Funding: Local heroes

I was acting and directing at Helmsley Arts Centre last week, in a little piece of ‘café theatre’ performed in the bar to an audience of only 50. But it was a sell-out every night and, I hope, a light-hearted distraction for the citizens of my Yorkshire town from all that gloomy talk about cuts, more cuts — and who deserves to be cut most.

I was acting and directing at Helmsley Arts Centre last week, in a little piece of ‘café theatre’ performed in the bar to an audience of only 50. But it was a sell-out every night and, I hope, a light-hearted distraction for the citizens of my Yorkshire town from all that gloomy talk about cuts, more cuts — and who deserves to be cut most.

Our arts centre, I should explain, is the very model of David Cameron’s Big Society writ small. We raised the money to create it out of the shell of an old Quaker meeting house and we have run it successfully, with a handful of staff and a large volunteer force, for almost 20 years. In exchange for modest five-digit subsidies from the Arts Council and the local council (about 30 pence from the taxpayer for every £1 we generate ourselves from the box office and elsewhere) we provide a culture hub for a rural area which has no other permanent arts provision.

Our youth theatre group has formed the career aspirations of dozens of teenagers over the years; participation in our work has brightened the lives and broadened the minds of hundreds of other local folk — including me. If our subsidy were cut beyond what Arts Council chief executive Alan Avery calls ‘the tipping point’, we might struggle on, with a shrunken programme and an ageing all-volunteer workforce.