On UK Arts Funding, Toby Young Makes Me Sad

Toby Young's piece in the Guardian makes me mourn and wail and sigh. Headlined "Culture: Why Small Theatres Shouldn't Get Handouts," this is the kind of ignorant claptrap that gives arts-funding policy a bad name. Maybe Young thinks the world is flat, too.

I would ordinarily not quote so liberally -- pardon the pun -- quote from a story, but the first five of the seven-graph think piece stunned me:

Britain's luvvies are up in arms at the Arts Council's proposed funding cuts to various regional theatres. They are concerned that many of the venues that depend on Arts Council subsidies – such as the Bristol Old Vic, the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and the Bush — will be forced to close if their annual grants are cut.

I'm sceptical about this. Surely the theatres in question will only go out of business if they continue to put on plays that fail to capture the public's imagination. It is only because they don't sell enough tickets that they're forced to depend on hand-outs. If their artistic directors were a little more in touch with the taste of ordinary theatre-goers, their survival wouldn't be in jeopardy.

The standard reply to this argument is that adopting such a commercial approach would lead to the end of the risk-taking that is a necessary condition of creative vitality.

In this light, subsidised theatres are the laboratories in which young writers and innovative directors are free to experiment. The vast majority of these productions will fail to put bums on seats, but some will be such artistic successes that they will go on to play to packed houses in the West End. A case in point is Jerry Springer: The Opera (pictured), which opened at the heavily subsidised Battersea Arts Centre.

I'm not convinced by this. Take the Menier Chocolate Factory. This 200-seat venue, which opened in 2004, is among the most successful fringe theatres in the UK, yet it has never received a penny of public funding. The production of Dealer's Choice currently playing at Trafalgar Studios began life at the Menier, as did the production of Sunday in the Park With George set to open on Broadway. It's latest production – a revival of La Cage aux Folles – has received glowing reviews and will almost certainly transfer to the West End later this year.

My first problem is the idea that, on the priority list for the theatre's accomplishments, capturing the public's imagination must rank first, second, third and fourth, all the way down to last. I'm a capitalist, yes, but these are the rambling of capitalistic swine. In a more healthy artistic atmosphere, theatre captures the public's imagination, yes, but it also leads and teaches; it rankles and it challenges; it swaggers and it defies; it sets standards and bends them and destroys them; it makes demands and it makes compromises; it wrestles and pins you down or, alternatively, it yelps and screams "uncle." As Young sees it, the only theatre of artistic value is the theatre that has literal value. And yet, Young writes,

"The standard reply...is that adopting such a commercial approach would lead to the end of the risk-taking that is a necessary condition of creative vitality."

Well, that's rather black and white, don't you think? Young goes on to talk about how the Menier Chocolate Factory in London has gotten along quite well without public subsidy, thank you, from its revival of Sunday in the Park with George (now transferring to Broadway following a very successful West End run) to its revival of La Cage aux Folles (about to segue to a West End run as well). But for every Menier Chocolate Factory -- oh, by the way, I was unaware that reviving preexisting works counted as risk-taking -- that triumphs, how many fail? The parallels with the nonprofit institutional theatre situation in the US are quite obvious, at least to me.

What really hurt me is this statement:

"It is only because they don't sell enough tickets that they're forced to depend on hand-outs."

Do I detect a note of hostility? Obviously ticket-selling is important, but if that's the most important thing, are we not, indeed, talking about a strict, unyielding commercial producing model? Consider now the final two graphs of Young piece:

"While the Menier's success can partly be chalked up to the entrepreneurial zeal of its founders, David Babani and Danielle Tarento, it also finds space for new work. In 2005, a play by Ryan Craig called What We Did to Weinstein was shortlisted for the Evening Standard's "Most Promising Playwright" award. Would the Menier have been so artistically successful had its directors had the safety net of a grant?

The real dispute here isn't between commercially minded philistines and high-minded theatre-lovers. Rather, the issue turns on who you consider the best judges of artistic merit: the theatre-going public or a bunch of Government-appointed apparatchiks. The Menier's success suggests it should be the former."

Again, bravo for the Menier Chocolate Factory. But how many companies never, owing to the Ayn Rand-worshipping slavishness of the conservative ultra-right (even in the UK), have the opportunity to present such work?

I, for one, do happen to believe that the dispute is between those who favor commerical theatre versus those who favor subsidized work, although, if we all agree that we want the best possible theatre we can get, then we should want those two seemingly opposed philosophies to find ways to work together. (The trend toward enhancement money is a good example.) Personally, I fail to understand why the reigning philosophy must be all of one or all of the other.

