AYR Gaiety Theatre will be forced to take a ‘bums on seats’ approach after their core funding from Creative Scotland was pulled.

This year’s overall Regular Funding budget for Creative Scotland was just over £99 million which has been given out among 116 organisations throughout Scotland.

However, Jeremy Wyatt, Chief Executive of Ayr Gaiety explains that none of this funding has been awarded to any groups in Ayrshire, including the Gaiety.

He said: “Creative Scotland had £99 million for over the three years and from that, we only had £225,000 per year – the only organisation getting any money in Ayrshire. Now, going forward, there will be no money for Ayrshire.

“We are obviously very disappointed. We were getting £750,000 over a three-year period under the funding scheme.

“What has happened was that we have to reapply every three years – we put in our application last April. We had asked for more money to do more interesting productions and then we were told that we weren’t getting the funds – this will have some serious consequences.

“We will have to reduce the programmes by 25 per cent of the performances. In the past we have put on programmes for more, but we won’t be able to do that now.

“It will be driven by finances and popularity – we will have no performances in the studio due to it only having 70 seats and other dramas hold 150 seats but because we don’t make money on these, it means decisions will be made entirely by money.

“Another thing is that we do outreach work – the Rural Touring Project – where we have around 50 performances per year in community centres and village halls around Ayrshire that is funded.

"This will continue but it took a long time to develop and we will continue, but we won’t have any money to further this.

“It will be a reduced performance driven by money and ‘bums on seats’ and outside of the theatre, we won’t be able to do new projects.

“This is all a direct consequence which we are not happy about. We have had setbacks before – we are determined to find other was of core funding. We don’t know how but we have done it before.”

It is understood that four organisations have taken around 20 per cent of the total amount of grants from Creative Scotland – Edinburgh International Festival Society was given the most amount of money, receiving £6,952,000.

The Dundee Repertory Theatre received £5,945,010, the Royal Lyceum Company in Edinburgh were given £3,630,000 and the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow received £3,333,000.

But, in December last year, it was announced that the Gaiety was set to benefit from a £340,000 investment from South Ayrshire Council as part of a new three-year programme.

The money will be used to fund the Ayr Gaiety Partnership, from April 2018 and help develop the existing cultural, skills and employment programmes to even more people across South Ayrshire.