For a truly disturbing experience this weekend you needn't look any further than AA Gill's interview with David Hare in the Sunday Times today.
Apparently David Hare asked for AA Gill specifically - 'I'm only doing one piece of publicity for the play, so I thought it might as well be The Sunday Times, and it should be you.' In a staggeringly unconvincing display of the modesty he is famed for failing to possess, AA Gill claims to assume this is because Hare will consider him a 'soft touch'. It seems more likely however that both believe Hare was demanding a journalist of the imagined standard that he believed he deserved, as he begins with mundane and predictable side-swipe at The Critics, his main criticism being that they don't talk enough about David Hare any more - AA Gill to the rescue.
As part of his ongoing crusade to prove that AA Gill is better than all of theatre, AA Gill has taken this opportunity to attempt to best David Hare, an icon of what Gill sees as the theatre establishment and a man almost as pompous as he is. And so Gill ends every quotation from Hare with a snide rejoinder and finishes with a sneering affirmation of the fact that (like much of Hare's drama) when you are the one doing the writing, you can always come out looking cleverest. AA Gill must have poured himself a large glass of expensive but difficult wine and given himself a firm pat on the back when he finally emailed this of to the editor - another job well done, another mountain conquered.
In reality though, the whole thing comes across far more like too bald men fighting over an aphorism - and despite his belief in the importance of entertaining, the funniest and most insightful things Gill can muster are quotes from Stephen Fry and Michael Gambon, gentlemen who you can be sure would never feel the need to indulge in such an embarassing display of smug dick measuring.
The whole sad affair feels rather like rubber necking a car accident with egos. You end up swinging to and fro as to what's worse - Hare's tired theatrical binaries ("There are two sorts of playwright: those that use events and the real world, and those that just write out of their head" - so where do Kane/Crimp/Barker fit into this facile dichotomy?) and Gill's equally brainless put downs ("Theatre director is a new profession and, with a few exceptions, the ones we've got at the moment are pretty desperate."). Apparently the two are friends - the long nights of cigars on the veranda must absolutely fly by...
So where to next for the self-designated saviour of British Theatre. Perhaps AA Gill to direct a West End Revival of George Bernard Shaw? AA Gill to chair a live primetime debate on the future of theatre on BBC4?
I've heard it rumored that Arts Council England might need a spot of restructuring - anyone have a number for the Sunday Times?
Showing posts with label ACE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ACE. Show all posts
Jan 13, 2008
Jan 10, 2008
My Inevitable Two Cents on the Arts Council Hootenanny
Well.
Arts Council England.
Where do we start?
It’s not been a good week. Following several bouts of preparatory sparring, the theatre community yesterday were able to give executive director Peter Hewitt the bloodthirsty pummelling that they so wanted to – huing and crying and soapboxing and sound biting and generally performing a faintly repulsive and entirely unhelpful pantomime of aphoristic declamations, neatly rounded off by a headline grabbing and debate-suffocating ‘vote of no confidence’. Well done, well done all of you.
The problem for me is that arts community is now ostensibly holding a knife to its own nose and threatening to cut it off. Everything, everything, should be done to salvage the Arts Council. The alternatives are frankly terrifying – money handed out directly by a government who, in a couple of years time, are likely to be run by a man who has already demonstrated his contemptuous and smugly populist attitude towards theatre and the arts. A party and an ideology that fundamentally questions why theatre that is not able to make a profit should receive government funding to allow ‘artists’ to ponce around enjoying themselves.
Without the Arts Council what’s going to happen when funding quickly begins to be cut funding altogether, or to be channelled into what Mr Cameron terms ‘right[or should that be Right] causes’? Are we going to wheel out Sir Ian McKellan and Kevin Spacey again, to complain about our livelihoods being taken away? Will they be greeted with anything more than the disinterestedly amused tone of Mark Brown’s article (in The Guardian, for Christ’s sake, heaven forbid what the Daily Mail or The Telegraph would say)?
The Arts Council must be saved. This for me is a first principal – good theatre in this country (of any stripe) will not survive without it. Which is why I look at events like yesterday’s, and comments like Christine Payne’s (suggesting the ACE are "fundamentally and possibly irreparably damaged") as being almost as damaging to theatre as anything the arts council is doing. It’s all well and good rich Actors and Artistic Directors making melodramatic votes of no confidence in the ACE – it’s not their careers that are staked on its survival.
