TAITMAIL Shuffling the pack
First, we don’t often do obits here but there’s a museum theme and it would be remiss not to acknowledge the contribution made to museums by Neil Cossons, who died on March 29 at 87.
TAITMAIL Solving the museums crisis by keeping them free
It’s 25 years since Chris Smith introduced free admission to national museums and galleries thanks to a VAT fiddle contrived by the charity Art Fund. So we’re celebrating by calls for a reintroduction of admission charges at national museums and galleries – not so much a silver anniversary as brass tacks.
TAITMAIL Barbicanoworms?
A host of arts celebs from Salman Rushdie to John Akomfrah have sent an open letter to the Barbican complaining about the departure of the centre’s arts director. Why?
TAITMAIL Buying in to the Bayeux
David Hockney, so inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry that he lives close to it in Normandy – “Something that has defined my life for more than eight decades” he wrote to The Independent - thinks moving it to London for an exhibition would be “madness”.
TAITMAIL Rebuilding the History House
Robert Jenrick, who is appalled at seeing so few white faces on the streets of Birmingham, has been obliged to leave the Conservative benches and join new friends in Reform UK, including Sarah Pochin who was shocked to see so many black faces in TV ads.
TAITMAIL Steve Reed’s culture tax
So here it is, sneaking in round the back of the Budget ushered in not by Rachel Reeves but by Steve Reed, the local government secretary: a tourism tax for England.
TaitMail Bringing Lughnasa home
Today, August 1, is the day on which the action of Brian Friel’s most celebrated play, Dancing at Lughnasa, plays out. It will open again today, its 35th anniversary, not in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, where it had its premiere but almost next to the very house in Glenties, Co Donegal, in which it was set (the main picture shows rehearsals earlier this week).
TAITMAIL An ACE tiff with quite a nice concert hall attached
A world-renowned arts organisation announcing it was washing its hands of Arts Council England could hardly have come at a worse time for ACE, just as Baroness Margaret Hodge was getting to the meaty part of her independent inquiry.
TAITMAIL De ja second vu
Frank Atkinson said of his creation, Beamish, The North of England Open Air Museum, that it should be “a place where people can look back into the past and see how things worked”.
TAITMAIL A Victorian arts angel
Alan Grieve, who has died aged 97, was perhaps the last of the new-Victorian arts angels. Or perhaps the first.
TAITMAIL The democratisation of the National Gallery
The National Gallery has shifted to the left, or at least its main entrance has. What used to be the main entrance, under the neo-classical portico, is now just one of several ways out, while the once designated annexe becomes the main way in. A people’s portal.
TaitMail Happy Days?
Timely, just as Margaret Hodge rolls up her sleeves to examine the entrails of Arts Council England, that ACE’s CEO, Darren Henley, should reissue his 2016 overview of the cultural landscape, The Arts Dividend. Even more timely that it should emerge just as his new boss at DCMS is commemorating Jennie Lee’s first White Paper of 60 years ago with her own affirming speech about the importance of the arts.
TaitMail Is this the big arts funding rethink we’ve been screaming for?
The arts don’t often qualify for words like “bombshell” when they get headlines, but Lisa Nandy’s announcement yesterday of at least £270m in a new fund is in the frame.
TaitMail Hardening up soft power
A week ago David Lammy and Lisa Nandy jointly launched the Soft Power Council (SPC), a multi-member new body tasked with finding ways of boosting the UK’s economic growth through our culture. They will also jointly chair it.
TaitMail Retelling history - with women
When would you date the establishment of women’s equal importance in our culture? Gloria Steinem and Women’s Liberation in the 1960s? Mrs Pankhurst and the Suffragettes (1900s)? Mary Shelley (1820s) or her mother Mary Wolstencraft (1790s)?
TAITMAIL The community of the Bayeux Tapestry
“Community” has become an over-used word, meaning anything from a Shaker village to half a dozen people gathered on a street corner. In cultural contexts the word is a little more refined, coming to refer to creativity in partnership in a single project.
