Oral evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee

on Tuesday 14 October 2003

Members present:

Mr Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair
Mr Chris Bryant
Mr Frank Doran
Michael Fabricant
Mr Adrian Flook
Alan Keen
John Thurso

__________

Memorandum submitted by The Bridewell Theatre

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR ROBERT COGO-FAWCETT, Chair, MS CAROL METCALFE, Artistic Director, MR TIM SAWERS, Executive Director and MS JANIE DEE, Artiste, the Bridewell Theatre, examined.

Q1  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for coming. I ought to explain that people will be coming in and out because, when we decided to hold this inquiry on this date (which was the only day we had for it), we did not take due account of the fact that this is the first day back from the recess; that this is a day when the House meets at 2.30 and, therefore, people are travelling down and, in addition to that, colleagues have meetings. May I assure you that the Committee as a whole takes this inquiry very seriously and we welcome the correspondence we had which led to it. I believe Mr Cogo-Fawcett would like to make an introductory statement and we would like to hear that.

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting us here. What makes the Bridewell unique in London's theatrical index is the fact that it alone is dedicated to the development of musical theatre and musical artistes of all kinds: composers, directors, choreographers, dancers, singers and actors. London has a number of theatres dedicated to new drama - the Bush, Hampstead Theatre Club, the Soho Theatre and so on. There are also a large number of subsidised theatres around the country which, like the Royal National Theatre, occasionally produce musicals. The motives for doing so, however, are often pecuniary. Because the genre is generally considered populist, subsidised production values can often produce substantial box office income in times of need. Morever, the transfer rate of musicals is good and they often provide an ongoing income stream for the originating house; but new musicals are also comparatively expensive to produce. Their development process can be long, highly experimental and therefore costly; and the quality of risk involved in their presentation incompatible with the potential rewards. The subsidised playhouse may also not have readily available the skills needed to develop musical work until it is stage-worthy. These factors make new musicals a comparative rarity in the country's subsidised theatrical environment. The Bridewell Theatre has been in existence for ten years and in the last five has produced and presented over 71 productions - 27 of these have been new musicals and six new operas. It has also presented 18 musical and opera revivals, as well as 12 new dramas and eight drama revivals. These productions have been a mixture of its own work and that of other producers and presenters. It has developed a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as a nursery for the musical as an art form. We have occupied the refurbished swimming pool on the ground level of St Bride's Institute free of charge for the last ten years; but the Corporation of London's annual revenue support for the St Bride's Printing Library, housed within the Institute, is to cease in March of next year. The rent paid by the Corporation for the space the library occupies has allowed the Institute to provide free premises and £40,000 subvention to the Theatre annually. The cessation of the subsidy together with the demands of the Disability Discrimination Act on an elderly building have effectively caused the Institute to need to charge us £72,000 rent and to stop the subsidy altogether. Our formal tenure will therefore come to an end in March, although were we to make good the shortfall of rent and subsidy the Institute could continue to afford us temporary accommodation in the building until their redevelopment of the premises takes place. There is a long-term straw of comfort for us in that we have the opportunity to become a beneficiary of the planning gain from the Mermaid redevelopment. That money - and £2 million is the sum which has been mentioned - could secure us new premises; but the timing of the development of that site is subject to matters beyond our control and it is possible we might not exist by the time it comes to fruition. The Arts Council is sympathetic to our plight yet despite past attempts we have never been accepted as a regular annual revenue client with core funding. Despite a number of recent project awards from the Arts Council our failure to have an ongoing relationship has hugely weakened our case with our stakeholders. Yet musical theatre has been a Cinderella of our principal arts funding body throughout its history. Their definition of music theatre being the theatrical presentation of music with classical roots rarely encompasses the form we would call musical theatre, and therefor we have been unable to benefit from this highly focussed funding. The very success of musicals, the fact that their commercial success when it does occur is so conspicuous, substantially weakens the case for the subvention of its development. I am not suggesting for a moment that musicals should be supported once they have arrived in a commercial context; but I would argue that without the application of adequate financial resources in the early stages of creative development one risks stunting growth or denying it altogether. This cannot be right for a section of the British theatre industry which is so vital to tourism and has attracted a wealth of sub-industries around it like a honeypot. If theatres such as the Bridewell do not exist as key strategic components in the national development of musical theatre to provide the artistic leadership and mentoring, as well as the environments for challenge, training and learning, musical form will continue to lag behind that of Broadway. Of 22 Broadway theatres currently open ten are occupied by new musicals without music and script created specifically for them. In the West End's 41 theatres there are two such musicals that are less than ten years' old which began their life in the United Kingdom. I would suggest that the writing is on the wall. The opportunities to experiment both at the workshop and the presentational stage can only sensibly exist in fringe theatres with small seating capacities like our own, where the scale of risk is so diminished that the financial consequences of failure are temporary and less meaningful. It is its very scale which makes us useful but which hampers our financial viability. In the meantime the Bridewell has a very immediate crisis to face and £112,000 per year to find if it is stay in its current premises albeit temporarily. I hope the result of today's inquiry may give us grounds for hoping for a future.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I will ask Mr Fabricant to start the questioning.

Q2  Michael Fabricant: First of all, how many seats do you have?

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: 180 seats.

Q3  Michael Fabricant: Do you think there is a future, short of subsidy, for any theatre with just 180 seats? Or do you think you are being a little purist in the sort of programming you are doing and maybe, between the redevelopment of the Mermaid and you not receiving subsidy, you should perhaps adapt your programming to be more populist or at least attract more support?

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: We are not short of support, but I know of no other 180 seat theatre which exists without subsidy. We attract sponsorship. We attract houses which I do not think any subsidised theatre would be ashamed of. We play to above 60 per cent average per year. Musicals are populist, simply because of the form. Musical theatre is popular theatre and attracts a level of attendance that we would expect; but the fact that we have to be experimental (because the very policy of the company is to encourage new work) it is that which suggests - on 180 seats even were we to fill all of them every day of the week - we would still not make money.

Q4  Michael Fabricant: Certainly I would not wish to see the Bridewell Theatre close, but you have painted rather a gloomy picture as to its future. I am just wondering whether you are being flexible enough in the sort of performances you put on not only to attract an audience but also to attract additional funding from the Arts Council. You have pointed out yourself the difficulty of attracting funding given the sort of repertoire you have?

Mr Sawers: What you are saying pulls in two directions. If one were to be more populist in our programming then we would be less likely to attract support from the Arts Council. I think the two things go in opposite directions. Like all of these things, one has to try and achieve a balance. We have always felt it is desperately important for musical theatre writing in this country and the art form as a whole to present the best of new writing that is around. Inevitably new writing means more risk; means that you can struggle with audiences more than you would do otherwise; but that is surely the process of support structures that exist within the UK arts funding, a system to support just that kind of endeavour.

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: We have seen ourselves, and continue to see ourselves, very much as a training ground, not just as a training ground for young artists but because of the structure of the profession in which we live, and because musical theatre is almost entirely commercially based, it is very difficult for artists who have been in the business for ten or 15 years to get the kind of practice they need to get, and to get the refreshment they need. I wonder if Janie Dee would like to talk a little bit about that for us.

Ms Dee: I met Carol about ten years ago when she opened the Bridewell. By chance I came upon her and saw the space in its pure form before she changed it into a theatre, and it was already a beautiful space. In the last ten years I have seen that develop into a theatre that has so much versatility as a space and yet you are asking what the Bridewell Theatre is. Its impression and image, for us as artistes particularly, is that it is a place where you go to do new musical theatre work. Also it has a huge audience following. It is very clear in their minds, "We can go to the Bridewell to see something we won't see anywhere else". It is not populist in that way; it is not commercial theatre. I have been paid huge amounts of money to do commercial theatre, and it is very, very nice to be paid a lot, but every now and again I will do something for no money because it is exciting to me as an artiste and I will get some sort of inspiration out of this. It was true recently. I did something last Christmas at the Bridewell and we had such a very artistic time and a good time - it was full as well and everybody came to see it. It was lovely to play to full houses, albeit only 180 seats. It was a fantastic atmosphere, of a type I have never experienced in London. It is unique.

Q5  Michael Fabricant: Part of the depressing aspect of it all is the point which Mr Cogo-Fawcett made that no theatre with just 180 seats is viable without subsidy. I note the Arts Council says that one of the requirements of core funding is that there has got to be a payment of minimum union rates. I just wonder whether you are being too purist in your repertoire, and if only you could adapt your programme - albeit temporarily until you find new premises or get this additional funding through the sale of the Mermaid - you could at least attract some funding from sources that you do not get at present. Have you looked at these alternatives?

Mr Sawers: I think we look at these alternatives all the time. To give you a clue, as Robert mentioned earlier, regional theatres will often say, "We need a bit of money, let's do a musical". We do not take that approach by saying, "Okay, let's do a populist musical because we know we'll make some money to subsidise our future". Because of the economics of 180 seats, even if we sold every single seat we would still lose -----

Q6  Michael Fabricant: Even if you attracted Arts Council funding?

Mr Sawers: I am talking about without the subsidy. Even if we sold every single seat we would still lose between £5,000-£10,000. It is not the right route for a theatre of that size. What we exist to do is to provide those experiences Janie was talking about, and to develop new work itself and present that and show that work available and look at the quality of it.

Ms Metcalfe: Obviously I completely take your point about what appears to be a narrowness to what we do. What I want to say is, yes, when I started that theatre you had to get the thing off the ground and had to move the rock. When we started we did all sorts of things. The reason why we had this vision about wanting to develop music theatre was that we looked around and it just was not happening. My inspiration for doing this came from working with young people and seeing the effect of the collision of drama and music on them and the empowerment it gave them - children who would sit around going, "Yeah, Miss", and suddenly you say, "Make some music, make theatre and put it together". The whole dynamic that happens - the National Youth Music Theatre, whom you will hear from later, another great organisation inspired by the same thing. Coming from a purely theatrical background doing lots and lots of drama you think, "Here is this wonderful medium which is so exciting and empowering to people". If you are in the drama field, as I have been, there are so many opportunities to develop new work to get those new ideas across. It is the newness which is important to all of us. If you all think theatre exists and is important it is because it is about explaining humanity to itself. If that has an relevance it is explaining now to us and not just the past. You always have to take any art form forward, I would content. When I came into theatre I was thinking if I wanted to develop new drama there were so many opportunities, so many small companies, writing companies and theatres where I could do that, and suddenly I find this enthusiasm for musical theatre through working with young people and I think, "Right, let's take this forward because it is such a wonderful medium", but where do you do it? There is nothing. Nothing is happening. When I started the Bridewell I had this idea of developing theatre and I was thinking, "Here is the space. My goodness, am I going to be in competition with a whole lot of other people? No. Nobody else is doing it". It had two prongs to it and one of them was thinking about wanting to developing the art form, and the other was thinking that nobody else was doing it. Yes, we have tried lots of other ways. Yes, perhaps if we had just concentrated on developing new drama, not populist drama but new drama, by now the Arts Council would be funding us - that is indeed possible. If those of us who feel passionately about it leave the medium to founder and say, "Tough, we can't get money and we won't do it" then it will die.

