On culture cuts
Tuesday 27th July 2010
I’ve been away on holiday, but little seems to have changed in my absence. People are still talking about cuts, cuts and more cuts. But although everyone accepts that Arts Council funding will go down, few people have a simple solution to what should lose money. So I really welcome Mark Ravenhill’s Guardian article about where the axe should fall. Inspired no doubt by the polemics in director Mike Bradwell’s new book, The Reluctant Escapologist, which tears into the overweaning influence of marketing and fund-raising departments in theatres, Ravenhill argues that it is these departments that should bear the brunt, not the creatives. Let’s cut the crap, and fund the playwrights, directors and actors. Sounds like a good plan to me. But, as Ravenhill points out, it will never happen. Fund-raisers, marketing people etc are on permanent contracts — playwrights and creatives are not! When the cuts come, they will fall where they have always done: on the heads of the small companies and the little people. On theatre-makers and not on bureaucrats.
© Aleks Sierz
