The Cold War period saw an unprecedented expansion of public funding of the arts, especially the performing arts. Theater in the Eastern Bloc was state supported, and often generously so. At the beginning of the Cold War, there was little direct government support of theater in the west. But this was about to change. If we're looking for global changes, affecting theater in the post-war period, then the recognition, on the part of governments, that theater should be subsidized in some way, is one of them. Although the argument for public funding of the arts, and theater in particular, well predates the Cold War, a strong case can be made that the almost universal agreement amongst western governments that theater, at least certain forms of it, should receive seen state support, was accelerated by Cold War rivalry. Remember, America had kitchens. The Soviet Union had the Bolshoi, and the Moscow Art Theater, as well as the state circus, all of which were directly financed by the state, and demonstrated a superb degree of excellence. The Soviet Union had, at one count, 625 subsidized theaters, a third of them for operetta. Throughout the 1950s, pressure grew on western governments to fund theater. The pressure was driven by a double imperative, the recognition of theater as an art form, as opposed to just entertainment, and as redefinition, as a kind of public service, available to all at affordable prices. The latter idea was encapsulated by the French director Jean Vilar in a famous quote. The Théâtre National Populaire is, in the first instance, a public service. Just like gas, water, and electricity. Vilar was artistic director of the National Popular Theater, a new state funded theater in Paris. He had a vision of theater as a public service, or as the economists say, a public good. It should enjoy the same status as the provision of gas, water, and electricity. Although this sounds somewhat strange to our ears, it was a vision with great prophetic foresight. By the late 1960s most Western European countries had publicly subsidized theatrical institutions. Germany had already completed its transition under the Nazis. France expanded after 1960 its network of public theaters, or Maisons de la Culture. Italy established a, a number of municipal theaters, so-called Teatri Stabili, the first being Giorgio Strehler Piccolo Teatro in Milan. Even Great Britain, the home of commercial theater, formally established, albeit with great reluctance, two flagship state subsidized theaters, The Royal Shakespeare Company, and the National Theater. In the Netherlands we find also, the establishment of a state subsidized repertory system. Now begins the era of the artistic, rather than managing director, whose interests were not financial, but rather artistic gain. Looking back, we tend to forget just how radical this shift from the managerial commercial model of theater, to a form of publicly subsidized entertainment really was. In cultural economics, one speaks of the welfare model, to explain this approach to financing cultural activity. It must be seen as part and parcel of the spread of social democratic ideas throughout Western democracies, which saw a much greater state involvement in all aspects of life.