Chairman: I think it would be useful to put this situation in its context. If you look at the National Theatre, the National Theatre only operates on a subsidy; and it operates on a level of subsidy which would have the Bridewell swooning in delirium if it got it; but the National Theatre takes far fewer risks than the Bridewell. If you want to go and see musicals which practically any amateur operatic company is performing at any given time, like Oklahoma and Carousel and even Anything Goes, okay, you can go there and they make money and they transfer them. In my view that is not what a national theatre is about. When they do something like Democracy which is, let us face it, not all that experimental because it is by a famous and successful playwright, they stow it away in the Cottesloe anyhow in case there is too much risk. My own view, and I am a paying customer at the Bridewell, is that their value is in not doing things that the amateur operatic companies do. They put on the world premiere of Sondheim's first musical Saturday Night, and I had the pleasure of seeing Janie Dee in it. They put on Anyone Can Whistle and I thought it was worth staging even though you could see why it closed very quickly.

Mr Bryant: Please do not take that personally!

Q7  Chairman: It is very important people get opportunities to see things like that. What I would put to Michael, as well as to our witnesses, is if you want the extremely facile stuff then there are lots of places in London, including the heavily subsidised National, where you can go and see it. It seems to me what is important about the Bridewell, and in a different way about the Donmar and the Almeida, is that they do things you cannot get to see elsewhere but can turn out to be wonderful experiences. Would you like to answer that?

Ms Dee: I would love add to that if I may. At the National Theatre Studio I have done a lot of workshops there; the subsidy is substantial and they make good use of their subsidy. They look into all sorts of wonderful projects. Over the ten years I have been involved with the National Theatre I have done two new musical projects. One was initiated by myself and the other one was initiated by some friends of mine who write music. It did get a professional production for a couple of days, but that was it. It was not commercial enough evidently, or it did not get the backing. That is just to add to the Chairman's point about heavily subsidised theatres as opposed to completely unsubsidised theatre. The amount of risk-taking is really minimal. Also, I would like to tell you a story about a gig I got at the Barbican last year which was funded by the Corporation of London. It was a wonderful gig. It was to interest people in the huge theatre being made into a cabaret venue where you could go and have dinner and watch an artiste, in this case it was me, doing a cabaret for you. The man who runs it (Gary England a friend of mine) is absolutely brilliant and said, "I think we'll start with acrobats falling from the ceiling; we'll have this amazing music; then the curtain will go up slowly; then the chandeliers will come down; the dinner will be brought to them; and then we will say, "Ladies and gentlemen, come up". They did this and it was fantastic. When I got back to my dressing room I had a huge bottle of champagne, glasses, roses and everything. I thought, "This is how you dream of it being". At the Bridewell somebody had given some lights which had gone wrong somewhere else and they had said, "You can use them at the Bridewell", but actually they were brilliant and they worked, for no money. We got back to our dressing rooms and we all had a little flower each to say "Good Luck". This moves me because there is no money but the achievement is just as magical. I know these people have been struggling for ten years with nothing and no subsidy.

Mr Fabricant: I am on your side but I have to ask these questions. One thing Robert Cogo-Fawcett said, you talked about the comparison between development of musical theatre in the United Kingdom and that in New York city and it is particularly tough at the moment. I have got very strong connections in the US and it is particularly tough at the moment with this Republican administration - although am very pro the Republicans in every other aspect, especially as I am off to Lichfield, Connecticut on Thursday, but that is another story.

Chairman: It most certainly is!

Q8  Mr Fabricant: Why does it work in New York city but it does not work here? I cannot imagine there is a lot of subsidy there either. What should we be doing here?

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: There is subsidy.

Q9  Mr Fabricant: From whom?

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: From the National Endowment for the Arts. It does in fact have a bursary fund. I cannot put a figure on it, but it does offer substantial sums towards the development of musical theatre. Also the commercial infrastructure is different. We are dependent upon a handful of producers in this country for the existence of our commercial musical theatre. I do not need to name them, they are well known names and you know who they are as well as I do, I am sure. Indeed, some of those producers do spend some money on the development of musical theatre - we have benefited from it at the Bridewell - but there are only a handful of them. In New York I could spend a month going round spending two hours with every musical producer and there would still be more to go to. They spend a long time and a lot of money developing things, because the whole structure there is very different. The size of the vehicle they create on each occasion is an enormous vehicle - a vehicle costing $10-15 million. Here, yes, there are occasional vehicles that cost that sum, but generally we try to put musicals on for £1-1.2 million. In the commercial economy of theatre that represents for us a tidy amount, which is the reason why so much old work is revived. The new work, the work that costs $10-15 million which is done over there, will have a substantial development period behind it, almost certainly; because people recognise the need to grow artistes and to grow the work. It takes a long time with musicals because it is such a collaborative process, in the way that all theatre is collaborative, drama is collaborative but it is not nearly as collaborative as musical theatre which involves so many different ingredients that need bringing together; some unfortunately get dropped along the way and others get brought in, and all of that takes a long time and a lot of development. It is recognised in the States. Perhaps it is to do with the tradition there; they have a longer musical tradition than we do. Here it is also because there are not the people to turn to. We have turned to most of them and had help from most of the five or six over the years. Finally, despite the fact that they create foundations, those foundations are not that wealthy and they spread it around, and often the foundations are there to help themselves for wholly legitimate reasons. For example, Cameron McIntosh's Foundation has helped work to go on at the National Theatre, which has then been brought back into the West End. It is wholly proper that it should be used in that way, but actually it has not been used for the development of new work, by and large.

Mr Bryant: I am going to play Devil's advocate. Having played the Duke of Austria in Blondel at university I think my commitment to alternative musicals is quite high! Chairman, I should point out that Sunday in the Park was also done at the National which would not have found a commercial house anywhere.

Chairman: I saw it there.

Q10  Mr Bryant: Indeed, I saw Promises Promises at the Bridewell which I enjoyed enormously; although why Burt Bacharach needs a non-commercial avenue for getting his work into musical theatre, I do not quite understand. The ordinary person looking at the London theatres at the moment would see Mama Mia!, We Will Rock You, The Rod Stewart Musical, Blood Brothers, Anything Goes, The Lion King, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Chicago, Sunset Boulevard and Bombay Dreams. In all of that there is quite a lot of musical going on. The Chairman refers to these kinds of musicals as "facile", but the truth is that they are extremely popular, good value and highly entertaining. Many of my constituents will do the journey from South Wales up to London for two musicals spread over two evenings. Why on earth should any of this be subsidised?

Mr Sawers: The best way to see it is to make a comparison with how new drama writing appears to us to develop in the West End. If you consider that in the West End each year there are perhaps ten new plays that appear on the West End stage, you need to think of a pyramid of development, if you like. For those ten plays to arrive in the West End (or those ten musicals, but we will come to that comparison later) there are a number of subsidised houses in London and elsewhere in the UK that are developing work, the best of which will go into the West End. There are ten or 12 theatres doing this kind of thing, all subsidised, and they are producing 30, 40 or 50 new plays a year for those ten to arrive in the West End. For those ten or 12 theatres to produce 50 or 60 plays a year they are receiving writing of 300, 400 or 500 - a significant number - because that is a development process of the work, that is a development process of the skills involved, and it is the inevitable, almost statistical process of writing. Some will be great, and for each great play a playwright will write three or four average plays, that is the way things are.

Ms Dee: You are talking about subsidising that part of the pyramid. You are not talking about the end product, which is Chicago. Chicago started as a concert performance with Ann Reinking saying, "Can we just try this, it might be good". It was subsidised at that moment, and then it became very commercial because it worked. The Bridewell is trying to produce new stuff all the time which is brand new and has not been thought of before and will end up one day, hopefully, being produced as those other commercial ventures.

Mr Sawers: That is the point I am getting to. There is a pyramidal structure of development within drama work and that does not exist for musical theatre in any way shape or form.

Q11  Mr Bryant: I understand the economics are different for musicals because it is much more expensive to put on the first night, especially to do it in such a way that you all get a big enough audience to last you six or nine months, which is the only way you can make it stack up. I understand that. The market seems pretty good at chucking out Which Witch and all the other rubbish musicals we forget about five minutes after we first saw them.

Mr Sawers: I would turn the argument around and say, do you want the musical theatre that is populist in the West End to be these (somebody else's quote) facile things that currently exist? Why is it that over the last ten years there has not been in the UK (apart from Bombay Dreams, and it is yet to be seen whether that will be seen as successful in the longer term) a new British musical theatre piece arriving on the West End that has done the likes of Phantom, Les Mis and Miss Saigon of 20 years ago.

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: It is a very difficult argument to counteract when all the musicals you quote are extremely popular. I did say at the beginning, only one of these which you have quoted has got music specially written for it. Only one of those Bombay Dreams is a new musical. The rest of them are entirely compilation musicals or they have music taken from previous eras.

Q12  Mr Bryant: I suppose you are including Les Mis as having started in France originally?

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: No, I did say of over ten years old.

Q13  Mr Bryant: Is that not one of the other problems, which is that we now have a lot of West End theatres clogged up with musicals that have been so successful, and successful at keeping people coming three or four times over the course of 20 years, that there is no great appetite for people to find new great big musicals. Is that fair or unfair?

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: I think there is no great appetite for producers to take the risk to put new musicals on. It is easier to keep a commercial vehicle going; to keep pumping more money into the advertising and the marketing on this fixed cost, which invariably goes down over time. Musicals are very interesting, because when you start them they cost so much, and they actually go up in cost when you get towards the first re-cast; but beyond the first re-cast they generally come down in cost as the musical goes on in time because you get cheaper and cheaper personnel in them, as we know, over a period of years. It is very comforting to have that kind of musical at the back of you, rather than to think, "I'm going to develop something new".

Q14  Mr Bryant: That is one part of the question, which is about why have subsidy. The other question is: why you; why not another theatre; why not the Lyric, Hammersmith; why not Hobson Hall?

Ms Dee: We have the reputation already. We have already established a reputation.

