The So and So is a professional actors’ self-help club that sources good new plays as material for rehearsed readings. Its ethos is of supporting artists across generations and it now has over 1,200 members in nine countries including Canada, the US and Australia, with patrons such as the critic Michael Billington, the director John Caird, the agent Ken McReddie and the actor Frances Barber. Its members are actors, writers and directors, among them Phyllis Logan, Terry Johnson, Bill Alexander and Joanna David.

“I’ve been an actor for 35 years and when you’re a pit pony hanging on to the rock face for a long time you get to a point when you’re tired of complaining about the lot – of actresses in particular,” Sarah said. “I thought I’d do something about it, but you can’t do much on your own so why not reach out? I’d say to other actors, I’ll open my contacts book, try to share opportunities and generate proactivity, will you do the same? Lots said OK.”

Using those contacts and Facebook she began doing readings in often unconventional places – one of the first was in a stained glass studio in West Drayton when a hat was spontaneously passed round the audience so that the readers actually got paid. They still do, getting £40 a reading, and the club which has generated work for more than 600 actors, writers, directors and designers.

For the last 18 months the So and So Arts Club has had its base in a four storey house at 6 Frederick Place off Old Jewry in the City, owned by the Mercers’ Company and let for a nominal rent. It is shared with James Roose-Evans’s Frontier Theatre Productions and its rooms of various sizes are used for rehearsals, readings, performances and offices, which Sarah can let as affordable space for other artists, “a holy grail in London”, to help fund the club. The So and So is now looking for longer term premises in which it can also establish a Fringe venue where young actors, too many of whom lack sufficient experience Sarah believes without the rep system, can learn their trade.

“Performers in particular feel so disempowered, it doesn’t really matter what you’ve done, what you’ve achieved,” Sarah said. “You look at TV in this country and you’d think only five people live here, it’s the same faces all the time, and that has crept into the theatre. It’s a very very closed shop, despite not having a functioning union anymore. The club helps people collaborate and meet each other, make it more of a level playing field.”

Sarah built a website to keep communications live, and it has been a one-woman operation. Membership costs are minimal and the turnover is tiny.

So far there have been 39 rehearsed readings and 68 performances including several productions at Fringe venues such as the Tristan Bates Theatre, the Drayton Arms, The Mill at Sonning (where she presented the British premiere of a Norah Ephron play) and at Jermyn Street. All that is earned goes back into the So and So; Sarah takes no payment.

She began a series of festivals in 2014 with the Hopefull season at the The Hope pub in Islington, four quite different plays for older actors for which she got her first and last arts council grant, and did it again last year, despite being turned down by ACE this time, at Fred’s Place, as she calls it, this time with a musical added -– “stories of people over 40 because I’m getting tired of having fallen off the face of the earth since I got past that age” – for which everyone was paid the Equity Fringe minimum.

There have been more festivals, such as A Kick up the Arts which showcased 15 plays with interactive masterclasses and workshops, and Women in the Arts with a similar format co-produced with the Actors Centre.

The biggest So and So venture so far begins on July 4, a month long season at Fred’s Place called Women at War: 16 plays, four films, two exhibitions and special events. A taster on June 27 was Seven, a one-off play by seven playwrights about seven heroic female activists from around the world featuring Miriam Margolyes, Rula Lenska and Josie Lawrence.

Sarah herself is directing Cleo Sylvestre in a play about Mary Seacole, the black Crimean War nurse whose statue was unveiled at St Thomas’s Hospital on June 30 (she will take the play to the Edinburgh Fringe). Her festival co-producer, the American Broadway director Rachel Neuberger, has written her own searing play, Nepenthe, about the notorious Block 24 brothel at Auschwitz. There’s an exhibition of portraits by the war artist Arabella Dorman. “This is a bold, important idea,” said So and So supporter Imogen Stubbs. “Now, more than ever, we need to raise our voices as artists to make sure that women across the world feel both heard and supported.”

The club is being set on a more formal footing, under the chairmanship of a City financial consultant, James Winterbotham. In June he set it up as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a corporate body that has a community purpose rather than a commercial one; it can make a profit and raise capital but also gets more sympathy from local authorities and the likes of the arts council. “However,” he said, “they do need to demonstrate good governance, hence Sarah’s desire to have us on the board”.

He met Sarah though his actor/director wife Emmeline Winterbotham (who also happens to be the Master of a City livery company), and was impressed by the So and So business model. “Speaking to Sarah was refreshing since she passionately believes that, first, the theatre profession should be paid, and secondly productions should be properly marketed. This requires applying business principles to the arts”, Winterbotham said. “Our intention is that the business is put on a sounder financial footing that enables Sarah to pursue her artistic aims using professional performers, to create stability for future planning and will enable her to be paid a proper salary. A key element of this is to have a space for performance, rehearsal and office use”.

First will be the creation of a business plan, and then finding a permanent low-cost base in the City – the lease on Fred’s Place could be ended at any moment. “I see this coming together of arts, business and an otherwise unused asset from a benign landlord as a perfect model”, Winterbotham says.

But, as So and So supporter John Caird, the director, says it has to be about theatre. He has known Sarah Berger since she was a very young Olivia in his 1983 RSC production of Twelfth Night opposite Zoe Wanamaker’s Viola.

“Theatre is a social art,” Caird said, “ and you can only make judgements about how good you are by being in the company of people you are working with, sharing ideas. Being a young artist is a very lonely business, especially for an actor, and you get on by making partnerships, forming alliances, doing things together. That’s why So and So is so important and why it works.”

Box
The So and So Arts Club
Founded June, 2014
Membership 1283
Headquarters 6 Frederick Place, London EC2R 8AB
Status Community Interest Company
Aims To create work for actors, directors, writers and designers
Chief executive Sarah Berger (unpaid)
Chairman James Winterbotham
Turnover £15,000 pa
Funding Membership (£30 pa) and box office
Staff None
Website http://www.thesoandsoartsclub.co.uk

For John Berry, English National Opera’s artistic director, the microcosm of the surreal switchback ride ENO has been on for the last couple of decades and more came on a balmy spring evening in 2012 at the Royal Opera House when the company picked up three Olivier Awards for the previous season.

“What you didn’t know then was that we’d had a real blip,” he says. “The arts council grant was down, the economy was tricky, box office was tough, a whole series of issues came together in 2011, and it was the very season when we won the Olivier for ‘outstanding achievement in opera for breadth and diversity of work’”.

It was very the season for which the company recorded a season deficit of £2.2m. “It’s an opera, really, isn’t it?” he says.

