The Investment Review, Review. (NTW)

Pictured:

The Arts Council of Wales on Wednesday morning.

As an entity with absolutely no journalistic integrity we don’t particularly like to get involved with any of the nuance of the of political debate regarding the investment review, primarily because Danny doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s talking about on the best of the days and him waxing lyrical about budgets will be like listening to your senile Nan tell you war stories from conflicts she has imagined in her own head. 

That does however leave open the possibility to have a little look at the backlash and what’s been going on.

The thing that inspired me to open my laptop was seeing someone online write a shit poem. They write; 

“We tried.
We spoke to them. 

They ignored us.

We spoke out.
They vilified us.

Other companies have worked so much harder.
It’s time.”

I’d love to examine this, but I fear the complexities in the writing may be a little too much for me to understand, but looking at the broad brush strokes of what it’s saying I gleam a very funerial tone, lamenting a company who was warned but continued to ignore and vilify it’s people before it was taken out to the shed and mercifully put down by a sweet and forgiving shotgun shell fired into it’s nape from a crying arts council assessor. 

“It’s time” the poem finishes, like this was a moment foretold in prophecy, the hubris of the organization catching up with it, an inevitable end to the path they had been walking.

I have a feeling this particular position is fairly untenable and won’t uphold much scrutiny.

National Theatre Wales has it’s problems. Probably. I never saw any of their work, but a bunch of people have told me it has it’s problems. 

In their statement NTW said it had connected with 331,000 audience members over 12 years. Appx 27’500 people per year. This is the equivalent of selling out the Sherman for about a month and a half every year, or selling out The Other Room for a year and a half every year. This isn’t chump change engagement, but there is a conversation to be had regarding the quality of their engagement and their purpose as a national theatre, but considering the action taken I presume that convorsation has been had and some failings have been made somewhere.

Some people I talk to say they don’t really rate the output of NTW’s main body of work, I keep hearing it is fun and has merit but it consistently lacks something. Bare in mind though, I only ever talk to people in the arts. I point blank refuse to acknowledge anyone who doesn’t apply for equity membership and I encourage you to do the same. So to see for myself I popped onto their notion site that serves as an archive of all their shows and had a browse to see what is there before I was properly around in the Wales theatre scene, some of it seemed really fucking cool. Boardergame, Lifted by Beauty, Mission Control, Mother Courage, The Passion, De Gabay, all stuff I can absolutely fuck with. Even recently the shows/projects they are putting out look genuinely really cool, Kidstown, FRANK, A Proper Ordinary Miracle all seem like really unique and fun projects. It’s rare that I think this when I see a company's portfolio of work. 

This may seem quite baffling for a theatre review site to admit but I don’t really like theatre too much, like theatre theatre, people on a stage saying words they learned at each other, so I personally welcome any company actually doing cool things and it seems like NTW stands out in Wales on this front. 

This all being said, I have never seen any of their work or really interacted with them at all*. It seems slightly strange to me that I've seen and worked on a National Theatre show before I have even seen a National Theatre Wales show, this is totally on me though, I don’t expect them to hunt me down and put a show on in my front room, although that would be welcomed. I think it’s quite revealing that they are achieving their aim of being a National Theatre of Wales and veering away from being totally Cardiff-centric that my inability to drive means I can’t really interact with some of their output but there being enough things on in Cardiff that I probably could have seen something had I paid enough attention to what’s going on around me. Alongside this I know so many other friends and creatives who have worked with NTW across a whole bunch of different roles and levels and they are undoubtably a huge employer of Welsh based artists, actors, designers, production staff, ect.

*apart from very recently having a zoom call where I thought I had the AV to work on a project and it turns out I didn’t, oops, sorry Nia!

This post is becoming quite rambly now, and I’m only continuing to write it to procrastinate on other work I should be doing, but I think the point of me writing it is below;

The Arts Council defunding the National Theatre of Wales is quite mad. I don’t know the politics behind it or what prompted this to happen. I think National Theatre Wales has also made a whole lot of mistakes in how it operates in terms of it’s use of Welsh and Wales based artists and how it operates generally. I think NTW does great community work and does have a great model for how it supports communities. It’s hard to see how defunding it completely isn’t a punitive measure in some way, but I don’t know what promises have been broken, or aims not met behind the scenes that prompted this to happen. I feel like a decision this drastic to an organization that high profile doesn’t come from nowhere.