Monday, August 18, 2014
We’ve had a year or more of being told that London gets unfairly weighted for subsidy against the regions. Figures have been strewn around the landscape, passions have been spent in the le…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:30AMMonday, August 11, 2014
There was a huge street party. Rappers, poets, reggae bands and classical musicians all turned up to entertain the 3,000-strong crowd. They were mostly – but not exclusively – black, and…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 11:43AMTuesday, August 5, 2014
Last week, the Watts Chapel in Compton, Surrey, was handed back to the restored gallery that its creator had also built. The eponymous artist – George Frederic Watts – came up with the i…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:39AMMonday, July 28, 2014
Labour’s shadow culture minister, Helen Goodman, has taken to her brief with enthusiasm. While the responsibility to shadow the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is nominally led by …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 11:16AMMonday, July 21, 2014
“It’s so bracing!” We’re all familiar with the poster for Skegness, with John Hassall’s rosy-cheeked and portly fisherman complete with seaboots and sou’wester frolicking on an o…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:55AMMonday, July 14, 2014
I was going to return to the arts council’s spending plans – I’m not going to use ACE’s adoptive banker-speak and refer to “investment” – now that the flotsam (that’s the use…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:27AMMonday, July 7, 2014
The arts council won’t say who has been cut from the national portfolio before it announces the three year settlement, let alone why, for the simple reason they won’t tell potential and…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 10:59AMMonday, June 30, 2014
Last weekend saw the 25th anniversary of the momentous demonstration on Bankside when the theatre world turned out to save the archaeological remains of the Rose Theatre from the developers&…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:33AMTuesday, June 24, 2014
On Friday, before a largely invited audience at the sedate if slightly shabby Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre, deep in the Urals in the far east of Russia, a remarkable premiere was offered by…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:16AMMonday, June 16, 2014
There is a cadre of venerable – no, not venerable, respected – people knocking about the arts who don’t owe allegiances to anyone except their friends and who occasionally step out and…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:20AMMonday, June 9, 2014
For the first time ever, lottery money is to be used to replace grant-in-aid arts funding. Those ‘additionality’ rules so jealously preserved by John Major’s Conservative gover…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:16AMMonday, June 2, 2014
Manchester, apparently, feels it doesn’t get its share of subsidy, claiming London is much too generously dealt with. Does it matter, or is it just another “I-don’t-care-how-you-read-t…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:36AMTuesday, May 27, 2014
Just as regional theatres are bracing themselves for the Arts Council’s funding pronouncement at the beginning of July, and as they continue to unpick the theatre production tax breaks ann…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 11:56AMMonday, May 19, 2014
When a new culture secretary is appointed the first question the press put to them is “What play did you last see?” It’s predicable, and every time there’s an embarrassing pause whil…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:00AMMonday, May 12, 2014
The data battle is going to be re-engaged this summer with the arts council’s new pay round, with figures being used and manipulated by all sides in the culture milieu to make different po…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:00AMTuesday, May 6, 2014
English National Opera’s roller coaster rumbles on. This summer it is likely to lose a substantial part of its annual arts council grant and be told that there will be no more ACE bale ou…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:43AMMonday, April 28, 2014
Theatre trade unions are stepping up their campaigns against the arts cuts, with the news that if the cultural industries thought they had had a hard time in the last three years, they ain�…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:49AMMonday, April 21, 2014
The funding cuts have been managed very adroitly by arts organisations so far. National subsidy has gone down by about 37% since 2011 and local funding by about 10%, but with imagination, wo…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:00AMMonday, April 14, 2014
This time last week Maria Miller was the culture secretary, glowing in the recent launch of the 14-18 NOW festival that was her brainchild, reputedly, and looking to hang on to her over-stuf…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 12:52PMMonday, April 7, 2014
Britain’s arts, with theatre to the fore, could be in for a new golden age of prosperity – with nothing to do with government. This is business. Carolyn Dailey was a senior executive at …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:46AMMonday, March 31, 2014
As we had all confidently hoped, Tony Hall has played the credentials as a genuine arts lover he earned at the Royal Opera House and given culture a major step up on the BBC’s agenda,̷…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:52AMMonday, March 24, 2014
So, announced in Wednesday’s Budget is a new scheme, coming in September, for cultural organisations to claim tax relief on productions of theatre, ballet, dance and opera, musicals and ot…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:43AMMonday, March 17, 2014
In Arts Council England’s This England report a couple of weeks ago and in Friday’s “evidence review” of “The value of arts and culture to people”, ACE tries to steer considerati…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:36AMMonday, March 10, 2014
We’re learning a lot from the forensic dissection in articles and television programmes of the run-up to the First World War, not just of history but, if we reflect a moment in the context…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:50AMMonday, March 3, 2014
The London-versus-the-rest controversy moves on. We’ve had academics, the artocrats, the politicians – oh, haven’t we had them – the funders, now we’re getting the workers.…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:27AMMonday, February 24, 2014
There’s still a popular opinion about critics that “those who can write/act/direct, those who can’t review”. It’s mostly popular among those who have been at the wrong end of a cri…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:17AMMonday, February 17, 2014
On Thursday I saw the future, and it doesn’t work. A simplistic, glib and over-cynical response, the good people at Nesta will say, but when a plea has to go out for someone who can...
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:54AMMonday, February 10, 2014
The debate on arts funding, begun by the report Rebelancing Our Cultural Capital, about the apparent disproportion in arts funding for the regions compared with London, reached the House of …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:49AMMonday, February 3, 2014
Gambling has long been the curse of the acting profession, with so many cinemas and playhouses having been taken over by bingo halls and more recently casinos. But, although there’s no way…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:46AMMonday, January 27, 2014
Maria Miller has defended her funding strategy once again, telling us that being able to make a good economic case has got a better deal out of the Treasury. It is not, of course, a...
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:00AMMonday, January 20, 2014
Southbank Centre artistic director Jude Kelly returns from duty at the Internet Services Providers’ Association conference in frozen New York today to find her cherished £120 million …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:27AM 