That switchback ride seems to have been up on artistic highs like that season’s Castor and Pollux to financial crises when the arts council – whose grant, though reduced, is still worth half the ENO annual turnover – has had to bale it out.

There will be no more bale-outs, Berry says unequivocally, the fairground ride has stopped. The loss of 2011 was cancelled not by ACE but by using reserves the company had decided to build up, and for last season will show a surplus of £200,000-plus. In April he announced a season as risky as any, but also a development programme that will change its business plan and the public’s relationship with the company.

Next year John Berry will celebrate 20 years at ENO and he is credited with the contemporary programming that has delighted and sometimes horrified audiences, which has brought new people to the Coliseum, ENO’s home, and kept traditional opera lovers away. He has been called both reckless and inspired, and he is presiding over the company’s biggest changes since Lilian Baylis created it 83 years ago.

At 24 John Berry was a promising clarinet player who had won one of just two scholarships to study the instrument at the Royal Northern College of Music (he was born in Lancashire and grew up in Cheshire) who had gone on to New York to study with Gervase de Peyer. He had been feeling unwell for some time and went for a check up. “The doctor said, ‘I hope it’s TB’”.

He returned to Manchester, went from the airport straight to Christie’s Hospital and found that it wasn’t TB but Hodgkin’s Disease, usually fatal then, and that the cancer had spread to his chest. Through 1985 and 1986, under the care of the pioneering oncologist Derek Crowther, he underwent operations, chemo and radiotherapy which failed, he had two treatments that failed he was given an experimental combination therapy not then used in this country. The tumour began to respond and by 1986 was gone. It has never returned.

His lungs damaged, however, his playing career was over and he launched into a different career, setting up a series of music schools in Cheshire, called Sounds Alive, with 500 pupils. “The cancer changed me, changed everything,” he says.

At the RNCM he had been captivated by the voice, with some of his classmates being a generation of great singers including Jane Eaglen, Clive Bayley and Barry Banks. In 1990 he founded the Brereton International Symposium masterclasses in Cheshire, sponsored by Jerwood, to which he brought stars such as Birgit Nilsson, Thomas Hampson, Renata Scotto and Brigitte Fassbaender. “When you’re as naïve as I was you don’t think about writing to someone like Nilsson, but she rang back and said she’d love to come – because it was private. Tom Hampson has become a life-long friend”.

He became a singers’ agent, an advisor to the Royal College of Music and the Hallé Orchestra and a consultant on BBC and Channel 4 opera film projects, but was still running his summer school when he joined ENO as casting director in 1995. He arrived on the cusp of the change between Dennis Marks, who hired him, and Nicholas Payne –still a friend and mentor – as ENO directors and rode the controversial three year reign of Sean Doran before the arrival of Loretta Tomasi as chief executive, a new title. By then Berry, now 52, had risen through director of opera planning to become, in 2005, artistic director.

“Under Loretta and me there has been no bale out. There were good years and not so good years when those reserves have been a fantastic foundation for us to make important decisions,” he says now.

Last December Tomasi stood down to return to her native Australia and with an interim management team and a new chairman, Martyn Rose, replacing Peter Bazalgette who had been appointed chairman of the Arts Council, Berry devised ENO’s future.

He had laid the foundations not only by creating a safety net with reserves saved from the good times, but by building a network of co-production partnerships across the world. There are 40, the first having been with the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The recent Thebans, Julian Anderson’s first opera, which Berry knew he wanted to do four years ago, could not have been possible if Bonn Opera hadn’t paid for and built the set in exchange for David Alden’s ENO production of Lucia di Lammermore. “It saved us half a million,” Berry says. “Our international connections are so extensive now that if I say I want to do something, I know we can raise the money for it”.

Terry Gilliam’s production of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini that opens on June 17 is one of the most ambitious projects of recent years, Berry says: “It has to be good”.

The 2014-15 programme has all the chutzpah that has been associated with Berry, with 11 new productions. Richard Jones, always controversial but particularly recently for his Glyndebourne production of Rigoletto, will direct The Mastersingers of Nuremburg; the enfant terrible of opera directors, Peter Sellars, returns with the world staged premiers of John Adams’s “The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and the first fully staged production of Purcell’s 1695 opera The Indian Queen; two young British composers get world premiers; the film director Mike Leigh will do Pirates of Penzance, his first ever opera; there will be a new partnership with the Bristol Old Vic for a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo.

Underneath the headline riskiness, though, is sound support in the programme, he says. Pirates of Penzance by Leigh will be extremely popular and there will be plenty of performances; there will be revivals of bankers like Carmen, La Traviata, The Marriage of Figaro, Jonathan Miller’s La Bohème. “There were probably two seasons where I programmed too much contemporary rep, too much rep that was edgy,” Berry admits. “This season and the next season it feels more balanced in an economy that’s still a bit jumpy in an art form that’s still finding it’s feet, so I think I’m actually being sensible”. His target is to raise £3m next year and he has identified 75% of it.

But the strike for independence is in the planning for the further future rather than the next season. The big announcement was the plan for a new production centre, site as yet unknown, which will cost a modest £10m and for which Berry believes he has enough of a promise from supporters to ensure it will be open by the end of 2016, while the company is using five or six different venues around London to rehearse. It will save ENO £1m a year.

He has made a deal with the West End producers Michael Grade and Michael Linnit to create musical theatre that they will fund with the ENO singers and orchestra, taking back some of the 17 weeks a year when the Coliseum is hired out, and which will transfer to other theatres after the initial Coliseum run. A potential profit of millions beckoning. New audiences will continue to be probed for through keeping ticket prices affordable and schemes like Undress Nights when first tickets are available at £25, and by an expanding database.

The Coliseum itself, which ENO now owns, is to open out. Until now closed to the public except when a production is under way, Berry is going into partnership with a restaurateur (as yet unnamed) to provide a restaurant, a foyer café and bars that will be open all day and, as a by-product, contribute to the wider database.

Because of arts council policy ENO cannot tour in England, so that productions like Anthony Minghella’s famous Madame Butterfly is still being enjoyed by audiences around the world but has never been seen in an English theatre other than the Coliseum. So Berry has made another partnership AltiveMedia to take filmed productions to 400 cinemas, as well as making pro-productions with the Barbican, the Young Vic and now the Bristol Old Vic.

Berry has a new partner in Henriette Götz who has arrived from Belgium as executive director, with a reputation for fundraising and commercial acumen in a creative environment.