Ms Metcalfe: Of course, they do occasionally do something that is musical theatre or has a musical content. Indeed, we really are the only place where the prime aim of our programming is to develop new work. I think it is this whole thing about new work. In a sense, you do make yourself honourable and 'twas ever thus with art in any form; the minute you start up with something new at first it is just not populist. People think, "That's a bit peculiar. Why are we doing that?" When Cezanne painted his first picture I am sure people said, "What was all that about? I wouldn't want that hanging on my wall, would I". That is what it is about, but that is what keeps the art vibrant.

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: There is also an infrastructural issue. There are places that have people like Tim and Carol who are musical managers/artistes, whereas the Lyric Hammersmith does not have those kind of people in it. When they do musicals they generally need to bring people in specifically to supervise the process.

Chairman: The only musical I can remember seeing at the Lyric Hammersmith was a musical version of Ruth Rendall's A Judgment in Stone.

Q15  Mr Bryant: I am not particularly arguing for the Lyric Hammersmith, I am just saying why should the Almeida not or wherever -----

Ms Dee: Because they do not have the reputation the Bridewell has. If you want to go somewhere to see something which is brand new which you would not be able to see anywhere else that is musical theatre you would go to the Bridewell, without question, if you know about it. If you do not know about it and you ask somebody they will say, "Go to the Bridewell".

Q16  Mr Bryant: My memory from some ten years ago was that the old fire station in Oxford had a relationship with Cameron McIntosh and with Stephen Sondheim to do with the Professorship of Musical Theatre at Oxford, is that right?

Ms Dee: Yes.

Q17  Mr Bryant: Is that still part of the equation?

Ms Dee: It closed.

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: It has fallen by the wayside. It opens occasionally when it is rented out by people.

Ms Dee: I was a performer in that Oxford deal; the writers who were part of that are still going strong, albeit going strong against all odds.

Mr Bryant: I think there was a musical called Galileo Galileo. I saw that. The scars at on my back!

Q18  Mr Doran: One of the problems of coming last is that most of the questions you want to ask have already been asked. I am not an expert on musicals like my colleagues here but I would like to pick up some of the threads of what has been raised. From the outside it strikes me that you have got a serious structural problem. At the top you have got these apparently very successful and very rich musicals running in the West End with very successful producers, with two or three millionaires at the head of it obviously doing very, very well, I will not say at the bottom there is a Bridewell, but somewhere underneath there is a Bridewell and organisations like the Bridewell. When my colleague, Michael Fabricant, asked about the situation in America you explained very well why that was different. Why have we got the structural problem you have outlined? What efforts can be made to plug the gaps? It strikes me that the work you are doing is extremely valuable but, at the same time, is unrecognised?

Ms Metcalfe: I can give you a personal answer which is, when we started and said we were going to do musical theatre, it was said to me, "Is there any? What are you going to do if you are going to do new musical theatre?" As your colleague has alluded to, we started off by doing revivals of shows which had been somewhat neglected and looking at the classics. Part of what I was trying to say to people was that you can do musicals on a small scale. One of the things people felt was that musical theatre could only happen in a huge theatre. Of course, if that is the case then it is very difficult to develop it. One of our starting points was, let us show people that you can do musical theatre in a small space. Going back to your question, certainly there was the question, "What are you going to do?" Then there was that sense of people feeling, as has been clear here, "If you are doing musicals that must be commercial, you cannot possibly need any assistance with it". I have to say, it has taken ten years, but because we produced work that was very clearly new, that was dealing with real issues and the emotions and the tribulations of the characters communicating, that was enhanced by the use of music (and most of these shows have been American), because we actually produced these shows and people were able to come and see them I think people's perception has shifted. Some of the people were saying, "Music theatre - that's just big, jolly shows in the West End", but they have now seen there is a much richer vein there which can be tapped. With people's attitude and thinking, the Arts Council are a very good example of that. Recently they have been very supportive of us, because they have seen that what we have been doing has got a value - the kind of value to which they subscribe - about accessibility, about developing multiculturalism and diversity in the community. I think that is happening and is beginning to change.

Q19  Mr Doran: But not supportive enough?

Ms Metcalfe: You must ask them. At the moment they would possibly say their funds have been very prescribed and that has made it difficult for them.

Q20  Mr Doran: You make the point in your written evidence because of the structural changes in the Arts Council you are seeing some improvements. From what you are saying it seems that is not going to be enough to save you from the crisis you face next year.

Mr Sawers: I think the issue there is one of timing with the structural issues Carole alludes to. As I understand the Arts Council position, the problem we have got is that we have got a core funding annual revenue problem, as they might expect from a small theatre. The funds within the Arts Council that support those kinds of expenditures are tied up until March 2006.

Mr Cogo-Fawcett: We should not just be alluding to the Arts Council here. We are unfortunate in that we have no relationship with the Corporation of London and we sit in the middle of London. We have no relationship with them because our relationship has always been at secondhand via the St Brides Institute who have hypothecated £40,000 of the funding from the Corporation to us. The Corporation has not been easy to contact and is not easy to deal with. In fact "dealing" with them is not the right word to use at all. We are occasionally dealt with. For something which is called the Corporation of London and to be at the centre of a city with a gigantic tourist industry that is dependent partly on musical theatre for it to be so attractive, not to be able to continue, at the very least, a £40,000 subvention to us is penny-pinching and mean from an organisation which gives to the Barbican Centre £22 million a year. We are the only other theatre in the City of London.

Mr Sawers: We do get a small amount of money from the Corporation of London for our education work and for our Lunch Box work

Q21  Mr Doran: Moving away from the specific problems for the Bridewell, and going back to the structural problems of your section of the industry - a point you make in your written submission is the fact that the Arts Council has no specialist adviser working in your area, and you are lumped in with theatre. Are you working with any other people in your field to change that? If you are, what response have you had from the Arts Council?

Ms Metcalfe: As I think you will hear from others, this is something all of us working in this field have found to be a real difficulty. I think the Arts Council are now recognising this. Previously they have had this rather odd delineation that there is something called "music theatre" and the funds from that come from the music "pot" as it were; but when we approach them and say, "We have this very interesting piece of music theatre with a very modern score", and it is sung through, "and perhaps we should be asking you for the funds", they say, "No, you are in theatre. It's a musical". When we have gone to the theatre department in the past they have tended to look (as we have said in the paper) but what we are offering can look bad value because it is so much more expensive. That has gone. I think many people who are in this room now will be as glad as we are that that has gone. There is a much greater overview now. People are looking at the project and instead of trying to put it into a box, into which it does not fit, they are actually looking at the project and the value of the project.

Mr Sawers: I do think it is worth saying I think it is a great improvement, and we have seen an improvement. It is very early days with it. I personally do believe if strategically it is important to try and fix this issue with respect to development of musical theatre as a whole into the future, and if the Arts Council, with the direction from the department, think that is something that needs to be dealt with then I do think having a specialist within the Arts Council is the only way that will happen.

Chairman: Thank you very much. It seems to me if you want to see a new production of smash hit Rogers and Hammerstein musicals like South Pacific, Oklahoma or Carousel sooner or later you see them at the National Theatre, with The King and I no doubt to come at some stage; but if you actually want to see something like Me and Juliet you are never going to see it at the National Theatre so you must hope to see it somewhere else. Thank you very much indeed. We much appreciate your coming here.

 

Memorandum submitted by Mercury Musical Developments

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MS CAROLINE UNDERWOOD, Chairman and MS GEORGINA BEXON, Chief Executive, Mercury Musical Developments, examined.

Chairman: Thank you very much for coming in today. Michael, would you like to start?

Q22  Michael Fabricant: You were here for the earlier session and I was just curious to know whether you have any observations to make about the environment here in the United Kingdom compared with that in the United States?

Ms Bexon: Yes, definitely. The situation in the US is incredibly different from here. What we have not talked about so far, which seems to me essential to the whole debate, is the umbrella, the overview from the writer to the smallest fringe producer feeding new musical work through to your first platform, which could be an off Broadway or which could be a studio or a repertory theatre in England or a fringe theatre through to a medium scale or large scale theatre. In America the economic situation is historically and fundamentally different, basically because of the trickle-down nature from their regional theatres. They sell their tickets by subscription schemes. Individual tickle sales in a regional theatre across America is a very small part of their overall income and therefore a very small part of their overall economic structure. They will sell five or six or even ten tickets for their whole season so (a) they have the money in the bank before they open on the first night of their new season but it also allows them to take far greater risk because they have already sold something like 70 per cent - I am generalising here - of their capacity of their theatre before they put on that high risk, expensive musical. They are not cost centring but they are covering their costs across the season, which enables every regional theatre in America to take occasional risks, I am not saying there is no risk involved, but it minimises the risk. Of course that is a huge contrast to the situation here where, by and large, every individual production is cost centred and everyone stands alone in terms of its profit or loss and that has an effect as it trickles down the system. The small producer or the independent producer is feeding work up to that middle structure and further down the line there is writer training, which does not exist in this country at all apart from the very small amount that Mercury Musical Developments does, there is much more development opportunity, ie workshops in getting musicals over that year 18 month to two year process from the written page on to something that a producer might recognise as something that he might want to put on stage. That is the key reason. There are other reasons in terms of funding, in terms of audience expectation, in terms of audience history and the fact that the perception in America is that musical history is viewed as the American art form. The economic factor is a principal factor.

Ms Underwood: In New York the size of the theatre is crucial. There are so many more small-scale theatres off Broadway the size of the Bridewell, of which we have so few in London, and that is the perfect venue for developing new musical theatre work. You do not want to do it in a 1,000 seater venue, you have to do it in a 200 or 300 seater venue and there are so many more of those off Broadway that there are outlets for writers to get their work seen, much more than there are in London.

Q23  Michael Fabricant: I remember going to see a very avant-garde play just off Broadway in a very small theatre and being recognised, much to my acute embarrassment. Do you think that you make sufficient use of regional theatre? We have a new theatre in my own constituency which has just opened, it has two spaces, one is about 450 seats and then there is a small studio which is I think about 100 - I may be wrong on that figure - and that is subsidised by the district council. Do you think that we are using regional theatre enough? I understand what you have to say about subsidy and it rings a bell with me because my background was in broadcasting before I became an MP and I am familiar with the operation of national public radio in the US, it seems a very similar system. We have a different methodology in the United Kingdom of subsidy, but it is an alternative form of subsidy which is from government and local government which they do not have in the US. I just wonder whether we are using that opportunity enough in the regions?

Ms Underwood: We are not using it enough in the regions. There are a number of regional theatres which we can name, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Waterman at Newbury and Plymouth, there various theatres who are putting on musicals but we are back to the risk factor again, they do want to take the risk of spending their budgets on new, untried work because often it is not hugely commercial, it is difficult to get your audiences in and they risk having funding taken away because they seem to have a deficit at the end of the year because they tried to do new work. I am certain there are theatres who would love to be putting on more new work but need to feel secure in order to do so that they are not going to cause offence by doing so.

