Not every Welsh valley can reverberate with choral singing and declaimed poetry, despite the stereotype. But leading figures in Welsh culture are warning that a different environment is looming: “An alien who landed in the country today would look around and think, “Wow, there do seem to be an awful lot of problems here for all the arts,” said Graeme Farrow.
Farrow, the artistic chief at the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), fears that rather than a landscape of fertile creativity, any visiting alien would be confronted with the near collapse of a string of national institutions, including the National Theatre Wales, Welsh National Opera and S4C, the Welsh television channel, which a year ago lost first one boss, Siân Doyle, to a row over accusations of bullying and then another, Llinos Griffin-Williams, amid claims of abusive behaviour at a rugby match.
“Whichever way you turn, it doesn’t look pretty,” Farrow added. And there has been a nerve-wracking run-up to winter as arts organisations prepare to learn details next week of the latest draft of a Welsh arts budget.
The Arts Council of Wales has suffered a 40% real-terms cut in funding since 2010, its head, Dafydd Rhys, complained last month, expressing a serious concern that the sector will fade away within a decade. “I doubt very much of it will be there in 10 years’ time, other than it might be in the hands of some very rich benefactors and won’t be available for everybody at an affordable price,” he added.
Rhys hoped to influence the upcoming budget by bringing out a report showing that, for every pound spent on the arts in Wales, £2.51 is returned to its economy.
This weekend, the award-winning Welsh actor Michael Sheen supported the call for more resources. He believes it would be “an outrage” if further funding cuts impacted on the ailing arts sector. “We have to do something about it,” he said. “We’re not going to sit here and let people take everything away from us. We have to make sure our voices are heard.”
The importance of Welsh storytelling became clear to the Port Talbot actor, he has said, when he took the role of the national political hero Aneurin Bevan in the play Nye, a show created in a collaboration between the WMC and London’s National Theatre.
Attitudes to the Welsh language are at the heart of some of the current struggles. Griffin-Williams resigned from S4C after allegedly telling ex-rugby star Mike Phillips that his Welsh skills were not up to scratch.
Meanwhile, the artistic director of National Theatre Wales, Lorne Campbell, stepped down this spring after a row prompted by a total cut to its Arts Council of Wales core funding last year. National Theatre Wales performs in English and so it accused the funding body of “dismantling Wales’s English-language national theatre” before an official review took place.
At least Farrow and the WMC have something close to home to celebrate this week. The cultural centre in Cardiff is thriving and reached its 20th anniversary last Wednesday, marking the date with the unveiling of a poem by the country’s national poet, Hanan Issa. Her verse, Dreams Building, pays homage to the now-famous line of poetry – “In These Stones Horizons Sing” – inscribed across the glass and slate facade of the centre. It was composed two decades ago by Issa’s predecessor, Gwyneth Lewis.
The new poem’s upbeat tone is justified by the WMC’s feat of keeping its head above water and make some money while the surrounding cultural terrain has been bulldozed by cuts and self-inflicted knocks. This month has seen crowds pouring in, for example, to see Hamilton, the latest in a run of popular musicals in the WMC’s theatre that have helped bring in 1.8 million visitors a year.
But Farrow is far from complacent as he waits to hear about the latest budget. When the draft financial provisions are released on 10 December, even the WMC will have to brace against a blast of financial challenges. “The situation is quite acute,” he said. “We have only managed it by building an audience with our more commercial shows. But it will be static funding at best from here on in, and we need to find new ways to make money. But it is very hard for those organisations with fewer levers to pull. It forces them to the brink.”
The WMC’s resident companies include the BBC’s National Orchestra of Wales, Welsh National Opera and the National Dance Company Wales, as well as the country’s literature and music agencies. It has also just announced plans for a standalone digital venue for immersive arts.
“We are an organisation that is 85% full and it has put us in a good position,” said Farrow, the man who delivered Derry/Londonderry’s City of Culture events in 2013. “It is about building an audience, whether for Welsh National Opera or Hamilton. But it sets up a bad dynamic when funds are lacking and creates a false divide between the commercial and subsidised theatre. You generally get a blander diet, without new things coming through.
“Museums have different problems, but there’s a common theme. It is getting to tipping point and there is a class of freelancer who now just can’t find work. It costs a million pounds more to run the building, and our insurance has gone up by £200,000. This can force producers to take safer bets, although the strength of the publicly-subsidised sector should be that you are able to take risks.”
And Wales is taking the brunt. Research commissioned by performing arts union Equity revealed this summer that overall arts funding in Wales had dropped by 30% since 2017, compared with a drop of 11% in England, 16% in Northern Ireland and a2% boost in Scotland.
An open letter signed by 175 artists – including Sheen, singers Bryn Terfel and Katherine Jenkins and actor Ruth Jones – called for emergency funding for the Welsh National Opera this spring after the company suffered a funding cut from both the English and Welsh arts councils.
In response, the Welsh government recently offered £1.5m of extra funding.
It said it is “determined” that the current financial challenges will not restrict its “long-term ambitions”. But it emphasised that its budget is now worth up to £700m less in real terms than it was in 2021.