And although the “transformation”, as Berry calls it, is towards a new independence as the expectation is for a further substantial reduction in the arts council grant when it is announced in July, ACE will still be important. Berry says ACE has available for the whole of England less than there is for the city of Berlin. “They’re under huge pressure, but money from the arts council has to be seen as a springboard for us to really be ambitious and excel with bringing money in from outside of the public funded circle. We are showing we can do that,” Berry says.

“I think what we’re showing is that we can increase what we want to do by getting commercial partners to take some of the risk. Opening the Colly won’t make us a lot of money, but it will change our relationship with the public completely.

“We’re going to be more efficient, have more work, give better public value and we’re going to try and create here a model that is an opera house for the future.”

John Berry box outs

1. Born in Bolton, Lancashire, 1961
2. Trained as a clarinet player, Royal Northern College of Music
3. Landmark production would be Anthony Minghella’s Madame Butterfly of 2005, the highest grossing production in ENO history
4. I’ve never received an award apart from on behalf of ENO
5. First job: Probably working for Harrison Parrott – I was self employed before that
6. Next job: I wouldn’t want to run another opera house unless it was a really exceptional offer, I want to get on with the exciting future there is here
7. Biggest influence: There have been three – Nicholas Payne, former director of ENO now director of Europa Opera; Gerard Mortier, the Belgian opera director; Matthew Epstein, a doyen in artists’ management for singers.
8. What would you have been? Nothing. I began playing the clarinet at 12 and have never had to think about what I do since.
9. Do you have any superstitions? No, when you’ve had a near death experience superstition is the last thing you need. I’m just glad I can stand up every morning which for a long time I couldn’t.

It came as a shock, seized as it was by the BBC’s arts editor Will Gompertz and thrust on to the Today Programme – in violation, it might be added, of the embargo which was for four hours later – and telling us that arts subsidy is so out of kilter that Londoners, per capita, are getting 15 times what those living in the region are.

The report, Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital: A contribution to the debate on national policy for the arts and culture in England, aims show that the arts council’s distribution is heavily weighted on the capital. It is written by three very eminent arts administrators who, separately and sometimes together, have been involved with the arts especially n the regions, since the dark days of the 1980s.

They write from experience. It celebrates 50 years since Jennie Lee, the first arts minister, published her white paper, A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps, which said: “If the eager and gifted, to whom we must look for leadership in every field, are to feel as much at home in the north and west as in and near London, each region will require high points of artistic excellence”. They counter it with a quote from David Cameron from just last month: This country has been too London-centric for far too long”.

The report is a fine polemic, but is it a reliable factual report?

The dramatic statistic tells us that while the average arts spend per head by ACE in 2012/13 was £14.51, but within that the average spend per Londoner is £68.99 while for the rest of England it’s a mere £4.58.

But the local authority spend in the mix is missing, and at least one London council has declared that all its arts subsidy is being scrapped; others are cutting dramatically.

And of the money spent in London, a large proportion goes to the national companies based there – where else would they be? Butt he National Theatre tours the regions constantly, the Tate has branches in Liverpool and St Ives, the four great symphony orchestras the capital boasts have residences in regions for parts of each season as well as touring, all activities at least partly paid for from the London column in the accounts book.

Sponsorship, too, is focussed more on London than anywhere else. Some analyses of individual giving put it at 90% going to London, but there is a fog around what is individual giving and what the real sources of the gifts are. Some reckoning lumps all private support under the word “philanthropy”, and this report puts private support of all sorts for the arts at 82% quoted most recently by Arts & Business for 2011/12. The arts council puts it at more like 65%.

So there are grey areas in assessing the grey area of private funding. The surge towards philanthropy as opposed to business support puts an emphasis on individual giving, but that is often difficult to assess: many thousands of pounds are left in the donation boxes in the foyers of every major museum, and the regions now are blessed with many major museums. Is that counted? All arts organisations around the country rely more and more on volunteers – the new archive centre in Sussex, The Keep, opening on November 19 has thousands of calico bags for its ancient maps made by Women’s Institute members for nothing– which is not assimilated into any of this.

“We observe that new public sector support to encourage philanthropic giving could exacerbate rather than ameliorate the situation with £18.5m (61%) of the first £30.5m of arts endowment funding under the Catalyst Programme going to London,” the writers say. It could, but another analyst could observe that it equally might not.

Pragmatic reports are not observation tolerant, and this observation betrays a bias which does its cause no favours. For it is as true now as it was in 1965 that there is an imbalance of funding in the regions compared with London, but it is to be expected. London is a one of perhaps half a dozen world cities and is a place where arts lovers come for the cultural offer. The report shows that while 14% of visitors to the US go to New York, 12% of those that go to France spend time in Paris and 10% of tourists in Germany go to Berlin, in the UK 48% of visitors spend time in London, such is the importance of the international offer in the capital compared with the regions. And London is becoming increasingly important worldwide as a cultural centre: Alistair Spalding of Sadler’s Wells says that his theatre has seen audiences for contemporary dance double there in ten years, and that New York and Paris have ceded their positions as the centre for world dance to London.

There is undoubtedly too little of attention paid to the regions, even within the arts community. In the recent trawl for a successor to Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre, a director who has never run a building and never worked much in the regions has been appointed. How interesting it would have been if someone nurtured in the regions with, nevertheless, and international reputation – Jonathan Church at Chichester, for instance, or Tom Morris at Bristol, neither of whom was interviewed.

The paper has a solution, in a new five year National Investment Programme to support the arts outside London with the emphasis away from the blessed south, south-east and east of England. It would be worth £120m drawn from the National Lottery.

In those terms, it’s simple. In real terms, it is extremely complicated, because of other elements such as local authority funding. The arts council, which is given credit in the report for positively trying to even things up but is castigated for not having followed up properly, is at present working on a complex series of partnerships with local authorities of different dimensions – county, city, town and borough – to keep money flowing to local and regional cultural operations. It is a process over-complicated by changes to local authority funding, political interference at local level and by the mercurial nature of private funding.

There is something about naming rights that is lividly controversial in the theatre in a way that it isn’t elsewhere in our cultural life. No-one bats an eyelid at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, Arsenal’s Emirates or Newcastle’s Sports Direct Arena. In the arts, museums and galleries positively tout their new developments among potential funders, so that the British Museum has its Mitsubishi Corporation Galleries, the V&A its Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art and the National Maritime Museum its Sammy Ofer Wing; the north-east’s finest concert hall is called simply Sage Gateshead after the electronics company that gave what was then the biggest single capital arts sponsorship.

