{"id":40,"date":"2026-08-18T16:50:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T16:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shoeleathermagazine.com\/2026\/?p=40"},"modified":"2026-09-09T21:34:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T21:34:51","slug":"the-british-theater-industry-is-becoming-more-american-but-what-gets-left-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shoeleathermagazine.com\/2026\/the-british-theater-industry-is-becoming-more-american-but-what-gets-left-behind\/","title":{"rendered":"The British Theater Industry is Becoming More American. But What Gets Left Behind?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As the United Kingdom shifts away from public arts funding, London theaters are losing critical support.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u201cTwo Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)\u201d at the Criterion Theatre in London. Photo courtesy of @luxpyramid on Instagram.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kit Buchan and Jim Barne learned that their musical was Broadway-bound in the most British way possible: standing in a nearly empty pub in London early one morning.<\/p>\n

The two, who had spent 10 years writing a small musical with a very long title, \u201cTwo Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York),\u201d were in London rehearsing for the workshop of their next show when their producer, Kevin McCollum, told them the news. Even though they had been dreaming about this for years, they still weren\u2019t sure how to react.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that definitely happening?\u201d Buchan wondered. \u201cIs this the bit where we celebrate? Or should I be concerned?\u201d<\/p>\n

But McCollum didn\u2019t exactly ease their nerves. \u201cThen obviously we found out that the theater was cursed,\u201d Barne said, laughing as he recalled the moment.<\/p>\n

Broadway\u2019s Longacre Theatre has a reputation for housing flops; in just the last two years, \u201cDead Outlaw\u201d lasted two and a half months before closing prematurely and \u201cSwept Away\u201d and \u201cLempicka\u201d both survived for only two months. Still, a curse seemed practically manageable compared to the challenges they had faced on the road to Broadway.<\/p>\n

Like many British musicals that came before it, \u201cTwo Strangers\u201d was developed with the help of public funding from Arts Council England (ACE), a national agency funded by the United Kingdom government that funnels public dollars to arts organizations and artists in England. Before moving to the West End, London\u2019s commercial theater industry, \u201cTwo Strangers\u201d premiered at regional, subsidized theaters in England. Many theaters rely on public funding in order to take creative risks on new projects without worrying about their commercial viability. But a recent redistribution of this funding, in an attempt to emulate the American funding model, has made it much more difficult for theaters to uphold that mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe benefited from what you might call the twilight of public funding for those regional productions,\u201d Buchan said. \u201cBut the kind of funding that made it possible for them to commission our show has now more or less disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n

England and the United States of America take very different approaches when it comes to funding the arts. This year ACE will invest\u00a0\u00a3458.5 million<\/a>\u00a0(about $606.4 million) in arts organizations across England. This funding works out to about \u00a37.8 ($10.59) per capita. However, for many years the funding was mainly concentrated in London, which is not only the country\u2019s capital city, but also the capital of the British creative industries.<\/p>\n

Comparatively, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the public arts funding organization in the U.S., distributes\u00a0$207 million<\/a>\u00a0annually across a much bigger country, or about 60 cents per capita. The NEA is also spread more widely and thinly so it reaches every congressional district with limited impact on large theater cities like New York. This leaves nonprofit theaters in the city to rely on private donors for funding.<\/p>\n

For the last few years, England has been moving toward the U.S. funding structure by decentralizing ACE funds and creating tax credits for philanthropic donations to the arts. In 2022, conservative lawmakers in the U.K.\u00a0pressured<\/a>\u00a0ACE to reallocate funds away from London in hopes of promoting a more equitable spread of funding across the country. But these reallocations caused many London-based theaters to struggle or even close due to their lost funding.<\/p>\n

For Buchan, the reallocation was \u201cvery, very heartbreaking,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause a great deal of British culture of the 20th century springs from public funding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both ACE and the NEA were founded as \u201carm\u2019s length\u201d organizations, able to distribute their funds based on art alone and free from government intervention, at least in principle. But Westminster\u2019s recent intrusion shows that it\u2019s not just through funding distribution that England is following in America\u2019s footsteps. Various administrations in the U.S. have done the same with the NEA; in fact, just this last year, President Donald Trump\u00a0proposed<\/a>\u00a0to eliminate the body entirely.<\/p>\n