Q24  Michael Fabricant: Given that we do not have quite the ethos of self-help, which is the ethos in the United States, the form of subscription that you talked about, do you think that the Arts Council, given their limited resources, should be doing more, and how?

Ms Underwood: That is probably something that you should ask the Arts Council.

Ms Bexon: That is a huge issue with many fragmented parts. Yes, I think they should be doing more. I would like to come on and talk about how writing is created and developed, because that is what our organisation does. I speak to a lot of regional theatre directors and producers and their answer is they do not have the funding for it because, as we just said, there is a risk and an expense factor there. As I understand it there are no specific musical theatres funds available for any organisation from the smallest organisation, such as Mercury Musical Developments, which is a writer based organisation, all the way up through this pyramid. My experience, and I think others' experience of trying to apply for funds, is that we fall between too many stools. We are trying to shoe-horn ourselves into other prescriptive policies for grant making. Looking through some of these documents for instance, looking out for new musical theatre, new writing you will see, I do not have time to work out the ratios, at a guess 80 per cent to 90 per cent for youth projects, for access projects, for minority projects, I do not doubt all incredibly worthy causes but everybody else is falling outside that particular focus. I know that is the case when we are applying for new writing funds and I see it all of the way through the system. That is a historic situation and one which has not been addressed so far.

Michael Fabricant: Thank you.

Q25  Mr Bryant: As I understand it from what you have just said one of the differences between New York and London is that New York has a network of theatres of a certain size, you were talking about 200 to 400 seaters.

Ms Underwood: They have a number of theatres which are defined as off Broadway theatres, which are 200 to 400 seater venues.

Q26  Mr Bryant: Do we not have quite a few?

Ms Underwood: We have some but they are playhouses, they are dedicated playhouses and they are not necessarily used for musical theatre work. We are back to where the reputation of theatre lies. I do not know how big the Lyric at Hammersmith is but there is the Bush, there is Hammersmith, Hampstead there are a number of venues, the Almeida but they are all very much focused on play work.

Ms Bexon: The Soho Theatre does not have musical theatre in its policy at all. The Almeida has never done a musical, they have huge space restrictions there of course but they do opera, the Donmar Warehouse has done a handful of new musicals but it is high risk in terms of finances. We could get on to British writers, they have never done a musical by a new British writer, ever.

Q27  Mr Bryant: Jeanetta Cochrane?

Ms Bexon: Jeanetta Cochrane is used by fringe producers for small try-outs occasionally. I would say that is on the lower level.

Q28  Mr Bryant: You were talking about 200 up seaters, the Bridewell has 180 seats. One of the things that the Arts Council says in its report to us is that one of the problems with the Bridewell is it is just too small to make enough money out of seats.

Ms Underwood: That is the problem that the Bridewell have already highlighted. We come back to the argument that on the whole you cannot do new work in a huge venue. The King's Head and Jermyn Street have less seats than the Bridewell but it is perfect place to see new work but they are not as dedicated to musical theatre work as the Bridewell is. You will see the odd musical at the King' s Head and the Jerymn Street Theatre but it is not anywhere near the kind of level of work, and experimental work, that the Bridewell do.

Q29  Mr Bryant: You are saying it is vital to keep the Bridewell but in addition we have to do other things if we are going to make sure that news musicals are built in. We may be rather complacent because we have had so many big musicals from 20 to 25 years ago now that have done so well and we think of as having been great successes but actually we cannot rest on those laurels. Is that right?

Ms Underwood: That is absolutely right. Also what people tend to be a bit blinkered about is that you see Mama Mia! and We Will Rock You and you think the industry is awash with money, because that is what people see up there in front of them, and that is not the case because that money is not getting fed back into the grassroots development, it is going back into the agents' pockets, which is fair enough, they have put the money in and invested the risk in the first place but the money is not being reinvested back to find those writers and those works which are eventually, hopefully, one day going to replace We Will Rock You and Mama Mia!

Q30  Mr Bryant: However wonderful Mama Mia! may be it is not new music, is it?

Ms Underwood: It is not a new musical. You cannot knock it because it is bringing people into London and into the West End and people are enjoying themselves but that is just one aspect, we talked about this pyramid, it is just the very tip of the pyramid.

Q31  Chairman: Can I just ask a factual question, if you happen to have the information, that is with regard to the Donmar, which is the only other place in London that I know of that puts on musicals which are, as it were, big popular successes and run of the mill. It has different configurations for different productions, how many seats does it have on average?

Ms Underwood: 254.

Ms Bexon: As a slight postscript to that I think an important contrast to draw between the Bridewell and the Jerymn Street or the Bush or the King's Head is that those theatres are all run principally as receiving venues, which means they do not have a policy and produce their own work, they rent out their theatre space, so they no creative or artistic control and they are not pursuing any particular aim in terms of encouraging or developing or providing platform space to new musicals, which is exactly what the Bridewell does and is exactly why the Bridewell is unique, it is the only theatre that does that.

Q32  Chairman: I remember going to the first night of Les Miserables at the Barbican, which points out that it also came in via subsidised theatre, and I remember the set making a dramatic impact of its own and it seemed to be the first time that a set had become a player in its own right in such a dramatic way, has that provided real problems for future musical productions because people expect these enormous production values and otherwise it is not a musical?

Ms Underwood: It is a re-education process and this is why the Bridewell is so crucial because you cannot get a helicopter into the Bridewell.

Q33  Mr Bryant: That was the worst moment in Miss Saigon, you could see them climbing out the back!

Ms Underwood: You are absolutely right, people have got so used to these epic musicals that you have to re-train audiences that they have can have a very good evening and a very fulfilling evening in the theatre with basically very little on stage, just a very good set of performers and a very good quality piece of writing, you do not have to surround it with all of the paraphernalia that can sometimes come with musicals. That is why the smaller venues like the Bridewell and the Donmar are so crucial because it gives the audience a completely different theatrical experience.

Q34  Mr Bryant: The blocking up of theatres, when Les Miserables went into the Palace they took out all the Victorian ruddles (?), it was the last Victorian stage floor to go, but it is stuck there, is it not, for ever?

Ms Underwood: No, I think you will find that Les Miserables will eventually move on and they will put the theatre back and put something else in. It will not be stuck there for ever but it is a real problem that these warhorses are in these theatres, great it is making money for the economy, I do not think we should be knocking it. As I said before those theatres are made for big shows, you cannot do or I think it would be a mistake to do something like Anyone Can Whistle, which was done at the Palace because there are certain shows what will not work on certain stages. That is why when Cameron McIntosh is looking for which theatre to put his next show into he talks about shopping for a theatre. The musical you are putting on has to be very much suited to the venue it is going into.

Q35  Mr Bryant: Quite a lot of our Victorian and Edwardian London theatres are not brilliant because their sight lines are poor. For instance in the Shaftesbury the balcony comes down over half the audience.

Ms Underwood: What is in the Shaftesbury now is Thoroughly Modern Milly, it is a big dance show and that is the kind of show that would go into the Shaftesbury, not a small, more intimate musical, which is the kind that the Bridewell and other theatres are putting on.

Mr Bryant: How dreadful to be all alone in the world!

Q36  Mr Doran: Looking at your Report and the conclusion you make the point that there is a lack of any funding structure. The question I want to ask is, is it only about funds, is it only about subsidy?

Ms Bexon: From Mercury Musical Developments viewpoint it is pretty much because we do work right at the grassroots because we work with writers. We have over 100 writers and our absolute conviction is there is no shortage of writing talent in Britain. What we are particularly preoccupied and exercised by is the fact that so little British product goes on in musical theatre stages across the country, from the smallest producer right up to the National Theatre. As Mr Kaufman so rightly said the National Theatre, I think I am right in saying, has only done two musicals by British writers. They have done very few new musicals of course but they have done many revivals. They did a musical by two of our writers Honk, which won the Olivier award two or three years ago and I think that slotted into the schedule at the very last minute because something else cancelled and because the budget shrunk and it was a small-scale show and they did Jerry Springer, which was hardly a risk exercise for them because it had been on at the BAC in Edinburgh and I know three commercial producers that were negotiating to try and get it into a commercial house and it ended up at the National Theatre. Those were both high quality works and it was marvellous that they achieved an audience but if the National Theatre is not setting an example by encouraging British writers it is hardly surprising that the repertory theatres and the smaller theatres in London, off West End theatres and smaller fringe theatres are doing the same thing. There is a sore lack of opportunity for British writers, again in huge contrast to what happens in the States. As Bridewell said in their report they do a good percentage ratio of new musicals but it is principally American writers. In the Sates there is a new generation of musical theatre writers in Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, John Lechiusa, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, there are no names we can mention in there apart from George Stubbs and Anthony Drew who have had a modicum of success, highly talented writers. We can name you 98 others who do not get an opportunity. There is no training and there is no development and all of that is down to funding. There is no structure because there is no funding.

Q37  Mr Doran: Just getting back to my original question, is it just about funding, if the money were available would it work? How would it work? What structures would you put in place to make it work?

Ms Bexon: I believe so, From the writing upwards we are the only organisation in the country that provides writers with training and we do very little of that because of our small budgets. There should be training, there should be development opportunities which can actually be quite low cost, it can be one-off workshops, it can be mentoring by other writers or producers or directors, it is lengthy but it does not have to be a high cost exercise. I know of theatre owners and theatre managers who have very small spaces that would provide a first platform, the off West End theatres, the studio spaces in the regional theatres, if there was funding diverted into there that would be the first outing for a small musical. Obviously funding is needed at the regional theatre level to minimise the risk for them to produce new musicals. The final structure of that pyramid is the West End and the commercial theatre which does not need funding, the top ends exists, it is all of the structure in the pyramid below it ---

Ms Underwood: As Georgina said you need very little money to be able to get a show looked at. The thing we get from the writers that we are dealing with all the time is they say to us, "this is great, you provide us with salons, we get to meet people, we network with each other but what we really want at the end of the day is to see if the show works on stage". With £500 to £1,000 you can put on a showcase or a workshop in somewhere like the Bridewell or another venue, because the other thing that the Bridewell do apart from their work open to the public is they provide a venue and a space for work to be looked at by people in the industry before it gets to the production stage. That developmental process which is also what is seriously lacking and which is another reason why we have so little British work in the West End because it needs to go through that evolution is actually quite a cheap thing to do but you still need that pot of money to be able to help a writer to put on that first showcase and that first workshop and get him or her involved with a team of people who can then advise them, work with them and help them restructure, recreate, add, take out and build that piece of work into something which can then start to become attractive to a commercial producer.

