North Edinburgh Art Centre set for dark autumn

Published Thursday 23 August 2007 at 16:25 by Thom Dibdin

Scotland’s centre of excellence for children and young people’s theatre will go dark this autumn, after incoming director Claire Hicks discovered a projected shortfall in the North Edinburgh Arts Centre’s budget of up to £300,000.

Although staff at the site have not been issued with redundancy notices, as had been reported in the Edinburgh Evening News, Hicks admitted that the situation is serious.

“We are consulting with staff, in accordance with legal requirements and best practice,” she told The Stage.”The options might include something that could potentially lead to posts being made redundant, so obviously we are consulting with staff.

“The autumn season is not going ahead. We are not in a position to go ahead with any performances or with our workshop programme. Those are the things that we have notified artists about because we would not be in a position to make an agreement about them.”

Although performances have been cancelled, it appears that existing work such as Starcatchers, an innovative project creating theatre for children as young as six months old, will be safe in some form or other.

While not being able to confirm details, Hicks added that “there are individual funding agreements for all of the money we receive and we need to make sure that we able to honour all of those agreements.”

Tony Reekie, director of Imaginate, which runs the Edinburgh International Children’s Theatre Festival, said: “With [the centre] closing for the autumn season, in the short term, we have lost at a stroke nearly all of the theatre provision for children and young people in the city.”