Max Stafford-Clark calls ministers 'philistines' over arts funding cuts

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/feb/05/max-stafford-clark-cuts-theatre

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Veteran director Max Stafford-Clark has lambasted the government over cuts to arts funding, branding ministers "philistines" or "dangerously ignorant" and arguing that the coalition's policies are more harmful than any of Margaret Thatcher's.

Stafford-Clark's diatribe came as his 25th anniversary revival of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, a play he originally directed as the Royal Court's artistic director in 1988, opened at the St James theatre in London.

"[Our Country's Good] was first done at a time when subsidy and theatre were dirty words to that government, and theatre was under threat," he told the London Evening Standard, "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."

The 71-year-old director, whose own company Out of Joint incurred a 27.9% cut to its annual Arts Council England grant last year, warned that "theatre is really on a knife-edge."

Writing in the Guardian last year, Stafford-Clark pointed out that, as a result of the cut, Out of Joint will go a year without presenting a new play for the first time in 18 years.

Ironically, Wertenbaker's play preaches the power of theatre and art to transform lives, focusing on a group of 18th-century convicts in Australia rehearsing a production of George Farquhar's Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer. One critic has already described the revival as "a cogent two fingers up at both the government and the Arts Council".