What we need is to begin to lobby for practical steps that can be taken to help revive an Arts Council who desperately need it. A new Chairman is about to be installed. Let’s prepare a series of positive changes to suggest to him (that may include reference to specific cuts) rather than machine gunning his predecessor – a man, who, frankly, is in no position to make concessions about the future of the ACE when he’s clearing his desk out in a couple of weeks time.
At Devoted and Disgruntled the two things that came up repeatedly from both those who were being supported by the arts council and those who were being cut, was more transparency and the inclusion of more peer review. Boom. There you go. That’s a start (one that the ever valiant Lyn Gardner has continues to trumpet on the Guardian Blog repeatedly, seeming ever more like an increasingly desperate Cassandra, watching the predicted disaster unfold in front of her).
There are two many agendas swilling around at the moment. People are too freely using ACE’s obvious failings as a stick with which to beat them for the decisions they have come to. People are all too quick to fly from these specific failings into a wholesale battle for the soul of theatre. I don’t support the idea of an arts council because I think it is likely to promote the kind of theatre I want, I don’t criticise it because it isn’t; I do both because with an Arts Council I simply won’t have the opportunity to make work, period. Or at least, it’ll be an awful lot harder. In this unreasoned maelstrom the claims of those with perfectly valid reasons to complain are diluted and misappropriated.
Look at the Bush for example. The Bush has my unqualified support in its attempts to reinstate its funding. It is an institution that continues to discover and support wonderful, talented theatre makers. It is unashamedly a small theatre and all the better for it. For a theatre to have so much influence and so much scope and such a legacy when it has less than 90 seats is a cause for celebration not for punishment. It is exactly the kind of place that can’t sustain itself on turnover and deserves the ACE’s support. That is all there is to it. Now how about we stop using this to draw a spurious line in the sand between modes of practise that, like some petty-minded War of the Roses, asks us to pick between two arbitrary constructs that relate nothing to the actual production of work.
Who’s voices are missing in all of this? Most of the time it’s the young companies. Those companies that don’t have a voice yet but in a few years (with the support of the Arts Council) might be doing some of the most exciting, wonderful, relevant things in theatre. For now, they remain obscured. They are the flipside to these cuts. They are the reason for these cuts. And though I don’t begrudge anyone failing to go gently into that sweet night, it’s important to remember that they must be given an opportunity to blossom, and that that opportunity will come at someone else’s expense. It’s tough. Brutal, in fact. And almost anyone making theatre must feel that their work is vital and significant and deserving of the ACE’s support, but there will never be enough to go round. While the water continues to be muddied between what the arts council has done and how they’ve done it, it is these young companies that will essentially suffer.
Or rather, it is everyone who will eventually suffer, for not cherishing a flawed, vital concept enough. For reaching for the knife when everybody else was, for joining a confused legion of conflicting agendas and collectively delivering ACE a vindictive death blow. If we don’t watch out, in the sweltering heat of this year’s messy protestations, we’ll do more harm than any ACE Chief Executive ever did.
[For the record, although I have worked for a variety of institutions that have been well-supported by ACE, in my capacity as a theatre maker I have had work directly funded by them]
Arts Council England.
Where do we start?
It’s not been a good week. Following several bouts of preparatory sparring, the theatre community yesterday were able to give executive director Peter Hewitt the bloodthirsty pummelling that they so wanted to – huing and crying and soapboxing and sound biting and generally performing a faintly repulsive and entirely unhelpful pantomime of aphoristic declamations, neatly rounded off by a headline grabbing and debate-suffocating ‘vote of no confidence’. Well done, well done all of you.
The problem for me is that arts community is now ostensibly holding a knife to its own nose and threatening to cut it off. Everything, everything, should be done to salvage the Arts Council. The alternatives are frankly terrifying – money handed out directly by a government who, in a couple of years time, are likely to be run by a man who has already demonstrated his contemptuous and smugly populist attitude towards theatre and the arts. A party and an ideology that fundamentally questions why theatre that is not able to make a profit should receive government funding to allow ‘artists’ to ponce around enjoying themselves.