TAITMAIL It IS happening here
This offering was to have been about collaborative community art and lessons to be learned from the Bayeux Tapestry, but I make no apology for changing the plan and refurbishing a piece from a few months ago which suddenly has become even more starkly relevant. - ST
How horrifyingly life can mimic fiction. The new President takes the Oval Office, and he goes into action immediately. He has won his election by riding on a populist mood for patriotism and traditional values, with some religious fervours thrown in, having mounted carefully constructed rallies spreading fear and promising drastic social and economic reforms. He has pledged each citizen a gift of $5,000 for their vote.
TAITMAIL Two community theatres
This is a story of two theatres, two local theatres, moulded to their communities. One is in Kent, the other in north London. One is a love story, the other a tragedy. They are each a signpost for Lisa Nandy as she looks for ways that the local arts she says she, as culture secretary, is determined to promote can not only survive but develop, encouraging partnerships and community involvement.
TAITMAIL The unsuspected magical mystery of the Warburg
It’s hard to define the Warburg Institute, a part of the University of London alongside the likes of the Slade and SOAS, that most people – even UoL students - have never heard of. The artist Cornelia Parker, a devotee, puts it well: “I always think of the Warburg Institute as a perfect, quiet place to absorb culture”.
TAITMAIL Heritage’s survival – and how to feel intended
Almost no sector, with the obvious exception of the NHS, has suffered more from the effects of Covid lockdowns, central and local government funding cuts and the cost rise crisis than heritage and art. Art in education has all but disappeared, theatres and museums have been forced to close, creatives have had to resort to the hospitality industry to live.
TAITMAIL It can happen here
How life can mimic fiction. The new President takes the Oval Office, and he goes into action immediately. He has won his election by riding on a populist mood for patriotism and traditional values, with some religious fervours thrown in, high carefully constructed rallies spreading fear and promising drastic social and economic reforms. He has pledged each citizen a gift of $5,000 for their vote.
TAITMAIL Arts and the future – at last the politicians speak
Despite the ballooning value of the arts and creative industries to our economy – in 2022 they were worth £126bn in gross value added and employed 2.4m people – they never surface in the seemingly endless multi-party televised debates or public focus groups. Scandals like politicians betting on their job prospects take the space.
TAITMAIL How the art elite made war propaganda
From the start of the First World War there was a highly secretive department tucked away a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. To hide its real purpose it took its operating name from its respectable-seeming building: Wellington House. And at its head was a former MP called Masterman, a close confidante of the prime minister.
TAITMAIL A tide of creativity
Art has never been subject to boundaries, and when politicians and educationalists define science and art as separate disciplines they’re missing the point. As anyone with a scintilla of imagination knows, art is nature, nature is science, science is art.
TAITMAIL ‘We need risk to survive – and a champion’
The Wales Millennium Centre was, frankly, an embarrassment. It was to have been Wales’s huge lottery-fuelled gesture to the Millennium, a capital project to rival the Sydney Opera House that would launch Cardiff’s international reputation. It almost sank it.
TAITMAIL Is art the only believable truth now?
Surrounded by fake news, undetectable scams and AI, what can we safely believe?
TAITMAIL Our culture? It’s behind you…
“Oh no it isn’t!” exclaimed the headline on the DCMS press release, choosing the Christmas silly season to release news that panto could now be recognised as an official British custom by the United Nations.
TAITMAIL ENO and the superclusters
So the deal has been done and after the angst-ridden omnishambles of a year ago ENO will after all go to Manchester as first mooted. It might be a brilliant move despite its ominous beginnings.
TAITMAIL. Why Sunak should use “common sense” and back out of the Elgin row
What did Rishi Sunak, for whom “the UK-Greece relationship is hugely important”, expect to discuss with the Greek prime minister at their meeting on Tuesday? What might have been be uppermost in the mind of Kyriakos Mitsotakis?
