Theatre

It was the stars that won it. Whatever the Arts Council claims, that’s the obvious conclusion to draw from the fact that The Bush, the Orange Tree, the Northcott Theatre and the National Student Drama School – all backed by the likes of Ian McKellen, Judi Dench and Sam West – won their appeals against potential Arts Council England (ACE) cuts last week. Other companies who have not had their grants renewed will be rightly seething as everyone was initially told that mounting a campaign was a waste of time and could even be detrimental. ACE has said that there are companies that quietly got on with making their case and won through but as far as theatre goes it’s hard to see who they are.
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At least we now know which companies will receive an increase in their funding over the next three years and which have been rejected. Of the initial 185 companies that were due to be cut across all art forms, only 17 have been reprieved. In addition, 27 will have their funding reduced. The ‘non renewals’, as ACE calls them, include the Drill Hall, London Bubble and Watermans Arts in London. Tara Arts and the London International Festival of Theatre are among those who have suffered a severe reduction.

The good news is that in London Punchdrunk, Improbable, Shunt, the Arcola, Fuel (the producers), Artichoke (who presented ‘The Sultan’s Elephant’) and Told by an Idiot, among many others, have all had their funding increased or have been taken on board for the very first time. The Barbican and Sadlers Wells have been rewarded for their success in attracting new audiences. The baffling news is that Hampstead Theatre, despite its dreary programming, is being rewarded with a hefty uplift, apparently because its grant has not so far taken into account the high cost of running the new building.

It seems that while the chair of the ACE, Sir Christopher Frayling, remains gung-ho and has made no apologies for the catastrophic ineptitude of the past few months, the incoming chief executive, Alan Davey, recognises that some lessons have to be learned, as does Arts Council London’s executive director, Moira Sinclair. For a start, many companies insist that the cuts came out of the blue. Although Sinclair hotly disputes this, she will make sure that warning letters are more blunt in the future. Also, Davey has suggested that there will be a return to some form of peer review in order to restore artists’ faith in those who are making the financial call. The trouble with peer review is that it can be cumbersome and guilty of cronyism, but it must be possible to bring some elements of it back without massively increasing committee time. Now that grants are awarded for three years, it is also surely essential to stagger clients so that only a third are considered every year and a proper amount of time can be given to the future of every company.

It won’t be much comfort to the Drill Hall, London Bubble, and Tara Arts but there is the promise that all the organisations that have been cut will have a chance to make their case again and that there may be transition money available if they show that they are addressing the problems that caused the cut in the first place. That said, once you close your doors, it’s very difficult to re-open them.

The credibility of ACE and its satellites will be hard to repair. Already Nicholas de Jongh at the Evening Standard and Michael Billington at The Guardian have come out in favour of abolishing ACE altogether. I believe that would be madness. Inevitably decisions made within the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, would become politicised. Arts organisations would be rewarded because they happen to be in marginal constituencies, not because of the value of what they are producing. The arm's-length principle of funding the arts must be preserved.

In order to answer the many valid criticisms of how a £50m increase in money for the arts turned into such a mess, there has to be a major shake-up, beginning with the early departure of Christopher Frayling. It is unbelievable that he criticised Nick Hytner for speaking out on the grounds that the National Theatre had got a very good settlement. Does Frayling seriously feel that it is wrong for one organisation to speak up on the behalf of others? I rather wish there had been more. He has to carry the can for the lack of transparency, poor communication and incompetence that have bedevilled the last few months. Let him go back to his spaghetti westerns and allow someone of greater substance to take over.