My hope for 2026? For theatres to be free to make theatre again.
How can Margaret Hodge's ACE review help on that front? Why did some British critics not enjoy Oh, Mary!? Is "theater kid" actually an insult? All that and more in this week's Shouts and Murmurs.
Hello, and welcome to Shouts and Murmurs, a weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more from The Crush Bar, written by Fergus Morgan.
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One last thing: as I mentioned in the last issue, this newsletter will be taking an extended break in February and March, while my wife and I go travelling. I’ll explain more about how the hiatus will work soon. This is just an advance notice that the newsletter of 23 January will be the last one for a little while. Terima kasih!
Previously in The Crush Bar:
Happy New Year. Hope you had a good break.
Hope you had a better break than Arts Council England. As an early Christmas present, the funding body unwrapped Margaret Hodge’s long-awaited review, which turned out not to be a new bike or even a pair of socks, but a damning indictment of its recent history and current trajectory. ACE has suffered a “loss of respect and trust,” Hodge proclaimed, due to “perceived political interference”, “bureaucratic and onerous” processes, and a “prescriptive” long-term strategy. Feliz Navidad!
Put simply, fiascos like the forced relocation of English National Opera have many doubting the arm’s length principle; what little subsidy there is requires a ridiculous amount of form-filling to obtain; and the Let’s Create strategy, which was introduced in 2020 and is supposed to dictate ACE decision-making until 2030, has, paradoxically, actually made it more difficult for arts organisations to, um, create. Public subsidy should make life easier for arts organisations. Currently, it is almost making it harder.
None of this is news to the theatre industry. Anyone involved with giving or receiving public money in recent years, directly or indirectly, can attest that it involves a huge amount of time and faff. Heck, in March, Wigmore Hall decided subsidy was not worth the hassle. Still, it is good to see that sentiment officially recognised, just as it was in November when a review of Creative Scotland said a lot of the same stuff. Clearly, there is now a wider awareness that both bodies are not working properly.
There is also a growing chorus calling for arts organisations to be allowed to prioritise making art, rather than being burdened with delivering education, social change, community services, and other responsibilities abandoned by an austerity-starved public sector. Of course, arts organisations have a huge role to play in all that, but it is neither their responsibility alone, nor their chief duty. Their chief duty is to make art.
Any development that encourages that should be welcomed, in my view. The review itself makes a series of recommendations. Some of them, like starting an ACE trading arm that would reap the rewards of commercially successful shows, or forcing local authorities to prepare cultural strategies every five years, seem insane. ACE is a public funding body not a commercial investor, and doesn’t that mechanism basically already exist in the form of… tax? And where exactly are cash-strapped councils supposed to find the resources to deliver a cultural strategy, when they can barely afford to collect the bins right now? Other ideas, though, like ditching Let’s Create, expanding tax relief, and overhauling applications, seem sensible from theatre’s point of view.
Change needs to extend beyond reforming ACE and Creative Scotland, though. More collaboration between the two would be welcome: it is a shame that Hodge’s report does not mention the senseless difficulties in touring across the border. As Martin Kettle writes in The Guardian, Labour also needs to make good on its promise to re-insert arts subjects in the curriculum, and encourage more individuals and companies to chip in. On that front, it is good to see Stephen Garrett, producer of The Night Manager, throw his weight behind the idea of the big streaming platforms doing more to support the theatrical pipeline they rely on in The Times: “In terms of their global profits, it’s a drop in the ocean.” And, as Lyn Gardner notes in The Stage, nothing will help the arts as much as funding them properly at a national and local level.
It is also vitally important that Hodge’s report is not weaponised against ACE in the culture wars, too. You can already see this happening, with The Telegraph calling for dismissals and The Daily Mail labelling ACE’s current strategy as “woke box-ticking.” Illustrating its article with a photo of the actor Patricia Hodge, instead of Margaret Hodge, is unwitting misrepresentation, but suggesting ACE should be abolished, or that arts organisations should not continue to consider diversity and access across their activity is wilful misrepresentation. In the report, Hodge herself states that…
“Access to artistic excellence should not be consigned to the privileged few, and a national Arts Council, free from political interference, is the best way to ensure that these benefits are realised across the country and by all the communities within it. We must continue to sponsor and fund the Arts Council.”
My main hope for the theatre industry in 2026, beyond a moratorium on musical adaptations of movies and a West End transfer for Romans, is a simple one: more. I want theatres everywhere to be free to employ more creatives and stage more shows. I want more people to be involved in them, on stage and off. I want more people to see and be inspired by them. And I think heeding the lessons of Hodge’s report - and the review into Creative Scotland that preceded it - would be a great place to start.
In other news: Oxford Playhouse will start producing shows in-house again for the first time since 2006; Rufus Norris will direct Samuel Beckett’s Not I somewhere this summer; Lucie Jones is returning to Les Mis; Bristol Old Vic Theatre School has introduced some new courses after scrapping undergraduate training last year; Bristol Old Vic chief executive Rebecca Dawson has defended casting big names; Cynthia Erivo, Meera Syal, Paule Constable, Nadia Fall and Emma D’Souza are among those recognised in the New Year honours list; Cameron Mackintosh made £10.2 million last year; the National Theatre did not fare as well; the Barbican will close for a year for redevelopment; Cumbernauld Theatre has been saved; a recording of a monologue from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is being beamed 40 light years to the North Star.
