Category: theatre

The Royal Shakespeare Company reports that it lost £1 million last year, “bringing its cumulative loses to £2.4 million. The company’s experimental season at London’s Roundhouse was “a financial disaster even though artistically it had its moments.” And this is the company with ambitious reorganization plans. “for the first time the staggering costs of the company’s reorganisation have become clear. Its administrators are budgeting on spending at least £9.2 million.”

Do London editors and critics ignore the rest of the country’s theatre endeavors? At least one director thinks so. “In other European countries, places like Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh would be all considered to be centres of endeavour. We are not really given that credit, and it makes people resentful; we do not need these divisions.”

London’s National Theatre began the year with a £626,000 debt, which it hoped to eliminate by next March. But thanks to the commercial box office success of My Fair Lady, the theatre popped into the black last March, about a year early. But, the theatre warns, financial prospects for the next season look less certain than usual.

Trevor Nunn leaves the National with a record of success As director, he introduced many new plays, generated lots of buzzand even…gasp.. made some money with high-profile commercial prouctions…Still, there were those pesky critics who refused to leave him alone.

Seven new shows are opening on Broadway this month – a lot for the holiday season. ”Some people say that fighting for media space with the movies, which always open a lot of films between Thanksgiving and Christmas, is a mistake. ‘Others think you have the excitement of the holiday season when people are focused on going out and consuming entertainment. So maybe it’s the perfect time to be in front of the public.”

Why aren’t more theatre performances recorded? Especially the really good ones, the historic ones? “We have the technological means to record a show without huge financial outlay and with a fair degree of style. It’s called video. We do commit theatre to tape in this country but we do so so sparingly, so shamefacedly, that it ought to be a national scandal.”

Hamish Glen, artistic director of Scotland’s award-winning Dundee Rep and one of Britain’s most highly-acclaimed theatre directors, has angrily quit the theatre and says he is joining “the drain of talent to the south”. He accused the government of not supporting the arts and predicted “a bleak few years of theatre-making in Scotland. ‘It becomes very dispiriting if somehow the culture doesn’t feel itself able to invest in its own success. It is a very energy sapping battle with no light at the end of the tunnel’.”

There are increasing doubts about the Scottish executive’s commitment to a plan for a national Scottish theatre. There are “mutterings in the theatrical world that it is using the alleged commitment to a national theatre to hide its other shortcomings in arts policy.”

Financially struggling German theatres have eliminated 6,000 jobs out of 45,000 in an effort to cut expenses and survive. But theatre leaders say “eliminating more would be impossible without damages to the substance.”

In a cost-cutting move, the Israeli government proposes to cut the budgets of the country’s national theatres by 25 percent. “Theater executives say the cumulative 25 percent cut in their budgets threatens to topple the entire industry.”