Arts Council

In defence of the Arts Council

29 July 2023 11:24 pm

I once knew a monster who said she could not read Proust because there were no figures in Proust with…

Why the Arts Council should kill off ENO and ENB

24 September 2022 9:00 am

It is high time the Arts Council put ENO and ENB out of their misery, says Rupert Christiansen

Could the Arts Council pay Americans to keep this stuff in America? Daddy and The Fever Syndrome reviewed

16 April 2022 9:00 am

The Fever Syndrome is a dramatised lecture set in a New York brownstone occupied by the super-brainy Myers family. The…

The promoter the critics love to hate: an interview with Raymond Gubbay

19 June 2021 9:00 am

Richard Bratby talks to one of Britain’s most successful impresarios about his promoter’s nose, Arts Council spinelessness and ENO madness

Defund theatres – and give the money to gardeners and bingo halls

5 September 2020 9:00 am

Why does the state fund theatres and not gardening and bingo, asks Lloyd Evans

Arinzé Kene is a performer of great charm and charisma led astray by bad advice and public money

Blacktivist rhetoric and impenetrable symbols: Misty reviewed

22 September 2018 9:00 am

Arinzé Kene’s play Misty is a collection of rap numbers and skits about a fare dodger, Lucas, from Hackney. Lucas…

If you wanted to cast someone as Spooner, the literary vagrant in Pinter’s No Man’s Land, you’d struggle to find a closer match: director Michael Boyd

The former head of the RSC finds cause for optimism in the Arts Council cuts

10 March 2018 9:00 am

He looks like an absent-minded watchmaker, or a homeless chess champion, or a stray physics genius trying to find his…

Director’s cut

23 September 2017 9:00 am

Much fuss has been made of the title given to Sir Simon Rattle on arrival at the London Symphony Orchestra.…

Choristers from the English National Opera (Photo: Getty)

ENO must go

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the…

What does it take to have someone declared dead? £480, for a start

13 February 2016 9:00 am

Matters of life and death Lord Lucan is now officially presumed dead. How do you have someone declared dead? In…

Gorgeous, visionary sights from Akram Khan at the Roundhouse

6 February 2016 9:00 am

How much of a compromise does a fashionable choreographer loved by all have to make with his paymasters? When he’s…

James McAvoy is wrong – the arts are better off without subsidy

14 March 2015 9:00 am

The season of cringe-making acceptance speeches at arts awards ceremonies is nearly over, thank heavens. But it hasn’t passed without…

You can’t force low-income people to go to an art gallery or the theatre if they don’t want to

28 February 2015 9:00 am

I went last week to see the justly praised production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers at English National Opera, and I…

Isn’t it time we asked the National Theatre to support itself?

12 July 2014 9:00 am

Isn’t it time we asked the National Theatre to support itself? Lloyd Evans says yes

The quango state: how the left still runs Britain

8 February 2014 9:00 am

David Cameron’s government continues to subsidise its critics