Following the announcement of the first round allocation of the Culture Recovery Fund, I’m pleased to share a statement from Jon Morgan, director of Theatres Trust, who comments:
With £500m in grants to be divided across all artforms, we always knew that the Culture Recovery Fund would not be enough to support every organisation in need, that there would be winners and losers.
As the theatre sector has been particularly impacted by the pandemic, we are pleased to see that a good number of theatres have been successful in this first round and hope to see more funded in subsequent rounds. It is also welcome that it includes treasured local theatres and important theatres on the touring network.
However, there will also be many theatres that were unsuccessful and this news will have a terrible impact on those organisations, their staff, the artists they work with and the communities they serve. We had hoped that November would bring good news about when theatres might reopen fully, but with the Prime Minister’s announcement of a three-tier lockdown system that now looks unlikely.
There is still a real danger of more redundancies and ultimately losing theatres that add so much to their local areas, to people’s sense of place and to town centre economies.
Theatres Trust will do all it can to support theatres to navigate through the challenges ahead, through our advice service, seminars and grants programme. We are continuing to raise money to help theatres through the #SaveOurTheatres campaign with Crowdfunder.
