"We have too many leisure facilities and not enough flats," says a comment on the website of the Edinburgh Evening News welcoming a story that the city's Gateway Theatre is to be sold for redevelopment. There is little evidence that citizens have been forced to sleep rough because of all the arts centres, but even if they were, the author is missing the point. For the last seven years, the Gateway has not been a "leisure facility", but a central part of the training of drama students at Queen Margaret University College. Its loss will not be noticed by the average theatregoer, but it is likely to damage the quality of drama education.
What's surprising is how unruffled the college authorities have been about the demise of their theatre. Queen Margaret bought the premises from Scottish Television in 1997 with the help of £1.5m lottery money. Total costs including upgrading came to nearly £4m. Yet last year when a building inspection revealed the 200-seat theatre to be inadequately protected against fire, the college simply shut it down. Presumably someone was responsible for allowing £4m to be spent on a fire-trap, but there were no calls for heads to roll.
It was, of course, a delightful coincidence that all this happened just as the college was preparing to move to an out-of-town campus at Craighall near Musselburgh. By selling the city-centre Gateway once fabulously known as Pringle's Atmospheric Theatre and where a young Tom Conti cut his teeth Queen Margaret will be able to teach all its students on a single site while picking up a tidy sum from the property developers.
That would be fine, except the new campus will stretch only to a studio, rehearsal space and workshop. "I will feel very foolish being professor of drama on a campus that doesn't have a theatre," says playwright and academic John Clifford.
You wonder how foolish the acting students will feel when they find their best chance of getting on a stage is a deal with the local Brunton Theatre and a vague promise of getting full-scale productions at "other theatre venues in Edinburgh, Glasgow and elsewhere in Scotland."
The greater fear is that the move is all part of an attack on the labour-intensive principles of conservatoire teaching. Why give expensive practical experience to a dozen trainee actors, when you could be lecturing 200 students at a single sitting for a fraction of the cost?