Further, if the idea that we must reflexively let the market decided all matters of theatrical art, why stop there? Why not, for example, compel museums to submit ideas for curated exhibits to a public referendum? Or force symphonies to submit concert selections to the same? Why not have the general public indicate, by vote, what dance companies ought to dance?

In something that resembles an enlightened society, "government-appointed apparatchiks," in fact, would not be nameless, faceless, blameless, wan-colored ghosts, but experts in their field and representative of a vast range of disciplines, aesthetics and beliefs. Maybe, in the world of UK public arts subsidy, that's the problem. But let's not slam those companies that depend on arts subsidies, and let's not attempt to con free-thinking people with blather about the fortunes of one company symbolizing the paradigm by which all theatres must model themselves.

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Crisis in the West End? Where New York's Michael Billington?

I'm finally catching up with some posts I've been meaning to put out there. Mind you, I should be working on the book, the whole book, and nothing but the book tonight, but even nose-to-the-grindstoners like me have to take a break now and then, and I really feel like my desk is just about overflowing with things I want to take care of, so...ugh, does that sound defensive? Yeah, guess it does.

Anyway, at the beginning of this month this article by Michael Billington in the Guardian really caught my eye. It's long but worth a read because, among other things, it's beautifully written and, in certain respects, terribly insightful, and it also, perhaps most important, permits those of us who are stateside an opportunity for a little bit of reflection on the state of our own West End and beyond.

You can get the upshot by skipping the needlessly alarmist headline ("Crisis in the West End") and focus instead on the uncommonly long dek ("Theatreland is in dire straits. Second-rate musicals rule, new drama is dying, and the venues are falling apart. The time has come for a revolution...").

I'm not going to (re)print the entire piece here, but there are a number of sentences and graphs that really stand out for me. For example, Billington writes, "Never in my lifetime has London's West End theatre looked so narrow in its range of choices or so out of touch with contemporary reality." When I first read this sentence, I thought, Gee, he could just as soon be referring to the commercial theatre in New York. Indeed, Billington's follow up sentence reads, "And it is high time the crisis was confronted and a debate launched abouot what we expect of commercial theatre." Among other things, it struck me as extraordinary that a critic, in this day and age, would presume that there are any expectations to be had of the commercial theatre, let alone the idea that we might choose to publicly assail them or debate them. It seems to me that here in New York we have become so utterly inured to the inevitability of commercial theatre's divorcement from assured quality (and often reality, though not if you're a Grease fan reality TV) that the whole notion of debating its usefulness is almost quaint.

From there, Billington lays out his argument, suggesting that while West End statistics are all happiness and light -- record attendance of 12 million, or roughly the same as Broadway; about $400 million in grossess and $800 million in economic benefits (adjusting pounds to dollars) -- it is without "any dynamic creative initiative."

If Billington's definition of "dynamic creative initiative" is one to be admired and one by which to measure our own (I'd say yes to both), it is also one quite capable of injecting a note of profound gloom into how we evaluate our own commercial scene. "At this moment," he writes, "there are 26 musicals in the West End but only seven straight plays and three comedies." In New York, the last time the genre of the straight play was viewed as something of an autonomous entity from the genre of the comedy I do believe Lunt and Fontanne, or maybe David Belasco, were still in their infancies.

It is curious to me that when Billington drills down further, when he examines "the provenance of the shows currently playing," he turns the default position of us Yankees -- that we're forever being overrun with British imports -- into a case study in agonizing irony: "...12 derive either from films or TV programmes or are compilation shows drawn from back catalogues. That leaves 14 shows that might loosely be described as 'original,' even if many of them are adapted from novels."

To get to my point, many of the musicals he cites originated outside of the West End -- Wicked and Avenue Q from the US; The Drowsy Chaperone from the US by way of Canada; The Lord of the Rings direct from its lame tryout last year in Toronto. In other words, we're fond of the argument that Broadway is full of British transfers, but Billington is saying that the West End is full of American transfers.

Later, a couple of paragraphs down, he warns that "if the West End musical relies parasitically on American imports, the straight play as a commercial proposition seems to be in an even more parlous state." Oh, irony, irony! I thought that Broadway as a whole was relying parasitically on the West End. Or is it? Or was it? Or will it be again?

