Theatre director: only philistines make arts cuts

Theatre director Max Stafford-Clark has branded ministers as “philistines” or “dangerously ignorant” in a stinging attack on the Government’s education and arts reforms.

The veteran director delivered his broadside as he prepared to stage a 25th anniversary revival of one of his most famous productions.

Our Country’s Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, starred Jim Broadbent, David Haig and Linda Bassett when it premiered at the Royal Court in 1988 and went on to win multiple awards, including most promising playwright at the Evening Standard’s Theatre Awards.

“It was first done at a time when subsidy and theatre were dirty words to that government, and theatre was under threat,” he said. “But Osborne and Cameron have inflicted more damage to the infrastructure of theatre in one term of office than Mrs Thatcher had done in three.

“Either they’re aware of what they are doing, in which case they are philistines, or they are unaware, in which case they are dangerously ignorant and ill-informed.”

As Our Country’s Good returns to London tonight, Stafford-Clark, 71, said its message of the arts as a force for good was even more pertinent today because the Government had launched a twin attack on culture — through funding cuts and the omission of the arts from the proposed English Baccalaureate.

He said his frequent work in schools, such as Camden School for Girls and the Mulberry School in Tower Hamlets, had shown what theatre could do even for pupils with no intention of pursuing a career in drama. “They grow and flower in confidence,” he said.

He said he feared the proposals for education were in keeping with the Government’s broader attitude to the arts. Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint theatre company has suffered a 30 per cent cut to its Arts Council subsidy and now presents only one production a year instead of two. The former boss of the Royal Court, added: “Theatre is really on a knife edge.”

Our Country’s Good is based on the true story of a lieutenant who directed a cast of convicts in Australia in 1789 in the Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer. The anniversary production opens at the St James Theatre tonight and runs until March 23.