| A Look-back and Guide |
Summing It Up |
| Things in Short Supply , The Arts of Wales , December 11, 2025 |
The legal conditions over the two years of the pandemic varied across the governments of the United Kingdom. Wales had three periods of lock-down. Performers suffered greatly, writers less so. The attention on this site found respite, in small part, in looking to the past. 101 productions from the previous 14 years were remembered. A broader cultural assessment was also made under the collective heading “Summing It Up.” * * * 29th January 2021: Things in Short Supply at the Culture of Wales There is a reluctance to engage with public issues. It is not new. Carl Tighe looked back on a decade of theatre of Wales: “The issues that should have concerned playwrights, the central issues of Welsh society over the last 20 years, have hardly figured on the Welsh stage. The language issue, holiday homes, the behaviour of the police, devolution, have hardly been given an airing.” “Robert Minhinnick wrote an article for Planet 200 “A Cancerous Culture”. This was his view on the state culture: “Not a word about politics or the environment. No mention of drugs or poverty of aspiration, those deadly Welsh scourges.” “This is now not entirely true. “Bruised”, “Llwyth” and “Sugar Baby” all had drugs within them. But look further to some specifics of our world. Young men from Wales this century have vanished from their homes and appeared in the wars of the Middle East. This appeared in a review from a production a dozen years ago: “A government minister warns that a hidden army of young men is primed for violence under the inspiration of a foreign religious power. Paradise is promised as the reward for martyrdom. Dubious statements extracted under torture are paraded as grounds for state action.” “The event was Terry Hands' directing Schiller; it was theatre written in 1805. Contemporary theatre about suicide bombers can be seen in England but does not exist in Wales. Indeed it could not exist. The nexus of authority would not tolerate it. To embrace the world dramatically requires a culture of emancipation. Artists are supposed to be nicey-nicey people. If they are not prepared to be nice the grant will not be forthcoming. But artists challenge. In his own country Orhan Pamuk has run into serious trouble. In “Other Colours” he wrote about his encounter with politics: “When a novelist begins to play with the rules that govern society, when he digs beneath the surface to discover its hidden geometry, when he explores that secret world lie a curious child, driven by emotions he cannot quite understand, it is inevitable that it will cause his family, his friends, his peers, and his fellow citizens some unease. But this is a happy unease.” The Arts Council of Wales should add this question to its form. “How do you intend to cause a happy unease?” “The overwhelming urge to avoid unease is behind the infatuation with the past. Charles Dickens, a scourge of his present day, knew it: “If the past makes such a bid for our attention, the present may escape us.” * * * * December 4th 2020: Art Is Better Off Being Artistic This article looked at submissions made to the Senedd from experts. The contrast is made with pronouncements lacking evidence. “The arts have a significant role to play in supporting...businesses to drive prosperity” is one. Prosperity is driven by, among other things, capital investment, innovation, infrastructure. The writers of the sentence simply have not thought. They have not looked at the world as it is. Prosperity drives a richness of culture, not the reverse.” “The Culture Committee reported on the deficiencies of top-down non-artistic objectives. “The imposition of an outcomes approach tended to discourage rather than encourage creative engagement”. * * * * November 27th 2020: Why Do Audiences Not Get to Laugh More? “Comedy is the genre most likely to appeal and achieve national status. This article looked at the inhibitions against. One factor- “the heritage of non-conformity runs deep. Puritanism has always been there strongly as a strand in cultural life. Cultural conservatism has been joined to political radicalism from Lenin onwards. George Orwell inveighed against it. Doris Lessing protested against “the deeply puritan pleasure-hating strand in socialism.” “In the theatre of England Nicholas Hytner openly talks of the pleasure in mounting comedies. A counterpart in Wales would not- perhaps could not- say the same. It is not just a matter of words. In 2007 Hytner directed “Rafta, Rafta”, Ayub Khan-Din's reworking of Bill Naughton’s 1963 play “All in Good Time”. Its theme was a marriage unconsummated, its setting a crowded Bolton home, its company of actors all of south Asian heritage. At its heart was a portrayal of a patriarch driven to dominate his son. It was comedy but serious stuff.” * * * * October 23rd 2020: Anxiety at the Top “All writing presupposes a reader. The authors of public documents do not write for a public. They write for one other. It is implicit because they know that there is no public readership. Banality may flourish in the public sphere in a way that cannot occur in more robust, more inquisitive, more courageous states. The tradition of criticism of our culture varies from our European neighbours in being empirical