They deserve better
Creative Scotland’s decision to axe funding for seven leading touring theatre companies defies logic, and its failure to explain its reasoning beggars belief
First, let’s spare a thought, this week, for Scotland’s culture minister, Fiona Hyslop. She has now held the post for a remarkable seven years; and in an age of mounting Uk-wide austerity, she has played a blinder of a game throughout, in persuading her colleagues of the need for the Scottish government to keep on supporting the country’s artists, and their work. Two months ago, in the final tussle over Scotland’s budget that followed the UK autumn budget statement on 22 November, she did particularly well, persuading finance minister Derek Mackay not only to avoid cuts to Creative Scotland and the rest of the arts, but to offer Creative Scotland an additional sum to compensate for declining arts Lottery income; and Scotland’s arts community and creative organisations breathed a sigh of relief.
So it says something about the decision-making process and presentational skills of Scotland’s main arts funding agency, Creative Scotland, that when its long-awaited three-year funding announcement came, on 25 January, it was greeted not with quiet satisfaction, but with cries of outrage and disbelief. Despite a massive artist-led campaign back in 2012 to make Creative Scotland a less managerialist and jargon-led organisation, it is still an agency that generates blizzards of impenetrable reports and strategies, in all of which principles like equality, diversity and inclusion loom large, along with the importance of arts for children and young people.
Yet somehow – in apparent defiance both of those principles, and of the fact that 2018 is the Scottish Government’s Year Of Young People
– the list of 116 core companies to receive three-year regular funding did not include seven of Scotland’s leading touring theatre companies, including two – Birds Of Paradise and Lung Ha – that are widely recognised for their groundbreaking work with performers with disabilities, and Scotland’s two principal companies making world-class theatre for children, Catherine Wheels of Musselburgh, and Visible Fictions of Glasgow.
The other high-profile victims – Fire Exit, Rapture Theatre and street theatre specialists Mischief La Bas – had also received excellent assessments of their work; but given the world-leading achievements of Scotland’s current generation of artists with disability and the inspirational role of both Catherine Wheels and Visible Fictions in building up an acclaimed children’s theatre sector, the decision affecting those companies seemed exceptionally perverse. Even the minister, in a rare public rebuke to an arms’-length organisation, tweeted that Creative Scotland should have been clearer about their future plans for companies in these key areas.
For it appears that Creative Scotland has a plan, of sorts, for those companies; but a plan which, extraordinarily, it had never directly mentioned to, or discussed with, the senior artists and companies affected until they received their devastating “Dear John” emails on 24 January. Coincidentally with the current RFO (regularly funded organisation) application process, Creative Scotland has been conducting a review of theatre touring in Scotland; and the decision to address longstanding problems in that area – with a new touring fund which will operate from April 2019 – is to be welcomed.
What was anticipated by no-one, though – except by Creative Scotland’s own in-house theatre team, who took the final decision only after the Scottish budget announcement on 14 December – was that Creative Scotland would react to the advent of this fund by, at the last minute, stripping seven of their highestachieving non-building-based companies of the RFO funding for which they had applied in good faith more than nine months earlier, and telling them that from April 2019, their funding will be dependent on their ability to bid successfully into a touring fund process that has not yet been fully set up, and that the companies themselves are being invited to help design. Laura Mackenzie Stuart, head of Creative Scotland’s theatre team, says that companies should not see this is as a demotion, or as an adverse comment on the quality of their work; one form of funding, she said this week, is not inferior to another.
The fact that Creative Scotland can say this, though, to internationally recognised companies used to undertaking commitments on a three-yearly basis, while ripping that small amount of security from under them, putting their very livelihoods in jeopardy, and inviting them to help design a new competitive annual funding system under which they will never achieve even that small measure of certainty again, is the mark of a bureaucracy that, despite fine words to the contrary, neither fully respects the work of those organisations, nor fully understands the impact on artists of its own decisions.
Now of course, any professional observer of the UK’S public sector since the 1980s could write a book about how we came to this pass, not only in arts funding, but in areas from the NHS to the BBC now plagued by layers of expensive and irrelevant managerialist thinking.
What’s most depressing about the current situation, though, is that even with a Scottish government that understands and supports the worth of its artists, and a creative community well equipped to argue its case, we are still stuck with an arts funding bureaucracy so insensitive to a vital part of its constituency, and to the real meaning of its own stated values, that it can walk straight into this kind of mess without apparently even anticipating the row that would result. To say that Creative Scotland needs a complete change of culture, and to be returned to the hands of those who will gladly get on – within a few core principles – with the business of funding great artists to make great art, is to state the obvious. How to get from here to there, though, is another question; although one that some of Scotland’s finest, funniest and most inventive creative minds are now bent on answering, long before the next three-year funding review ever gets under way.
To say that Creative Scotland needs a complete change of culture is to state the obvious