The Castle Theatre Wellingborough is a community theatre in Northamptonshire. It contains a main house which seats five hundred and three audience members and an eighty nine seat studio theatre. It even contains rooms for a youth theatre group, resident artists space and an art gallery. The Castle is a pivotal part of local life in Wellingborough who use it not just as a theatre space but also as a community centre. Now the venue needs to find an organisation to take over the space before the first of February to secure the jobs of its staff, unfortunately even if The Castle does get another organisation to take it over the local council will cut its funding by ten percent in April. Considering that in 2010 this mainly amatuer and community theatre venue had such artists as Victoria Wood, Jenny Eclair and Julian Clary put on their work there and that it hosts the East Midlands Youth Theatre Festival every year this will be a terrible blow to Wellingborough. I have always had a problem with closing regional theatres and with them losing their funding and to see what this venue offers and realise that the excellent services they provide will have to be cut does make me worry about the future of regional theatre. With the rise in ticket prices for West End and big city venues run by the larger theatre groups it is more important now than ever that a cheaper option in the provinces is widely available. We all have to do our bit to dig the UK out of this black hole of debt but do we really know what the cultural and educational cost of all this cutting is going to mean to our society in twenty years time. For more information please read this article by Bernie Goodjohn of the Northants Evening Telegraph.
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