Drama school takes to stage to restore Arches club licence
RCS chief claims closure would be threat to contemporary arts in UK
SCOTLAND’S leading theatrical talent school has added its weight to the campaign for a key arts venue to have its licence to stage club nights restored.
Hugh Hodgart, the director of drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), writes in a letter published today that “any threat to the future of The Arches as a contemporary performance venue is a threat to Glasgow’s place within Scotland, the UK and beyond”. The strongly supportive letter from the RCS comes as more than 400 artists, including writers, playwrights, actors, DJs and musicians, released an open letter expressing their “shock and dismay” at the effective removal of the venue’s nightclub status by Glasgow City Council’s Licensing Board last week.
More than 36,000 people have also signed a petition urging the city to allow the venue to once again stage club nights, the income from which subsidises the venue’s artistic and cultural activity.
Mr Hodgart says The Arches is a “special friend and partner” to the RCS and concludes: “At a time when Scotland is leading the world in active citizenship, it would be a matter of great regret if one of its most influential contemporary performance venues was no longer playing its vital role in broadening boundaries and challenging cultural conservatism.”
The club’s licence was revoked following a string of drug and alcohol-related incidents. The board of The Arches meets next week and may still appeal the licensing board’s decision.
The open letter of protest signed by more than 400 names from the Scottish arts world warned that closing the arts venue would have a “catastrophic effect” on the cultural life of Scotland. It urged power brokers to consider the “huge ramifications” of the decision for one of the key venues of the “cultural renaissance” of the city in the last 25 years. The letter was written to three of the senior figures in Scottish arts: Fiona Hyslop, the Culture Secretary, Janet Archer, the chief executive of Creative Scotland, the national arts funding body, and Bridget McConnell, chief executive of Glasgow Life, the arms-length cultural body of Glasgow.
Names signing the open letter also include Cora Bissett, the theatre director, Dominic Hill, artistic director of The Citizen’s Theatre, actors Ashley Jensen, Aidan Gillen and Kate Dickie, the writer Irvine Welsh and the comedian and writer Stewart Lee.
Mark Thomas, writer and comedian, Don Paterson, the award-winning poet, and Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai are also signatories.
It says: “We are not satisfied that full consideration has been given to the potentially catastrophic impact this decision will have on the cultural life of Scotland. The Arches is a hugely important institution in Scottish culture which performs a number of key roles.”
It adds: “The Arches nightclub also plays a vital role in the live music scene of which Glasgow is so rightly proud, and which is reflected in the city’s status as Unesco City of Music. Alongside the nightclub’s own role, it helps fund the Arches theatre and arts venue. This a uniquely successful and innovative financial model which deserves to be celebrated and encouraged as a key venue at the centre of Glasgow’s cultural renaissance of the past 25 years.”