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 06:30AMThere 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 11:43AMLast 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 05:39AMLabour’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 11:16AM“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 07:55AMI 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 06:27AMThe 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 10:59AMLast 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 08:33AMOn 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 08:16AMThere 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 05:20AMFor 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 05:16AMManchester, 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 04:36AMJust 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 11:56AMWhen 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 04:00AMThe 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 04:00AMEnglish 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 05:43AMTheatre 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 03:49AMThe 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 05:00AMThis 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 12:52PMBritain’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 06:46AMAs 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 06:52AMSo, 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 06:43AMIn 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 06:36AMWe’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 05:50AMThe 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 06:27AMThere’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 05:17AMOn 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 05:54AMThe 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 06:49AMGambling 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 05:46AMMaria 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 04:00AMSouthbank 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