But theatre is another category. When the Jerwood Foundation stepped in to save the Royal Court’s tottering redevelopment it was accused of trying to buy immortality by having the theatre renamed the Jerwood Royal Court, and it was even suggested the Queen herself had intervened to ensure it didn’t happen: nothing could supersede the word “royal”. Jerwood’s chairman Alan Grieve angrily refuted the story: “Look,” he said, “the Royal Court was going bust, John Mortimer (the Court’s chairman) and Stephen Daldry (its then artistic director) came to us to save it, and we were happy to do so with the biggest grant we had ever given, £3 million. We agreed on Jerwood Theatre Upstairs and Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, and we have established the name Jerwood as a brand of quality”.

The Royal Opera House was almost badly burned when the American investment advisor Albert Vilar pledged £10m to pay for the conversion of the Floral Hall, with naming as the quid pro quo – iroinically, he said he hoped it would encourage other philanthropic businessmen to support arts projects. But the money never arrived, and Vilar was eventually convicted of, among other things, money laundering, and for a while the Vilar Floral Hall was just the Floral Hall. The Paul Hamlyn estate came to rescue, and undeterred by the Vilar experience the hall has Paul Hamlyn’s name.

But those are subsidised theatres. In the commercial sector it is somehow different. In 1995 when Janet Holmes à Court wanted to rename the Globe in Shaftesbury Avenue after our then greatest living actor, there was a long public tussle which was only resolved by the fact that there was to be another Globe in London, Sam Wanamaker’s creation on Bankside, due to open in 1997, and so the Gielgud came into being.

Now the Ambassdor’s Theatre Group has announced that it is putting naming rights for some of its most iconic London theatres – they include the Duke of York’s, the Piccadilly and the Lyceum – on the market as it casts around for sponsorship, just as museums and football clubs have done. Even though ATG are unspecific about what kind of money they are looking for or what they would spend it on, in those terms it seems a fairly innocuous business decision.

Not when you put it to some of the non-ATG theatres around the country, though. “There seems to be absolutely nothing that the money people won’t stoop to, to increase shareholder return,” raged one, who asked not to be named. “Over the last few years the West End and associated theatres have initiated a colossal growth in extra income – transaction fees, pp seats, individual booking fees, group booking fees, unspent restoration levies, as well as ice cream tubs for £4.50 and glasses of wine for £6.50. We’ve had the Labatt Apollo – thank goodness it’s too late to have the London Rubber Gielgud Theatre!”

ATG are keen to confirm that the group being sold to a new majority share holder, Providence Equity, has nothing to do with the management of its theatres. The conversations about selling theatre naming rights are “a scoping exercise”, so that we probably won’t be going to the Providence Equity Lyceum. But the ATG high command, Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire, are ruling nothing in or out.

Some theatres simply can’t do it. Peter Wilson, CEO of the Theatre Royal Norwich, says it would be impossible within the legal framework of a Theatre Royal to attach a second name that compromises the royal warrant. “However,” he adds, “if the Cottesloe can be renamed the Dorfman in recognition of significant financial support, perhaps the dam has already been breached.”

Which is the though ot Nica Burns, half of one of ATG’s major rivals in the West End, Nimax. She has been lobbied for a name change to one of the company’s six West End houses and turned them down – not because she disapproved of the principle but because it was not appropriate for the theatre in question. She believes the stable door of naming rights has been flung open by the subsidised sector: “Whatever you call it, Jerwood, Dorfman, it is a result of money having changed hands”. And she has happily named the bars in her theatres for American Airlines, generous sponsors of her operation for many years.

The concern of the heritage element of the theatre business, embodied in the Theatres Trust, is that the name of oa theatre reflects the ownership. There is a rapport with audience and with location that wouldn’t be served by a short-term name change as part of a purely commercial deal.

And then, as Philip Spedding, director of Arts & Business says, it’s all right for playhouses to forsake their names for the sake of an actor’s memory, but the GlaxoSmithKline Drury Lane sits less comfortably.

He sees another problem, though – for the sponsor. Such deals are usually long-term to be financially worthwhile, perhaps ten years, and as we saw in the Nineties and Noughties, theatres and theatre chains can change hands quite suddenly. What if the Coliseum becomes the Barclays Bank Opera House in a long-term arrangement, then ENO sells it to move to a purpose built house and an anarcho-circus company funded by a Russian oligarch is the new owner, bringing a reputation for raves and unruly audiences? Could Barclays legitimately require ENO not to sell for the term of the agreement? Probably not, and venerable Barclays will be stuck with something its shareholders would not want to be associated with.