not declarative. Declaration without example has no validity.” * * * * October 9th 2020: Theatre and Ethics “The ethics of theatre consists in shedding the self. “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting yourself.” “Art…is important because it provides the moral matrix, the moral sensibility, from which we make our judgements of the world.” “I don’t write plays with heroes who express my point of view...I tend to write for two people rather than for One Voice.” “It is a mistake to assume that plays are the end-products of ideas (which would be limiting.) The ideas are the end-products of plays.” “In our own age James Graham is the lead exponent of the play of politics and gets it. Graham. “I’m more interested in trying to understand people I don’t necessarily agree with, try to understand their motivations and why they feel what they do.” “The counter-trend, material human beings secondary to abstract issues, was discussed by Duerenmatt is a playwright who has lasted the test of time.”The stage is not a battlefield for theories, philosophies and manifestos, but rather an instrument whose possibilities I seek to know by playing with it” from his “Theaterschriften und Reden” of 1966. * * * * September 11th 2020: Hebbel, Brecht, Kaite O'Reilly on writing. Simon Stephens: “Dramatic narrative needs present tense action...common tendency in apprentice playwrights to write about ancient family secrets which are revealed four fifths through the play, often in a drunken confessional speech. This is theatrically inert. Another problem is that people see life as 'something that happens to them. It is the playwright's task to change the question from 'Why is this happening to me?' to 'Why am I doing this?' * * * * September 4th 2020: Wales' theatre has a deficit of villains “A good story starts with a deep-hued villain...A version of “Tartuffe” was due at Birmingham Rep 20th March, a reprise of a popular production. Its setting was to be a Pakistani-Muslim community in Birmingham... It is no coincidence that the best drama of Wales is powered by the best villain. “Simon Nehan, shaven-headed with a tribal tattoo running from elbow to shoulder blade to ear, is simply terrifying.” * * * * August 15th 2020: Act Versus Process: A Perspective on Government & Culture “Artists are not PR spokespeople for the ruling party. The Letter of Remit, Government to Arts Council, is missing this: “Acceptance of the artists' role to question issues of state and to offer critiques of public policy- to challenge both rulers and the ruled. Arguably, this is particularly important in Wales where visceral issues of language and identity are contested issues. Throughout history, literature, plays and exhibitions have offered an alternative to issues on which there was a prevailing political orthodoxy.” * * * * August 1st 2020: Governance, Nation & State: A Right Tangle “The arts are not there to favour individuals in power over other citizens. “If the Arts Council operates as it should, it has no need of ministerial control and no means of conforming to it...The Minister's function is to provide the money, to seek to procure the greatest amount possible and, in discussion with the chairman, to learn of the intended policy and if necessary to express his views. But his views can have no greater cogency than any member of the Council and probably less since they are not aired at the relevant moment of discussion.” * * * * June 20th 2020: A Discomfort with Debate “The article observes that the Senedd projects a discomfort with debate. “Health, employment, education are what matter and need expertise. But it is to be expected that the non-governmental leaders of culture embrace it and warm to its practitioners. We should expect the Arts Council of Wales not just to embrace the dialectic but to be thrilled by it.” * * * * July 26th 2020: Why Creativity is Over-valued “The article argues against the notion of art-making being about the self and its expression. “The writer Peter Flannery was once suffering a block. Sleep solved it. He woke with the solution-"Why don't you get out of the play?" “One human capacity that is enormously important in certain types of creative achievement is that of abstraction, the ability to divorce thinking from feeling and to be more concerned with the relation between concepts than with the objects from which the concepts originated.” “The route to form is slow, unsparing and repetitive via dedication to craft.” * * * * 31st March 2020: Why Young People Are Not the Beneficiaries of Public Art “The ecology is full but at the same time it is insufficient. In Aberystwyth, the cultural fulcrum of north and south I have seen thrilling work for children from Iolo, Arad Goch, Cwmni'r Frân Wen. But there is a deficit- there is little I can take young adults to. There are two principal causes...The word group-think was inspired by George Orwell and popularised by William H. Whyte Junior in 1952. Whyte described it as “a rationalized conformity – an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well.” * * * * 29th March 2020: Matthew Syed on Diversity “Matthew Syed is the best mainstream author on diversity. His book “Rebel Ideas”, sub-titled “The Truth is that Great Minds Don't Think Alike”, ought to be part of the working vocabulary of all who have responsibility for making decisions about culture. There is small evidence of diversity in public statements on the arts. I doubt if ecologists, system theorists, aestheticians or sociologists are admitted in any serious way into a Cardiff forum...