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Exorbitant expenses breaking Cultural Centre’s back

Dec 02, 2013 News

– High rental costs continue to chase away producers…

The hike in rental costs for use of the National Cultural Centre (NCC) is literally chasing Producers away. This is according to Godfrey Naughton, the Director of the National Cultural Centre.
The Director did not miss the opportunity to highlight this issue at the National Drama Festival Awards which was held yesterday at the NCC, during which he also challenged Culture Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony who was present at the event, to take serious action as it relates to developing the centre.
Naughton told Kaieteur News, “We only had four major productions for the year, and that cannot sustain the Cultural Centre. The light bill is extremely high and we are unable to pay it with just that. “We are up to our neck with expenses and we continue to plead with the Minister (Dr. Frank Anthony) to help us with subsidies as other companies are assisted. We are currently unable to bring in the money needed to maintain the site and that is mainly because the high cost to rent the centre is chasing people away, especially Producers of plays because they would have to pay 20 percent tax on even the tickets.”
He continued, “A production usually grosses at about $2M and out of that, the Producer would have to pay $350, 000 to $400, 000 in taxes.  The hike of the prices came under the Minister (Dr. Anthony). At first the cost to rent the Centre was $25,000 then he moved it to $40,000 and then to $80,000 per night. So if a play is on for three nights then the Producer would have to pay for rental, which would amount to $240,000 and tax on the tickets as well. Now, if the producer does not rake in the amount of people to cover his expenses then he would be operating at a loss. We are not making it easy on our Producers and this is having serious domino effects. When we chase the Producers with the high cost of rental, we reduce the amount of revenue the NCC brings in thereby diminishing the amount of stage plays we have that celebrate culture. We are not encouraging our Producers, we are only chasing them away and this is sad.”
During his presentation to the audience of the NCC yesterday, Naughton said that while he lauds the students and other participants for their hard work and encouraged them to pursue their studies in drama, more needs to be done to improve the platform on which they exhibit their talents.
In a subsequent interview with this publication, he revealed that for over two years the processors, which produces lighting at the events and during most of their plays were down and the Festival was relying on only one processor, which unfortunately stopped working during one of the plays.
Naughton explained that the Minister was told from the time the first two broke down some three years ago but the Ministry of Culture did not respond in any way to this situation.
However, during his presentation yesterday, Dr. Anthony revealed that he will be putting in place a new state-of-the-art lighting system at the National Cultural Centre.
The Director then suggested that the old ones be fixed and donated to other theatres.
Meanwhile, the winners of the major categories for the Drama Festival received monetary prizes at the event.  For the Best Production in the Open Full Length Play Category, copping the $1M dollar prize was “Watch De Ride 2- Justice,” whilst “Anybody see Brenda” won the second prize of $400,000 and “When Chocolate melts” won $200,000 as it got third place.
As for the Open Short play category, earning the first place prize of $400,000 was the play, “Before her parting” written by Mosa Telford. Coming in second was “Mommy” written by Sonia Yarde followed by “Fare picker.”

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