ABSTRACT
In 1980 cuts to the Arts Council budget led to the demise of eighteen theatre companies, including repertory theatres in Crewe and Canterbury. Theatre buildings often became dilapidated, though sometimes urban regeneration schemes uplifted them, and while the Arts Council gave some money to support 'new writing', the repertory companies could often only afford limited runs of new plays in their smaller spaces. A different facet of the government's relationship with the theatre was revealed in the stories of the Theatre Museum and the discovery of the remnants of the Rose Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. The Theatre Museum, which had been housed in Leighton House, Kensington between 1963 and 1977, had been seeking new accommodation and identified the old Flower Market Garden early in the 1980s. The overthrow of Communism in 1989 prompted a few fine plays, not least Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest and David Edgar’s The Shape of Table and David Greig’s Stalinland in Scotland.
