BUILDINGS BEFORE PRODUCTIONS SIR,—In a long article on the Artistic
Needs of Wales Professor R, I. Aaron, the second Chairman of the Council for Wales, demanded far more buildings to house performances. But is this the best way to get the Arts going?
The cultural situation in the Principality is far more desperate than that in the North-East, which has Lord Hailsham and a go-ahead Arts Association, and hasn't yet resorted to the sword or explosives! Another long article in the Spectator (July 5) by the correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation awarded the palm for philistine provin- cialism to Cardiff, or the Welsh capital if you prefer it. This extraordinary city has let down the rest of Wales since the days of Lord Tenby as Minister for Welsh Affairs.
This is:its record: the Prince of Wales Theatre- Club scheme flopped; now the New Theatre has had to be taken over by the corpOration for seven years; the Cory Hall might also close now the BBC are no longer using it for concerts; and the brand-new Wales Television studios (which ate up most of the co-operatively subscribed capital—I covered the opening) have stopped all non-network productions. Now the actor Clifford Evans, brandishing the names of a brace of film stars (Richard Burton, Stanley Baker) and Harry Secombe, supported by Lord Aberdare as Chairman, is appealing for £500,000 for a live Welsh National Theatre in Cardiff. Before the Games the previous Lord Aberdare did get Cardiff to run up an Empire Swimming Pool in record time.
Were it not for the hush-hush artistic plans for this National Theatre idea (inbred, cliqueish?)— and the writing on the national wall and press—all true Welshmen would whoop with joy.
But the Arts Council arc being asked for finance again out of a limited annual grant of just over £100,000. Is this spending of cash on bricks-and- mortar justified when the same Welsh Committee cannot find a few guineas in fees for creative writers and artists? Not even for an article on the newly- discovered Ibsen! May I cite its total neglect of the author of Under Milk Wood (no readings, no play- writing bursaries), to give just one instance over the past fifteen years.
Nearer home, Lord Aberdare during his term as President of the London Welsh Association a few years ago found hostile criticism of his Welsh Theatre scheme in a leading article in the LWA organ, which argued that as there were only two Welsh (radio) playwrights, this would mean letting in outsiders, or worse, the Anglo-Welsh. Clifford Evans discounted all talk over the tea-cups in the Arts Theatre Club also—by Welsh actors who had played Cardiff.
Isn't it high time the Arts Council and bodies like the BBC in Wales raised their sights in a more literary direction and put the encouragement of plays that are literature before buildings (which Cardiff can't fill) even if Sir Keith Joseph doubles as Minister of Housing? KEIDRYCH MIN'S 40 Heath Street, Hampstead, N W3 KEIDRYCH MIN'S
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