Another sign of the Age of Austerity - The Castle Wellingborough Northants

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.

£19 million has been Cut from the Art Council's funding

As readers of my blog will know I have been following the proposed and now the reality of cuts to the Arts Council since the start of the year and now here is the latest news from the Arts Council. Here are two articles from the Stage newspaper.

£19 Million Cut from the Art Council's funding.

Now I say it HAS been cut mainly because the Government has asked them to do so which generally means there is no negotiation. However the Arts Council has made it clear that cutting 19 million is not really possible. Here the Stage continues its coverage with the second article.

£19 Million could harm frontline Arts.

And of course there is the BBC Arts Editors blog which covers the story here.

My opinion is that it doesn't matter how much they cut the Arts will survive, are we in for a dark time? Sure we are, its going to get tougher to get funding and the guidelines for funding will be followed with more scrutiny over the next few years but the good thing is that situations like this will make artists work harder to get their work seen and developed. £19 million as Will Gompertz is manageable but its still a hefty chunk and further cuts could curtail our cultural growth further... but it remains to be seen if more cuts will come, they probably will but we can hope they won't.