Matt Trueman: There's no such thing as regional theatre

As an idea, regional theatre is redundant. A show in Newcastle doesn't do anything for an audience in Plymouth and vice versa. Scotland has its own theatre culture, as do Liverpool and Bristol, Cardiff and Brighton. Lumping them together tells us next to nothing. Likewise, pouring money into Manchester's cultural scene might lessen the Londoncentric funding imbalance on paper, but it won't solve the problem in practice.

Theatre is a local art form and so when we talk of regional theatre, we really mean local theatre – lots of different individual ecologies, each of which needs cultivating for its own sake and in its own way. What works in Sheffield may not work in Birmingham. What Edinburgh and Glasgow need might be quite different.

All these local scenes inter-relate, be that through co-productions, collaborations or touring networks. They're part of a wider ecology – one that includes London – but, first and foremost, we need local theatre for local audiences.

'There has to be more to 'regional theatre' than regional theatres'

Regional theatres have wised up to this, programming work that wouldn't work anywhere else – be it Rona Munro's Scuttlers at the Royal Exchange, about Manchester's Victorian gangs, or West Yorkshire Playhouse's look at a local legend in Beryl. HOME can reset a German play from the 1930s to contemporary Stockport. Sheffield Crucible can imagine a nationwide revolution born in its streets, as it did in Camelot: The Shining City.

Great though this is, there has to be more to 'regional theatre' than regional theatres. It's easy to conflate the two, but these buildings cannot serve a local community single-handedly. Most have two spaces and, with receiving houses factored in as well, they tend to turn around ten shows a month, tops. This doesn't leave audiences an excess of choice, certainly not enough to sustain anything but the most catholic of tastes. Building a regular theatregoing habit might mean hopping from Chris Goode's Men In the Cities to Shrek: the Musical. (No bad thing per se, but rare to find someone with the stomach for both.)

We need to cultivate local arts scenes, to expand the options available to audiences and, indeed, to artists. Look at the proliferation of work that came out of Bristol through start-up schemes like Residence and Mayfest, or what Slung Low's own space, The Hub, offers Leeds. It's why the closure of The Arches in Glasgow is such a loss.

Fortunately, similar platforms are springing up all around the country. Last week, I visited the new Theatre Delicatessen space in Sheffield, which has taken over an old Woolworths in the centre of town, inviting young artists inside for residencies and showings. The next day, in Manchester for the International Festival, I stopped off at the Flare festival, a week-long programme of emerging, experimental artists, both home-grown and international, that will push local practice into new territories.

As London becomes more expensive, early career artists will need more spaces like these. Local theatre scenes need to proliferate and, since they tend not to show up on a national level, local criticism too. Healthy local scenes will add up to something more – regional theatre in the true sense of the term.

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