Should there be public funding of the arts? Of course… er, well, no, actually…
According to YouGov that have just carried out a poll on the question, the positive view belongs to what are called UK Opinion Formers (who get initial capitals, henceforth OFs), the negative one is the general public’s (who languish humbly in lower case, and for our purposes will be both promoted and contracted to the GP). That is, the survey records that 65% of OFs believes in arts subsidy, but only 28% of the GP do.
It occurs to me that if the Opinion Formers really were forming others’ opinions, 65% of the general public would think as they do, so perhaps they are more accurately Opinion Holders who happen to have a forum to propound their opinions in. But this is not a frivolous issue, it could be deadly serious.
Asked what the primary benefit of publicly funded culture was, the OFs’ top answer, 67%, identified “social and cultural benefit through giving access to the while population”; that was the GP’s top answer too, but they were less sure, only 42% ticking that box.
And while almost two thirds of OFs think arts funding should be shared equally between the public and private sectors, almost a quarter of the GP think arts should be entirely funded by the private sector, and three-quarters of both groups think there should be cuts in line with other government departments. It’s this GP section that believes the arts are a significant boost for tourism, the best reason for subsidy, while the OFs want government funding to ensure talent is developed and that all of us can have our spirits lifted by the taxpayer-funded arts.
Both sides in the YouGov poll think that arts subsidy is “poorly distributed”, but it is the GP that seems to be at odds with the generous funding of opera when it is an artform enjoyed by relatively few taxpayers. But then, opera needs (and gets) private funding too, which OFs believe is encouraged by public support: the GP, on the whole, does not agree that subsidy has any influence on private giving to the arts.
And so it goes on: to put it simply, the OFs represent the theoretical, the GP the practical; the GP directly feels the effects of recession in their purses and shopping baskets, the OFs are paid to be objective.
The YouGov poll is very general, too, and doesn’t take into account the enormous effect of local authority arts funding, and the way arts administrators respond to what they see as the most propitious path for both their audiences and their funding sources.
It is poignant that the Lowry’s influential and pioneering artistic director, Robert Robson, should have died suddenly recently, just after the appearance of the YouGov survey. Robson and his CEO Julia Fawcett had turned around the fortunes of what had become a £106m white elephant of an arts centre, beleagured in the Salford Quays where the city’s ambitions of revival had not come to anything two years after it opened. It almost closed again. Robson and Fawcett concluded that they had looked to international success too optimistically and had ignored their own doorstep, so that they turned to the local public with a publicity blast and a pledge to “keep its (the Lowry’s) feet in Salford Docks”. The public responded in their thousands, and following their vote with their feet, the BBC chose the Quays to plant their behemoth of a Media City. The Lowry has a footfall of nearly a million a year now.
In Leicester, The Curve has become the city’s arts centre, open 18 hours a day providing ticketed and free entertainment of all genres. It is a national portfolio organisation so it gets a government subsidy of almost £2m, and it needs every penny. Leicester is one of the worst conurbations in the country for either corporate sponsorship or private arts philanthropy, and though The Curve struggles with its limnited national support, its success with the East Midlands public is due to the ingenuity of its executive and artistic directors, and the support of the local authority.
The truth is that most of the culture-consuming public are largely unaware of what is subsidised and what is not, and not through sheer ignorance. In the modern zeitgeist, “mixed funding” has never been more mixed, with public funding coming from national, regional (though less so since the abolition of the regional development agencies) and local agencies, and private funding sources now a spectrum of private giving, corporate sponsorship, and trusts and foundations.
The government is eager to increase the input from the private sector, and tends to use the word “philanthropy” as a cover-all word that conceals the fact that corporate sponsorship, and to be precise what the Labour government encouraged as “corporate social responsibility”, or CSP, as a subsiding factor. No OFs refer to CSP any more.
The funding soup is confusing and the public are happily enjoying the arts in greater numbers than ever before in this country – which happily coincides with another truth, that we are in a golden age of creativity – blissfully unaware of the financial breakdown.
The theatre owner and producer Nica Burns was recently named Private Businesswoman of the Year, sponsored by the super-accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers and created to celebrate the best of private business. That the theatre should be considered the apogee of commercial achievement is a significant endorsement, and nobody would say that Burns is not worthy. But she never lets the opportunity go to emphasise how much the commercial industry she is at the forefront of owes to subsidised theatre, which allows for experiment, trains and nurtures talent and gives the first modest showcase to what can become a major earner for the economy when fly-eyed producers like Burns exploit them.
OFs see that happening all the time, but how much is the GP aware of it?

The Nicks, Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, have taken a leaf out of the RSC book and announced together that they are leaving the National Theatre, just as Michael Boyd and Vikki Heywood did. The implication is that the undoubted success that both companies have had in terms of critical acclaim and business efficiency, has been a joint effort between the two brains, artistic and commercial. Michael Grandage and James Bierman were the same at the Donmar, leaving together but in their case staying together, setting up the Michael Grandage Company together last year (the Nicks might follow a similar course, taking a subsidised sector praxis into a commercial operation).

There is no doubting the success that those partnerships have wrought over the last eight to ten years, and that success trickles down in the perception of the cultural sector. Both the National and the RSC are aware that their brands can help regional theatres when their logos appear on touring venues’ billposters.

To them, Maria Miller’s lecture about making art pay was old hat. They have cracked it, and the secret is understanding that the process of creating art that people will pay to see is too complex to be interrupted by commercial implications. Leave that to someone you trust implicitly, says Boyd/Hytner/Grandage, while you devote every innovative fibre to artistic genius, and the alchemy is done. Not only do you get great plays, but you get commercial income and new theatres to boot.

That’s what happens at the top level, but the creative process is no less imperative lower down the chain. No less imperative, but dramatically more difficult.

In the realm of music festivals one of the most innovative and successful in terms of bringing home the box office has been Ian Ritchie, who has run the City of London Festival for eight years, but the 2013 festival in June and July will be his last. One factor that has driven him out of the job is the need to spend more and more time on the commercial necessity of fund-raising in the face of dwindling subsidy and elusive sponsorship, at the cost of creativity.

“Creating a new programme each year, which one has to do, is in a way as demanding as being required to produce a new symphony or write a new opera each year. It is a creative process, it’s not routine, and it’s not a shopping expedition to see what’s available and then just buying it and programming it in,” Ritchie says.

For him, the model of a partnership at the head of an endeavour, one for the art the other for the money, that works for the National Theatre and the RSC needs to be adapted for humbler, but no less vital, aspects of the artistic creativity if they are to survive. For the first time his subsidy doesn’t cover core funding, and there is no main sponsor. He has managed it, but it has become too much for one person. “Partnership is more than half the answer,” he says.

The trouble is that the City of London Festival Trust has increasingly limited resources, and despite listening sympathetically to Ritchie’s recommendation, it cannot afford two senior executive salaries – the former head of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Paul Gudgin, is to take over, alone.

There is no shortage of gumption, will and innovation in smaller arts organisations’ as they take on the new challenge of survival. A year ago the Northumberland Theatre Company, the ensemble that tours to unconventional venues such as village halls and community centres, lost its Arts Council funding, 65% of its income. Many businesses in the private sector would have not had second thoughts about folding under those odds, but not NTC.

They created themselves out of the immediate crisis by delivering three main features, and four new plays by new writers, which brought in an additional £68,500 through box office alone. They rattled their tin to get what, with matching funding from the Arts Council’s Catalyst scheme, amounted to £9.500. Altogether they raised almost £160,000, and despite the fact that 80% of sponsorship and philanthropy for the arts in England is set in London. To do it, the staff of three and a half went on short-time working.

So this should be the object lesson that proves Mrs Miller’s point, but it isn’t. Not according to its own artistic director/CEO Gillian Hambleton.

“Our huge success in fundraising last year is no guarantee of success this year or beyond,” she says. “There are limited numbers of trusts and foundations for arts projects or core funding – these are all heavily oversubscribed and many require a gap of at least two years before re-applying. ACE GftA applications are also over subscribed for the funds that are available. Individual donations to NTC have increased but not to a level of sustainability.

“Despite a major strategic business overhaul and diversification of income streams our main mission of touring to non-traditional theatre spaces limits income and opportunities to increase it further. NTC’s time is now focused on fundraising, not on the art or on our audiences.”

The Nicks and their comparitors testify that in Mrs Miller’s world the most commercially successful cultural organisations are two parent families. What she does not realise is that beneath aristocracy of arts society, the single parent families that are the norm like the City of London Festival and NTC know that commerciality is a key to political approval, but that the struggle to survive without government assistance, or with it greatly reduced, is so consuming that the art they are devoted to is the inevitable victim.

