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As I understand it, the purpose of the Young People's Theatre strategy which the ACW has now reversed, was to make cuts to the Drama budget. Why the drama budget is targeted isn't clear to me but we'll put that to one side. The cost in people-hours to set up this strategy and for Companies to apply for its franchises must be incalculable. But tell me it wouldn't have funded a handful of new plays or even a small company! And now the exercise has been abandoned and that cost wasted. Is that why the Drama budget has to be cut in the first place? And can it be that the reversal is implemented with such bold indifference to the peoples involved because you are a bureaucracy which has become well practised in waste? Which is why you seem to lurch from one crisis to another? As you know, my words are not the words of a disaffected writer angry because he can't get a grant. I've been in receipt of a lot of "Arts Council" money indirectly over the years - most recently working with Spectacle Theatre. My words are the words of a professional angry and disgusted at the waste produced by people who are behaving like amateurs. But it's not just the economic waste that makes this whole episode so shameful. I was driven to despair when I heard Sybil Crouch on BBC Radio say that the Arts Council had suffered criticism for their decision! What use of language is this? "Suffered!" It's a use only those morally deadened by instutionalism could engage in. People who've become cavalier because of the security they in their unelected, unnaccountable posts enjoy. I'll tell you where the real suffering is in all this, Sybil. Over the last year, I have watched (at first hand in Spectacle's office and been aware of others elsewhere), as some of the best minds and talents in the Theatre in Wales have been humiliated, obliged to take part in an excerise which they knew would mean the end of three fellow companies, in order to save their own. Appeals against this policy were made but they fell on deaf ears. I saw real suffering. Uncountable hours devoted to getting the wording right on application forms because failure would spell the end. Out of work. I saw confusion: a sense of taking part in a kind of treachery and having no option but to take part. I saw old colleagues falling out, accusations flying around in an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion. I saw the TIE movement in Wales - the strongest in Britain and perhaps globally - fracture. I saw the soul of Welsh Theatre culture wrung out like an old shirt. Everywhere agony, suffering and frustration. Even the elation that came with being told that you'd succeeded in your application was tempered by the feelings of guilt. And then….IT WAS ALL FOR NOTHING! That's what I call suffering. But it's even worse! That suffering has been caused by those whose very existence at a professional level, is to serve and facilitate the smooth and fair operation of the culture within which these Companies work. But none of this surprises me. How many times in the recent past when I've been working with Spectacle have we experienced in the middle of producing fine work (ask the schools; read the reviews; read the published plays!) threats to our continued existence undermining the equanimity one is entitled to expect under any circumstance when embarked on endeavours with such meaningful purpose? And not from some protection racket or mafia firm but from Arts Council Officers! And how many times in recent years have you not even bothered to come and see the work we produce? And what about the fairness? I remember how, not so long ago when there was a squeeze on resources that particularly effected Spectacle Theatre, Theatre West Glamorgan had a highly suspicious deficit (some say £50,000?) written off by the Arts Council. But that's not the worst of it: there was a raging but supressed disquiet throughout the TIE movement: was the Company bailed out because the Artistic Director, Tim Baker was Drama supremo Mike Baker's brother? Could there be any truth in this? Did you give a satisfactory account? Not as far as I can remember. Similarly, these days Mike Baker's brother is the Assistant Director at Theatre Clwyd and it is being said that this is why Theatre Clwyd - a company that in the main produces English plays for predominantly English audiences - gets bailed out and even receives increased funding while Welsh Companies suffer. Whether there is any justice in these claims isn't the point, the fact that there is this disquiet is evidence of a lack of competence and an inability to promote fairness. They are symptomatic of the malaise throughout Welsh Theatre culture, a malaise produced and administered by you. If you were running a hospital you'd be out on your necks. This maladministration and, who knows?, malfeasance has gone on for too long, we cannot sustain the waste. We are at the watershed. Sybil said in effect that she thought it was a good day. That it shows you're listening. That this decision has come about because of consultation. Is this a new kind of humour? For close on a year a whole industry howled from the rooftops: Don't do this! And you took no notice. I remember Spectacle Theatre appealing not to have to take part in this new lottery and they lost the appeal. It happened with others too. Over the last twenty years, the theatre culture in this country has produced work that's internationally renowned. It's been a remrakable invention but not because of the Arts Council, in spite of it. You've never done anything to promote what we've got but have only ever put up obsticles as though in order to say: it's not working, our Theatre practitioners are producing nothing of worth, it's time to take the whole thing apart and start again. But you didn't start it before, we did. I've heard it rumoured that you, collectively, have visions. Perhaps you should see a doctor. It's the artists who have the visions. The Arts Council is there just to hand out the money (our money as it happens). Finally: at the moment the Assembly is failing. It's failing, paradoxically, because the people want it to work. They're not prepared to accept the talking shop - a kind of elective beaurocracy - that New Labour would like it to be. In the end the people will make it work. It's come about because of a collective vision. A vision of a kind of paradise in which Wales can have democracy. No undemocratic manipulation can kill off that. This example, viewed from all the bridges of the new paradise enables us to see more clearly what's wrong in the swamp of our Arts policies - so fundamental to a nation like Wales. It's its lack of democratic accountability. What will happen now? How will the waste produced by this exercise be administered? Perhaps you will cut entirely the new writing budget - which you are always, as uncreative people, minded to viciously attack - even though it's the writers who make the culture. Who knows? Unless you cease to exist as you are we can only expect the worst. To paraphrase Kinnock (paradoxically as it happens as he is the architect of the undemocratic New Labour) - what you end up with is an Arts Council - an Arts Council, sloshing about in the swamp of its own incompetence, handing out redundancy notices to artists! Yours sincerely, Dic Edwards Aberaeron |
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Sunday, January 23, 2000 |
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