We cannot afford to let our dazzling culture fall victim to financial crisis

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
Pixabay
Matthew d'Ancona21 May 2020
WEST END FINAL

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In common, I imagine, with most Londoners, I have a list of things I can’t wait to do and see when lockdown lifts more fully and we try to resume a life that at least resembles normality.

For me, the capital has few experiences that beat an evening at the Bridge Theatre, opened by Nick Hytner and Nick Starr in 2017, nestling snugly between City Hall and Tower Bridge.

In less than three years, it has become a dazzling feature of London’s cultural firmament, fizzing with the energy and excitement that characterise artistic ventures bringing together talent and enterprise. And fun: I have enjoyed few professional puzzles more than the one Hytner set me in 2018 when, planning his immersive production of Julius Caesar, he asked for tips to help him design Brutus’s quarters to resemble a young Oxford don’s study.

During the crisis, he and his company have been busily collaborating with the BBC to produce a new run of Alan Bennett’s classic Talking Heads monologues. The list of performers is sensational - including Jodie Comer, Martin Freeman, Tamsin Greig, Lesley Manville, and Kristin Scott Thomas. The project is British culture at its best and most ingenious: the re-purposing of familiar texts for times of emergency.

Matthew d'Ancona

In similar spirit, if you haven’t watched the Globe Theatre’s Macbeth on YouTube, you really should. And then consider that this magnificent theatrical house, opened in 1997 after many years of visionary work by Sam Wannamaker, is now facing insolvency.

So shaken was the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee by the evidence of impending extinction submitted by the Globe that its Conservative chair, Julian Knight - scarcely a poodle of the liberal élite - has written to the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, urging him to avert the ‘tragedy’ of the theatre’s closure.

Most senior figures in the arts sector that I have spoken to understand, with varying degrees of sympathy, that the resumption of sport, and especially football, is the inevitable priority for a populist government. But they also want Dowden and his colleagues to understand how much is at stake if they delay much longer.

Fund-raisers in the arts world are used to scrimping and saving, trying not to raise ticket prices while paying their staff at least a living wage. Most performers are effectively part of the gig economy and many thousands have found that they do not have the necessary proof of steady earnings to qualify for Rishi Sunak’s various rescue schemes. We are losing a generation of talent to loopholes.

This has nothing to do with sentimentality or cheating taxpayers, it’s the opposite. Sunak must spend in haste

Meanwhile, hundreds of venues are dealing as nimbly as they can with the question of social distancing - how to make imaginative use of the space they have, especially where there is access, as in the Bridge’s vast entry area, to the open air. But institutions are also bracing themselves for the basic revenue crisis that will follow tentative reopening: how to pay the bills as productions are being rehearsed and tickets have yet to be bought. Very few artistic institutions have much working capital, and most of it will be gone before the Chancellor’s furloughing schemes expire.

As in so many respects, this pandemic has brought a brutal clarity to a structural problem. There is only one honest fiscal response to the funding crisis facing culture in this country and it is this: go big or go home.

Yes, Arts Council England has already made available £160 million to help arts institutions through the crisis. But - welcome as this is - it is a sticking-plaster compared to the subsidy needed to prevent a wave of closures and unemployment.

Those who understand how important the cultural sector is to the British way of life and its multiple identities will need little persuasion that a one-off Marshall Plan for the arts makes sense. Those who approach theatre and galleries and opera and ballet and museums with suspicion as havens of communism, veganism and unlicensed laughter might like to calm down and consider the following.

According to research in 2019 by the Centre for Economics and Business Research the sector generates £23 billion a year, contributes £2.8billion in taxation, and accounts directly for 363,700 jobs. For post-Brexit UK plc, the soft power of our global cultural reach and its gravitational pull to tourism will be more important than ever.

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To spell it out: we cannot afford not to pony up for British culture. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or cheating the taxpayer, but precisely the opposite. Spend in haste, Mr Sunak, or repent at leisure. This is one decision that is magnificently easy.

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