Olympics

Time Out writers’ ideas
Let’s release the West End from the stranglehold of musicals: all musicals that have run for more than five years have to close and new productions (preferably by young playwrights) take their place.

We need cultural collaboration – no more infighting between the institutions and the Arts Council; instead, resources should be pooled to create an Artistic Village (like the Museums Quartier in Vienna), where galleries could collaborate.

Ask the doyenne of community theatre, Ann Jellicoe, to create a play with David Edgar based on the history of the East End, to take place in the stadium after the Olympics. Feature continues

Seeing as London already has a huge amount of great dance that the majority of people don’t see, let’s just institute a £5 flat fee for all seats at the Opera House, Sadler’s Wells and the South Bank.

The city should commission a series of short films from top British filmmakers to celebrate London and the Olympic ideals, in the vein of ‘Paris Je T’Aime’, the recent portmanteau work from France. But don’t let the films feel like corporate videos: artists should work with their own visions (whether that involves images of Myra Hindley or not).

Let’s persuade Shakespearean actors to follow David Calder’s courageous lead and perform at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Antony Gormley’s figures should be brought back across the whole of London.

Since it’s all about the East End, councils should organise a good old cockney knees-up – ideally synchronised to take place en masse across the city.

Anyone visiting London is going to be spending a lot of time on the tube. They should be entertained. More poetry and art on the walls, and dance productions, comedy gigs, art installations, VJs and ad-hoc operas on the platforms, please.

Subsidise cinemas to show a quota of British films in the run-up to 2012.

Let’s commission Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas to write a satirical opera about Britain to be staged during the Olympics to prove that we don’t believe in censorship. Which would, if nothing else, give us a definite one-up on Beijing.

London and the country as a whole needs a new centre of film to replace and surpass BFI Southbank: let’s use the Olympics to focus ideas, energy and funding on this crucial project.

Britain last hosted the Olympics in 1948. This was a very strong year for theatre, with premieres of ‘The Lady’s Not for Burning’, ‘The Browning Version’ and ‘Eden End’, plus ‘Rocket to the Moon’, ‘All My Sons’ and ‘The Glass Menagerie’ from the US. These plays should be revived, in tandem with commissions of new work.

We should celebrate the integration of our indigenous cultures with a series of ‘battles’ in Trafalgar Square, like those you’d find in breakdancing or MCing. So: English Morris dancers v Highland country dancers, or a Welsh male voice choir facing off against an Orange Order march.

A perpetual game of cricket to be played on Parliament Green, with local sides from around the country invited to take part, and play not stopping for bad weather or light. It would certainly liven Parliament up if a ball crashed through the window during a debate over fiscal policy.

Use the inclement weather: commission our best artists to design umbrellas, then distribute them around London. Oxford Street in the rain would become a moving gallery.

Tag Buckingham Palace. It would be ludicrous if graffiti – one of our most innovative art forms – didn’t get a place in the Olympiad, so over the next four years everyone’s invited to spray a bit of the Queen’s house, so that by 2012 it looks like a massive, colourful tube carriage.

Time Out readers’ suggestions
I’d like to see bonfires lit across the UK, culminating in London. Bells could also be rung across the country. Chris L

I’d like to see a demonstration of Olympic sports based on computer games – so real people playing ‘Speedball 2’, ‘Street Fighter II’, ‘Super Mario Kart’, ‘Frogger’ and ‘Leisure Suit Larry’. Charlie Cooke

I’d like to see plays and exhibitions offering first night or private view parties for the 13- to 17-year-olds who want to go out together but have no place to go. Sara

See what other reader said