Q38  Mr Doran: One of the difficulties I have in the way you are presenting it and the way that the Bridewell and everyone else who has given us evidence is that everything concentrates on subsidy and I understand that is necessary when you are talking about risk-taking in the sort of theatre you are talking about, but it seems to me no matter what you do, no matter what structures we put in the place the public's perception will always be that musical is a place where lots of people make money, it is the big commercial operations and no matter how much support the Bridewell has it will still be limited in the number of people who have access to what it produces. From my own point of view some of the best theatrical experiences I have had have been at the Edinburgh Festival, where lots of the people go through the hands of the Bridewell, but they will perform on the fringe and it is still a limited audience. Nobody has said anything to us about widening the audience by putting pressures on the television companies. I cannot remember the last time there was a musical on televison which was not a Hollywood film. It seems to me that everyone is in a box and is not looking outside the box.

Ms Bexon: We are doing a showcase of five new musicals at the arts theatre next week and we have television and film producers coming along, we have made a special PR marketing initiative to get them along. I suspect this is a very, long, weary road to travel. There are mindsets and historical situations and it will be an education process, I think you are entirely right.

Ms Underwood: I would agree. I hope we will get to the position where you are starting to see musical theatre work on television, it happens in the States, they are now doing and recording television versions of Annie, classic musicals, which are then broadcast on the American networks. We are not in that position yet and we have to persuade the television companies it is worth investing that kind of money, that it is not going to be a one-off showing on BBC 1, that they will be able to sell that product round the world, because otherwise it is not worth their investment. It going to be a long haul. I think we are now at the time we can start to do that with the success of film musicals coming back in thanks to Chicago and the ones which are in production now I think television and film people are beginning to open their eyes to those possibilities, but I think we are at the very beginning of that. It is going to take quite a long time and quite a lot of lobbying on the part of the theatre industry to start bringing them round. One of the producers in the Jerry Springer is Avalon, which is a television production company, it is there and it does happen. Tiger Aspect invested in Our House, it is creeping in but it is going to take a while.

Q39  John Thurso: Before I ask the question I want to ask can I follow up on the point that Frank Doran made, you said that the top end exists happily, and one might say even fairly lucratively, and the problems therefore are at the beginning and in the middle, could the top end not do more to assist the bottom or the middle, is there something that should be looked at?

Ms Bexon: I have to say they could do far more. Mercury Musical Developments only exist and it has only achieved what it has in the last twelve years because of support from the top end. Our sponsors and supporters have included every major theatre producer in the West End I think at various times but I have to say with extremely modest amounts but they do see and recognise the need for support of our organisation and other similar organisations. It is absolute a drop in the ocean even though our budgets are small and our needs are very small. I come back to the fact that we are harking on about funding, the sort of funding levels we are talking about for our organisation are very small and I would compare the musical theatre situation to the funding available for new drama. We work on them the whole time.

Q40  John Thurso: They recognise they ought do be doing it but they do not like to put their hands too far into their pockets.

Ms Bexon: Yes, there is quite a lot of that.

Q41  John Thurso: We are going to have evidence shortly from the National Youth Music Theatre and I have a particular interest because my PA's son performs with them and she has briefed me on it, I would very much like to get an understanding of how organisations in musical theatre feel towards the National Youth Music Theatre and how important you feel it is in helping to develop it?

Ms Underwood: It is crucial. There is an absolute overlap between what we do and the writers we are working with and the work that the NYMT is doing, writers that are part of Mercury are writers who have written for the NYMT. We have had opportunities earlier this year presented to us by the NYMT for the writers that have come under our umbrella, where the NYMT are looking for new work and are saying to us, "have you got writers who can submit some works for us to consider?" We feed into each other. We are at the grassroots level who are producing the writers who are writing the work that the NYMT are putting on. The NYMT are catering for a very specific market. They are also training and bringing up the generations of tomorrow. It is absolutely crucial as far as we are concerned.

Ms Bexon: I could not agree more. They work regionally so they are spreading the word about new music writing across the country, they are creating and developing new audiences from their performer base and their audience base.

Q42  John Thurso: Leading on from that, from all that I have heard this morning it seems that everybody is struggling quite hard, how do you feel that you relate to the Department of Culture Media And sport? Do you feel that the Department understands the problems and is being helpful or that you are not get through to them? Is there anything that the DCMS could be doing to help?

Ms Bexon: The answer to that question is in our small environment the DCMS is very remote.

John Thurso: I think you have answered the question.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, we are most grateful to you.

 

Witness: DR MAGGIE SEMPLE, Chairman, The National Youth Music Theatre, examined.

Chairman: Welcome Dr Semple, we are very pleased to see you.

Q43  Alan Keen: I have had a little bit to do with the National Youth Music Theatre, I think I hosted an event when you were first chair. I just got back in the early hours of this morning from a week's holidays so I do not really know the worst that has happened, could you start off by telling us?

Dr Semple: Thank you for the opportunity. I apologise for not having a cast with me, we are a late witness and I apologise for the limited information you have in front of you. To answer your question directly, to say first of all I am a volunteer as the Chairman of the organisation and my background has been working with young people, I was head of the arts in a large comprehensive school not very far away from here. Why I am involved and why the board is involved and why we do this is because we believe that opportunities for young people in musical theatre is what they indeed enjoy doing and it helps the whole of the industry. What has happened to NYMT? Since 1976 when we were formed we began in a small way and we have developed over the last 25 years. We received funding from Andrew Lloyd Webber of about £200,000 a year for six years. In 1999 the funding ceased and at that time we had are a turnover of about £750,000. We had grown, we were working predominantly in large scale productions but we had also undertaken an audit of our work and we had begun a programme of regional activity. The education audit that we undertook told us several things, one was that there was a market of young people out there who indeed wanted to experience musical theatre and these were young people that extended the base from which NYMT first grew, namely a boys public school in the south of England. We began a programme of talent spotting, of engaging with all young people, all sets of society all over the United Kingdom in getting involved. If I tell you that in 2001 we provided 7,000 room nights in forty plus towns across the United Kingdom that will give you the scale of what we have done. The issue for us is at some point with funding being increasingly difficult to attract a decision had to be made. Unfortunately we took that decision on 22 September. We took the decision because when we looked to the future - our financial year ends December - we found that our deficit would be in the region of£70,000. With all honesty we could no longer sit there, because each summer we do sit as a broad and bite our finger nails and go, "I know we will make it through, we will get there". This year we thought it would be more difficult to raise funds, so we have paused, we have undertaken the CVA, a Company Voluntary Arrangement, we have written to all our creditors and with that we are going to spend I would say until Christmas in our offices at the Palace Theatre - that Andrew Lloyd Webber has given us free, we used to pay rent but we now have it for free for the next three months - trying to stabilise ourselves. What we have done is contact Alumni. As Alumni can and do they called and pledged £40,000 and another US $5,000, which we have, so there is a will to keep us going. I cannot talk about our future because that would jeopardise the CVA route but I can say that we are determined ( and the company has not closed) to ensure this activity continues in some or another for the thousands of young people out in the United Kingdom

Q44  Alan Keen: Can I say for other people's benefit I have seen a number of productions - and I had the thrill of entertaining Celeste Holmes here during the summer, she was the first person to sing I am just a girl that cannot say no in the first production on Broadway of Oklahoma - and the NYMT's production of Oklahoma was magnificent and what was even more outstanding was to go back stage at the end and realise these were not adults who were singing and acting in it, it was just outstanding. I know that you go round the country and you go into areas where kids have never had the opportunity to find out what was possible. I cannot believe that the Government did not come up with the funding to continue that. Considering the number of people who have put something into NYMT over the last couple of years, it is just heartbreaking that the money could not have been found to give you that future for the benefit of kids. Most of us were at Paisley when Renfrewshire Youth presented 20 minutes of Our Town for the Dome and it was brilliant. What was more outstanding was that when we had a buffet lunch with them afterwards you could not get a word in edgeways, they just talked all the time and it was because of the confidence they had gained from being involved in this. You are getting funding from one of the trade unions or has that stopped, or is it just that you did not have enough coming in from elsewhere?

Dr Semple: If you will not hold it against me I will just tell you about the Dome because I was Director of the Millennium Experience and you met Alison, one of my directors for Scotland, we produced the Our Town story and every day, as you know, we had hundreds of children at the Dome hearing that story. We are one of the NASUWT's flagship projects and we apply to them each year for specific pieces of work. We have had their grant and we have used it and I am sure if we apply again, if we are able to, they will look at us favourably. The Department for Education and Science is very keen to work with us, but the regional opportunities have been for local authorities and other grants. Youth Music has been very helpful and very encouraging and supportive of our work and what we want to do in the future. This is an area where we have not had the time to pause because we are running all the time to keep these activities going, but I think we are going to be able to do so now. I imagine the future scenario for young people and youth music and musical theatre might look like this certainly for NYMT but there might be others, although there are not many organisations like us in this field. There is the National Youth Theatre who we talk to, but I imagine that we could develop our regional programme even more and that would not only mean going along with local authorities and arts councils of each region and so on but also working with theatres who have good relations with us. Newcastle Theatre, for example, is very keen to work with us. We would certainly - and this might sound crude - contract our services out to theatres for those who do not have the capacity or who are just emerging in this area of working with young people. There are lots of regional theatres that do have an excellent regional programme in musical theatre. I think we could develop the regional programme, but also what we specialise in, as you know, are what I call the large scale, major projects where you get Alan Ayckbourn writing Orvin for you and if you get into that as a kid it is a fantastic experience. What young people say to me about NYMT is it is wonderful having the regional programmes, absolutely perfect and it is on a wonderful scale, but if we brought people in from all over the country to do the large scale stuff with other sorts of writers, it could be new writers, it does not have to be somebody who has made their mark, that is an experience that very few young people have and it is that excellence as well that we are endorsing. So attracting sponsorship and funding for the large scale project has been the most challenging and that is what Andrew Lloyd Weber has funded for us in the past and that is what we need to think about in terms of carrying on there. That is the model I see there.

Q45  Alan Keen: Do you think the Department for Education does not understand the value that this can give to children? We all want our kids to be able to read and write and be good at maths, that is essential, but do you really think the Department for Education has an understanding of what it can give kids if they have the opportunity? I started to play the guitar when I was 40 because I did not get a chance to before then, I had an aversion to music because of the way I was taught at school, I just did not want to know. Last year's music theatre-type of productions and the training gives kids the opportunity and lets them see that it does not have to be serious music, it is part of the enjoyment of life. Does the Department and the DCMS not understand the value of this? There is a vast education budget there. Why can we not get more of it for this aspect of life?

