What is the Arts Council for? When I was on its drama panel a few years ago, that seemed easily answered. As far as the English theatre was concerned, it was to ensure that the public got its fill of exciting, provocative and instructive work. It was to launch the promising, encourage the excellent and so serve the future as well as the present. But isn't it embarrassing to be labouring the obvious, as I am now?

But to the bureaucratic shower now in power at council headquarters the obvious is a total eclipse of the Sun. They gave specific warnings of swingeing cuts just before Christmas, thus ensuring it was as inconvenient as possible to object, and are, it seems, to make a decision on them this very Thursday. And the result of this sinister urgency may well be the loss of theatres that seriously matter: Richmond's little Orange Tree, whose great strength is unearthing and staging forgotten or neglected work, and, even worse, the Bush, which faces a 40 per cent cut in its £480,000 grant.

It's surely significant that both theatres are small and ipso facto offensive to new Labour correctness, with its buzz-word of “access” for the zillions and its mindless terror of “elitism”. And, yes, the Bush has just 81 seats to fill. But more than 100,000 people saw one of its shows last year and, still more importantly, it has discovered, created and nurtured talent that matters: Billy Roche, Conor McPherson, Mark O'Rowe, Richard Bean, Joe Penhall, Mark Ravenhill and many, many more. And if you went into the West End last year and saw Richard Wilson as a ferocious apparatchik in Whipping It Up or John Simm as a benign headcase in Elling - well, both productions originated in the Bush.

Only the Royal Court, which is two theatres in one, stages more lively new work than this attic in Shepherd's Bush. Almost more than the fashionable Donmar or Almeida, the Bush has become the pacemaker in the sometimes dodgy heart of the British theatre. Every time I've settled into one of its seats - and no Arts Council apparatchik has seen more plays there than I have - I buzz with an anticipation I far less often feel in bigger, posher theatres. What will it discover this time? Another Trainspotting, another Kiss of the Spiderwoman, to name just two of its world premieres?

Do I need to defend the principle of subsidy? Even Margaret Thatcher's administration accepted that, without it, British theatre would dwindle into an American nothing-very-much. And it now take a tiny fraction of the Arts Council's budget to ensure the survival of a theatre whose grotesquely underpaid staff commission, solicit, read well over 1,000 scripts a year, run writers nights and workshops, and stage, tour and transfer play after play? It will also take the fraction of a fraction to destroy it.

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