Blogs

Jo Caird: Three cheers for the NT & subsidised theatre

At
the Whatsonstage.com Awards on Sunday night I found myself in a
huddle of people praising the National Theatre to the skies. The
huddle mainly consisted of members of the ensemble of London Road, which
opened at the Cottesloe in April 2011, so they may have been a touch
biased, but the point made in that conversation stands: the NT is on
extraordinary form at the moment.

Scan through the list of Sunday night’s winners and the NT comes up again and again.
The organisation collected seven gongs in total for Frankenstein,
One Man, Two Guvnors, Season’s
Greetings
and War Horse in the West End,
along with Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork‘s London
Road
, which I’ve already mentioned.

Having already cleaned
up at the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards 2011 (winning in six of
the eight award categories) and the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2011 (taking home the awards for Best Actor, Best Play
and Best Director for Frankenstein, One
Man, Two Guvnors
and Mike Leigh’s Grief
respectively), the NT is having a pretty successful time of it right now. The
nominees of the 2012 Olivier Awards won’t be announced until 15 March
(with the awards ceremony taking place on 15 April), but it’s fairly
likely that the NT will be well represented there too.

For
the individual winners of all these awards, it’s a lovely thing to
have one’s work lauded, but what’s more important is that subsidised
theatre is getting the recognition it deserves. The NT is far more
than just the productions that play on its stages. From developing
new work and supporting theatre-makers from all the creative
disciplines at the National Theatre Studio, to audience development
schemes such as NT Live and the Travelex £12 seasons, the NT is an
integral part of the UK theatre landscape.

I’d
wager that the vast majority of people working in or writing about theatre
in this country would acknowledge that without the subsidised sector,
the commercial sector would be a far poorer place. This isn’t always
so obvious to the public however. A streak of award wins like the
one the NT is enjoying at the moment puts the subsidised sector in
the spotlight. It’s not that buildings like the NT need to win awards
to prove their value – the value is there all the same, gongs or
not – but it terms of raising awareness of the importance of public
subsidy and thereby (hopefully) safeguarding it for the future, every
little helps.

The
National opened in 1976 with the slogan “The New National Theatre
is Yours” and that’s exactly the sentiment behind NT Future, the
£70 million scheme launched in 2010 to ensure that the organisation
continues to meet the needs of audiences and artists going forwards.
Exciting changes are afoot, from the refurbishment of the Cottesloe
(which will reopen as the Dorfman Theatre in early 2014); to the
creation of the Clore Learning Centre, a new education space
alongside the Dorfman; to making the NT more welcoming to first-time
visitors through the opening up of the building’s public
spaces and entrances. As the recession continues to bite, the NT is more committed than ever to the notion that theatre is for the many, not for the few.

Times are tough and it feels like every day there’s more bad news – about the state of the economy, the health service, the education system – so let’s allow ourselves just a moment of pride: the NT is our theatre and it’s excelling itself. Three cheers for the National Theatre.