Dr Semple: I know the DfES fairly well and DCMS fairly well. I would say there is an interest in knowing more. My issue is to find the right place to go to have that conversation, that is my own personal difficulty. I do not sense resistance, certainly not, but I used to work at the Arts Council many years ago and it would help if those of us outside of that structure understood the conversations that were taking place on musical theatre for young people with the DfES and DCMS. I know they have brought together a lot of their thinking on arts education and I think it would be very helpful if we could progress that to youth musical theatre. I think there is still some work to do and I would love to be able to sit here and say I am totally confident that both those departments have and understand the issues. I have yet to have that detailed conversation, but I do not think I meet resistance.

Alan Keen: Thank you.

Q46  John Thurso: Dr Semple, we are very grateful you are here. I know you are a late witness and I also know you are a volunteer, but please do not take these questions as being aggressive, they are not meant to be, they are just to find out something about what is going on. Is there any research that anybody has done on the relationship between kids who have theatre experience not becoming vandals or whatever and those who do not have the theatre experience becoming vandals? Is there any way of proving to Government that if you invest in this you get better young people?

Dr Semple: If there is not then I will do it! This is longitudinal work we are talking about here and I would think the best place to look for that would be the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER), they might have a comment on it and they will have examples of that sort of justification, of people engaged at a certain age in arts activity having their lives transformed which means they have not gone down an undesirable route. I am sure there is some work there.

Q47  John Thurso: It does seem to me that if, when putting your case to Government, you could actually point to a cause and effect it would help considerably. I know, because of the announcement you have made, you cannot talk about what may happen in the future, but can I ask a little bit about the past. You have mentioned your turnover of £750,000 and I also know that a certain amount of the funding comes from parents and you have a very good funding pack that goes to the parents of kids that are involved and so on. Can you give us some idea of the break down of funding and broadly where your funds have come from in the past so that we can get an idea of the sort of scale of the problem?

Dr Semple: I will give you an example here. I have here a report on activities in 2002, as we are completing our audit now. We wanted to attract from external sources, that is not parents, around about £250,000 and corporate sponsorship makes up £100,000 of that. Then we have donations, trusts and foundations, friends and individual donations, corporate entertainment and musical theatre industry. We also know from the costs of our productions that the break down between what parents contribute to our funders, Youth Music, would be £150,000 and I will say Youth Music would contribute another £150,000 and the box office would contribute around about the rest. That is broadly what it is. The thing about parents contributing is that of course they pay a subsidised rate for the course or the event. As I said earlier, our biggest cost is residential costs for our young people. What we are looking at, in order to have a viable way to go forward, is whether we should change the age group for whom we are catering. The National Youth Theatre work with older young people and do not have that issue to do with chaperones and beds and all those other things. It is a phenomenal part of our budget goes on residential costs.

Q48  John Thurso: You might like to look for a hotel group to sponsor you.

Dr Semple: I was actually going to say what you could do for us. I mentioned 7,000 beds and again it is only because we are in this situation that we have had time to pause and to say NYMT cannot go, that is the first thing. In previous walks of life I have not been shy of saying we have got to take a decision here, which is what we have done with NYMT. If we had carried on we could have said we will have £70,000 of debt at the end of the year, somebody will have to come in and we will start the new year and carry on. We had to take the decision. I am not saying it should continue because it is NYMT but it is actually filling a huge gap there. I would say it was 7,000 room nights in 2001. There must be a deal that we can do with a major hotel chain and I had thought of the Youth Hostel Association but it may be something quite different from that, but we need help in how to go about that.

John Thurso: I had better declare my interest, Chairman, as I am deputy chairman of a listed plc of a hotel company.

Q49  Mr Bryant: I should declare an interest because I am an associate of the National Youth Theatre which means that if it folds I have to fork out £1, so it is not a big financial interest. I wanted to ask a bit about the relationship with the National Youth Theatre because the National Youth Theatre has done quite a lot of musicals over the last couple of years, it did Maggie May, Blitz and another one which I cannot remember the name of. It seems to me there is some overlapping here. I just wonder whether there is more work that you could do together.

Dr Semple: Absolutely, and I have already met the National Youth Theatre's chairman. What I want to be able to go to him with is a proposition - when we are out of this particular situation as we are not attractive to anyone at the moment in terms of talking about the future - for how we might look at our organisations and benefit from our joint expertise. An example is office space, that is just a simple thing and there are things we can be doing together without diluting the brands. Those conversations have begun, but I do not want to frighten the world out there by having them think we will be merging or something like that. That has not been discussed but we have given it thought.

Q50  Mr Bryant: Why would it be frightening for the world to say you were merging?

Dr Semple: Because of the state we are in at the moment. It might be that we will say, after we have got through this particular period, it seems sensible that the future looks like this in that we know National Youth Theatre have not got such a great regional presence as we do so should we pick that up? We know that they have wonderful premises and we do not. It is those sorts of things. When you talk of a merge people just hear the word and think both are going to get subsumed within something new. I want to qualify the merger with specifics. That is why I think outside people might be a bit frightened.

Q51  Mr Bryant: One of the historic problems has always been the Arts Council has only wanted to look in a very minor way at youth drama or theatre in any way at all and you have said today that you are never quite sure who to go to in DfES. I had understood that this area was meant to be with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It seems that there is no fixed point anywhere in Government to take this forward. Many of the arguments that have been advanced in terms of why youth musical theatre is so important are to do with the fact that young people who maybe are not all that interested in the academic route understand how to express themselves and can find theatre and drama or music very enlightening and helpful, and exposing people to the professionalism that the NYMT and NYT puts on them is a wholly different experience from just doing a play at school. How important do you think it is to try and get Government to focus its aim?

Dr Semple: Very much so, and it will only enhance the infrastructure and the sector and the form by doing so. Perhaps they already meet and they talk but I am not aware of the outcomes of that, other than Youth Music, who I see as the particular programme we benefit from, where there has been a successful relationship between the Department for Education and Skills and the Arts Council. If that is as a result of those two departments working together then I would say that is excellent and there might be other things that we could do to inform those departments of how else they might look at things. It is difficult for me to know exactly who to go to to have the conversation.

Mr Bryant: I suspect there is not anybody.

Q52  Mr Flook: I was interested to hear you say that the DfES were interested in knowing more about your plight and coming to help you. I presume I heard that right.

Dr Semple: Did you say the DfES or Youth Music?

Q53  Mr Flook: DfES.

Dr Semple: No, Youth Music is what I said.

Q54  Mr Flook: Sorry, I must have misheard you. What I want to look at is how the Government is involved in helping you through the Arts Council. On October 6 you put out a press release, but in the months running up to that internally you must have known that things were looking a little bit ropey. Did you approach them or were you approached by the Arts Council? Can you just take us through that more accurately?

Dr Semple: Every summer we sit biting our nails about the rest of the year and so in the summer, when it is our busiest season, we know that not only are we going to have cashflow problems but there will also be creditors mounting up and the promises and the pledges we hope would come in. Before the summer this year we looked at our programme and the board took the decision that we would run it because we had sufficient pledges to enable us to believe that we could pay what are now our creditors. At that time we worked very closely with Youth Music and continue to do so and they have been incredibly supportive. What we will be putting to our creditors as part of the success of this dreadful state that we are in is that those creditors that took part in the August programme we hope will be able to receive their fee because Youth Music is going to help us meet that cost.

Q55  Mr Flook: We probably misunderstand each other. I am not looking at whether you have done the right thing, I was looking at how active involvement funders have tried to help you. You have looked at it from your angle and said we can move forward, we are going to be solvent and that is very important as a charity, etcetera and I do not deny for a moment that it would appear that you look as though you have done things absolutely correctly, you knew you were going forward. Did you put any calls in to the Arts Council and what was their response? Did they rush round and offer to help or did they say they would help you in November?

Dr Semple: No, they would not say that because I would carry on calling them. Youth Music is our point of contact, not the Arts Council. We have called and we have good relationships with Youth Music about our situation and they have been supportive, they have helped us through the thinking and they have provided resources to us in terms of their own staff expertise. There has not been an obstructive comment or view or lack of interest in our particular situation from Youth Music. I did not approach the DfES because they fund us for specific projects. Youth Music was the major player for me to go to.

Q56  Mr Flook: But you are nationally important. Did it not occur to the people that you were a point of contact for to think outside their own silo mentality and to say, if there is a shortage of money, where can we get the money from, where can we get our contacts to go to the Arts Council, to think outside the box? Did that happen?

Dr Semple: I suspect it did, but if I am honest, we have now been to ask for emergency funding at least on one occasion if not two and so we have had to draw on their resources again and their goodwill to help us and they have done so. I can only say this because I received phone calls from people to let them know the situation we are in. They really have helped.

Q57  Mr Flook: So Youth Music is funded by?

Dr Semple: The fund I am talking about that Youth Music holds has come about, as I understand it, from collaboration with the Arts Council of England and the DfES. I am sure DCMS is in there somewhere, but from my perspective that is how that fund is made up.

Q58  Mr Flook: I understand that DCMS funds the Arts Council. The reason for asking all these questions is that somewhere along the line the Arts Council, which is in charge of Youth Music, which is funded by the DCMS, which we scrutinise, does not seem to have gone up. Has a response from the DCMS to your plight been commensurate - and you may or may not be aware of this - with its first strategic priority which is to increase the access of children and young people to culture?

Dr Semple: Not yet.

Chairman: Dr Semple, thank you very much indeed. We are most grateful to you. I have got to say this and I am not saying it in anticipation of any decline in standards when we get the Arts Council, but I believe that these are some of the most outstanding witnesses that this Committee has heard for a very long time. Thank you.

 

Memoranda submitted by Arts Council England

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MS SARAH WEIR, Executive Director, Arts Council London, MS NICOLA THOROLD, Arts Council England, examined.

Q59  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for coming to see us and although I ought not to say this, I find it extremely satisfying that seven out of our nine witnesses today have been women. Sometimes the balance is far too much the other way and that is no reflection on the male witnesses we have had this morning.

Ms Weir: Chairman, may I make an introductory statement?

Q60  Chairman: Yes, of course.