“One of the obstacles to gaining the benefits of diversity”, writes Syed, “is that we are unconsciously attracted to people who think just like ourselves. It is comforting to be surrounded by people who mirror our perspective. It makes us feel smarter. It validates our world view. Brain scans reveal it stimulates the pleasure centres.” * * * * 28th March 2020: “Tensions and Fissures” “Organisations are information loops; some information is welcomed and cherished. The revealing part is the information that is rejected. Organisations, like humans, are fierce in defence of their self-concept. Find the information that threatens; it says a lot...Another surefire route to organisational interpretation is to look at the tensions. All organisms embody tension from cellular level upwards. An organisation is only two syllables away from an organism...we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled.” * * * * 23rd March 2020: History and Comfort Blanket Theatre “The invisibility of Wales is a long-standing theme of Ed Thomas, declared with gusto at many a a public forum. The same word occurs in the Showcasing Report. “When asking about the shortcomings in Wales, the most commonly cited failing was its invisibility in the field.” Nick Stradling wrote for Nation Cymru on 11th February an article on film that had the headline “While Wales remains invisible on the silver screen no one will know who we are.” Gareth Leaman wrote for Wales Arts Review 26th January about “a perfect summation of “official Welsh culture” at present: no real representation of ourselves on screen; a superficial idealisation of the natural landscape; exploitation of crumbling socio-political structures” * * * * March 8th 2020: The Fragility of Criticism in Wales “Culture without Debate: A Welsh Malaise?” The truth is, there is a need for strongly refined responses to the arts and society, and these can be attuned by the critic, the expert. Remember that the role of the critic is not to tell you what to think, but is to challenge your ideas – give you the opportunity to reassess, to change your mind, to strengthen your position.” * * * * February 29th 2020: Confidence and Using the Right Words “March 6th 1940 The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts made a formal request to the Treasury for financial assistance. The language in the Memorandum was clear: its first clause committed the organisation to the “preservation in wartime of the highest standards in the arts of music, drama and painting”. To what purpose? That was equally clear. “The widespread provision of opportunities for hearing good music and the enjoyment of the arts generally.” * * * * February 23rd 2020: The Beneficiary Doctrine “Organisations exist within an ecology. When internal complexity fails to mirror external complexity they judder; and worse...Organisations are artifices, teleological, formed to benefit certain people, specific and nameable...No organisation should serve more than one set of homogeneous set of intended beneficiaries- that is, the person or persons for whose benefit the organisation was originally formed or for whom it now exists should be unequivocally defined and limited to one set, class or category of people.” * * * * February 16th 2020: Hebbel, Nation & State “The contrast with Jennie Lee as Minister for the Arts. “The situation is not like that here. The Government is overt. “The Arts Council’s aims should reflect Welsh Government policies.” But the arts are the domain of civil society. State is not nation.” * * * * February 9th 2020: Localism and the Politicisation of Culture “This is art as political outreach, as the Arts Council subscribes to Welsh Government political strategies...In Wales, art now must contribute to education, to empowerment, to social mobility, or it is not worthy of subsidy from the public purse... This is noble, but also ignores the genius of the unintentional.” * * * * 12th January 2020: Migration “All the peripheral territories of Europe are losing people...Wales cannot escape its demographic destiny. Cardiff has added 70,000 people in the last 20 years. Since 2014 five out of six new jobs have been created in Cardiff.” * * * * 9th January 2020: The Sociology of Hill Countries. “The downside of this disaggregation is a less fervid urban culture. There is no great novel of the city of Wales. The great urban novels are made in societies with lowlands with their higher stratification. There is no equivalent to Bellow's Chicago or Doeblin's Berlin or Jeff Torrington's Glasgow... The arts that conserve the status quo fare better than those of social and political critique. Drama has a tough time.” * * * * 5th January 2020 : Geography of Wales, Water and Culture. “The histories of Tyneside and Taff-side have more factors in common that unite than separate them. But it is “Billy Elliot” that plays worldwide. Its Broadway gross is $183 million alone. There is no “Billy Evans” storming the world theatre.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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