Royal Shakespeare Company actor Charlotte Cornwell has an angry message for David Cameron on the subject of arts funding. She talked to Viv Hardwick

THERE is a long gap between visits, but Charlotte Cornwell is looking forward to returning to Newcastle with the Royal Shakespeare Company because she recalls the stir created back in in the late-1970s.

“The Gulbenkian Theatre (on the old site now occupied by Northern Stage) had been closed and David Rudkin’s play Sons Of Light had been done there and been blamed for the closure because it had been so dark,” she says.

“We went back there with our production of the same play and re-opened the Gulbenkian.

I’ve also been to Tyneside a couple of times on tour,” adds the actress, who is still fondly remembered for TV’s Rock Follies, in the 1970s, but has gone on to have a wonderful acting and teaching career in the US and UK.

North-East audiences will see her perform as Gertrude in Hamlet and the Countess of Rossillion in the rarely-seen All’s Well That Ends Well.

“All’s Well isn’t a problem play, so audiences mustn’t come thinking that. My daughter said when she came to see it, ‘It’s only a problem for men because it’s about women’. So that might sell a few seats to the Geordie women,” she says with a laugh.

All’s Well is best described as a wartime fairytale, although Cornwell admits that in today’s climate the heroine, Helena, might be looked on as a stalker and that her love interest Bertram is an out-of-control party boy.

“I do think the production should end with a question mark because you feel is it? and the Countess, at the end, is thinking, ‘Is this going to work?’ I think he wants Bertram to give it a go with Helena because she sees Helena as his salvation. I think there are 17 ifs in the last two pages of the play,” she adds.

On returning to the RSC from the US – where she’s appeared in TV series such as The West Wing and The Mentalist – Cornwell admits it was an emotional experience seeing the rebuilt Stratford Theatre .

“There were ghosts here for me of actors who’s feet I had sat at. People who I had learned from. I wasn’t ready for it at all. Institutions change slowly, but it’s very different now and that’s great. But I do think that young actors feel I’m an old dinosaur,” she jokes.

She reveals that her brother, the novelist John Le Carre, rang her when the news was broken on the RSC’s website that Cornwell was rejoining the company after 32 years. “He said it’s almost like saying the oldest actress in the world has reappeared and can still walk and talk,” she says.

Cornwell is all in favour of theatre critic blog writers and the appeal of the internet in getting younger audiences to experience Shakespeare.

But she is a huge critic of the way that David Cameron’s coalition government is handling the arts. “You’ve got an industry that is making the government money. For every pound invested you just think of the VAT that they are getting back. It’s stupid.

“Theatre practitioners will have to become more innovative, but that’s not to say that what concerns me is new writing. In the arts you can’t not have failures. This isn’t the production line at a car factory. We have to be free to fail. What is it that (Samuel) Beckett said, ‘Fail again, fail better’. I think there is another ten per cent funding cut coming.

“David Cameron doesn’t go to the theatre.

He’s got Mad Max 2 on his video shelf, why would he go to the theatre? It’s horrible. I would never have gone to theatre schools without a full local authority grant. I’ve been to school where I live in Hackney and talked to students and teachers.

“Now students are talking about not going to uni because other members of the family have ended up with £40,000 of student debt… and haven’t got a job,” she says.

Cornwell points that the interest on this debt is still building for people who are going into jobs linked to art, social work or humanities.

“The likelihood is that the chance of repaying this money is very low and we used to bring up our children telling them not to get into debt.

Now we’ve got a government saying ‘we must cut because we can’t be in debt, but student you can borrow £40,000 or £50,000’.”

Her worry is that so many students will never be able to pay back their debt that the country will then face another financial crisis.

“The Government hasn’t got it’s sums right,” she says.

Cornwell dreams that one day there will be a National Theatre Of Performing Arts based on talent rather than ability to pay.

“I think we are still the best and British actors are just wonderful,” adds the actress, who is determined to set up the Fearless Choices Young Actors Project which will be London-based, but open to 18 to 25-year-olds from low income families, and those brought up in care.

  • Hamlet, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Friday, October 18 until Saturday, October 26.

As You Like It, Tuesday, October 29 to Saturday, November 2.

All’s Well That Ends Well, Tuesday, November 5 to Saturday, November 9.

Box Office: 08448-112121 theatreroyal.co.uk