Lyn Gardner | Stage | The Guardian: The news that Hull Truck theatre is to receive a further £250,000 in emergency funding from Arts Council England (ACE) will have come as no surprise to anyone following the troubled venue, which has faced a series of financial problems since moving into its £15m new premises in 2009 . Like so many arts organisations, from the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough to Northern Ballet in Leeds and the Curve in Leicester, the Hull Truck has found it difficult to make ends meet in its new building, where costs are higher and income lower than expected. Like many theatre organisations (particularly those out of London), it has been hit hard by the financial downturn resulting in lower income. It has also faced challenges in its leadership .
4 comments:
I think that this serves as an excellent wake up call to a lot of designers and technicians. Some feel as though that if there is a big enough name or venue behind something that it will succeed no matter what. Take Viva Elvis by Cirque Du Soleil. A show about the king of rock n' roll by the biggest entertainment organization in Las Vegas and around the world, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out people just did not want to see it. It’s hard to predict the reaction to a performance, i.e. revivals on Broadway. You can do as many case studies and predictions as you want, you just cannot know what the audience is going to think when they walk out of the theatre on opening night. What’s interesting about this article is that it is something without emotion that has the reputation, it’s a building, an inanimate object.
I'm not sure how to feel about all of this, simply because I don't think theres any way that you can simply say that one thing is more valuable than the other when making a commercially successful piece of theatre. I like a lot of this has to do with the history of each individual theater itself. In some theatre communities, the work has continued to succeed just because of the nature of the theater. In some communities, the quality of work is so high that people continue to come back again and again just because they're naturally drawn in by that. Some work because of a combination of spectacle as well as historical background. However, with this particular issue, it is kind of interesting how even government-supported arts programs are failing, as this has been a continually suggested idea for failing theaters in the US. It'll be interesting see how this issue develops.
I think that the fact that the Arts Council of England has given so much to try to support this theatre is great, because this type of government support for the arts is a really good thing, but the fact that they’re giving (and have already given) so much to this theatre is just terrible. This organization is trying to support the arts, and part of that mission is to save this theatre, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. I think that there are much more effective ways that the Arts Council can distribute funding that would support their mission much more than continually bailing out the Hull Truck theatre. By giving so much financially, their not so much supporting theatre as an art but rather everything that goes into it. All of the money that has gone into this could have been much better spent creating smaller theatres that have a much lower chance of failing due to financial issues, but instead it went to a larger theatre that can’t sustain itself without continuous government support. This whole situation is ridiculous, and it looks like the AEC isn’t in a position to stop funding this theatre because of how much they’ve already invested in it.
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