The new Arts Council chairman is a dapper 59-year-old whose trim frame gives the lie to his second favourite recreation, according to Who’s Who, of gluttony. His first is opera, and although many saw him as an arts outsider when his appointment was announced as Jeremy Hunt’s parting shot on leaving the DCMS, his insider credentials are strong.

He has written often in the Daily Telegraph and The Times on arts policy, particularly on how it is impinged on by digital technology, and for a year was on the DCMS advisory board – in which the department’s very future, post-Olympics, was being debated last year.

And almost the same day that the headhunters came calling on behalf of the culture secretary, he was elected chair of English National Opera, of which he had been deputy chair, a board member for eight years and in change of its fundraising.

It is ironic, he says, that just as he takes his seat at ACE, ENO is declaring its biggest deficit in recent times. “It was a poor, tough, difficult year in which we won all the opera awards but had a poor box office,” he says.

Some might think that having presided over a £2.2m deficit at an ACE subsidised company would disqualify anyone from taking charge of the Arts Council itself, but Bazalgette is unabashed. “Actually, it’s given me quite an insight into what it’s like running an arts company at the moment, in that you’ve got to keep up box office and you’ve got to improve your fundraising,” he says. He had been chair for only seven months, but as deputy chairman had got fundraising up from a base of under £2m to over £3.5m. “The way I’ve left it, this year the deficit will be halved, and everybody’s setting a very tough budget to balance it next year. So I know how tough it is out there”.

The TV executive, who had brought us Ready, Steady, Cook, Changing Rooms and, his greatest crime for some critics, Big Brother, was headhunted for the ACE job. He was persuaded to apply and with the then culture secretary’s stated wish for someone who was convinced about arts philanthropy and who was part of the digital revolution, there can have been little doubt as to whether or not he would get it.

But why would he want it? A 30% arts cut in 2011-14, more on top in 2013 and 2014, the Arts Council itself forced slash its own operation by half and a Comprehensive Spending Review due this year which promises more misery do not promise fulfillment.

‘Yes I know,’ he says. ‘Cuts, reductions, difficulties, local authorities, but it’s marvellous, you know, and it’s actually a rather wonderful time to take over the Arts Council in the sense that we’ve just posted the Olympics and those opening and closing ceremonies were a fantastic iteration of how world class our arts and culture is. And so, yes, it’s a tough time, but actually it’s a very exciting thing to do.’

A fundamental difference with his predecessor Dame Liz Forgan is over the halving of the Arts Council’s administration, an issue Forgan was prepared to stand and fight over and lost. “It was a wholly necessary move in order to protect the arts organisations themselves as much as possible,” Bazalgette says. “If it was a given that the Arts Council’s grant-in-aid would be cut by 29.6%, then restricting the National Portfolio Organisations’ to a 15% cut (a stipulation of Hunt’s to keep the worst of the pain from the front line), soaking up the rest centrally was the right response.”

They would agree, though, on the critical importance of local authority arts funding, particularly to regional theatre. We speak as Newcastle is still planning to cut all its arts funding, but the following day it is announced that the council has rethought and developed a package with just a 50% cut, a deal that seems to have been brokered by the Arts Council.

“My point to councils like Newcastle is, ‘There is another way’,” he says. “We can’t replace the money. But we can commit and we can even imaginatively help them administer their money to keep it going to the front line.”

Regional theatre is the lifeblood of West End success, he says, not only because the training our actors, directors, writers and technicians get there, but the product itself liked the Judas Kiss, transferred from Hampstead to a successful run at the Duke of York’s.

Bazalgette believes whole-heartedly in the so far untapped potential of philanthropy – so far worth as 1% of the charity cake – as a source of arts funding, but not to replace subsidy. Business sponsorship has “fallen off a cliff”, but Arts Council funding can be a catalyst to persuade individual givers, and ACE is tasked with developing a strategy for attracting more.

And what of ACE’s parent, the DCMS, itself halved in size and next month moving out of its own premises to share with the Treasury. From his insider’s seat. Bazalgette believes the threat of abolition has passed. ”There was a worry that post Olympics – such an enormous thing it had to do – that it wouldn’t still be able to stand as a ministry on its own,” he says. ‘But actually, it’s been given extra responsibility for broadband and 4G which has made DCMS a more important ministry with economic responsibilities.

“Our job at the Arts Council is to remind DCMS and any other politician we can get hold of that we are part of that process too.”

A gleam comes to his eye with the digital prospect, of which The Space, the Arts Council’s portal devised with the BBC, he says is only the start. Five years ago he made a speech advocating a new public service with content from arts organisations. He lobbied the BBC, and The Space resulted, and the Arts Council is now planning the next two phases. “The UK should have a really exciting arts pool,” he says. “In the next ten years there’ll be a massive opportunity from digital to deliver lots more arts and culture to lots more people in lots of different places”.

The arts and culture are, he believes, a major economic asset for the UK as he will keep reminding politicians, but as a by-product: “Let me be clear, we don’t put money into arts and culture because we’re looking to grow the economy, we do it because of the manifest intrinsic advantages to our sense of identity, our cultural life, our educational life, our intelligence and emotional health and well being, we know those things but they need to be repeated,” he says.

“But the corollary of putting money into the arts is that it does have economic benefit. We do fund companies that are responsible for some wonderful cultural exports, and where soft power goes goes trade, as they say.”

