| The Flame of Theatre Burns On |
My Year of Theatre |
| Fifty Productions, Best Revival & Best Show , Theatre of Wales in 2024 , January 1, 2025 |
The background to the arts in 2024, collated below 28th December, was sombre. A second chapter asks to be written on how the Arts Council of Wales deploys its income. With the ratcheting down of budgets for culture by the Government of Wales a new backer made its appearance in 2024. Productions were to be seen carrying the logo of the lion and the unicorn above the text: “Funded by UK Government. Wedi ei ariannu gan Llywodraweth y DU.” The Shared Prosperity Fund was a compensation policy for the departure from the European Union. It was an economic policy widely recognised as a failure. It accounted for 0.4% of GDP, spread over five years. It required bids of complexity from councils. The parliamentary public-accounts committee has called its delays “astonishing”. Capital projects were not many. In Wales the budget for capital works on Porthcawl's Pavilion is £18,000,000. Alice Briggs has left an account of the work in Powys. “We were able to offer funding to ten organisations, two of whom; Impelo and Mid Wales Opera were on the point of closure due to the loss of Arts Council Wales portfolio funding.” A result was the tour of “Pagliacci”, below 26th November. Aberystwyth Arts Centre was able to use the funding from Westminster to continue its tradition of a summer musical, below 15th August. The National Theatre of Wales had a Cardiff City councillor as Chief Executive for four months of the year. The company was beneficiary of the Shared Prosperity Fund via Cardiff City; no theatre productions ensued. * * * * But culture is eternal. It is eternal in the same way that the dilemmas of human living are eternal. The quest for affiliation, the blocks to intimacy, the need for meaningful activity, social grounding; they bond Oedipus to Hamlet to Effie. Fifty productions were recorded over the year on this site. There were probably a few more. The number is much the same as ten years ago, 1914, but those fifty productions came with some differences. Taliesin was a producer. Michael Bogdanov took “A Child's Christmas in Wales” out on the road. Dirty Protest. Frapetsus, Mappa Mundi were seen from Colwyn Bay to Cardiff. “A Regular Little Houdini” and “Hiraeth” were seen everywhere, Wales and Edinburgh, and went on to travel the world. All were facets of a national theatre. In 2024 few productions moved beyond a local audience. Performances were not many and there was another divergence from public demand. The public likes actors who are acting and inter-acting, with other actors. Fewer earn less money. Equity will no doubt know the numbers. The abundant talent of Wales makes much of its living elsewhere. And in 2014 the productions were about social humans. The notion of the primacy of self for authenticity- a bogus and cultish aesthetic doctrine- has ever grown over a decade. Autobiography-as-theatre grew to such an extent that it prompted a Scots critic, Fergus Morgan, to write a widely read article calling it out. Solipsistic vapour in the way of advertising copy is pretty much guaranteed not to attract an audience of magnitude. But the Arts Council of Wales seems very partial to it. * * * * The reviews and articles read on this site in 2024 averaged 39,274 monthly. This was a rise of 62% over 2023. A reason no doubt was the collapse of virtually all regular reviewing. Many of the 50 productions recorded here left no critical trace. This situation goes back to an article written by David Adams in October 2000. He had been there to record the enlivened scene of the 1980s and 1990s. He called his article “Theatre, Cultural identity and the Critic” and New Welsh Review published its weighty 3760 words. “The problem is the general cultural one of Wales being more or less invisible or remains only dimly perceived, if not invisible...Any theatre practice, and especially that of a subdominant culture such as Wales's in relation to England, does becomes invisible if it is not recorded.” The culture of now is not just being steadily rendered invisible. It is thinned with nonsense and evasion put out by monied, vested interests. * * * * Revival of the year was “Operation Julie.” It travelled joyously as far as Swindon. I have seen 32 productions of musical theatre in England since the pandemic. Geinor Styles and company's production was good enough to have made the extra eighty miles east and held its own for Wales in a London venue. Alas, it was not to be, not at least in 2024. New production of the year was “Kill Thy Neighbour”, a Theatr Clwyd and Torch co-production, written by Lucie Lovatt and directed by Chelsey Gillard. Artistic response is personal. The review, below 2nd May, saw structural sophistication, sharp observation and a richness of human relations, propelled by springy dialogue. A character muses of a long life: “They'll stick us in Saint Fagans when we retire.” Most of all it was about something that matters, taken from our world of today. The population churn of fringe and rural Wales is a central dynamic fact. The erosion of the language is an effect. Would that there were many like “Kill Thy Neighbour.” National theatre has proved so elusive as concocted from the capital. But it is vitally there, as made in Neath, Milford, Mold and other places. May the Theatre Review report, due in 2025, serve to recognise this. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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