Hotchpotch of unshapely grottoes

The luvvies are in uproar. Just listen to the din. ‘Horrified,’ says Dame Judi Dench. ‘Disgraceful,’ spits Sir Peter Hall. Equity’s spokesman is officially ‘astonished’ and Sir Donald Sinden calls it ‘absurd’. They’re talking about the imminent closure of the V&A’s Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The museum has been open since 1987 and it houses a vast collection of costumes, scenery, photographs, scripts and theatre paraphernalia from the past three centuries. But the space is in need of a major overhaul. Two attempts to cadge a multimillion pound grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund have failed, and now the V&A has decided it’s had enough. In January it will shut down the life-support systems and the entire collection will be beamed back to the mother ship in South Kensington.

What happens to it after that isn’t entirely clear but a touring exhibition has been promised for 2008. Not good enough, say the leading lights of the theatre. After a lacklustre start their campaign is gathering pace. When the closure was announced last March a group of famous actors met up in a stationery cupboard and penned an angry letter to the Times — an ante-diluvian tactic which had very little effect. Then the veteran producer Thelma Holt threatened to withdraw her photograph of Jill Bennett (aka Mrs John Osborne) if the museum closed down. Odd tactics that, like negotiating with a kidnapper by offering to shoot the hostage. Most recently the theatre newspaper the Stage has assembled a fistful of big-hitters and announced a last-ditch campaign to save the museum.

They’ve got two months. Will they succeed? First, the sums. The museum sucks up two and a half million quid each year and draws in 166,000 visitors. So each attendance costs £15 in subsidy. Sounds a lot but it’s actually a quid less than the V&A’s average expenditure per visitor.