The Artistic Director of Playwriting Australia explains the whys and wherefores of the National Play Festival.

You’d have had to have been living under a rock not to know that the arts in Australia are mired in an unprecedented crisis. Three years of merciless funding cuts during the Abbott and Turnbull administrations has seen the sector all but bled dry. As the PM begins his second term in power, artists across the country are still very much in survival mode, desperately trying to stem the haemorrhaging of precious dollars as they stare down the barrel of three more gruelling years of an arts-disinterested Government. The immediate consequences of this are painfully obvious, as arts organisations of every variety nationwide have been forced to shut up shop or contort their offering into a more commercially palatable form. But beneath these conspicuous repercussions, there is a more insidious side-effect at work. In an environment of severely depleted resources, Australia’s arts sector is becoming a case of ‘every man for himself’.

For Tim Roseman, Artistic Director of Playwriting Australia, there is a single word that encapsulates what Australian artists are perilously close to losing: community. “We’ve become so...