As public arts funding declines and production costs rise due to inflation, theaters are having to shift to presenting more commercial productions, like revivals, adaptations, and celebrity-led shows that are more surefire money-makers, rather than developing new works, like \u201cTwo Strangers.\u201d Broadway, in particular, relies on shows that develop across the pond because production is much cheaper there. But with less public funding support for London theaters, the transatlantic pipeline has grown wobbly, making successes like \u201cTwo Strangers\u201d harder and harder to achieve.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis show probably wouldn\u2019t have happened if it had happened 10 years later or even five years later,\u201d Buchan said. \u201cEven though now it\u2019s privately funded, a great big commercial piece, I don\u2019t think it would have happened without central funding for the arts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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About a week before their opening night in November 2025, Buchan and Barne sat in the balcony of the Longacre Theatre. The two are self-proclaimed \u201ceccentric British men\u201d with matching beards, round glasses, and a combined height of 12 foot 6 inches. Even looking down at the stage where crew members adjust a New York skyline made of suitcases, they still can\u2019t quite understand how they got here.<\/p>\n

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Director Tim Jackson, Producer Tim Johanson, Barne, and Buchan on opening night of \u201cTwo Strangers\u201d on Broadway. Photo courtesy of @timjohansonproductions on Instagram.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Buchan and Barne, two lifelong friends and bandmates, ventured into musical theater in 2015 when they attended a writing program where participants watch a show and have 24 hours to write a short musical in response. Their assignment became a 15-minute comedy about two English actors who dislike each other but have to perform an American love song. For the next three years, they continued writing the show as a Christmas cabaret, which they submitted to\u00a0BEAM<\/a>, a new musical showcase in England. BEAM is funded by ACE and produces excerpts of about 40 new musicals from English writing teams bi-annually.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, independent producer Tim Johanson was looking for new material at BEAM and was intrigued by Buchan and Barne\u2019s presentation. \u201cI believe that the hardest thing to do in musical theater is to make people laugh through song,\u201d Johanson said. \u201cAnd it really made me laugh.\u201d He talked with the writers at a bar afterward and signed on. From that moment on, things moved quite quickly.<\/p>\n

With Johanson on their team, Buchan and Barne expanded their cabaret to a musical comedy titled \u201cThe Season.\u201d The show was about a wedding on Christmas day and first premiered in 2019 at Royal & Derngate in Northampton and The New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, both small theaters in England, which, at the time, were receiving ACE funding. But even with successful regional runs, Johanson still hesitated to move it to London\u2019s commercial theater scene because, as a Christmas show, he worried the West End might not take them seriously year-round.<\/p>\n

Buchan and Barne were hesitant to remove the Christmas aspects at first. But when the COVID-19 pandemic halted their progress, they started revising and \u201cTwo Strangers\u201d emerged: a two-person musical comedy about Dougal, an exuberant Brit traveling to New York for the wedding of the father he\u2019s never met, and Robin, the hardheaded Brooklynite sister of the bride-to-be.<\/p>\n

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Buchan and Barne outside the Criterion Theatre in London. Photo courtesy of @luxpyramid on Instagram.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2023 the show moved to Off West End\u2019s\u00a0Kiln Theatre<\/a>, which is supported by ACE, and soon coasted to the West End\u2019s\u00a0Criterion Theatre<\/a>\u00a0in 2024 with positive word of mouth and an avid fanbase. The show\u2019s evolution was, in large part, due to the publicly funded spaces that gave Buchan and Barne the chance to workshop the piece in front of audiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s those regional theaters who had the courage to take a punt on two completely unknown writers and a completely unknown story,\u201d Buchan said. \u201cBut the budgets for those regional theatres are very small and, increasingly, they\u2019re closing or ceasing to produce work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reallocation of ACE funds has had a substantial impact on the ability of theater companies inside and outside of London to function, which has, in turn, stunted the development pipelines that \u201cTwo Strangers\u201d benefitted from. The funding cuts came in 2022, after Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary for the U.K.\u2019s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) at the time and a member of the Conservative (Tory) Party, ordered a major redistribution of ACE funds away from London in order to \u201clevel up<\/a>\u201d the regional areas. This resulted in a cut of\u00a0\u00a350 million<\/a>\u00a0worth of ACE grants in London. During the Tory rule from 2010 to 2024, ACE funds were also cut by about\u00a030%<\/a>\u00a0due to austerity, a fiscal program meant to reduce national spending.<\/p>\n

Though Dorries sped up the process, ACE had already been slowly shifting the funds away from London as a part of \u201cLet\u2019s Create<\/a>,\u201d a 10-year strategy aimed at helping people experience the arts wherever they live. \u201cOver recent years we have been rebalancing our investment to make sure that everyone, whichever corner of England they live in, has better access to great creative and cultural experiences,\u201d ACE \u200b\u200bChair Sir Nicholas Serota\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in London news website The Standard.<\/p>\n

