NAtional theatre office
Plans to base a new National Theatre HQ in Easterhouse smack of tokenism and confirm that politicians are taking centre stage. By Keith Bruce
IT does not much matter where the office of the new National Theatre for Scotland is located - as the good folk of Easterhouse probably do not need me to tell them. If the director appointed to the innovative commissioning body that is to be our latest national institution is worth his or her salt, it will usually be unoccupied.
Thursday's premature announcement that the Scottish National Theatre is to be headquarted at the Art Factory in north-east Glasgow, which is due to open in 2005, smacks of tokenism. It also illustrates the vacuousness of much of the current obsession with ''social inclusion'', betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the shape of the national theatre project at the heart of government, and confirms to an ambivalent Scottish theatre sector that the politicians have run off with the ball.
The first question is: what on earth has the siting of the National Theatre office got to do with Frank McAveety MSP? We do not (yet) have a culture ministry. The funding of the arts in Scotland falls within his portfolio but the administration of that funding is down to the Scottish Arts Council and its individual client organisations. Or have I missed some constitutional change? The board of the new organisation has not yet been appointed, never mind met. Surely it is up to them to decide where best to base the new national company.
Perhaps they will take the view that it makes little odds. The money which the Scottish Executive has found for the project may be from down the back of the sofa in terms of the national budget, but it is significant in relation to the spend on the arts in Scotland. Nonetheless, a lot is being asked of it. The pressure to create a new theatre building with a resident company has been resisted in favour of a commissioning body that awards the kudos and companion spondulix to existing theatre organisations. According to the plan proposed by the Federation of Scottish Theatre and honed and budgeted by the working group under Donald Smith, it will provide small touring shows that reach a' the airts, middle- scale productions to tour the country, and main-stage extravaganzas to go to A1 receiving houses - as well
as bolster and promote our internationally-admired work for children and young people and make everything available to potentially-interested overseas promoters endorsed with the ''Scottish National Theatre Production'' label. There won't be much change out of the (pounds) 7.5m.
Does the government understand that this is what it has backed? The brouhaha in parliament this week would suggest not. The location of a few desks for the director and his small team, charged as they are with scouring the Scottish theatre community for the creme de la creme and working with selected companies to create their best work, will hardly occasion the erection of those brown tourist-orientated road signs welcoming all comers to the home of the Scottish National Theatre. Particularly when there will be nobody in.
So if it doesn't matter where the office is, why not Easterhouse? Why not indeed, except that that is not what is being said. Locating the Scottish National Theatre's office will do nothing for the regeneration of the area or demonstrate the relevance of the arts to that community, no matter what Mr McAveety thinks. It will neither create jobs nor foster local creativity since it is emphatically its job to do neither. I would also like to place a small side bet on the likelihood of the board ever meeting there, if anyone is interested in taking it up.
Never let the reality stand in the way of a spot of political point-scoring, however. The government was unashamedly giving the impression this week that some benefit, not mere prestige-by-association, was attached to this unnecessary piece of gerrymandering. It is altogether unsurprising that some of the local residents canvassed by The
Herald were a tad cynical. ''Social inclusion'' imperatives apart, basing the national theatre in Glasgow is potentially geographically divisive when the directors of producing theatres in Edinburgh and Dundee have been at the forefront of the drive towards its creation. Would not a city like Stirling with a thriving arts scene but without a producing theatre and with good transport links to them all have been a better idea?
Not if you are an MSP from Glasgow, of course, and that points to the real worry behind all of this. The imagination that produced the clever compromise that sought to create a Scottish National Theatre without damaging Scotland's existing theatre infrastructure was a collective artistic one. Its ingenuity has already been recognised in coverage of the plan beyond our borders. However, when the announcement of the funding to bring it about was made, it was made by McAveety alone. Overtures to those who will have to make the work to be in at the kill reportedly received such a lukewarm response that the executive decided to go it alone with the press. Artists are rightly wary of political interference and there is a suspicion abroad in the Scottish theatre sector that the initiative has passed into the hands of politicians.
As anyone who's attended a session of the Scottish Parliament knows, they are rotten at theatre. Not to make a crisis out of a small drama, but if Messrs McConnell and McAveety want a national theatre worthy of the name, they should leave it to others to get it up and running.
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