Arts funding | The Guardian: Can one star save Welsh theatre? On a spring morning in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), 180 people are thronging for the answers. We’re in the Awen bar next to the gorgeous 1,900-capacity Donald Gordon theatre, which last summer staged the hit play Nye, about NHS founder Aneurin Bevan. This experience inspired its lead actor, Michael Sheen, to set up the new Welsh National Theatre (WNT), as he tells us today, scruffy-bearded and check-shirted, bouncing around a much smaller, makeshift stage.
2 comments:
This argument is unfortunately a very common, and very stupid, one. When it comes to preserving the arts and cultural infrastructure, anything and anyone who is willing to offer it is worthwhile. What to people suggest, that successful people from a culture do nothing to attempt to preserve their countries cultural resources? The unfortunate truth of the modern market is that people will give more money to, and care more about, faces they already recognize. People will travel for a show with Michael Sheen, whereas a local show with equally talented Welsh artists may flop because it doesn’t have a selling point. While it is undeniably performative to frame an entire theatre around one celebrity, and it does little to mask the actual motivations, that doesn’t change the fact that this theatre is going to receive funding that Cymry is not currently getting easy access to, and it is following the mission of spreading Welsh art and language. In a couple years, once the theatre has found success, we can talk about featuring other welsh artists, but for now let the theatre use this huge resource available to it.
I think its really admirable when actors come back to their home town or country and work to really contribute to the arts scene there. Same goes for any creative fields. I think it displays a level of dedication and genuine care for the arts and an understanding of their importance when people do that- becoming successful and being able to make a living off of their art was not the end all be all to them. It’s clear that they genuinely care about others being able to access art and express themselves and have the institutional means to do so.
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