By The Earl of Clancarty - 20th July 2011
The loss of regional theatres due to government cuts, would be "an incalculable loss", the Earl of Clancarty writes.
Everyone in Britain deserves access to a local or regional theatre. Yet because of the current government's cuts, affecting both central and local authority funding – the worst of which are yet to come – this access is now under threat.
And it is regional theatre, along with the smaller-scale and radical London companies, which are being most affected by the cuts. Theatres and theatre companies across the land, in Derby, Oxford, Hull, Cardiff, Huddersfield and Oxford – just to name a few of the towns and cities at risk – do not know whether they will have theatre at all in a couple of years. The Northcott Theatre in Exeter, for example, has programming up to March next year, but cannot predict beyond that date.
The Theatres Trust has said that venues are bearing much of the brunt of the cuts, and cuts to a single venue – including arts centres – will lead to numerous job losses and have a knock-on effect on more than one company, as well as community groups, and indeed other art forms such as the visual arts or dance.
In one sense theatre has been here before. It was poorly funded by the former Conservative government, and the last administration's increased funding merely made good that lack. Yet there is one particular reason why regional theatre is more under threat now than ever before, and this is the current government's clear intention of permanently reducing public subsidies in favour of a philanthropic model of funding – a move that would be a disaster for British theatre.
Under the post-war funding regime developed in Britain (one third ticket sales, one third public subsidies, one third private funding) a vibrant theatre culture developed and has continued to develop across the UK, with a commercial theatre often sitting side by side with the experimental and the political.
Many commentators have noted the degree to which theatre is a fragile ecosystem where players, directors and technicians move between London and the regions, between the commercial and publicly subsidised, between the large-scale and small. Philanthropy is not attracted to the experimental but to success, not to the regional but to the metropolitan, not to small but to big.
Tom Morris, director of 'War Horse' and artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, has observed that the great international critical and commercial success of that play and 'Jerusalem' simply would not have been possible without public subsidies – and the seeds in the regions that such subsidies sow. And the one new triumph – the newly opened Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury – was facilitated by a regional development agency which is due to close next year.
Our current system is also incredibly cheap, the cost to each taxpayer being, using one measurement, equivalent to two-thirds of a takeaway pizza a year (a little over £7). Our post-war model has been the envy of the world, not least to the Americans, whose far more conservative funding system Jeremy Hunt wishes to emulate. Its disappearance would be an incalculable loss.
The Earl of Clancartyhas been a hereditary peer since 1995. He is an artist and writer.
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