Ms Weir: Thank you very much. Firstly, Arts Council England very much welcomes the opportunity to talk to the Committee and I would like particularly to say that Nicola and I welcome this opportunity because this is the first time that you see us in the guise of the new Arts Council England with me as Executive Director of London and Nicola as the Director of Theatre looking at the policy for the whole of England. Musical theatre is part of a much bigger genre between music theatre, including opera. Having said that, musicals are the most popular form of live performance that we subsidise. We know that the impact of West End Theatre as a whole is significant. In 1997 the economic impact on the UK economy was approximately £1 billion with 41,000 jobs depending on West End Theatre. As the Committee will know and has been discussed this morning, musicals are a major component of that. It is easy to be dazzled by the big musicals and the huge successes of productions such as Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera and the Lion King, all of which were new pieces of work when they first appeared, but quite rightly, we believe, you have chosen to focus on the artistic development of musical theatre and the smaller scale production. Our engagement with musical theatre covers all scales and both new music and classical musicals. We want it to be put clearly on record that we value this genre, not just for its popularity or its economic importance but also for its potential to develop artists and as a medium for artistic experimentation. The briefing paper we have provided for you covers the history of our interaction with musicals but in summary I would like to say that, in recent years, with the recent growth of our funds, we have adopted a more proactive and developmental approach to music theatre. It is true that in the 1980s and 1990s we chose not no prioritise this area given our restricted funds and the involvement of private investment in musical theatre. The Arts Council also supports musicals whether through the repertoire of our regularly funded clients, the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre or the Plymouth Theatre Royal. We do know that these musicals tend not to be new musicals. The most fertile area for the development of new musicals is undoubtedly the smaller organisations such as the Bridewell, Battersea Arts Centre and NITRO. The economic risk for larger organisations is a factor that mitigates against them developing the work but just as importantly, the process of developing the work is often more appropriate for the smaller developmental organisations. We offer core funding to some countries that develop new musical work, as we outlined in our paper, and importantly too, we have restructured our project funds to ensure equal access to them from all art forms and that includes practitioners in the field of musical theatre. This is the programme called Grants for the Arts and over the next few years it has a budget of £28 million for individual artists and £123 million for organisations. This is a major step and in the first six months of the new programme we are starting to see a large number of companies and individuals coming forward and taking advantage of this new programme. For example, we have offered two grants to individuals to develop their ideas for musicals at a very early stage which would not have been possible before. The Arts Council no longer holds earmarked funds for particular sub-sectors of an art form. For example, we have rolled our previously ring-fenced fund for theatre writers into the new Grants for the Arts scheme. It is worth noting that the development of new musical work encourages collaborations not only between artists but in terms of backers for ventures. Our experience is that some commercial producers have been willing to seed-fund new work but not on the considerably larger scale that happens in the US. The Arts Council has had a partnership with the Cameron Mackintosh Foundation to encourage new work and we are also aware of other partnerships such as Barclays that have benefited the development of work or artists. We recently launched an initiative to strengthen the relationships between the commercial and subsidised theatre sectors which Mr Cogo-Fawcett spoke at and we described that in our paper, and we hope that is going to be a useful contribution to the infrastructure for producers of musicals whether big or small. We are convinced of the artistic value of musical theatre and committed to its development. We feel we have enabled the sector to develop both in terms of innovation and infrastructure, but we also recognise that there is much more to do. However, to build on the existing successes further would require significant additional resources which we do not have at the moment. Thank you very much, Chairman.

Chairman: Thank you.

Q61  Mr Doran: That is a very helpful opening statement as it adds a little bit to what you have said in your written submission. I am still concerned as it appears to me as a novice in this area from the evidence that I have heard that there is a lack of structure. You have obviously changed strategy in the fairly recent past and that was acknowledged by the Bridewell witnesses we heard earlier and you have been open about the fact that there are not the funds to devote that perhaps you would like to devote. In terms of the structural change which would see organisations like the Bridewell see their fortunes improve a little, what changes do you see that would be appropriate over the next few years to try and close that gap between the financially successful musicals at the top of the tree and those like the Bridewell?

Ms Weir: I am going to ask my colleague Nicola Thorold to answer that.

Ms Thorold: It is a very complex issue because it is not solely about the development of work. If we are going to talk about the pyramid that has been discussed which at the moment is inverted, you are not just talking about the training and development of artists and practitioners and the new writing of both musical and book in this context, you are also talking about the promoter network which does not really exist, you are talking about an infrastructure where you would have probably an agency that could help with some of the issues you have been touching on which is not just about the work itself but about the partners and the range of partners that can come into this sector. That is where we say this is important. We can see that there are things that need to be done but it would not be cheap and we do not have the resources at this time to be the initiator.

Q62  Mr Doran: There must be an issue about the way you allocate resources at the moment. Just looking at your own paper, page 5, we heard earlier that Bridewell is the theatre dedicated to new musical works whereas Battersea may have one every now and again, but the disparity between the amount of grants which each receives seems to be quite significant.

Ms Thorold: I would argue that Battersea has more than a one-off relationship with musicals.

Q63  Mr Doran: I did not say one-off but every now and again.

Ms Thorold: They do develop work.

Q64  Mr Doran: It is not their main focus.

Ms Thorold: It is one of their main focuses. They developed Jerry Springer the Opera, they are a player. Greenwich Theatre is also a player in this area and then Stratford East or NITRO. The Bridewell is a key player, undoubtedly, but it is not unique.

Q65  Mr Doran: But they do not seem to have any core funding. According to your paper on the grants which they receive, it is £30,000 by way of project awards as opposed to core funding.

Ms Thorold: You are quite correct, they do not receive core funding. We cannot core fund every single organisation, I think that is the truth of it and we have been working closely with the Bridewell to develop a relationship with them and we asked them to put themselves forward for project funding a couple of years ago. Although that was not successful, we are going to ask them to do the same this December and we are working with them to help them make that grant possible.

Q66  Mr Doran: So there is the possibility of core funding in the future?

Ms Thorold: It would not be core funding, it would be a specific grant for genre development and it would be a two-year grant, it would be £30,000 a year for the next two years.

Q67  Mr Doran: The other issue which was raised by the Bridewell in their submission was the fact that they are lumped together with theatre and that is obvious from the way that you set out your grant awards. Musical theatre is not really a separate speciality. Is there likely to be any change to that in the future?

Ms Thorold: I was interested to hear that point, but we do not have specialists in every single area. As I think you will be very aware, with the restructuring of the Arts Council one of the things we wanted to achieve was to cut our costs so that as much money as possible can go to the arts and we are there to enable the arts to flourish, we do not want that money to be spent on the administration in the middle. We do not have specialists, for example, in classical theatre. Nicola would expect her teams to know about theatre across the spectrum. Our theatre teams and our music teams work extremely closely together. With the change that we have made, with people being able to apply for grants for the arts right across the genre, I do not think that is a problem.

Q68  Mr Doran: They think it is a problem because it means there is not a proper focus within the Arts Council.

Ms Thorold: I do not believe that is the case. I think that the focus is there for musical theatre just as it is for theatre or as it is for music.

Q69  Mr Doran: But you have advisers for physical theatre, for performance and for art, opera and ballet.

Ms Thorold: We do not. That was perhaps a misunderstanding on the part of the Bridewell who made that claim.

Q70  Mr Doran: What do you have then?

Ms Thorold: We have theatre officers.

Q71  Mr Doran: And you cannot dedicate one of these to be a specialist in musical theatre?

Ms Thorold: Not without creating a new post.

Q72  Alan Keen: You have not got enough money as far as I am concerned and you are concerned. Let me just take the NYMT as an example. I can understand the big productions they put on. I would accept and I would be confident that funding could be acquired for that sort of thing and I think Maggie Semple confirmed that. What concerns me more than anything is the lack of opportunity for young people to know what is possible. This question is not directed at the Arts Council but generally speaking. Those of us who care about the theatres and realise the value of musical theatre know you are restricted through a lack of funds. How can we get the Department for Education to understand the value of it as part of the education of our young people?

Ms Weir: I think the example Maggie Semple was talking about is a very good example of us working closely together because in that partnership we delegate £10 million to youth music. That partnership was with the DfES and it is out of that £10 million that funds then go to the National Youth Music Theatre, so we are working in that particular area. She also in her statement, or I think you in your question asked about new research that was done to show whether these opportunities do make a difference and the answer is they do and research has been done because we work not just with the DfES, but also with the youth justice boards. There was a programme called Splash which we ran last year which was run again this summer which showed exactly that, that when young people have other things to do in the holidays than just being out on the streets, then yes, the crime in that area goes down, they feel more confident about themselves and there is quite a direct correlation between the two.

Q73  Alan Keen: Do you, as the experts in the field, get involved in the discussions on the general education curriculum or do the educationalists decide what they want to do, where they want to spend the mass of the money and then they give you a little bit and you do your best? Are you involved with the discussions on the curriculum and how can we, as politicians, really help to redress that balance and focus?

Ms Thorold: We do have discussions with the DfES and indeed with the DCMS on a reasonably regular basis about issues like that and I think it is probably worth noting, because of the way your conversations were going earlier, that we have with the last increase in award from government significantly increased the amount of money we have made available to youth organisations. The National Youth Theatre was on £15,000 a year last year, it is on £100,000 this year and by 2005/06 it will be on £200,000. That came out of discussions with the DfES and the DCMS about the value and indeed about the new Arts Council and its priorities, but you are right, there is always more that can be done in terms of the conversation and the importance that is attributed to it.

Q74  Alan Keen: Going back to the research, and John asked about research, what else can you do to make sure that this research is taken notice of or am I wrong and it is not of such wonderful value to children to be involved in musical productions and just in music itself? What has the research produced? I know there is a lot of research now about obesity and that sort of thing and how a healthier lifestyle can put that right and the Sports Minister actually involved the All-Party Athletics Group and we were told by the Sports Minister to concentrate on a healthy lifestyle because that is where the biggest budget is in the Exchequer, so concentrate on that. In our case we are talking today about musical theatre, so what has that research shown and can we not go further in that? Is that something the Arts Council can do?

Ms Weir: That research does show that it has an effect and we make sure that we talk to both the DCMS and the DfES, but in one sense the strongest example, and I wish I could transport all of you to where I was last Friday, is a composer called Jonathan Dove, of whom some of you might have heard, and he has been commissioned by the Spitalfields Festival to do a community cantata. He is working in a school in Tower Hamlets and he let some of us into a very early workshop where he was developing his ideas with those children, they were ten-year-olds, and we actually then had to become involved and do a song-and-dance routine, but when you saw the way he worked with the children, who do not in a way think they are getting culture, it is just a part of their day, it was completely extraordinary, so it helped him do his work and the children who started at the beginning of the session, particularly the boys, not being very engaged, probably thought it was not really their thing, by the end were completely entranced with what they had produced, so you just have to actually see it and it is always the strongest message of anything.

