had a cast of six (playing 19 parts between them) and it ran for one night.  How did they get funding? I asked.  They didn’t: they did it because it was something they wanted to do and they knew that this would be the only way they would get to do it. Hopefully it will have a life beyond the one night and they will have some profit to share, but that’s unknown.

 I chatted to the writer, who was also one of the actors, and she told me they were sick of waiting around for auditions but there’s not very much original theatre being produced in the region and applying for Arts Council grants means having to jump through so many hoops to fit into the “priorities”, the forms are complex and time-consuming to complete and there is certainly no guarantee at the end of the day that any money will be forthcoming.  So they decided to go it alone on a profit-share basis.

They are not alone.  That’s how we did A Cold Coming last year and very recently a group of NE actors have got together to form a group to put on their own work on the same basis.

These people I’m talking about are all professional actors, directors and writers, some with decades of experience, but they feel that their only chance of working, given that the number of plays produced in one year in the region is in single figures, is to do it themselves. 

It’s a dreadful situation.  There is TIE work around and corporate work, but real theatre? the sort of work we came into the business to do?  Forget it! 

Or do it yourself.

“I know I sound blimpish, but I do feel the straight play is a doomed species. And what I get really angry about is the terrible starvation of the theatre out of London. You can see it in insidious ways. The death of regional work is very serious. You pick up the programme of the average rep company and you find no individual voice - it’s all co-productions with other theatres. Or it’s ‘devised’ work, and most of that is rubbish.”

So said Alan Ayckbourn to The Times earlier this week.

What he says about the straight play is a subject for another time, as is his comment about devised work, but the subject of co-productions is one which is worth taking up now.

He is absolutely right that co-productions between regional theatres are becoming more and more common, as are regional theatres’ co-productions with companies like Headlong, Kneehigh and Frantic Assembly, and the reas0n is obvious - money.  Plays, and particularly plays wth a cast of more than three or four, are expensive to put on.  Not as expensive as musicals, of course, but then the potential returns are much smaller.  By sharing the costs, theatres  are able to do more productions than they could otherwise afford and those productions have a life outside of the originating theatre.

It does, however, mean that, as Ayckbourn says, the “individual voice” is reduced because the theatres are doing fewer productions of their own.  However, given the financial constraints that theatres are suffering from, it seems to me that co-production enables more adventurous - and more expensive - plays to be presented.

The ideal, of course, is what Ayckbourn wants - each theatre developing its own voice, its own style and even its own stable of writers - but financial pressures are making that very difficult, if not impossible, so in a way the co-production route is the least worst of all possible worlds.

The Tories, says Jeremy Hunt, shadow culture secretary, are the natural party of the arts.

There was a time, even just a year ago, such a comment, if it didn’t draw derisive laughter, would have been ignored.  Jeremy who?  The Tories - and the arts?  Come on! 

This week, however, it has been widely reported and the meeting at the House of Commons at which he made his speech was attended by many theatre and arts luminaries.  So what’s changed?  Have the Tories suddenly become honorary luvvies?  Has the arts world had a road to Damascus conversion?

Of course not.  The answer is much simpler than that.  On the first anniversary of Gordon Brown’s premiership, when Labour is beaten into fifth place in a by-election behind the Greens and the BNP, the Tories are suddenly looking like the next government.  Indeed, if there were a general election tomorrow, David Cameron would be be getting ready to move into No. 10 the day after.

So it behoves all of us in the arts world to start taking a long and hard look at what the Tories are saying about their policies on the arts, because we could well be having to deal with them in the not too distant future.

A week, it was famously said in the sixties, is a long time in politics, so things could change before the country next goes to the polls, but it seems difficult to believe that Brown and his government can raise themselves out of the abyss into which they have sunk, so it might be a good idea to start getting used to the idea that Cameron and company might be holding the purse strings.

The first question that must be on the minds of everyone in the arts world is “Can we trust them?”  The devastation to the arts caused by Margaret Thatcher and her policies still looms large in the memory but Hunt (and Cameron) tells us that they have changed.  This is a new Conservative Party, with new policies for the 21st century, and the shadow culture secretary has laid out his vision for our artistic future.

It’s bright, but it’s the brightness of the sun shining through mist: luminous and attractive, but with all the detail obscured. 

• A “renewed” ACE, but quite how renewed we don’t know (except for the Tory mantra of “efficiency savings” - the answer to every economic ill)
• A new relationship between the Ats Council and the DCMS: he does support the “arm’s length” principle, but how long is this particular arm?
• Incentives for philanthropists (how very Victorian!) to give to the arts, but quite what they are we don’t yet know: it could be this, possibly that, or even the other
• Protecting the Lottery from “raiding” by politicans for “pet projects” by Act of Parliament - now that’s pretty clear: why do I keep thinking about the Dome?
• And he wants rid of the culture of target-setting and ticking boxes.  Remind me: who was it invented Ofsted?

And then he finds the idea of direct funding for major arts organisations by the government “interesting - indeed radical” - and doesn’t rule it out.  I can’t see Nick Hytner or Michael Boyd jumping with joy at that statement.  I’m certainly not.  He who pays the piper, and all that.  But of course it’s only an idea to be considered: it hasn’t been ruled in, but then it hasn’t been ruled out either.

The phrase “smoke and mirrors” comes to mind.

But I suppose we should be encouraged that the new Conservative Party feels it needs to cosy up to the arts world after the contempt with which it treated it in the Thatcher years.

And in case you think this is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party, think again.  Yes, the arts are better off financially under Labour, but at a cost.  Whilst no one can quarrel with the principles of access for all and inclusivity, the pursuit of artistic excellence has been sidelined (by the goverment and, therefore, ACE - arm’s-length?) in favour of  using the arts as an instrument of social engineering.  There are those who would quite approve, but they are mistaken.  The arts should not be an vehicle for delivering government policy, no matter how worthy.  That way lies propaganda, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin and Adolf Hitler. If an individual artist or group want to use their art to put a point of view, political or social, that’s one thing: it’s quite another for a government to do it.