TAITMAIL Tusa and the Big Idea
No one has been more of a breath of fresh air in the arts than John Tusa in his long and kaleidoscopic career, and he should be a case study in his own new book, Bright Sparks.
TAITMAIL Nationalising the National
As del Piombo’s massive and newly cleaned The Raising of Lazarus - the first picture in the collection in 1824 with the accession number NG1 – loomed from the wall, Gabriele Finaldi announced this week that to mark its 200th birthday the National Gallery was at long last going to live up to its title. It’s going national.
TAITMAIL How museums can Flower
“A museum is like a living organism; it requires continual and tender care; it must grow or it will perish.”
TAITMAIL Poisoning our cultural grassroots
There are two key phrases in the cultural news this week, equally ugly: “levelling up” and “gentrification”, sparked by four different stories.
TAITMAIL The museum as playground
Forty years ago after the last refurbishment but one of the museum that is now Young V&A, the then director Anthony Burton, who liked to refer to what was the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood as “the nation’s toyshop”, remarked prophetically: “A later generation could easily take it all away and start again… but it is, I hope of more than local interest”.
TAITMAIL The toys we are
This column has had a lot to say about recovery reinvention, how the people who run the arts are having to think outside the box that’s outside the box, and try to ignore politicians but focus instead on local communities and even councils for support where they wouldn’t have before, keep risk to a minimum and work with partners. So it’s good to see that an old friend is doing just that.
TAITMAIL Camden’s tale of two museums
This is a tale of two museums whose only other commonality is that they are both in the London Borough of Camden, but they each represent a different aspect of the angst that is keeping directors and trustees awake at night. I’m talking about the British Museum and the Jewish Museum.
TAITMAIL ENO and Jerwood: all change
The Arts Council’s handling of ENO and the way it carried out Nadine Dorries’s instruction to slash arts funding in London with English National Opera being expelled from the capital was at best amateur at worst incompetent, but with this week’s joint announcement from ACE and ENO the dust seems to have cleared revealing - what?
TAITMAIL An Act of culture war?
Michael Heseltine was no longer environment secretary when the National Heritage Act came into effect in 1983, but he was its godfather, patron of perhaps the most significant cultural change before the National Lottery a decade later.
TAITMAIL We are not alone
Sculpture in the City, says Will Gompertz, artistic director of the Barbican Centre who also has oversight of the City of London’s cultural profile, is “telling the story of the present and future while reflecting on the past”.
TAITMAIL. Following the arts into a new world
The music sector has gone apoplectic over cuts in the subsidy for music, first with the Arts Council’s unexplained and, frankly inexplicable decisions, and then with the BBC’s loony attempt (failed, so far) to lop 20% off its orchestras’ budget.
TAITMAIL Alice Black, from Design Museum director to artists’ translator
Whatever happened to Alice Black, the credit analyst who fell in love with creative art, helped make the Design Museum, becoming its co-director … and then left?
TAITMAIL Our children are leading us back to orchestral music
This is to be the third and the last in our series on music in the community, focussing today on a symphony orchestra’s research into audiences, but first the BBC…
TAITMAIL Who loves music? Don’t ask politicians, ask the Artistic Citizens
Free music lessons at his Coalville comprehensive are the reason why Jonathan Vaughan did not become a brickmaker in the Leicestershire village of Ibstock where he was born and where his grandfather was foreman at the brickworks.
TAITMAIL Nine Elms and the musical heart of the problem
Sahana Gero’s guiding principle has been that everyone of us has music at our soul, because we’ve had a heartbeat and therefore rhythm from the start of our existence. So we each have a right to exploit that fundamental component of our make-up.
TAITMAIL What Ruth and Jenny could create 4 us
The Adelaide Festival this week announced a bold new feature for its 2024 edition, Create4Adelaide which, if it works, its progenitors believe could impact the rest of the world. Thousands of young people across Adelaide’s state of South Australia are being asked to use art to show their fears for climate change, and maybe their hopes.
