Dramatic stand

SAMUEL WEST begins with a story about another actor, Sam Neill, who takes a bag of sweets into press interviews and offers a sweet for every question he hasn’t heard before.

There’s no bag on the table at York Theatre Royal. He doesn’t need any bribes because this chat isn’t about him or his work. “I’m simply a mouthpiece, or funnel if you like, rather than have a spotlight trained on myself, which it sometimes feels like when you’re publicising things you’ve done.”

He is in York to talk to audiences about the threatened double squeeze on funding from both local councils and the Arts Council faced by theatres up and down the country. West is here – and at other theatres up and down the country – not to fight against cuts because he knows they’re inevitable, but against senseless, swingeing cuts.

He is promoting My Theatre Matters, a campaign created by The Stage newspaper, Theatrical Management Association and Equity actors union with the aim of mobilising audiences to speak up in support of their local theatres.

The six-month-old campaign is building to a crescendo as councils begin to fix budgets. “So this is the point at which people’s voices are going to be heard and where we hope matter,”

says West, actor-director son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales.

The important thing that makes this campaign unique is that it’s about audiences, not about artists. It’s about mobilising the electorate and the community.

“Incidentally we need places to work so we can entertain you but this isn’t actually about us, it’s not about jobs for the boys. It’s about potential really. A good, cheap experience of the arts is a vital part of what makes you who you are or can be.

“It can comfort you and challenge you and disturb you, make you laugh and cry and think. Any local theatre that’s well-run and keeps things cheap, as this place does, should be a vital part of life for any citizen.”

The funding producing theatres receive from local councils and the Arts Council is “vanishingly small”, he says. “Most theatres operate on a very, very tight budget and nobody’s making a fortune. There’s precious little fat to cut. I’d say there is no fat to cut in most theatres, certainly in the ones I’ve had experience of.”

Councils may see cutting theatre funding as the easy option. “The arts are not a soft target and this campaign is here to say so because the sort of money you’re cutting to a theatre like this is a tiny, tiny proportion of your total budget.

“I know figures for two councils whose arts plans I demonstrated publicly against – Somerset and Westminster. Weirdly they have an arts budget that is the same proportion of their total budget which is 0.04 per cent – about £150,000 in both cases and they have both cut all of it.

“Westminster were facing a cut of £30m in a budget of £900m, which is roughly three per cent. If they had cut their arts budget by three per cent I wouldn’t be here, but they cut it by 100 per cent – that is punitive.

“If we get our share of the pain, fair enough.

I’ll grimace, I might curse privately. We can get through a period of three per cent cuts but we can’t get through a period of 100 per cent cuts.

“And for every council that does what Westminster did and Somerset did, and Newcastle tried to do, there will be others going, we could do a Newcastle.”

The council there proposed a 100 per cent cut to funding. After a campaign, they backtracked and set up a pot of money for which theatres can apply.

“I’m delighted Newcastle rode back from what they did but it’s still a massive cut in a city that is culturally thriving. Interestingly one of the things that made Newcastle back off was business people saying if you don’t think twice about reversing this cut we will think twice about investing in a cultural dessert.

These great new buildings that you’ve got won’t have anything in them and there’s got to be something for our workers to do in the evening.”

He worked with Newcastle writer Lee Hall on a revival of Alan Plater’s play Close The Coalhouse Door that toured after opening at Northern Stage in Newcastle last year.

“Lee is an example of somebody whose hinterland in Newcastle was really cultural. He’s grown up to write a musical (Billy Elliot) that is running in nine cities around the world and is about a miner’s son that does ballet. When we see it we don’t think ballet is only for people who can afford it, we think of course miners should do it, of course they should.

“It strikes us in exactly the right place that this campaign should strike us in – it’s all for all of us, not for those who can afford it. Because Lee says that beautifully, it sells and incidentally he makes millions of pounds for the treasury in VAT and theatre tickets, much more than it costs to support the theatre he wrote it in.

‘SO it’s a good investment as well. But ultimately it isn’t about money, it’s about pride and in this case pride is not a sin. Pride in your city and in what your city’s got that other cities haven’t got.”

“Civic pride is hard to put a price on but in this case you can – and it’s very small, just a tiny fraction of one per cent of any council’s budget. It will always be presented as a false dichotomy.

It will always be presented as meals on wheels or cheap tickets to the theatre.

“I recognise that things are going to be tight but I also know that we have a world-beating theatre industry. I think people like the idea that a tiny proportion of their taxes goes to support public entertainment, a place for them to go and dream in public.

“There will be other people who say I never go there why should my taxes go there? Well, more fool you if you don’t. It’s there, it’s cheap, it’s fun, it could change your life.”