Q75  Alan Keen: It seems to me that people look at the arts and they say, "It's a good thing and we should give some money to that", but it does not seem to play an important part in the actual education curriculum and that to me is where the mass of money is available and it should be part of education. I am speaking, as I mentioned earlier, from my own experience where it was rammed down my throat as culture and I rejected it because I would rather play football and it was not until later in life that I realised the tremendous value of it. That is what I am worried about. How do we get the people with the large budgets at their fingertips to understand the enormous value in this? How do we do it?

Ms Thorold: The Arts Council agrees with you and we do try and advocate this whenever possible. I think when it comes to the curriculum we have a particular issue which I feel strongly about which is that theatre is not part of the curriculum and music is. That has been made possible for all sorts of opportunities for music in schools which are not available for theatre in schools, so there are all sorts of issues that we, as the Arts Council, would love to be able to address. Musicals, crossing music and theatre, one could perhaps see coming through the music curriculum, but theatre at the moment is not in the curriculum and this is an issue for us. We would welcome any support to raise the profile of those issues. I seem to remember a few years ago that there was some American research which suggested that people's mathematical ability was improved by their music skills. At the time it got some attention back from the press, but, as ever with these things, they are one-day wonders and they go away and it is only people like us who actually remember that that is the case.

Ms Weir: Could I just make one other point to add to that which is that we have a programme which actually comes directly from the DCMS called Creative Partnerships, which some of you might have heard of, and that is a partnership where artists work with schools to develop, across all areas of creativity, opportunities for children to develop themselves, so it is not just theatre, it is not just music, but it actually goes across science and many other subjects, but that is something that is running and there are two areas in London and in the south and the east where that is already in place, but it is all over the country.

Q76  John Thurso: Can I just get a bit of clarification on your footnote on funding which was in your paper, page 8, to understand where you are now. From now on there is effectively only one programme that is available which is Grants for the Arts and it covers absolutely everything. Is that correct?

Ms Weir: For organisations that are not regularly funded by us?

Q77  John Thurso: Yes.

Ms Weir: Yes, that is correct.

Q78  John Thurso: And you are currently evaluating the impact of the £25 million invested in theatre. Are Grants for the Arts and the £25 million related or are those two separate?

Ms Weir: They are completely separate. The £25 million came from the Theatre Review in 2001.

Q79  John Thurso: Is it then £25 million there or thereabouts that goes into theatre? What I am driving at is how much goes into theatre?

Ms Thorold: In this year it is £100 million, including the National Theatre and the RSC.

Q80  John Thurso: That is all theatre, and how much would Grants for the Arts be of that £100 million?

Ms Thorold: That is for the regularly funded organisations.

Q81  John Thurso: So it is £100 million for the, as it were, regularly funded organisations. Are any of them statutorily funded? The £25 million is on top of that and that is for?

Ms Thorold: The £100 million includes the £25 million. This is the first year in which that £25 million has been available in full which has brought the funding level for theatre up to that.

Q82  John Thurso: So of the £100 million, £75 million is the regular, what-you-do-every-year programmes and £25 million is available ----

Ms Thorold: The £25 million was almost entirely rolled into core funding.

Ms Weir: In 2001.

Q83  John Thurso: I am not sure I am any the wiser after this.

Ms Thorold: Perhaps it would be easier for me just to explain. Three or four years ago when we were looking at a theatre sector in crisis, the core funding for theatre, which excluded the National Theatre, was around £40 million. We then successfully made the case to government and received the extra £25 million to roll into the core funding of theatre in order to revitalise the sector. That, therefore, brings us up to a £70 million baseline of core funding to theatre and then the national companies had a bit which brings you to the total of £100 million, so the Grants for the Arts money is entirely separate and theatre competes for that on the same basis as any other art form.

Q84  John Thurso: So looking at, for example, the National Youth Music Theatre, it would be competing, if it wished to, within Grants for the Arts?

Ms Thorold: Yes, although we have specifically with the DfES set up this fund through Youth Music so that they do not have to go through that kind of process.

Q85  John Thurso: Looking more broadly at what you do in music, you wrote some interesting appendices and opera was brought out. Can you tell me broadly how much is spent on what one might call 'classic opera' as opposed to how much you spend on what might be termed 'musicals'?

Ms Weir: The figure for music theatre is £41.6 million in the year 2003/04. Within that £41.6 million, £38 million is for large-scale opera houses which would be the Royal Opera House, ENO, WNO and Opera North.

Q86  John Thurso: Which leaves £3.6 million for musicals.

Ms Weir: But of course do not forget that some of those opera houses also do musicals.

Q87  John Thurso: Do you think that is a fair balance given how much the cities are having to pay for opera?

Ms Weir: Yes, I think this takes us right back to where we started which is that we cannot fund everything and probably every art form could come to us, indeed does come to us, and say that their art form should have more money.

Q88  John Thurso: Yes, but you make the judgment, do you not, within the Arts Council? Everybody can come to you, but you decide where it goes, so I am interested as a nation really, as an Arts Council, as a government, as to why we think that opera is worth £38 million and musical is worth £3.6 million. Why not make it £37 million for opera and £4.6 million for musical?

Ms Weir: On top of the money for opera which is the core funding, there are of course project grants and many, many people who would be coming forward in the musical theatre area or the musical area could also apply for project grants. I think there probably is not an easy answer to that question. I said in the earlier submission that during the 1980s and 1990s we made a decision not to specifically fund the growth of that area due to restrictions on our own funding and also due to the possibility of more commercial funding to come in. The example of the US was made on several occasions earlier, but there is substantial commercial funding there, substantial, and we do not have the same situation in this country.

Q89  John Thurso: I was fascinated to read that five of the 17 musicals currently running in London's West End have origins in the subsidised sector.

Ms Weir: Yes.

Q90  John Thurso: Given some of the amazing productions now that one thinks of as long-running, highly lucrative and all the rest of it in the West End, is there any way in which if productions have started through the subsidised sector that when they become lucrative, there can be a pay-back from that investment which can then be redirected into the next generation of musical?

Ms Weir: There is already. That is exactly what happens.

Q91  John Thurso: Can you tell me how that happens?

Ms Weir: For example, Battersea Arts Centre with Jerry Springer started at the Battersea Arts Centre, then went to the National Theatre and it has now just transferred into the West End and Battersea will get a proportion of the monies that are made as it goes on through its West End run.

Q92  John Thurso: It goes back to Battersea, it does not come back to you?

Ms Weir: You mean come back to us?

Q93  John Thurso: Yes.

Ms Weir: No, it would go back to the originating theatre because I think our job is as enablers of the art to happen, it is not to manage that. Therefore, I think it is right that the money should go back to the theatre and not to us.

Q94  Chairman: This inquiry was originally called after we heard about the difficulties that have affected the Bridewell and we have conjoined it, it is a wider inquiry, with the National Youth Music Theatre because of the problems which have afflicted that and of which we heard earlier this month. Now, I know that you have a very wide remit, I know that you have guidelines, I know that you have limited amounts of money and it would be very good if you got more. Nevertheless, what we are doing here in this inquiry is facing predicaments. Of course nobody is challenging that you have obligations to all kinds of other institutions ranging from the Royal National Theatre right through. Nevertheless, whatever happens, the Royal National Theatre is going to survive, and a good thing too, and it is doing very well under its new director. It has got a whole collection of things which are great successes, including commercial successes. We are not in danger of losing the RNT and it would be a tragedy if we were in danger of losing it. Nevertheless, we are dealing here in particular with two institutions which are in very serious trouble indeed and that has been shown by the notice put out on October 6^th by the National Youth Music Theatre and by the fact that unless something is done, we are in danger of losing the Bridewell. Now, I think you will have heard from the range of questioning you have heard from different members of the Committee that although it is our job to ask searching questions about any institution or organisation that comes to us, there is a very strong feeling among members that it would be very sad indeed if these institutions were to be lost. It is perfectly clear that the National Youth Music Theatre is in very serious trouble and has declared redundancies. It is equally clear that unless something urgent is done with regard to the Bridewell, we could lose that and we could lose it permanently. Now, that being so, one of the reasons we hold inquiries like this, as we do and as we did, for example, with the last World War II Destroyer, which was not the most glamorous of subjects, but was an important subject and which, without our inquiry, would have been sent to the scrapyard and is now an important historical relic and also a major visitor attraction on the Medway, one of the reasons we called this inquiry was to see what could be done to save the Bridewell and now the National Youth Music Theatre. Why do you not sit down with these two organisations, separately of course, and without in any way abnegating your obligation to take care of the money allotted to you through the public purse, why do you not sit down with each of them and see if you can for each of them work out a rescue package which will not be profligate on your part, but will help to maintain the existence of two institutions without which the cultural scene in this country would be the poorer?

Ms Weir: Well, I am glad to say that we have partly read your mind because we have sat down with the Bridewell, in fact we did it in May, and went through with them because we knew that this situation was going to be occurring, one of the major reasons being, as you heard earlier, that their grant which was given to the St Bride's Institute by the Corporation of London is no longer possible, therefore, their onward grant of £45,000 disappears and they have to pay rent. So we sat down with them and they applied to Grants for the Arts because what we felt they really needed most, and they agreed, was somebody who could provide very direct technical experience to look at different avenues of what they might do because there is never one answer to these things, there is usually a range of things, so we did that straightaway. They applied for the money, they got it, they will be appointing somebody very shortly and we will be working extremely closely with them to see the outcome of that.

Q95  Chairman: That is promising and encouraging, but I would like to press you a little further. Can I make clear that in my view, and I think it is probably the view of my colleagues as well, this is one of the situations in which there are no villains, there are no bad people. Bridewell would not exist without the Corporation of London and they have been very good about it. Nobody is saying that they are behaving badly ----

Ms Weir: No, absolutely.

Q96  Chairman: ---- as one can sometimes say about organisations who come before us, and I will name none of them, not now anyhow. I would like to go a little bit farther. What you have said is encouraging. We have got about five weeks because of our other programme before we compile the report which we will issue on the subject of this inquiry. Will you undertake that, say, by the second week of November you will come back to us, though we will not hold another public session, but that you will come back to us and let us know what progress you have made in the initiatives you have embarked on?

Ms Weir: I believe we can certainly tell you that we will come back to you and let you know the progress that the consultant who we believe will provide the right support for them has made by that time. Yes, I see no problem with that.

Q97  Chairman: Well, that is all I want to ask you because I do not believe there is any sense in probing your policies further as you have explained them with great clarity to other questioners from the Committee. I believe that one of the roles of this Committee is to serve the cultural and artistic community as well as the heritage community, as we did with the Destroyer, and I believe that it would be an achievement of yours and ours if the outcome of this inquiry could be to bring hope to these two organisations and I hope we can agree on that.

Ms Weir: I think we can agree on that, Chairman.

Chairman: Thank you very much.