Levelling up in the North East is 'quietly catastrophic'

Hamzeh Al Hussien takes to the stage at Live Theatre in Newcastle. He is 28 and arrived in the North East from Syria via a Jordanian refugee camp, where he spent six years. For the next hour, he takes the audience through the epic sweep of his life and, by the end of the show, has most people up on their feet. The show’s title, Penguin, is an appropriation of an insult hurled at him throughout his life in reference to his disability, a rare condition called phocomelia. 

Flanked by Arabic and English captions, Hamzeh is in total control of himself and the audience and loving every minute. His energy, charisma and palpable pleasure is not just that he can tell his story unfiltered in front of an adoring audience, it’s also because the frame set up to enable his work has been full of care, love and attention. 

That frame is not provided by Live (although we are its proud hosts) but by an exceptional North East organisation called Curious Monkey. Our region’s only theatre of sanctuary, for ten years, with tiny resources and an equally tiny team, it has been running transformative creative projects with refugee and migrant communities. 

The region may not have the UK’s largest refugee population, but Curious Monkey has always been about depth rather than numbers. Each year 150 people seeking sanctuary work with them on creative projects that platform their experiences, build skills and social networks and advocate for their human rights. Its work goes beyond art. During the run of Penguin, Hamzeh and his wife were effectively made homeless. Amy Golding, the company’s artistic director, took it upon herself to personally lobby councils, MPs and arts leaders to ensure their safe housing. That campaign is still underway. 

And now, after ten years of dedication, Curious Monkey has announced they will be closing permanently. They have survived and thrived this far with investment from trusts, foundations and ACE project grants. But having been unsuccessful in the last NPO round, there is simply not enough left to sustain them for the longer term. 

Quietly catastrophic

This is quietly catastrophic for our region and for the people whose lives have been enriched, in some cases changed, by what they do. But you won’t be hearing complaints from those communities directly as one of their very few visible platforms will be gone. 

I am not in a position to know the ins and outs of any funding application; and I think ACE does a brilliant job in the nearly impossible circumstances it is set from above. But this year we learned Newcastle and Gateshead were the only parts of the North East not deemed priority areas. 

While I champion any increase in long overdue support to the rest of our region, this internal level up is counterproductive. It overlooks the interdependence of the region. In 2024, Live Theatre will be staging plays by writers from Northumberland, Durham and Sunderland with a good proportion of our audience visiting us from those counties. We want to stretch and connect more. But we can’t do it with less. 

Catalogue of closures

Several Newcastle-based organisations, whose work and impact stretch far beyond, either closed or were not successful in their NPO funding bids. Alphabetti for example: a theatre that has totally transformed the arts landscape for early and mid-career artists, launching careers on a wing and a prayer. 

And Side Gallery, our most significant photography gallery and film centre, lost its NPO status and has closed indefinitely. Tyneside Cinema, our city’s main independent cinema, has launched a crowdfunder to try to secure its future.  

The essential Gosforth Civic Theatre, founded by artists with a learning disability, was also unsuccessful with its bid. Given how time-consuming and labyrinthine the NPO process was, it’s dispiriting that a postcode could be a major deciding factor counting against you. 

Live Theatre was fortunate to be successful in the latest ACE investment round. So I’ve been thinking about tangible ways we can help. Not just talk, it needs action, money and resource. We held a fundraiser for Side Gallery, we supported and opened Curious Monkey’s latest tour and we are currently producing a revival of Gerry and Sewell for Laurels - another excellent grassroots organisation who failed to secure NPO funding. 

But it is not enough

With standstill funding - a cut in real terms – Live is not sufficiently resourced to replicate the work of other organisations, and nor should we. The care, attention and nurture a company like Curious Monkey brings is uniquely theirs. It’s much deeper than what’s possible from ad hoc activity. They live it rather than talk about it and have the buy-in of the communities they work for. In Hamzeh’s words: “Curious Monkey is a family, a close friend, everything.”

I have only been in Newcastle two years, but culturally the city has visibly diminished in that time. The first casualties are those who have done so much with so little. New closure announcements are coming thick and fast. The social media eulogies follow. If Newcastle wasn’t a priority area last time, it looks set to become one next.  

Jack McNamara is Artistic Director and Joint CEO of Live Theatre Newcastle. 
www.live.org.uk/
@LiveTheatre | @JackMcNamara81