Historically, ACE funds have been disproportionately concentrated in London and the south of England, with the North receiving lower funding per capita. In theory, the reallocation was meant to help the kinds of theaters that \u201cTwo Strangers\u201d played at during its development, as it allowed for funding increases for regional theaters. But, in effect, this harmed many London-based cultural institutions.<\/p>\n

Unlike in the U.S., where the economic output is distributed among multiple states, London is responsible for about\u00a022.3%<\/a>\u00a0of England\u2019s gross domestic product (GDP), despite making up only 1.2% of the country\u2019s landmass. Arts attractions in the capital city are an important economic driver, as\u00a051%<\/a>\u00a0of the \u00a3124.62 billion in economic output from England\u2019s creative industries in 2022 was generated in London. But when theaters in London experienced funding cuts, the entire industry was thrown into disarray.<\/p>\n

The Gate Theatre was founded in 1979 as an artistic space to bring international stories to the London stages and started receiving funds from ACE in the early 2000s. Organizations that receive ACE funds are called National Portfolio Organizations (NPOs). The application to become a NPO takes place every three years and even if an organization achieves NPO status in one cycle, they still need to re-apply in the next. In 2022, there were a few reasons why The Gate didn\u2019t have the strongest application.<\/p>\n

For several years, The Gate had been planning to move from their original venue, a 60-seat blackbox theater up a rickety staircase from a pub, but could never find the time amid its yearly show schedule. Then the industry shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and they saw their chance. But when it came to applying for ACE funding, they had just moved from their home of 40 years and had not yet proved that they could exist anywhere else. They had also moved from a borough that had only a few NPOs at the time to a borough that had 17, which was a detriment since, due to the reallocation, funds were distributed based on zip code.<\/p>\n

Their team was prepared for a partial cut, but the 100% cut came as a shock. \u201cIt was just unthinkable that you would go from \u00a3345,000 a year to nothing,\u201d said Nicola Clements, CEO and Executive Director of The Gate.<\/p>\n

To make up for the lost 45% of their income, they shrunk their team by half, let go of their office space, and decreased the number of shows they produced per year from five to one. They no longer have a permanent venue, instead using other theater companies\u2019 spaces, and their new office is just one small room in a shared facility. In the move, they also lost their phone and printer contracts as well as their computers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince the cut we have been six months away from closing. Consistently. For three years,\u201d Clements said. \u201cWe\u2019ve basically spent the last three years trying to answer the question: can we survive without the Arts Council? And after three years I can emphatically say no.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though the funding reallocations were planned around decreasing funding in London, theaters outside of London have also been affected. New International Encounter (NIE) is a theater company with various offices around Europe, one of which is in Cambridge, England. They have been a NPO for about 10 years but the amount they receive hasn\u2019t increased, apart from the occasional one percent, so it doesn\u2019t go as far as it once did due to inflation. They\u2019re also a touring company that doesn\u2019t have their own venue and must travel to other theaters to present their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s getting more difficult for us to book a tour because the venues don\u2019t have the production budgets that they had to be able to book us,\u201d said Lisa Elmer, Executive Director of NIE\u2019s U.K. office. \u201cOr if we\u2019re new to them, it\u2019s whether they\u2019ve got the money to be able to take a risk on us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the venues that will take a chance on them often cannot offer as much as they used to. In the past, theaters would reach out and ask NIE to develop a show and then pay for any associated costs. Now, some theaters will require that NIE pay to develop the show before approaching them, so they can decide whether they want to book it or not. Other theaters have offered to pay for the cost to put on the show but can only offer to split the revenue from the box office with NIE, so their income depends on how well the show sells.<\/p>\n

\u201cVenues have got less money to commit to the unknown,\u201d Elmer said. \u201cIt may be that if they\u2019re a small arts center, they are better off hiring the space out for a private party than they are having a performance of Shakespeare in there on a Friday night.\u201d<\/p>\n

New works cost more to put on because they involve paying all of the creatives for the time they spent writing and developing the piece, compared to a pre-existing work where those expenses are already taken care of. But the inability for theaters to pay for new works has affected the makeup of productions in the British theater industry. Many theaters are shifting to producing more revivals of classics, adaptations of well-known intellectual property, and celebrity-led productions, rather than developing new projects.<\/p>\n

