Bringing Down the House: The Crisis in Britain's Regional Theatres (review)

For those with an interest in the politics of theatre funding in the United Kingdom, this is an intriguing, if not altogether optimistic, time. After a period in which public funding of the arts grew substantially, it is unlikely that they will be spared from the severe cuts in state expenditure that will almost certainly result from the recent global economic crisis. Indeed, there is a legitimate fear among those who work in, and comment on, the arts in the UK that the cultural sector will receive particularly rough treatment from government for some time to come. The arts are often easy targets for cuts, and these rarely attract much opprobrium from the electorate.

Olivia Turnbull's Bringing Down the House is a useful reminder of the last time the arts received such unwelcome attention (at least for them) from the British state. For much of the period of Conservative government between 1979 and 1997, arts funding was either reduced or its growth tightly constrained. Equally importantly, the Thatcher and Major governments took a much more dirigiste approach to the governance of the arts than had previously been the case, and imposed a more market-inflected calculus of their value than had previously been employed. As Turnbull documents, these actions not only placed significant strains on the publicly subsidized elements of the British theatre industry in general, they caused particular difficulties for the country's regional theatres: without much access to sources of private income, regional theatres could not take advantage of new government schemes to encourage private investment in the arts; they depended on funding from local authorities whose own spending had been restricted by the national government and was increasingly ring-fenced for other activities; and many regional theatres struggled to reconcile long-standing tensions related to their own programming practices, audience relations, and internal management.

Bringing Down the House is organized into four parts of eleven chapters but is perhaps best viewed as comprising three main sections. The first section is a broad historical overview of arts funding and governance in the UK, especially since the founding of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946. The second consists of seven individual case studies of English regional theatre companies - three in the north of England and four in the south. Two of these cases are in Liverpool, but the rest are modest-sized companies located in smaller urban centres; Turnbull is more concerned with an organization like Harrogate Theatre than a larger company like, say, Birmingham Rep. The third section discusses trends in funding and governance since the Labour party's return to government in 1997. Turnbull focuses mostly on England, but she makes some reference to events in Scotland and Wales (and does not consider Northern Ireland).

There are a number of merits to Bringing Down the House. Turnbull provides a welcome focus on an important element of the not-for-profit theatre industry in the UK. There is a tendency among policy-makers and academic critics to treat the British theatre industry as less differentiated than it is in practice. Turnbull's focus on regional theatres draws attention to the ways in which arts funding and cultural policy - which are often conceived in systemic terms - have quite different material effects depending on where they are negotiated. Turnbull also illustrates how, even within the regional theatre sector, the strictures impressed by successive Conservative governments gained purchase in distinctive ways depending on the size of the organization and its geographical location. Moreover, she provides a good account of how the "seemingly irreconcilable tension between the funders, board, staff, volunteers and audiences as to what the [theatre company] should be" (as one artistic director put it) was not just an idiosyncratic feature of any single theatre company, but a characteristic of the sector as a whole (210). Turnbull shows that regional theatres suffered repeatedly from a perverse, and recurring, psychodrama during the long period of Conservative government...