NIAMH LAWLOR,
Madam, - Púca Puppets is a non-venue-based theatre production company working also in community arts and education. We have suffered a 100 per cent cut in Arts Council funding this year.
Last year's revenue grant of €12,700, while coming nowhere near our needs, at least assisted in our survival, so that we continued to tour shows throughout Ireland and represented Ireland at the Asia Europe Puppet festival in Bangkok (with the additional assistance of an Arts Council travel grant).
We are quite unusual in producing puppet theatre for both children and adults, and in working within community and educational contexts also. We are confident that the council cannot have decided the work we do is unnecessary. Consequently we fear that a negative value judgment has been made. This puzzles us, as we have found nothing but affirmation and encouragement from our reviews (in The Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Belfast News Letter, Sunday Tribune and Belfast Telegraph), from venue and audience responses, and from the groups we have worked with in communities or educational establishments.
To worsen our difficulties, our application for project funding for our exciting new show on the life of Agnes Bernelle was also turned down. This show has elicited much interest already, and promises much creatively, so we are determined to continue with it and are attempting to find alternative funding. Last week we had to make our administrator redundant and at the end of this month we will lose our studio base.
The director of the arts council says (Opinion & Analysis, February 6th) that she doesn't want to hear from Punch and Judy. But the way things are going for puppetry in Ireland, they and their better respected colleagues may never speak here again. She prefers to hear from Vladimir and Estragon, and no wonder: dressed in rags, they were content to sit on a bench and wait indefinitely for nothing.
Deirdre Falvey (Opinion & Analysis, January 15th) highlighted the lack of protest against the Arts Council cuts. I have been trying to dissuade one of my puppets from hanging herself from the railings of Merrion Square. Perhaps artists are comparatively quiescent because we are already exhausted from years of trying to survive. - Yours, etc.,
NIAMH LAWLOR, Artistic Director, Púca Puppets, Convent Avenue, Dublin 3.