China is still a lost continent to much of Western culture. Although east coast cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have become cosmopolitan in the 40 years since diplomatic relations with the UK were restored, to the west vast cities of five million-plus populations are rising with new theatres, concert halls and museums that have little inkling of the art of the outside world.
Since April and until November the British Council has been running UK Now, the biggest ever festival of British art in 25 cities across the country, with theatre, music – from rock bands to cathedral choirs – dance and exhibitions, which half way through has attracted an audience of 750,000. And although, says David Elliott, the British Council’s director of arts in Beijing, the Chinese authorities are “rather clumsy and clunky” with the contemporary and the unconventional, much experimental art has “got under the radar”, spread largely among the youth through Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Theatre companies like Blind Summit and Idle Motion are part of the festival, and in October the anarchic King Creosote is appearing in the remote far western cities of Urumuqi and Kashgar.
Which delights Linda Davies, who has helped with UK Now events. “You have to be a bit subversive,” she says. When she took the National Theatre Live film version of Frankenstein to Beijing in June she found that Danny Boyle, its director, and Benedict Cumberbatch were already stars there: Trainspotting, directed by Boyle, had been an enormous underground hit in China, and BBC TV’s Sherlock has spread among internet viewers like wild fire.
Lady Linda Davies lives in a Georgian terrace mansion in a tranquil Kensington square from where she runs her charitable foundation. She sounds the quintessential English milady, and nothing seems more English than her foundation’s co-production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde which opens tomorrow, August 10.
But although she never even visited China until well into adulthood, Linda Wong Davies is “100 per cent Chinese, unadulterated” and she has dedicated her life to creating a cultural bridge between China and Britain of which this production is the latest span.
She formed the K T Wong Foundation in 2007 in memory of her father, the property tycoon and philanthropist Dato Wong Kee Tat, whose passions were music, horticulture and China, and who never lived in China. She has homes in Beijing and Shanghai
There were musical trips to Europe with her father, but when she was 18 she made a solo foray. London became a regular haunt, and it was at Glyndebourne after the memorable Maria Ewing Carmen in 1985 that the banker David Davies proposed. The marriage ended in 2007, however, when Davies threw herself into her foundation.
Her mission is to finesse the two cultures in special productions and projects, not to bring traditional Chinese culture here – “the government can do that” – but to create something new.
For nine days on the lake in Belfast Zoo, Britten’s great children’s opera will represent a major element of Festival 2012. A co-production by Northern Ireland Opera and the foundation, it features local children and the Chinese National Children’s Choir she has flown in.
She sent designer Simon Lima Holdsworth to the Shangdong village of Weifang and the workshops where centuries-old methods of making kites and lanterns are opactied, to develop an extraordinary menagerie of animals made from bamboo and paper and carried by children. His Ark bears a striking resemblance to a modern supertanker, with a pagoda superstructure.
“It’s not just a biblical story, Chinese history is full of flooding and famine, and I thought we could tell that story together,” Davies says. “We could integrate the traditional crafts of China to give them a new lease of life, and show the rest of the world what we can do through a western artform”.
Directed by NI Opera’s artistic director, Oliver Mears, and conducted by Nicholas Chalmers, Belfast’s Noye’s Fludde was planned as a conventional production, but changed dramatically after a conversation between Davies and Ruth Mackenzie, director of the Cultural Olympiad, she says. The production will go to Beijing in October.
One of the foundation’s first productions of Handel’s version of the Greek/Roman mythical tale of Semele. Davies believes Baroque music is still inscrutable to most of China, less so in this piece directed by the avant garde Chinese director Zhang Huan with a Chinese designer and mixed Chinese and European cast, set in a Hang Dynasty pagoda and featuring Japanese sumo wrestlers. It had its premiere in Brussels in 2009, a year later it was in Beijing and Davies hopes to take it to New York next year and then perhaps London.
An early success for the Wong Foundation was to win the first Asian gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2008 with the Lost Scholar’s Garden, devised to show the profound influence on all cultural life the Chinese philosophy of gardening has.
The ten year scheduled change of the Chinese politburo in October may bring a new approach to culture, says David Elliott, but there is still censorship and resistance to what has become known as the Jasmine Revolution and the very public treatment of one of its leaders, the artist Ai Wei Wei.
“They may be building the most extraordinary architecture but the content is just not there, and the content can only come from developing your own people, not by importing non-Chinese tropes,” Davies says. “The Chinese government said earlier this year that targeting culture was one of the big features of their development. They’ve got everything else, China is poised to be the greatest economic power in the world, yet their own society which is so vast is still going through so many different stages of development.”
Artists realised that they needed to develop not just their own culture, but to understand more about the outside world too in order to be part of it. “What we’ve done,” she says, “is to bring Chinese talents out to the world and present them with opportunities to create something totally new on an international footing.”

Ruth Mackenzie got in first and started the interview by saying we didn’t have to talk about Shakespeare, did we? Hadn’t we talked enough about that? And she ended by asking if we’d discussed Shakespeare enough.

The truth is that, unavoidably for many reasons, Shakespeare is the core of Festival 2012’s drama programming, something like 70 productions and 40 venues involving amateurs – 7,200 amateur theatre makers in 260 groups are working with the RSC and its partners on Open Stages in Festival 2012 – as much as pros, and the range is bewildering. “There’s the South Sudanese doing Cymbeline –a country that’s only just become a country with all of the joy of being free to express and enjoy their own culture using the words of Shakespeare”, Mackenzie says. “An absolutely great thing”.

She is actually inordinately proud of the Shakespearian element that is being offered in the festival, of which she is director, between June 21 and September 9. When she was a student she even had a walk-on part in Keith Michel’s production of Bingo!, Edward Bond’s play about Shakespeare in old age, which was the sensation of the mid-70s, “Nothing like it if you want to get to know Shakespeare”.

The problem for her is that the Shakespeare is so good that in a conversation like this it threatens to obscure the extraordinary range of other drama that bedecks the £55m programme stacked around the London Olympics.

She’s desperate to talk about Peter Sellars; Deborah Warner; ATG, whose offering she thinks has been shamefully under-played so far; of Punchdrunk; Mnoushkine, here for the first time almost in living memory; Handspring; John McGrath and his Welsh National Theatre experiments; Silviu Pucaretti; Ayckbourns’s new play, the “very amazing” Rimini Protokoll; the wild choregoaphy of Elizabeth Streb; the Unlimited programme for deaf and disabled performers – “I’m convinced that that’s going to be one of the stories that the sharp-eyed will tell’; the Wooster Group; Robert Wilson… Well, in an hour we’re not going to get to them all. No-one has stopped to count how many presentations there are but Mackenzie’s one regret is that no-one will be able to see them all, even her. “Except that most of the Globe’s 37 plays will be on the Arts Council’s new Space site, that’s pretty fantastic”.

Ruth Mackenzie’s provenance is in music, opera, festivals, but she reluctantly has to admit that her heart is in theatre. Her job has been about who she knows, and what she knows they know. Not a few commissions have gone to play makers she has come across during her time running Nottingham Playhouse or with Martin Duncan at Chichester, not to mention at the Manchester International Festival, and she has clumped around her the likes of Duncan, Alex Poots of Manchester and Brian McMaster who ran the Edinburgh Festival for 15 years, as her advisers.

Between them they needed to find out not just what theatre makers around the world were doing but what they were thinking, and it was talking informally at first to mates like Warner and McGrath that teased out some of the most fascinating drama you will see.

