Just how fanatically right-wing is Tony Blair’s New Labor government? So fanatically right-wing, it seems, that, not content with slashing benefits for single mothers and the handicapped, they’re now doing the same to—gasp!—the arts. Eight months after the revolution of May 1, just about every theater known to the casual observer —from the Gate in Notting Hill (one of London’s most “influential” fringe houses) to the King’s Head in Islington (the capital’s first-ever pub theater)—is trembling on the brink of closure, its funding wiped out by the heartless, philistine Tories … er, I mean Socialists. The Tories are also heartless and philistine, of course, but, after wearily enduring eighteen years of one savage indictment of Thatcherism after another from these theaters, they felt it would somehow be bad form to retaliate by closing them down, especially given the paltriness of the sums involved ...

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