Earlier this week, Arts Council head Peter Hewitt put on the year’s least popular stage show in living memory.
His matinee at the Young Vic in Ken Livingstone’s “We’re Cutting All Your Funding and Spending it on the Olympics” met with a chorus of boos from an audience that included Sir Ian McKellen, Kevin Spacey, Joanna Lumley, Richard Briers, Caroline Quentin, Sheila Hancock and Jonathan Pryce. Sheffield Theatre’s director Sam West even leapt onto stage to express his disapproval.
It’s not just regional theatres that are suffering from the cuts – Richmond’s Orange Tree is losing nearly a fifth of its funding, and The Bush is set to suffer a potentially fatal 40% cut.
And yet… in a couple of weeks, the giant Lyttleton Theatre at the National, a tenth of whose funding would probably keep the Bush going for a decade is to put on a production of Peter Handke’s 'The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other', which they describe as:
“Twenty-seven actors, 450 characters and no dialogue: a play without words by the great experimental figure of European theatre.”
To you this might mean very little: an easy decision to steer well clear of the National Theatre for a month or so and rave reviews in The Guardian and Time Out to read and shake your head at. It’s a little tougher on those of us who occasionally get called upon to write reviews, since there’s always a risk of having to actually sit through the bloody thing, trying to think of something nice to say about it, since it’s clearly Art.
Bur more importantly, this kind of grimly self-important theatrical navel-gazing is a quite extraordinary way to spend a subsidy. No dialogue? 450 characters? Could you not just sit on Eros and watch the tourists bumping into each other around Piccadilly Circus to get that kind of entertainment? And then there’s opera, which currently absorbs about a sixth of London’s arts budget so that fat hedge fund managers can take a break from their mistresses and treat their wives to a night of exquisitely tasteful boredom. Or contemporary dance, which is either dull or pornographic. And while I’m quite happy with the latter, I’m not sure I really need quite so much of my income tax to be spent on it.
The process by which theatres’ subsidies are calculated currently makes about as much sense as a Beckett monologue. I propose a simpler method: for every use of the word ‘abstract’, ‘experimental’, ‘ground-breaking’, ‘avant garde’, or ‘wordless’ in a review of a show, the theatre gets 1% of its subsidy passed on to a smaller venue. And ‘physicality’, ‘serio-comic’ and ‘radical’ count for double. Problem solved.
Off the streets, into the Dungeon!
A controversial idea bandied about for the London Dungeon’s Jack the Ripper show would take reality entertainment to new levels. Think ‘celebrity judge’ Billie Piper, star of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, think prostitutes on London’s streets, think auditions and you’ve got a ready-made formula or recipe for disaster – yes, that’s right, real-life prostitutes to become the imaginary ones in the show…what is it they say about all publicity being good publicity?
The Art of Shopping
Sometimes it looks as if Selfridges’ famous window displays are works of art and now they actually are. But, of course, the luxury department store’s latest display is nothing to do with publicity and everything to do with the art (spot the cynic). Charitably, they are giving this space, named the Wonder Windows, as a showcase for up-and-coming young artists who might otherwise not get such a prime exhibition spot.
Muscling In
It seems that an ‘alien species’ of mussels in the Thames are flexing their…er, shells and threatening native species. Apart from being surprised that anything can actually survive in the Thames, there has apparently been a zebra mussel invasion, according to the Marine Conservation Society, which is surprising as they come from south-east Russia. The greatest danger from the little blighters is to the depressed river mussel – no wonder they’re depressed!
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