So the question of how much these are genuine commissions and how much “badging” – existing programmes that she has simply stuck the Festival 2012 label on – doesn’t really arise. It’s more subtle. “It was as much about allowing artists to do what they hadn’t been able to as anything,” she says. “Yes, it’s risky, but I just think about what Beckett said”. Oh yes, Samuel Beckett is someone else she needs to talk about: Robert Wilson is directing his acclaimed new production of Krapp’s Last Tape at Enniskillen.

What Warner and Fiona Shaw, teamed with Artichoke, have come up with is Peace Camp, a series of installations celebrating our coastline through art and poetry. With Toni Morrison and the African singer Rokia Traoré, Peter Sellars is creating a prequel to Othello in which Desdemona talks to her nurse about her life.

Mackenzie particularly wants to draw attention to the Ambassador Theatre Group’s The Sacred Truce – a reference to the ancient Olympic Truce notion Mackenzie is fond of whereby participating nations forget about war and politics to compete in amity. Ursula Rani Sama has created a new play, The Ripple Effect, devised for ten to 15 year olds working in six different productions in six different venues. “It’s the first time ATG theatres have tried to do something together, the first time they’ve commissioned a writer and team to create something for young people, and they’ve promised the young people it will come into the West End,” she says. “I love this project”.

Handspring, the puppet company that made the horses for War Horse, have put Ted Hughes’s CROW poems into a theatre piece as a co-commission with Greenwich, and John McGrath has asked the Argentinian Constanza Macaras to set stories from the Welsh folk myth cycle, the Mabinogiog, in the forests of North Wales.

From last year’s Manchester Festival she’s brought Punchdrunk with their take on Dr Who in which, you can guess it, the audience has to save the Tardis from certain doom, in an Ipswich car park.

And then there’s Alan Ayckbourn whose double bill at Chichester and Scarborough includes a new piece, Surprises. “It’s so important for me to say to the world, ‘Here’s another playwright, performed almost as often around the world as Shakespeare’”, Mackenzie says. “For me, he has broken boundaries, he’s reinvented theatre, he’s serious about experiment, risk and surprise”

But if there was one… “Oh, please don’t ask me what my one tip is, drives me mad,” she says, and after the smallest pause adds. “Well, actually it would probably be the Woosters…’ And we’re back to omnipresent Shakespeare, because The New York based Wooster Group are playing a dramatised Troilus and Cressida with them as the Greeks and the RSC as the Trojans, rehearsing separately and coming together in Stratford, co-directed from both sides by Rupert Goold and Elizabeth LeCompte.

That Beckett quote, though? “Oh yes, you can’t beat old Sam and I seem to think of him more and more. ‘Don’t be afraid to fail,’ he said, ‘but if you’ve failed, fail again but fail better”.

George Osborne’s apparent mistake over how the new tax relief cap – under which anyone claiming more than £50,000 of tax relief in one year would be subject to a cap at 25% of their income, due to come into effect in a year’s time – would affect philanthropic giving is all the more inexplicable when you know that he was on the board of Arts & Business for the four years before he became Chancellor, and by all accounts was an assiduous attender of meetings. It was A&B that first saw the potential of philanthropy for arts funding, and he would have watched the figures for individual giving steadily rise until it was hit by the 2008 credit crunch. In 2011 individual giving appeared to be on he way back up again, according to A&B calculations.

The row over how charities would suffer from the new tax relief cap has been a slow burn since the Chancellor announced his plan to get the wealthy tax shirkers who abuse the charity channel, but it was A&B that had seen the danger straight away.

The day after the budget, A&B’s new director, Philip Spedding, said the new cap was “a matter of some concern” for three reasons: it could put off potential donors, it was sending out a message that the government does not value large donations, and it breaks the unwritten rule that you don’t tax money that has been given for the greater good. “This is a central philosophy to how the tax treatment should treat philanthropy and breaking it is a matter of grave concern to all,” he said.

It was another two weeks before Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, and Arts Council chairman Dame Liz Forgan put some flesh on the fears. Hytner announced that a donor who had promised £250,000 for the NT’s development was likely to withdraw, and that £40m pledged to the cheme was at risk.

Even John Whittingale, the former shadow culture secretary and now chair of the culture select committee, stepped forward to say that the cap “just seems to me to send a very contrary signal to all the messages that the government has been putting out up to now”.

Forgan and the Arts Council reckoned that £80m might be lost to the arts directly because of the new cap. They arrived at the figure by taking a mean of the income from charitable giving of some of our largest arts organisations over three financial years.

It was devastating, not least because it came with no warning – Forgan was never consulted. “The whole of the arts sector has been putting its back into increasing the amount that’s raised from private giving alongside public subsidy, and this seems to have stopped it in its tracks”, she said on the BBC’s World at One.

She is worried that the Catalyst scheme, a fund set up with DCMS and HLF to create a £55m pot of money (£30m of it coming from the Arts Council) to lever matching philanthropic donations, was “up in the air” now, just as the first results of the scheme were about to be announced. “It’s very difficult for arts organisations to raise private money, it’s hard work, and seeing a concession from the tax man really does help, it’s a critical ingredient in the package,” she said. “So I’m afraid that unless something changes this will make a big difference.”

So will anything change? Not soon, it seems, because the Prime Minister has entered the row and said there will be consultations with the charities over the summer, effectively an attempt to kick the matter into the long grass. The signs are, though, that donors will not wait before deciding to assign their money elsewhere, possibly to overseas development.

The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who has built his entire arts funding policy around the potential of philanthropy to offset the 30% cuts he has imposed on the Arts Council, has been resoundingly silent on Osbourne’s move so far. He would be expected to maintain cabinet collective responsibility binding him not come out and criticise the Treasury’s decision, but nor has he spoken up for it, and although he is said to be negotiating behind the scenes, inferences are already being drawn: that culture is simply not important enough to deflect the government’s thrust against the wealthy tax avoiders.

But culture is not that lightweight, according Coutts’ latest annual survey of £1m charitable donors, an dit shows that the money arts organisations do get is used gto keep them operating. It shows that in 2011 more than £60m was given to arts organisations in 2011 in packages of £1m or more – the cap, remember, will operate from tax relief claims of only £50,000.

More interestingly, it shows that almost 10% of this money was used for operational purposes – running theatres, concert halls, museums and galleries and the arts going on in them – rather going into endowments or development schemes, more than any other sector apart from higher education and international development.

The Coutts report says that arts and cultural causes saw a drop in donations, but predicts that his could change “as a result of the government’s £55 million matched funding scheme to build endowments in the cultural sector” – the Catalyst Fund that Liz Forgan believes is in danger of collapsing because of the new cap.