Leave drama alone

It is, they say, only a play - but that's not how our masters see it. In the terrible years of Stalin's rule in Russia, the arts were obliged to adopt a doctrine called socialist realism. In Tony Blair's Britain, it's called social inclusivism. No sane person would compare a murderous regime to one that is merely manipulative, but the shadow of state interference does fall heavily on the British stage.

Here's the message: embrace social inclusivism, and government will give your theatre just enough subsidy to pay the wage bills. Reject it, and ... well, the threat has never been quotably articulated but directors have been given to understand in unmistakable private terms that if they don't serve the social objectives and political correctnesses of New Labour, their projects will somehow slip to the bottom of the funding pile.

A leading dramturge told me yesterday at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards of a form he received from a funding authority advising him that London's population in 2010 would consist of 40 percent ethnic minorities and demanding to know what steps were being taken in his avowedly equal-opportunity theatre to reflect demographic change. What was he supposed to do, he wondered: recruit a token Afghan refugee?

The Arts Council of England published its annual report at the weekend. The opening page dealt with internal restructuring, the second with social strategy, the third with education initiatives and the fourth with the poisonous, politically motivated assertion that "institutional racism exists within the theatre". Just when you think it can get no stupider, the following page announces the Arts Council's new partnership with the Youth Justice Board to occupy idle teens "in 10 police force areas where 82 percent of the country's street crime occurs".

You have to read two-thirds through the ACE report, all the way down to the small print of balance sheets, before you arrive at the business for which the organisation supposedly exists - the funding of public arts. It is no exaggeration to state that under Blair, with his do-gooding, sound-bite sloganising, the authorities have done more than ever imagined to restrict artistic freedoms and shackle the arts to social policy.

Mercifully, the arts have ways of resisting interference. At yesterday's awards, one winner after another rose to receive an accolade for original work that ranged from the perils of cloning - Caryl Churchill's A Number, voted Best Play - to dereliction in post-Soviet Russia - Vassily Sigarev's Plasticine, winner of the Most Promising Playwright award.

The Donmar's Sam Mendes did not stage Uncle Vanya (which won him Best Director) in order to promote family policy, any more than Sir Richard Eyre, a noted Government supporter, directed Vincent in Brixton (with Clare Higgins as Best Actress) to project the efficient assimilation of Dutch asylum seekers in south London. What motivated them, this year as in all others, was the urge to make the best theatre they possibly could - for no purpose other than making good theatre. Had anyone proposed otherwise, they would have been laughed out of the rehearsal room.

Award-laden theatres like the Donmar and the Globe, can ignore public pressure since they receive no public grant. The Royal Court, another multiple winner, maintains its independence by splitting its funding between rival bodies, national and local. Independent theatres such as these are on a roll.

This is not to decry the noble and ambitious programmes of the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, which receive grants of £13.2 million and £ 10million respectively. No company but the National could have created Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy. The RSC, in the doldrums, is struggling purposefully to project a 21st century identity.

Nevertheless, there is a feeling across the performing arts that subsidised companies have been drained of vital energies during the Blair years - or, at the very least, have been distracted from their core function of creating art. A resentment has crept in. Many performers don't want to be educators. They pay taxes to provide a state education system that ought to be teaching children the essentials of civilisation and cultivating their curiosity to experience music, theatre and dance. If it fails to do so, that is a failure of government, not of art.