Creative Scotland should reconsider devastating cuts to Fire Exit theatre company

Fire Exit has received a 100 per cent cut in funding from Creative Scotland and will face potential closure in April 2019.

We are deeply perturbed by this decision. We tour multiaward-winning experimental theatre across Scotland and 90 per cent of our audience rate the shows as excellent or very good.

We’ve toured internationally across four continents for over a decade; 81 per cent of our press reviews are four or five stars. Reviewers describe our artistic director David Leddy as a “genius”, “maver- ick”, “iconoclast”, “star” and “leading theatrical innovator”.

Our partners include the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Tron Theatre, Take Me Somewhere, Royal Shakespeare Company, Anne Bogart’s SITI Company in New York.

Managerially we are in exemplary condition. We run five creative learning strands. In the last two years we have given 70 hours of mentoring and advice to 45 people and 96 per cent of mentees surveyed rated our support as excellent. Our Pyromania mentoring programme pays £1000 to playwriting mentees. We are deeply concerned about Creative Scotland’s process. In this funding round no advice was taken from external peer review panels.

Creative Scotland do not undertake any external or internal evaluations of artistic quality. We have been told that the final funding decisions were made by a senior management team who were not given sight of our funding application or business plan.

Their decision was based on an internal report about which we also have grave concerns as it contained factual errors and profound misrepresentations of our company.

Our application contained a wealth of evidence and statistics regarding our work, but the report made criticisms of our company that were unsubstantiated by evidence. In many instances the report ignored or misrepresented the facts and plans provided. It was written by a staff member who, as far as we’ve been told, has never seen our work.

Despite these errors, the report rated our work highly and recommended us for funding, but senior management chose to not fund us because “the Theatre RFO network should focus organisations [sic] which support and develop the wider sector”.

This sentence remains the only explanation we have received; and prior to this decision Creative Scotland has never given us any indication at all that they are unhappy with our work.

Creative Scotland now intends for us to apply to a new project fund which has not yet been designed. However, we develop our projects many years in advance and project funding would make this impossible.

We urge the Board of Creative Scotland to reconsider this decision. FIRE EXIT BOARD OF

TRUSTEES: KATRINA BROWN; MEADHBH HENDRIE; ANGUS MCCALLUM;

CHITRA RAMASWAMY; JOHN SCOTT MONCRIEFF;

KATIE STUART And 123 signatories including:

Liz Lochhead, Rona Munro, Louise Welsh, Eimear Mcbride ,

Maureen Beattie, Siobhán Redmond, Blythe Duff