The question should be: can we trust any of them?  And that’s depressing.

Over a year ago a colleague (actress and writer Viktoria Kay) and I were commissioned to write a community play about the town of Jarrow for the Jarrow Festival.  As you can imagine, it took a while and we finished it just too late for the 2007 Festival but we were asked to direct it for this year’s event.

 It’s a big piece, as community plays tend to be, covering the town’s past, present and future, and has over 40 parts for a range of actors, from 15 to 70+ (although they could be played by around 23 actors).  There’s live music, some dance and an opportunity for video work to be incorporated.  And it was to play in five different venues.

Funding applications went in months ago but were knocked back time after time and we eventually were offered funding (with a lot of strings, but we won’t go into that!) less than two weeks before we would have to begin rehearsals.  That’s a week to get the word out, followed by auditions on the Thursday and Friday, with rehearsals due to start the following Monday.

A thankless (although we worked extremely hard) - and ultimately fruitless - task.  The vast majority of those who would have been interested were already committed to other things and we were compelled to knock the project on the head.  Hopefully it might be possible to revive it next year, but who knows? It all depends on the funding.

And there’s the rub.  It turns out that the reason funding was refused was the fact that Viktoria and I were to be paid.  Naturally we were: it’s how we make our living.  But no: funders would not give money, no matter how worthy the cause, if anyone was to be paid.

Most of the organisers of Festival events are being paid, because they are employed by community centres, the local authority or schools and given time to do the work on the Festival.  Without their work the Festival could not take place.  They are professionals who are using their professional expertise to ensure the success of the Festival and are being paid to do so.  We, however, are freelance: nobody employs us full-time.  If we take on a project, then the project has to pay us, and this is what disqualifies our particular project from being funded.  We couldn’t even be offered a percentage of the box office income because Festival events must be free.

Obviously we’re disappointed - massively disappointed - but more than anything else I am saddened that the funding bodies seem to feel that either theatre is not important enough to be involved in a community festival or that, if it is, it cannot have any professional input. They’ll pay for transport hire, costumes and props to be hired , bought or made and lots of other expenses (all payment being made to commercial firms, of course) but not for the professional expertise which will bring the whole thing together and make it work.

Of course, it happens all the time.  You get actors being asked to take part in events or films for free because “it will look good on your CV”, even though others - such as the crew - are being paid.  I was, just this week, asked if I could put a producer in touch with some actors to play ensemble roles in a production for nothing (”It will look good on their CVs”), even though everyone else is being paid.

The problem is that we’re in theatre because we love the job and want to be part of it, so people do take advantage.  Profit-share in one thing - as long as it is fairly done and seen to be fairly done - but exploitation is something else.  I recently came across one company which was offering its actors £5 an hour for performances and nothing for rehearsals.  Now that is not only exploitation. it’s also illegal, but the idea of the minimum wage does not seem to have percolated through to the murkier parts of the theatre world.

What a business theatre is!

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.

So now we know.

 The highest profile cuts (the Bush, the Orange Tree, Bristol Old Vic, the National Student Drama Festival and Exeter Northcott) have been reversed.  One wonders how much  the very public support of major theatrical figures like Nick Hytner had to do with that. Perhaps rather more surprising - but most welcome for all that - Eastern Angles have also had their funding reinstated, as have Jacksons Lane, Harrogate Theatre and the Birmingham Opera Company.

But 165 organisations have still been dropped by Arts Council and a further 27 have had their funding cut.  This is core funding and it is what keeps the companies alive: without it, the majority will either have to cut their activities to the bone or close.  Indeed the Drill Hall has already closed and we can expect to hear of more closures over the coming weeks.

No one has a right to Arts Council funding but ACE must assume some responsibility for the companies it chooses to stop funding.  It must give them a reasonable space in which to prepare a case for appeal, enough time to the actual cessation of funding to find alternatives, and be absolutely clear and accurate in presenting its reasons for its decision.  It cannot be said that any of this has been the case this time so a bad taste has been left in everybody’s mouth and trust in the organisation has been severely damaged.

That is probably the worst legacy  of the whole sorry business.  How can the arts world trust ACE after this debacle?  Already one influential figure - Nicholas de Jongh of the Evening Standard - has called for the Council to be scrapped, but if that happened and funding decisions were left to the DCMS, then that would be an even bigger disaster.  The arms-length principle must be maintained.

What is needed is a root and branch look at all of ACE’s funding procedures - a major reconstruction job, in fact.  Incoming chief executive Alan Davey has the Herculean task of re-establishing the arts world’s trust in the organisation and if he doesn’t realise that, he shouldn’t be in the job.  Now that the funding brouhaha is finished (barring any legal challenges), his first job must be to make the Council more arts-led, more transparent and more hands-on.

If, as many of the affected companies have complained, the officer responsible for “looking after” them never leaves the office to see what they are doing, that must change now.  It should be part of their job description that they see the work of the companies for which they have responsibility a minimum number of times a year.

ACE claims that it is putting into action Brian McMaster’s recommendations about excellence.  Excellent!  Now let’s see them institute another of his recommendations - peer review.  Let the professionals assess the work that is being funded, not the desk-bound bean-counters, some of whom wouldn’t recognise excellence in an art form if it hit them in the face with a wet fish.

Since those letters were sent out in December the arts world has been in turmoil and the reputation of Arts Council England has sunk to an all-time low.  If changes are not made - and are seen to be made - then more and more people will start to wonder why we have an arts council at all, and that will take us into very dangerous territory indeed.

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!