Letter: Funding the theatre

Sir: Thank you, Polly Toynbee (article, 10 November), for focusing attention on how the Lottery has become a poison chalice for the arts. But the issue is not "financing the arts" generally. The crisis affects the live performing arts.

Art that can be mechanically reproduced (books, films, videos, paintings, CDs) and object art in museums have no problem of financing or valuation. Backed by industries or, in the case of auction houses, a major element of our commercial life, they need no special government support.

The live performing arts are dead or dying because they cannot make a living wage from ticket sales for a physical event that is distorted or destroyed when subject to mechanical amplification. A playhouse has to be intimate - like the Greenwich Theatre. An opera house can be larger, but not much.

No theatre company in Britain now employs a company of actors on a year- round basis, whereas well over a hundred do so in Germany. Money for the arts at the local level is distributed by centrally funded remote quangos, which are naturally nervous about their impossible responsibility. But a theatre company needs a close relationship with its economic and social hinterland.

Even when local government was permitted to spend a penny rate on culture in the 1950s and 1960s, there was no obligation on it to do so. But the live performing arts should be recognised as being, just like universities, an essential element in our culture.

Constitutional reform being prepared by Mr Blair should include establishing a local government framework with a built-in obligation to rebuild the culture of the live performing arts and reconnect them to audiences (and electorates) that now, in most cases, simply do not know what they are missing.

TOM SUTCLIFFE

London SW16