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Dateline: 21st March, 2004 Row over Clwyd Mobile Theatre The Welsh Assembly Culture Committee has announced that Clwyd Theatr Cymru's mobile theatre is to receive a one-off grant of £100,000 from the Arts Outside Cardiff scheme. It is two years since the mobile theatre last operated, having been forced to stop when its commercial sponsorship ran out. The mobile theatre toured to non-theatre spaces, such as sports centres, in much the same way as the RSC's small-scale touring does. The announcement has set off a row in Welsh theatre circles on a number of fronts. The worry has been expressed that the Nights Out/Noson Allan scheme, which part finances tours areas where there is no theatre, may suffer. In addition there are concerns that there is not enough Welsh product for actual theatres and for CTC to specifically avoid them may well cause further losses. It has also been argued that there was no evidence that the previous tours undertaken by the CTC mobile theatre had reached a new audience and so the money would be better spent elsewhere. However the main concern seems to be that the Assembly and the Welsh Arts Council seem to be operating totally independently so that there is no strategic planning, at a time when Peter Boyden has been asked to review the whole future of English-language theatre in Wales. As one contributor to the Theatre in Wales Forum says, "the relative merits (or otherwise) of the proposals re the CTC Mobile and CTC being resident in Cardiff are immaterial - what I'm questioning is the lack of transparency and accountability in relation to the process of where, how, when and why decisions about arts funding are being made." Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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