Will Waspe's Whispers
Paymaster-General Lord Eccles, Minister with responsibility for the Arts, would seem also about to assume a more specific responsibility for crafts. When the Lords reassemble he will be announcing an annual grant of at least £50,000 for the support of crafts through a new council under the chairmanship of Sir Paul Reilly of the Council of Industrial Design — or so it is expected by those concerned with the encouragement, not to say the survival, of British craftsmanship.
Nothing wrong with that, on the face of it. The sum involved is trifling and the cause is worthy. Indications are, however, that Lord Eccles may be taking too narrow a view of the question, confining government support to the professional area, which involves only a few hundred full-time craftsmen.
He would be wise to examine the work and the record of the already-existing Crafts Council of Great Britain (president, the Duke of Edinburgh; director, Cyril Wood). Financed largely by awards from private trusts, the Crafts Council — whose existence, incidentally, will raise a confusing question of nomenclature for the proposed new council — devotes itself to the promotion of crafts throughout the country on an altogether broader and more catholic basis. Its activities involve the interest of perhaps 2,000,000 people. The survival of crafts is a sociological question as well as a commercial one.
Captive customers
London theatre programmes are going up 100 per cent from 5p to 10p (most are up already, others will follow suit), a decision by Theatreprint, the firm that monopolizes the trade, and whose contracts are with the theatres themselves, not impresarios.
A management taking a play into a London theatre has no option but to accept the monopolistic arrangements. Even the Royal Shakespeare Company — which produces beautifully elaborate programmes of its own at Stratford — can't buck the system at the Aldwych. Ditto the National Theatre at its West End branch, the New.
So what price Sir Bernard Miles taking over the business? His Mermaid Theatre programmes (the only notable hold-out from Theatreprint) have long been admired and have always made a point of providing useful, well-researched background information about the play and its subject. The Mermaid programme costs 5p and is not going up.
PS: A concession wrung from Theatreprint by the RSC is the right to supply patrons with a free cast list at the Aldwych, as an alternative to the tenpenny programme — a concession perhaps not unconnected with the fact that their landlord at the Aldwych is Mr D. A. Abrahams who also controls the company that controls Theatreprint.
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