Nick Ahad: Magical moments when the arts door opened

The arguments have been made, often and vociferously. Now is the time to batten down the hatches and prepare for the looming storm.

The quote I have most enjoyed hearing repeated during the to-ing and fro-ing as people try to make us all realise how important the arts are, is apparently from Churchill. Asked, during the Second World War, to cut funding to the arts in order to help with the war effort, the great leader’s response was: “Then what are we fighting for?”

It is perhaps best now to reflect on what we may lose in the wake of this morning’s announcement.

For me, it was a combination of Prince Caspian and Shakespeare. I must have been eight years old and was fortunate to have a teacher in Mrs Goodridge who believed education did not stop when the school bell rang at 3pm.

She also believed that the arts were a vital ingredient in creating the well-rounded individuals she hoped to send out of her classroom and into the world.

This belief ran to organising school trips to the theatre and to the galleries of Cliffe Castle Museum, up the road from St Anne’s School, in Keighley.

So there I was, aged eight, sitting in the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford, watching the story of Prince Caspian unfold, and something that, more than two decades on, I can still only describe as magic, happened.

A boat floated onto the stage, bearing Prince Caspian heroically at its helm. The vision of the hero of the story “floating” on to the stage of the Alhambra is as powerfully remembered now as though I saw it yesterday.

I went on to study the writings of CS Lewis and, in particular, his theological essays, and these days, although I find much about his treatises distasteful, my revised opinion of the author has never dulled the magic of that moment when I was a boy.

There was another defining moment when I was 11. Again on a school trip, I visited Leeds where I saw a promenade production of Romeo and Juliet in a disused building somewhere near the city centre. That was such a magical evening that I often question whether it was real.

It was the first time I had heard Shakespeare, spoken live, by actors. The impact of that evening is a little more difficult to give words to as it would take someone with the skill of the Bard himself to describe what happened to me the first time I heard Shakespeare spoken. Suffice it to say, it was a vastly important night in my life.

As an ordinary, working-class child whose parents were loving but not particularly literate, I realise now that the world of the arts might have never opened up to me without those early experiences.

I can draw a direct, indelible line between the evening I watched Prince Caspian, through my first experience of Shakespeare, to the job I do today.

Those two formative and vital experiences were like a door being opened to a whole new world which hitherto I had no idea existed.

When the Arts Council announces its cuts, there will be some small organisations that go to the wall. The bigger organisations, such as the RSC, The National Theatre and English National Opera look set to be protected.

But to place a fence of security around these organisations is to deny the enormous ecology of the arts in Britain in which companies and venues of all shapes and sizes exist. We may queue up to buy tickets to watch Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot – but both came from the rep system, with small companies who need public funding.

My great fear is that sometime between 8.30am and 10am today, when the Arts Council announces its final verdict, we will hear the clanging sound of millions of doors slamming shut in the faces of other youngsters whose personal story with the arts is going to come to a close before it has begun.

They deserve, without question, access to the arts. They deserve the chance to experience Shakespeare and allow it to have the same effect on them as it had on me. They deserve the opportunity to visit museums and see if a sculpture or a painting opens up something inside them they had no idea existed.

This is what the arts can do and it is what we may see sacrificed in the name of spending cuts.

Nick Ahad is the Yorkshire Post’s arts correspondent.