TAITMAIL South Yorkshire, a petrie dish for the business of art
The choreographer Gary Clarke was at the top of his game, creating contemporary dances that won acclaim and awards and working at every kind of venue from the Royal Opera House to the Edinburgh Fringe, making seminal pieces such as Coal (pictured), born from his Grimethorpe background in Barnsley, and its sequel Wasteland.
TAITMAIL How Nad raised the ENO stakes for ACE
Just when you thought the ENO row was quietening down for some serious beer and sandwiches negotiating, up pops guess who to raise the stakes again. Turns out we’re not just talking about ENO’s survival, but the Arts Council’s too.
TAITMAIL The endless game of Marbles
There’s a blur of works of art and antiquity criss-crossing the world in a frenzy of decolonisation and repatriation, claims and accusations.
TAITMAIL Believe me, this is urgent theatre
Alisha is a 35-year-old woman with learning difficulties and an abusive partner. The partner attacks her viciously enough to force her out of her home and into the street where she is confronted by a male acquaintance who sexually assaults her. Her mother is over-protective of Alisha, and when she tries to report the two incidents to the police she is not believed.
This is not a true story. It is a series of true stories put together to make a play with the profoundest of messages: one in three women in the world suffers from domestic and/or sexual abuse, too many never get justice in a system loaded against them, but if you’re one of them you need to know that you are not alone.
Alisha’s Story is the latest production from the theatre company Open Clasp, co-founded almost 25 years ago by Catrin McHugh, now the artistic director and joint CEO. It also marks a turning point for the company, for this is the first play to be written to a commission following a stream of plays the company has produced, all of them written by McHugh. Their aim is to change the world, she says, “one play at a time”, by placing theatre at the heart of transforming the lives of disadvantaged women and girls. Open Clasp puts their lives at the heart of their theatre, for political, social and personal change. They call it urgent theatre, and its patrons include Erica Whyman, acting artistic director of the RSC. “This is a company that does something which is not only unique, entertaining and engaging, but also incredibly important” she says. “They tell stories that need to be hears and they allow their audiences to see the world through unexpected eyes”.
The commission follows research at Durham and Sunderland Universities showing that women with learning disabilities are especially vulnerable to sexual assault and that their reports to the police are less likely to be believed or lead to conviction. In fact, a working party from Durham University, Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland, and Northumbria Police found that the criminal justice system actually creates barriers for those with autism or learning difficulties when they report rape and sexual assault. “It’s not just an other world” says McHugh. “Everybody knows it even if they haven’t personally experienced it”.
The modus operandi is to gather groups of women gleaned from communities’ social, professional and welfare networks to meet in a room with an Open Clasp facilitator who stimulates a discussion while a playwright builds from the conversation to create a dramatic but faithful mirror of it. The 2015 play Key Change, written by McHugh but devised with women in Low Newton prison to take on tour to men’s prisons, won a Best of Edinburgh Award. It inspired the company’s first foreign tour and in 2016 was the New York Times Critics’ Pick. The piece was then filmed with support from the BBC and the Arts Council (Open Clasp is an ACE NPO and has received standstill funding for 2023-26). That was a watershed which let the company’s ambitions run free, and this year it launched a workforce development programme to expand its operation. It has its first international collaboration with a New Zealand sex workers' collective for a production with a cast of eight.
Us Too: Alisha‘s Story is the first Open Clasp play not to have been written by McHugh. Commissioned by the two universities, the writer is the award-winning playwright Julie Tsang. one of four the company worked with. The play’s task is to bring change and develop inclusive criminal justice responses to domestic and sexual violence against women with learning difficulties or autism, the lack of which is the theme of the play.
Open Clasp have made the piece by working with the Exeter-based drama group Us Too whose members have learning difficulties or autism, and Holly Wilkinson (pictured in the role), who is a brain injury survivor and has autism, is cast in her first professional role. Having deliberately trawled for disabled actors, in her McHugh believes they have found an original talent. “I responded to the casting call because I don’t think that there is enough representation of disabled performers within the acting industry, which is something that really needs to change in my view” Wilkinson says. “Performers with disabilities need to be seen and heard”.
