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Goodbye 2001!Dateline: 30th December, 2001 It is tempting, when you look back at a year of theatre, to try to characterise it in a few words, to look for something that will sum up the whole year in a single phrase: The Year of the Musical, perhaps, or the Year of the Revival. It's tempting, but it is, at best, misleading and, more often than not, just a journalistic hook on which to hang a story. And, of course, most of these "hooks" tend to be London-related, which is understandable because most commentators are, inevitably, London-based. However, I think I could make a case for 2001 being The Year in Which Regional Theatre Revived. I'm not going to, though, because it would be just as misleading as any other "hook". It is true, however, that, probably as a result of the extra money "inspired" by the Boyden Report, that there was a greater sense of confidence in English regional theatre during the year. The newly-refurbished Liverpool Everyman, one of the oldest rep theatres in Britain, reopened; Sheffield's Crucible brought Joseph Fiennes to its stage in March and announced that Kenneth Branagh would make his return to the UK stage in 2002 there and not in London; Patrick Stewart also returned to the UK stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; the Chichester Festival Theatre announced it was to operate as a producing house all the year round. The West End, on the other hand, showed signs of problems: it began the year with 27 theatres offering tickets for £10 to young people between the ages of 15 and 25 (whilst the Young Vic offered free tickets to the residents of Lambeth and Southwark) and the year ended with Mayor Ken Livingstone's Greatest Show on Earth promotion, with over £2m being offered in discounted theatre tickets, hotel rooms and restaurant meals . During the year a number of theatrical luminaries, including the producers Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber, made loud complaints about the air of dirtiness and seediness which, they claimed, had begun to characterise theatreland, comparing it to pre-Giuliani Times Square. And the fall-off in tourism, which came from, first, the foot and mouth epidemic and then from the events of 11th September, undoubtedly caused enough worry for Livingstone to create his initiative. Predictably - and with good reason, too - both Scotland and Wales cried foul over the extra cash to the English regions, claiming it would damage them. The turmoil in Welsh theatre and, in particular, the almost universal distrust of the Arts Council of Wales, which had characterised 2000, began to settle with the departure of Jo Weston and the intervention of the Culture committee of the Assembly, and, by the end of the year, the anger and bitterness which had been a part of the Welsh arts scene for so long were gradually evaporating, although it is likely that the scars will last for a long time to come.
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