Sir Nicholas Hytner has delivered alarming warnings about the health of British arts and culture amid Brexit, council spending cuts and the downgrading of subjects at school.
Hytner, who was the director of the National Theatre for 12 years, expressed publicly views that are shared privately by many people in the arts. The difference, Hytner told the Cheltenham literature festival, was that he no longer worked in the public sector.
“I can say all this because I run a theatre that does not receive a penny from the government. I don’t even know who the arts minister is any more,” he said. “The future is precarious and it really matters.”
On Brexit, Hytner said: “You will find nobody in the arts world who doesn’t think there is an enormous black cloud on the horizon in the shape of Brexit. We are so dependent on ideas, talent, people moving freely. Freedom of movement was nothing but good for us.
“This is a tomorrow crisis for the classical music and dance world,” he said. “It will just all finish. They need players, dancers … they are dependent on them coming in from the European Union. It will take a little longer in my world.”
Hytner mocked the reaction of Jacob Rees-Mogg to a recent letter signed by leading figures in music. Rees-Mogg said Handel had not needed freedom of movement to write Messiah in London.
“This is untrue twice over,” said Hytner, as people were able to move where they liked without a passport in the 18th and 19th centuries. George Eliot lived in Germany, Brunel studied in Paris and Ruskin in Italy.
“In order to be employed as teacher of music to the king’s children there had to be a Handel naturalisation act – parliament had to pass an act just for him. Boy, why are we surrounded by so many people who tell us in a very posh fashion that things are true without even bothering to check whether they are true or not?”
Hytner said there were “fantastic young people thriving in the performing arts, really thriving”. But outside London “the situation is looking really grim”. He said “draconian” cuts to local authority budgets had been so severe that “many of them have simply stopped spending on arts altogether”.
He added: “There is a real crisis looming. Repertory theatres have gone to the wall. The reps at the moment are doing fantastic work but they don’t know how much longer they can do it for.”
There was also a crisis in education, he said, and not only the lack of compulsory arts subjects in the new English baccalaureate.
“It is that the downgrading of the arts and humanities in our schools has a really chilling effect. Private schools are spending more and more on arts facilities, state schools are spending less.
“We won’t have the audience of the future but, more particularly, we won’t have people who know that they might want to train as actors, they might want to train as musicians, they might want to train as technicians. They just don’t know. That is happening now.”