Without the Arts Council what’s going to happen when funding quickly begins to be cut funding altogether, or to be channelled into what Mr Cameron terms ‘right[or should that be Right] causes’? Are we going to wheel out Sir Ian McKellan and Kevin Spacey again, to complain about our livelihoods being taken away? Will they be greeted with anything more than the disinterestedly amused tone of Mark Brown’s article (in The Guardian, for Christ’s sake, heaven forbid what the Daily Mail or The Telegraph would say)?
The Arts Council must be saved. This for me is a first principal – good theatre in this country (of any stripe) will not survive without it. Which is why I look at events like yesterday’s, and comments like Christine Payne’s (suggesting the ACE are "fundamentally and possibly irreparably damaged") as being almost as damaging to theatre as anything the arts council is doing. It’s all well and good rich Actors and Artistic Directors making melodramatic votes of no confidence in the ACE – it’s not their careers that are staked on its survival.
What we need is to begin to lobby for practical steps that can be taken to help revive an Arts Council who desperately need it. A new Chairman is about to be installed. Let’s prepare a series of positive changes to suggest to him (that may include reference to specific cuts) rather than machine gunning his predecessor – a man, who, frankly, is in no position to make concessions about the future of the ACE when he’s clearing his desk out in a couple of weeks time.
At Devoted and Disgruntled the two things that came up repeatedly from both those who were being supported by the arts council and those who were being cut, was more transparency and the inclusion of more peer review. Boom. There you go. That’s a start (one that the ever valiant Lyn Gardner has continues to trumpet on the Guardian Blog repeatedly, seeming ever more like an increasingly desperate Cassandra, watching the predicted disaster unfold in front of her).
There are two many agendas swilling around at the moment. People are too freely using ACE’s obvious failings as a stick with which to beat them for the decisions they have come to. People are all too quick to fly from these specific failings into a wholesale battle for the soul of theatre. I don’t support the idea of an arts council because I think it is likely to promote the kind of theatre I want, I don’t criticise it because it isn’t; I do both because with an Arts Council I simply won’t have the opportunity to make work, period. Or at least, it’ll be an awful lot harder. In this unreasoned maelstrom the claims of those with perfectly valid reasons to complain are diluted and misappropriated.
Look at the Bush for example. The Bush has my unqualified support in its attempts to reinstate its funding. It is an institution that continues to discover and support wonderful, talented theatre makers. It is unashamedly a small theatre and all the better for it. For a theatre to have so much influence and so much scope and such a legacy when it has less than 90 seats is a cause for celebration not for punishment. It is exactly the kind of place that can’t sustain itself on turnover and deserves the ACE’s support. That is all there is to it. Now how about we stop using this to draw a spurious line in the sand between modes of practise that, like some petty-minded War of the Roses, asks us to pick between two arbitrary constructs that relate nothing to the actual production of work.
Who’s voices are missing in all of this? Most of the time it’s the young companies. Those companies that don’t have a voice yet but in a few years (with the support of the Arts Council) might be doing some of the most exciting, wonderful, relevant things in theatre. For now, they remain obscured. They are the flipside to these cuts. They are the reason for these cuts. And though I don’t begrudge anyone failing to go gently into that sweet night, it’s important to remember that they must be given an opportunity to blossom, and that that opportunity will come at someone else’s expense. It’s tough. Brutal, in fact. And almost anyone making theatre must feel that their work is vital and significant and deserving of the ACE’s support, but there will never be enough to go round. While the water continues to be muddied between what the arts council has done and how they’ve done it, it is these young companies that will essentially suffer.
Or rather, it is everyone who will eventually suffer, for not cherishing a flawed, vital concept enough. For reaching for the knife when everybody else was, for joining a confused legion of conflicting agendas and collectively delivering ACE a vindictive death blow. If we don’t watch out, in the sweltering heat of this year’s messy protestations, we’ll do more harm than any ACE Chief Executive ever did.
[For the record, although I have worked for a variety of institutions that have been well-supported by ACE, in my capacity as a theatre maker I have had work directly funded by them]
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