Arts Council OF GREAT BRITAI N Value fir Money ;ES;VHH AND IN,'-ORMATiON L13PARY DO NOT REMOVE FROM OM THIS ROOM Thirty-second annual report and accounts year ended 31 March 1977 Thirty-second Annual Report and Accounts 197 7 ISBN 07287 0143 X Published by the Arts Council of Great Britai n 105 Piccadilly, London W 1 V OA U Designed by Paul Sharp Printed in England by Shenval Pres s The montage on the cover illustrates the work of the Art s Council's specialist departments : Music : Page of vocal score of Sir William Walton 's Troilus and Cressida, showing revisions made by the composer for the 1976 production by the Royal Opera Art : Foy Nissen's Bombay by Howard Hodgkin Drama : The Olivier auditorium at the National Theatr e Literature : Some books and magazines published or subsidise d by the Council Contents Chairman 's Introduction 5 Secretary-General's Report 7 Regional Activities 15 Drama 1 6 Drama 1948-1977 (a personal commen t by N. V. Linklater) 20 Music 23 Visual Arts 26 Literature 30 Touring 3 1 Community Arts 32 Festivals 34 Housing the Arts 34 Training 35 Research and Information 36 Marketing 36 Scotland 37 Wales 41 Membership of Council and Staff 44 Council, Committees and Panels 45 Annual Accounts 53 The objects for which the Arts Council of Great Britai n is established by Royal Charter are : 1 To develop and .Improve the knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts ; 2 To increase the accessibility of the arts to the publi c throughout Great Britain ; and 3 To co-operate with government departments, local authorities and other bodies to achieve these objects. Chairman's Introduction It seems hardly appropriate that I as a very new Chairman - I am writing only six week s after taking up my appointment - should be introducing an Annual Report covering a period for which my predecessor, Lord Gibson, was wholly responsible. The opportunity is, however, most welcome since it enables me to pay my tribute to Lord Gibson for th e wise leadership, the vision and the understanding he displayed throughout his five-yea r term of office. None of them were easy years and the last one or two in particular brough t money problems perhaps more intractable than those his predecessors had to face . I have quickly learned how much I owe to him and how fortunate I am that, despite thes e problems, he left the Council in such good shape . The other matter I should like to raise here is the composition of the Council, since this has attracted criticism in some quarters during the past year . The members of the Arts Council are appointed by the Secretary of State following consultation with the Ministe r for the Arts and the Chairman . The objective of all three is to have a Council which i s broadly based in more than one sense . There should be members who have a n understanding of and a love for the arts in general ; there should be some who have perhaps a deeper knowledge of one particular art form . The members should come fro m different parts of the United Kingdom and from a variety of educational, cultural an d social backgrounds . The academic, the practitioner and the consumer should figure i n the membership . There need to be enthusiasts for both the traditional and the avant-garde . And not least, a sizeable proportion should have had experience of the process of collectiv e decision making through committee or other groupings, and each should be ready t o support a majority view whatever his own . Such a group of individuals should be more able than most to recognise what is best in the qualitative sense in the arts ; they will equally, one hopes, have sympathy with the more popular manifestations of art . Their minds need to be open to new ideas, and alert at all times. They should have differin g views and approaches, and yet be able to function as an entity, without necessarily always reaching a consensus . While neither I, nor I think any of my colleagues, would claim that the present Counci l is exactly the paragon which the foregoing implies, it does as a body broadly fulfil thos e requirements. To dismiss it as merely elitist, as some of our critics have done, is quite simply to ignore the character and background of its individual members . What is the alternative to the present method of appointment? How would one set abou t making the Council more representative or more democratic, to choose the two favourit e objectives and epithets of our critics ? We should, they say, have representatives of th e local authorities, the trades unions, the arts professions sitting on the Council as of righ t and nominated by their parent bodies . The Arts Council covers a very wide spread of th e arts and it is largely for this reason that both the Minister and the Council have in th e past doubted the value of representation as such. If this trades union were represented , why not that one? If this profession, why not the others? And why this particular loca l authority? Clearly, there would have to be ruthless selection leading to distinctions of the most invidious kind, which would satisfy almost nobody ; or one would have so many Chairman *~ IntroJnrti~M representatives that the Council would become a parliament, cumbersome in operation, interminable in discussion and almost incapable of speedy action . One way ofachieving more democracy might be through some process of election, and indeed this has been advocated by some . But it is difficult to believe that they have thought seriously about such a proposal . How would constituencies be drawn and by who m Would the boundaries be geographical, occupational or what- And how many peopl e would trouble to vote on what most might regard as a peripheral issue- The solution seems unlikely to emerge through the ballot box . Perhaps the present system of ministeria l appointment, with a limited term of office and therefore a constant change of membership , is after all preferable to the alternatives so far canvassed . KENNETH ROBINSON Secretary-General's Report Value for Money The details given below of the work of the specialis t the minority which enjoys these arts is a very sizeabl e departments of the Arts Council reflect a year of one, and it is steadily increasing. Second, some of th e considerable achievement by artists and ar t work of the `traditional' theatre, for example, ha s organizations, despite a `no-growth' grant-in-aid from eventually reached vast audiences . Look Back in Ange r the government to the Council . came from the subsidised theatre, where it was enormously successful, but it has since been seen b y It is often said that in a time of financial difficultie s many more people through commercial exploitation s the arts cannot expect to be exempted from cuts, in London and New York, in the regional reps. and in especially when essential services, such as schools an d foreign productions, and finally by millions in its fil m hospitals, suffer them . This way of putting it implies and television versions . Third, through a `two-ste p that the arts are not an essential service, but a luxury . flow' process some of the fruits of developments in th e Most people, however, would agree that life is more arts permeate to those who do not directly experience than livelihood and that the arts provide an essentia l them, not least through the design of everyday things . service to the community by helping to make lif e Again, teachers form a significant part of the art s worth living. audience and it would be surprising if those they teach did not derive some benefit from this fact . Finally, it Arts support received an unusual amount of attentio n should be emphasised that the Council has over th e during the year. There were three published reports : past decade deliberately extended its scope . The a Labour Party discussion document, the proportion of the total grant spent on arts centres , Redcliffe-Maud report on Support for the Arts in touring, Regional Arts Associations, arts films , England and Wales, and the TUC Working Party photography and jazz has increased more than ten-fol d report. It is significant that all three advocate increase d in that period. government expenditure on the arts. The key to the enjoyment of the `high' arts by a wide r The present expenditure in Britain works out at about public is a better education in the arts at all age level s 2- p per head of population per week . This is a modest from primary school to adult education . Lord enough amount in all conscience when one consider s Redcliffe-Maud is surely right to urge that : `We must the range of activities supported by the Council 's reject the long established fallacy that "arts support" grant. In Holland, with a quarter of Britain's population , and "education" are two separate things . More the amount spent on public subsidy for the arts i s positively, we must insist that those responsible fo r twice that in Britain . In Germany three cities togethe r them are natural allies and see to it that they collaborate spend as much as the total subsidy to the arts i n at national, regional, and local levels .' Britain. The Paris Opera receives nearly twice as muc h grant as our Royal Opera House, and the Vienna State Opera has more than three times as much for a Politics and the Arts similar operation.