Stop these savage cuts to London's creative gems

Those under threat, a list that includes two of the finest fringe theatres in London, the Bush and the Orange Tree, have been given just a few weeks - over the Christmas period - to muster their appeals against the decision.

If these cuts are approved, they will be a dangerous blow to the health of London's theatre. But they also point to wider flaws in the Arts Council, the principal body managing official financial support for the arts.

The battle is not lost yet - but time is short. The Arts Council's Regional Board for London, whose only theatrically well-known member is Graham Sheffield, the Barbican's artistic director, is due to consider appeals against the Council's proposals on 15 January. The cumbersome, secret bureaucracy the Council has developed and refined more than 50 ridiculous years of administrative self-contemplation ensures that a national board will then review the London board's decisions.

A key figure in deciding whether appeals should be heeded is Barbara Matthews, the Council's director of theatre strategy. In the past, Miss Matthews ran the Royal Court for about 18 months as its chief executive and she has worked in executive posts in other leading theatres. It smacks of oligarchic complacency.

I am not alone in dissenting from these plans. Five hundred theatre people, a flock of theatrical stars including Sir Ian McKellen, Kevin Spacey, Sheila Hancock and Samuel West, together with hundreds of supporting players, this week passed a vote of no confidence in the Arts Council when they gathered at the Young Vic to protest about the the way in which the Council had planned to deliver its cuts - and corresponding increases.

The Arts Council replies to this chorus of criticism by saying, quite rightly, that it must encourage the excitement of the new as well as the pleasure of the familiar. That explains plans to withdraw some grants, increase others and even fund those who have never received anything at all.

In so doing, the Council and the Culture Secretary, James Purnell, cite that old, familiar buzzword "excellence", as if they had just hit upon some visionary blueprint by which to set the cultural standards of the future and the criterion by which every organisation is judged. What suave, specious nonsense this is. Excellence means whatever you want it to.

The Council, undeterred, points to its dashing new theatrical initiatives. For example Shunt, the extraordinary company that performs under the arches at Waterloo, is to receive a dramatic increase, suggesting the kind of theatre the Council wants to support. The Arcola too, in impoverished Hackney, whose repertoire of foreign classics is far more daring than anything the National Theatre usually manages, gets more cash. Similarly the born-again Roundhouse and the restored Hackney Empire will receive financial uplifts.

It is easy to see what the Council is trying to do and even to applaud the plans. Change and decay are a part of theatrical life. You cannot go on funding every company or theatre building forever if there is to be money and space for the shock of the provocative, exciting and new. Yet the Arts Council's plans, by which it means to bring about these changes, command little confidence.

But anyone making these kind of changes needs to enjoy the support, understanding and respect of the industry it seeks to change. First, the Council needs to put its plans for a change of theatre policy out to public discussion. Yet the Council operates in autocratic secrecy. It picks its own Regional Boards - the London one could not be less impressive as far as theatre is concerned. Should Barbara Matthews and Peter Hewitt take the final decisions in ivory-tower isolation, with the Council's national body rubber-stamping its decisions? I think not.

Of course the Council cannot allow the theatre world to control subsidy decisions - but it needs to seek a wide variety of theatrical opinions. Yet it got rid of its Drama Advisory Panel several years ago. It says it will create a new, different body in the future. But who will do the choosing?

Second, in drawing up plans for cuts, the Council needs to put forward a coherent strategy. It has not. What a weird and wrong-headed move it is to propose withdrawing money from the Bush and the Orange Tree. The Bush has long been one of London's prime studios for discovering and nurturing new writers. The Orange Tree has specialised in the theatrical art of rediscovery of 20th-century British dramatists and earlier who are ignored and neglected, from Granville Barker to John Whiting. It has reminded us how exciting and radical Edwardian drama could be.

The Arts Council may argue there is enough theatre in the Richmond area without the Orange Tree. That, though, is to succumb to bureaucratic rigidity. The Orange Tree has a distinctive identity. Kill it and you destroy something invaluable. Taken to extremes, you might argue that Westminster is oversubscribed with theatres and start cutting there.

Besides, as if to show up the Arts Council's lack of strategy, one can point to the proposed cut of grant to the Northcott theatre in Exeter - just after the completion of a multi-millionpound upgrade, funded in part by the Council. If it goes, there is no theatre for miles around. Why not seek to improve rather than destroy it? And why single out the Roundhouse and the Hackney Empire for investment? Both of them are primarily receiving houses, booking in ready-made productions.

The Arts Council is an overstuffed bureaucracy. It is high time that government tried something different. Let the Council be mothballed, its staff dismissed and its functions be taken over by the Department for Culture, which could draw up a diverse cultural blueprint for each art form.

These blueprints would then be used to decide who got what support, with diverse teams of practitioners called in to advise and encourage. That way, the theatre world would at least establish a more democratic relationship with government and the subsidised arts.