Clare Bayley, a playwright who teaches a class on modern British drama at New York University in London, noticed that this last year she took students to various pieces that were riffing on classic works, like Henrik Ibsen\u2019s 19th-century plays \u201cHedda Gabler\u201d and \u201cThe Lady from the Sea.\u201d She supposed that theaters had commissioned playwrights to write contemporary versions of them as a way to persuade audiences to see new work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s still very limiting for writers because they\u2019re just doing versions of existing plays,\u201d Bayley said. \u201cI think theaters are terrified of not filling their auditorium and so they\u2019re programming quite conservatively.\u201d<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just adaptations. Many of the theaters that used to present new works now primarily show revivals. The Bridge Theatre, for one, was founded specifically for commissioning and producing new shows. Now, they\u2019re presenting a production of Stephen Sondheim\u2019s \u201cInto the Woods\u201d and last year they housed 1950s classic \u201cGuys and Dolls\u201d and William Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cRichard II,\u201d which starred \u201cBridgerton\u201d actor Jonathan Bailey.<\/p>\n

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The cast of \u201cInto the Woods\u201d at the Bridge Theatre in London. Photo by Lila Penenberg.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Because theaters are less able to present new shows, writers will often have to work for free and self-produce their own workshop just to attract a producer or venue. But for many independent artists, that\u2019s unsustainable. If BEAM didn\u2019t exist, for instance, and Buchan and Barne hadn\u2019t met their producer, Johanson, they would have had very few ways to get their emerging show in front of audiences and receive the developmental help that they did.<\/p>\n

Every year, Matt Wolf, an American London-based theater critic, makes a list of his\u00a0top 10 shows of the year<\/a>\u00a0for The Arts Desk. This year, he was about to publish his list when he looked down and realized that, for the first time ever, he didn\u2019t have a single new British play.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was kind of upset by that because new writing has to be in the life of a theater,\u201d Wolf said. \u201cI love the classics. I genuinely do. But if you\u2019re not going to have new plays, how are you going to have the classics of tomorrow?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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While the British industry is dependent on ACE funding, it\u2019s a different story across the pond. Without as much public funding, the American theater industry relies largely on philanthropy, a strategy dating back to the very beginning of the American arts industry. In the late 19th century, the wealthy population of the U.S. wanted to create high-art institutions like they had in Europe. But without royalty to finance them, they pooled their money to subsidize the institutions, starting with museums, orchestras, and opera companies in the Northeast.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat they realized is that for certain kinds of art, the market will never really be able to support it,\u201d said Michael Rushton, professor of economics and public policy of the arts at Indiana University. \u201cAnd this was as true in 1880 as it is now.\u201d<\/p>\n

This became the model for the American nonprofit institution, long before the government got involved. Since philanthropy was created as a substitute for royal donations, it never took root in the British system the way it did in the U.S. One time, Nancy Lukitsh, an American private arts donor, was fundraising and ran into two of her friends from business school who live in London. She was asking for about $500 but both of them said no because, at the time, they didn\u2019t receive any tax credit from the U.K. for philanthropy.<\/p>\n

The Tory government in the U.K. did\u00a0create<\/a>\u00a0tax benefits for donations to the arts as a part of their effort to emulate the American philanthropic model. Now, British residents can offset their taxes by donating to the arts. But the theaters that lost their ACE funds in 2022 still had trouble turning to private funding, either because they didn\u2019t have as much fundraising staff on their teams or because their audiences were less accustomed to donating to arts organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe lean on the arts funding a lot here,\u201d said Kate McKeown, the development producer for \u201cTwo Strangers.\u201d \u201cI do think there\u2019s something really amazing about how America views theater investing as an actual business. We don\u2019t have different laws about how you invest or how you get your investors, anything like that. Whereas in America, it\u2019s so much more set up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Public arts funding from the government is a relatively recent invention \u2014 and, ironically, the U.S. was the first country to implement it. In the wake of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which involved pumping government money into various industries, including the arts, to generate jobs and stimulate the economy. They hired writers to create a collection of travel guides to each of the states. They put on plays and built infrastructure. The WPA was short-lived because it was less concerned with the quality of the art and more with getting people back to work, but it set the tone for the positive societal effects that government arts funding could have.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe arts provide jobs, they provide economic vitality,\u201d said Tooshar Swain, the director of public policy at advocacy group Americans for the Arts. \u201cPresident Roosevelt understood how important the arts were to the mentality of a country that was going through some really harsh economic times.\u201d This is still true today, as the arts are a\u00a0$1.2 trillion industry<\/a>\u00a0in the U.S. and make up 4.2% of the nation\u2019s GDP. For every dollar that is spent on the arts, more goes back into the economy.<\/p>\n

A similar situation happened on the other side of the Atlantic following World War II. England was struggling, as the war had desecrated both its land and wealth, and English economist John Maynard Keynes had the idea to create ACE in order to bring the arts to the whole country.<\/p>\n

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