Theatre and cinema

London has several dozen theatres, most of them not far from Trafalgar Square. A successful play can run for many months or even years. Outside London some quite big towns have no public theatre at all, and hardly any towns have more than three. But there are private theatres, some attached to colleges or schools. Innumerable amateur groups produce plays, often with some professional help, in these theatres they hire or borrow, or in halls temporarily equipped with makeshift stage furniture. Shakespeare is honoured by a great modern theatre in the small town of Stradford-upon-Avon, where he was born. But serious theatre needs subsidy to survive.

Several first-rate orchestras are based in London. The largest provincial centres also maintain permanent orchestras, which give regular concerts. All these orchestras occasionally visit other places to give concerts, and some financial help is given to them by the Arts Council or by local authorities. The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, in central Lodon, is leased by the government to the Covent Garden Opera House trust, which receives a government grant. Seasons of opera are performed there and also of ballet by the Roal Ballet, which has in recent years been one of the most successful of British ventures in the arts.

Touring opera and ballet companies visit the principal theatres in major towns. Opera of the highest quality is performed throughout every summer in Glyndebourne, 90 kilometres south of London but visited by people who come from London and its suburbs.

Local enterprise has been responsible for the development in recent years of “festivals” of the arts in several places, of which the best known is the annual International Festival of Music and Drama in Edinburgh, held in late August. As well as the performances by musicians, etc. from all over the world, the “fringes” of the festival produce an interesting variety of plays by less established companies. Among other such festivals are those held at Bath, Aldeburgh (connected with the composer Benjamin Britten), Pitlochry in the Scottish Highlands and Llangollen in north-central Wales. The Three Choirs Festival, which circulates among the three western cathedral cities of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford, has a continuous history going back to 1724.

British governments have been less generous than many others with subsidies to serious or experimantal drama, music and ballet. There a Minister for the Arts (not a memeber of the Cabinet) and an Arts council which receives a grant from the government. Part of this money is used to sustain the performing arts, but it is easy to compain that some performances are helped which do not deserve such help. The whole question of subsidy to the arts creates s dilemma for politicians dedicated to the market, and reluctant to use tax revenues to support the expensive enjoyments of minorities, however worthy. Yet they do not wish to be accused of philistinism. Meanwhile, some big companies are helping by sponsoring performances.

From about 1930 until quite recent times the cinema enjoyed an immense popularity, and the large cinemas built in the 1930s were the most inpressive of the buildings to be seen in the streets of many towns. More recently the rapid spread of television has brought a great change. In 1946 the average British person went to the cinema forty times a year, but by the 1980s the figure had fallen to 1, 2 times, and 1,500 cinemas were closed during this period. Most films shown are from Hollywood, but some British films have won great international success. For foreign-language films there is a healthy prejudice against “dubbed” English soundtracks, and such films are usually shown with English subtitles.

Cencorship of the theatre “for the preservation of good manners, decorum and the public peace” was at least abolished in 1968, but some films are classified as unsuitable for children. More than half of all households have video equippent, sometimes used for viewing films on the home TV set. Video-film hiring is a big business.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14