PRESS RELEASE: Announcing War of the Worlds
22nd May 2025
It was with great sadness and more than a touch of anger that I read that Oldham Coliseum are to cancel all further events following the Arts Council’s decision not to include them in the forthcoming NPO. A terrible loss to the local community and the wider arts world and no doubt the first of several closures, most of which, I fear, will be in the very areas the government claims will benefit from “levelling up”.
We did a lot of work with the Coliseum about a decade ago, leading on production design on two shows (Hound of the Baskervilles and Mist in the Mirror) and working on a project with their incredible youth theatre. It was a creative, experimental, open-minded, inclusive and supportive experience. We marvelled at what a job the Coliseum did in a place with its fair share of social and economic problems – putting bums on seats and making things work whilst simultaneously offering cutting edge work in The Studio, incredibly ambitious Youth Theatre projects all around the town and quality entertainment in the main house. They are a producing house (a dying breed) and are known far and wide for being a centre of talent development. Whenever we needed someone to work on a show someone would say “have you asked at the Coliseum?”. Our link to them remains with many co-workers and board members having originally come from the Coliseum.
I hope Oldham can find a way to carry on, but without the NPO funding I imagine it will be almost impossible. Local councils are also tightening belts to try and save vital services whilst central government ploughs forward with HS2 and…well…I’ll leave that there. There have been some curious and inexplicable decisions by funding bodies in recent months, mainly in the name of “levelling up”. Government policy is meddling in arts funding decisions under the masquerade of equality and fairness, but if a centre point of Greater Manchester’s “most deprived borough”, the 140-year old Oldham Coliseum, doesn’t deserve to be funded then, really, what does?
Simon
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