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Decision Day for the Theatre MuseumBy Ian Herbert, former publisher of Theatre Record and president of the International Association of Theatre CriticsDateline: 8th May, 2006 This article was first published in The Stage on 4th May, 2006, and is reproduced here by their kind permission. May 18 is a big day for the Theatre Museum. It’s when the trustees of the parent body, the Victorian and Albert, meet to decide its future. They have sent out a consultation document, outlining the only two possibilities they see for the Covent Garden site - close it down and put everything back into some new V&A galleries or go into an as yet undefined, uncosted partnership with the Royal Opera House to run it. Any replies and reactions must be in by then including, presumably, some detailed work from the Opera House. You may feel that this shotgun wedding of ‘consultation’ on only two alternatives, neither of them offering to retain the status quo, is not much consultation. You will find some attempts to explain this in the document, which you can download from the Save London's Theatres website if you are interested—as surely you should be. It says that the Theatre Museum is expensive to run, costing about £2.5 million a year, of which £1 million is overheads like the lease, security and power supply. That doesn’t seem a lot for a site attracting 300,000 visitors annually. The ‘curatorial cost’ is claimed to be higher than that of the V&A itself, which, if true may relate to the fact that the Theatre Museum is several times more interactive in its contact with the public, as a museum of the performing arts should be. Much is made of the shortness of the Theatre Museum’s lease — 20 or so years compared with the 30-odd of the Transport Museum, which shares the building. Because of this difference, which presumably arose when the V&A weren’t looking, the Transport Museum got lottery funding for its refit, while the Theatre Museum was turned down. It’s a little late to ask why two national museums occupying the same building didn’t make a joint bid but the question still hangs embarrassingly in the air. As does the question of whether the V&A is entitled to make money by selling the remainder of the Theatre Museum’s lease—it’s probably worth a million or so, which won’t actually go far to help the V&A’s own growing budget deficit. Otherwise, the excuses for closing Covent Garden seem pretty thin, since much of the document is devoted to stressing the importance of the activities carried on there and promising that they will continue, if not expand, under the new, allegedly money-saving proposals. It ends with some fairly naive questions which are apparently the V&A’s idea of consultation but if you’re really keen to save the museum you might like to ask a few questions of your own, such as, ‘What makes you think that the long list of improvements you promise if the Covent Garden site is closed will cost any less than keeping it open?’ or ‘Who do you expect to come to South Kensington, a seriously theatre-free zone, to learn about West End theatre?’ and above all, ‘Why has the Theatre Museum been starved of funds, especially development capital ever since it opened as a separate institution?’. There are other issues at stake here, of course, one of them being that much of the Theatre Museum’s collection was given on the express condition that it be housed as a separate entity, not a few galleries in Albertopolis. But let’s start by simply kicking up the most almighty fuss, to ensure that proper consultation takes place. Perhaps the V&A could itself begin by consulting interested parties such as Equity, SOLT, Visit London, Ken Livingstone or even Westminster council.
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