Unless you've been locked in a sealed box for the last month, you'll know that this week the Scots will decide whether they want to be joined at the hip with England. For all that…
It will be a big night on Thursday when Maxine Peake starts her new job as an associate artist at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. Not that the audience will be bothered about her status…
There's a contradiction about near-legendary Sheffield-based experimentalists Forced Entertainment. On the one hand, it has been at the far front end of performance and innovation, on the ot…
When theatrical people get involved in politics, like the Tricycle Theatre's artistic director Indhu Rubasingham cancelling the UK Jewish Film Festival's showings there, a creepy tingle runs…
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 lett…
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 it …
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 idea …
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 La…
"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 otherwise des…
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 useful cargo that f…
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 f…
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&…
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…
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 prono…
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 governm…
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-the-dat…
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 annou…
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 while they r…
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 poin…
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…
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't…
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…
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…
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 the&…
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,…