So here we go again. Another regional theatre – this time the Northcott in Exeter – faces an uncertain future after the board voted late on Wednesday night to put the theatre into administration. Clearly trustees take the risk, and therefore must be the people to decide whether it is viable to continue (companies are not allowed to trade while insolvent), but – as with Bristol Old Vic and Derby before it – this could be another instance of a board acting in haste and leaving everyone else repenting at leisure.
The Arts Council's tight-lipped statement declaring its disappointment is, quite clearly, a polite way of expressing more extreme frustration about the way events have unfolded in Exeter. The Northcott, you may recall, was one of the theatres threatened with closure back in December 2007, when Arts Council England (ACE) announced it was cutting its grant on the day the theatre reopened after a £2m refurbishment, to which the ACE had contributed £100,000. A campaign to save the theatre proved successful, with the ACE confirming its funding for three years from December 2008, providing that changes were agreed both in programming and the management team. But now, of course, the future looks uncertain.
According to ACE, all seemed hunky-dory as late as the end of last year, when it received the theatre's quarterly accounts. But on 27 January the new team contacted the organisation to say that after working on the accounts they couldn't make sense of them. The ACE advanced monies from next year's funding to keep the company afloat and sent in an accountant. But the accountant had not finished work when the board pulled the plug at a meeting that went on almost until midnight on Wednesday. The decision will certainly present problems for ACE, which has had to agree to underwrite the performances of Theatre Alibi's The Ministry of Fear so they can go ahead at the Northcott next week.
All of the theatre's funders, who include the university and the local and county council, will be consulted in an attempt to find a solution, but that may prove tricky in the current financial climate – not least because both universities and councils are facing funding cuts – and it will be made harder still because a clause in funding agreements prevents ACE from giving money to organisations in administration. If the Northcott could have carried on trading until the full extent of the situation was known, it may have been better placed to get it out of the hole it has dug for itself.
Questions must inevitably be asked about how the theatre could have got into such a situation without anyone – including those on the board – being aware of the true financial situation. As with Bristol and Derby, this disaster also raises issues about the quality and expertise of the people acting as regional theatre trustees. With such a chill economic wind blowing through the arts, and harder times ahead, theatres would be wise to put not just their books, but their boards, in order.
