Last night, Greg Sinclair and others were awarded £10,000 prizes at the Arts Foundation awards. That’s brilliant, but what we need is a funding system that puts bread on the table and supports dreaming

On 28 January, the Scottish-based Greg Sinclair, whose work includes the award-winning Sonata for a Man and a Boy and I Do, I Do, won the Arts Foundation award for children’s theatre. Others on the shortlist included Rosie Heafford, whose show Grass is currently at the Unicorn; Steve Camden, better known as spoken-word artist Polarbear; and Liz Clark, a dancer turned theatre-maker makes tactile theatre for the under-fives, and whose show Sponge will tour this year. I confess an interest: I was on the selection panel that chose the shortlist from a longlist of artists nominated by industry experts.

The categories in which the awards are given change each year and come from all across the arts: this year’s awards also included prizes for art in an urban space, jewellery design, literary translation, live music production and more. It’s good to see children’s theatre, so often under the radar and treated as a poor relation to adult theatre, getting an award that comes with a very significant cash prize attached: £10,000. The runners up get £1,000 each too.

The awards have been going for 23 years, and in that time theatre-makers from other areas have benefited too, including Sarah Kane, Ed Thomas and Zinnie Harris, who received awards for playwriting, Mervyn Millar, who got his for puppetry, and theatre directors Clare Lizzimore and Rufus Norris. The award is good at spotting talent, but even better at supporting artists at a crucial stage in their careers, when they have already made a mark in their field but need to have the dreaming time or research time or even the childcare or rent money needed to sustain their careers. One of the things I like about the award is that the money comes with no strings attached.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steven Camden, AKA Polarbear, who was also nominated for an Arts Foundation award

It is often mid-career artists in their late 20s and early 30s who have the least support – they’re too old or too experienced for many of the schemes that offer some support to emerging artists, and yet caught in the financial and commissioning trap that means they find themselves constantly emergent but never fully hatched. With artists increasingly reliant on project funding, it creates a cycle in which they are constantly chasing the money and never have a moment to reflect on their practice or the space to nudge it forward. Rufus Norris has spoken of how he didn’t make enough to live on until he was 36.

Nobody who is interested in theatre could be unaware of the self-exploitation that goes on in order to get the work made, and recent reports concerning directors and playwrights and their lack of income reflect this. But reading the submissions made by nominated artists was a salutary experience, reminding us just how many people are hanging on by their fingertips and how often the financial realities of projects go unseen. If you get Arts Council funding for a project, those involved must be paid, but such funding applications often don’t reflect the sacrifice involved, the unaccounted-for time that will go into a project (or even the application itself) that is never financially rewarded to any degree.

I know all this, and yet reading the applications written by the theatre-makers in support of their nominations, which include some details of their income, was a sharp reminder that so many artists whose potential is unlimited, and who have already worked on visible, prestige (and in some cases commercial) projects, are still barely scraping by.

This is not a new thing, although of course the current funding situation tightens the screws. It reflects the fact that a great deal of the increased funding that went into theatre over the last 20 years found its way into buildings and administrative posts, leaving artists to apparently exist on thin air. The Arts Foundation awards are a terrific thing, but they’re a one-off. What we really need is a funding system that recognises the need to properly invest in artists, and where those who make the work are as adequately supported as the organisations and institutions that commission and present it.