The 20-minute piece is being released online tomorrow, December 3, the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities, running until December 10. It will then be widely used in an Economic and Social Research Council funded project to develop criminal justice practice and to train frontline officers in recognising coercive control, with a team from Open Clasp using the film to train 200 police officers at Durham Constabulary in April and May next year. It will also be made available to schools, and will be a live touring performance as well.
“Even before the pandemic we had moved online, capturing work on film, streaming across worlds and con6nents” McHugh says. “We could see the impact and reach when theatre meets film. This commission joins our catalogue of work, theatre that raises its fist and demands an end to violence against women and girls.”
The co-lead researcher into the treatment of women with learning difficulties in the criminal justice system is Helen Williams, Sunderland University’s senior lecturer in criminology, and she fully approves of the play, its uncompromising content and delivery and the process in which the narrative was built. “It's hard hitting because it is truth, that story is truth. I feel bonded to the women, it’s a special sort of bravery and to speak those words... it’s been a privilege.”
TAITMAIL Thinking into The Box
When The Box, Plymouth’s £46m museum/archive/art gallery, opened in 2020 it did so with a mission statement: “To redefine the collections-based institution for the 21st century, expanding its horizons from local to global, placing collections, artists and audiences at its core”.
TAITMAIL Where the art leads us, and we lead the art
ENO are accusing the Arts Council of making a “howling mistake” in its three-year investment announcement, the one that reduced the opera company’s subsidy to nought unless they agree to go to Manchester - which may not want them even if they did, no-one has asked Manchester. Elsewhere the act has been described as “shocking”, “devastating” and “cultural vandalism”.
TAITMAIL Where the aria is clearer
So ENO gets dumped on again. You’d think they’d be used to it by now, but their website was in buoyant mood as the announcement was made on Friday that they’d lost all their grant – they had already been “reimagining what a modern opera company should look like, building new audiences and reaching beyond London”. Manchester seemed like a good spot, and they should get it sorted out by April.
TAITMAIL Beauty Queens and Banshees – the future of theatre
By Patrick Kelly
To the delightful Theatre by the Lake in Keswick to see a spirited production of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. A healthy-looking house enjoyed the show despite a typical Lake District wet and windy October evening.
TAITMAIL Altogether now…. NET ZERO!
There’s long been a perception that artists are in the vanguard of the campaign for environmental virtue, and so they are. Mostly.
TAITMAIL Surviving to dazzle
On Wednesday a capacity audience in the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, witnessed an interpretation of “The Scottish Play” like no other.
TAITMAIL Brenda Rawnsley and the war for our kids’ arts access
This is a Russian doll kind of a story, one intriguing tale inside another, till we get to a real-life heroine who went swimming with Picasso on behalf of British primary schools.
TAITMAIL Durham doubles down
By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
Amid all the grim economic news, it’s good to be able to record positive events. One such is the reaction of Durham County Council to the disappointing news that it had been pipped by Bradford for the title of UK City of Culture in 2025.
TAITMAIL Lighting the fire of physical theatre
In the foyer of the new Brixton House theatre shortly before 11am last Saturday, 18 young people in their teens and early 20s introduced themselves to each other for the first time, strangers. Ninety minutes later they had created a moment of theatre together.
TAITMAIL Cultivating Ms Donelan
New culture secretaries used to have to endure a rather tiresome game at the hands of arts correspondents when they were routinely asked what the last film/play/exhibition was that they saw. It was a small test of their cultural credentials which they always failed, more pressing questions no doubt being on their minds, and so they started their (usually short) terms of office with a small amount of egg on their faces to the amusement of a handful of hacks, and no-one else.
TAITMAIL Can museums survive to ‘serve society’?
Museums used to be fondly classified as “cabinets of curiosity”, more tendentiously “the memory of our communities”, even “the story of our cultures”. In the 80s, when the word “museum” was anachronistic anathema, they were known as “heritage centres”.
