Michael Kustow
AMERICAN THEATRE: AN ENGLISH VIEW
Taking leave from the familiar, tidy landscapes of the Brit–
ish and European theatre to spend a year working in America, I've
once again been elated by the edge and urgency and exuberance of
American and especially New York theatre, and dismayed by its
hurry and hype, its abrupt lurches into awfulness, its kleptomaniac
imports. None of these virtues or failings are unique to the American
theatre, of course, but they seem to have a distinct quality here, a
hothouse profusion and suddenness. While I was still trying to
puzzle out what was special about that, America changed presi–
dents, and I found myself in what, all disclaimers notwithstanding,
seems like a rerun of aspects of Margaret Thatcher's Britain: supply–
side economics, including cuts in government funding for the arts.
The way these cuts have been proposed and opposed has given me a
clue to the volatile quality of American theatre and, since theatre is
the most social art, of the arts in general in this society . It is the lack
of what I can only call a public dimension .
In
Britain, the public spending cuts have begun to bite into the
arts . Beginning this past spring, forty clients of the Arts Council of
Great Britain, the equivalent of America's National Endowment for
the Arts, will no longer receive grants and, in Britain's chilly eco–
nomic spring, may not survive. The victims include such famous
names as the Old Vic company, and such worthwhile institutions as
the National Youth Theatre, which gave actors such as DerekJacobi
and Jane Seymour their early opportunities. But, comparing
Britain's arts funding cuts with America's, one crucial difference
strikes me.
When the Arts Council of Great Britain takes a 2 percent
budget reduction, particular arts and companies, judged on the
quality of their work, are penalized. However, the principle that the
arts are part of the public good, potentially accessible to all, and thus
a defensible charge to all taxpayers, is not fundamentally chal–
lenged. That has been a bipartisan policy in my country for more
than thirty years . And that is why the British government spends six