Billington then writes about some things that I think we might well find wildly redolent to our own parlous (love the word) theatrical situation(s). After discussing the straight plays currently running and ruefully comparing the West End's fallow fare to the embarrassment of riches he encountered upon first becoming a critic in 1971, he writes, "The audience for plays basically goes to subsidized theatres. They will only pay West End prices if offered a bona fide star." I'd argue that not only is this true, but perhaps that it is just as well, frankly. Indeed, perhaps what our equivalent -- the nonprofit business model -- is ultimately the best at is the preservation, development and perpetuation of drama, including new drama; and engaging in this preserving, developing and perpetuating without, at least initially, the pressures of commoditization. I know, I know: nonprofits that enter into development deals and enhancement funds with for-profit commercial producers can be accused to putting the profitization cart before the aesthetic horse, but that's a subject for another day -- most nonprofits fostering new plays aren't operating with enhancement money for every project. In sum, I don't know that Billington's lament that plays are no longer viable or far less viable in the commercial sphere is necessarily a bad thing in the end. I almost think it could be seen as a necessary check on the crassness of commercialization.

Billington, I should add, discusses the physical plant of the West End skillfully and with smart detail; I don't know that Broadway theatres have quite the same issue, what with extra ticket charges supposedly going to renovation and preservation of the buildings themselves. I had to laugh, though, when I read that "60% of West End theatres had seats from which the stage was not fully visible, and that 48% had inadequate foyers and bars." What exactly, I wonder, constitutes "fully visible." And heaven knows an unstocked Broadway bar is reason to riot.

Much of this carping and winge-ing is not without suggestions for change. Billington refers to the "urgent need" for "dynamic young producers to succeed the senior generation" currently ruling the commercial roost; he fears "the relative scarcity of applicants who think in broad commercial terms: reared in the ethos of Fringe theatre, they largely come armed with small-scale projects." Here, again, I'm not so sure something has been lost...I think that to the extent that the fringe (and Fringe) mentality in New York has been fiscally unable to think in broad commercial terms for at least a generation, it seems to me that the work has, of necessity, been able to blossom beautifully in its diversity, intelligence, daring, wizardry, dynamism, hope and swagger. I think if you properly subsidized artists, if you considered producers of conscience and taste to be among them (and they're out there), you'd find no lack whatsoever of people thinking in terms of large-scale projects. The problem is one of accessibility, of practicality, not of vision. And I don't think, unlike Billington, that the commercial theatre is -- or should be -- the only or the primary forum from which large-scale projects might be tackled.

Finally, two things. First, I absolutely loved the fervor and ferment in Billington's final graph. Check this out:

"I'd like to see Sunday openings, lottery money for the rotting fabric, more imaginative use of the buildings themselves: in particular, pre-show talks, jazz and poetry recitals, stand-up comics in the dead hours before the 7:30pm opening. If the commercial theatre can't bear the subsidized sector, it should, in effect, join it: not only by adopting its practices but by employing its personnel. ...[W]hat it needs are director-managers, or even dramatist-impresarios, of proven vision."

There, for once, is something concrete to chew on, if you'll allow me to mix metaphors.

Meanwhile, the second thing actually takes me back to my discovery of the article itself, when Billington raged red-faced and waxed rhetorical about the disconnection between theatre of substance and meaning and what theatregoers are currently being presented with in the West End commercial marketplace. Being a story on the Web, the Guardian naturally runs ads smack in the middle of the story; in this case it was an advertisement that I think really sums up the whole problem. Here, direct from YouTube, is the ad:



Does that just say it all?

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On Matt Wolf On Ben Brantley On Matt Wolf On Ben Brantley

Talk about meta. You've got Matt Wolf, a perfectly good critic, on the Guardian's blog blogging about tailing Ben Brantley of the New York Times who is tailing himself, in essence, by blogging about his trip to London on the Times' ArtsBeat blog -- 27 shows in 21 days, and suffering from food poisoning, thus preventing him, it seems, from checking out the 47th revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

But it does make me wonder about something...if it is so significant that Brantley is in London reporting on West End theater for American audiences, why aren't there prominent U.K. critics here doing the same thing for their readers? Does it say something that they, at the moment, are not?

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Watching a Dog Consume Its Own Vomit

Very funny and very on-point article in the Guardian, issue of June 28.

Salient graphs:

There's a new recycling process evident in the arts: the decent film which spawns a lousy musical now spawns an ever more dreadful movie.

And:

All this is a little like watching a dog consume its own vomit. We have become a witless, disposable culture, and it shows most clearly in our popular entertainment. Bad enough that theatre should look to the pop charts for inspiration; that it should also go scrounging from Hollywood - where original ideas are rarer than full-fat lattés - is little short of terrifying. How long before some enterprising young producer seizes upon the chance to make a movie of the musical of "Spamalot"?("This 'Knights Who Say Ni!' stuff...this is gold!") Or a musical re-telling of that sparkling comedy classic, "Legally Blonde"?

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