Madam, - On behalf of all of us involved in the Forum on Acting Training, I would like to welcome the publicity given to our report in John Downes's report of May 27th, "TCD forum calls for independent academy of theatre arts". However, I need to make one correction and one clarification.
The Forum on Acting Training, while it was initiated by the Provost of Trinity, was a wholly independent group of stakeholders in the theatre profession, not a TCD forum. It does not represent the views of the college.
Patrick Sutton of the Gaiety School of Acting is quoted in the report as saying it was an "absolute mystery" to him why his school had not been asked to participate. It was decided, as a matter of policy, that people currently involved in running acting training courses in Ireland should not be invited to be members of the forum because of a possible perceived conflict of interests. However, we did urge the Gaiety school to make a written submission to the forum and we repeatedly invited Mr Sutton to make a presentation to us; unfortunately there was no date that suited him to do so.
In the forum report we acknowledge the importance of the work of the Gaiety school, and we were very disappointed to learn from its website that it has had to postpone the three-year degree course validated by DCU planned for this coming autumn, due to a failure to agree the necessary level of funding with the Higher Education Authority. This regrettable postponement underlines one of the key findings of our report: that we need to establish new funding mechanisms for training actors in this country to sustain and develop our great theatrical tradition. - Yours, etc,
NICHOLAS GRENE, Chair, Forum on Acting Training, Trinity College, Dublin 2.