| "We Have the Talent": 2022's Best Critical Articles By Two Writers Named Gary |
Theatre in Wales: Comment |
| Gary Owen & Gary Raymond Speak Plainly , Public Culture of Wales , January 19, 2023 |
If this site has one watchword it is a phase written by A O Scott: “Criticism is not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another name-the proper name- for the defence of art itself.” 2022 was the first full year for the return of public culture. In the second half of the year the citizens of Wales were not well served by their managers of culture. The board rooms and committee chambers may command the money and hold sway over the public relations. But they have no command over the narrative. Culture's record is the domain of its creators. The two most important cultural articles of the year were written in the same season. Both writers are named Gary. Gary Owen is a writer of two decades' standing. He is a rare dramatist of Wales to have ascended to the Royal Court- below 29th September. He has a premiere next month at the National Theatre. Gary Raymond is the lead novelist-editor-broadcaster-critic of Wales. His current work includes a new literary history of Wales. Their writing matters where the sayings of Ministers, Chairs, Directors are of little account. * * * * In September Gary Owen wrote an article of 2500 words for Nation Cymru. The article is both acute and expansive and deserves to be read and addressed in full. The argument reduced to its essences: “In Cardiff the WMC brings in shows which sell out its 1,500-seater main auditorium for 6 week runs. At 6 shows per week with an average ticket price of £20, that’s over a million pounds in ticket revenue. Typically, 90% of that revenue flows out of Wales to the show’s producing company, and only around 10% goes to the WMC. And the money does flow out of our industry, because these shows are never created by Welsh theatre companies. “If we were able to attract even a fraction of the audience that exists in Cardiff and keep the income they generate within Welsh theatre, it could transform our sector beyond recognition...All the shows that come in to the WMC’s main stage come in from outside Wales and they take their ticket money home with them. “And instead of developing work that could play at the WMC and the other bigger stages in Wales, our theatre companies make do with the status quo. They create the small amount work that they can afford to with their arts council subsidy and do no more. “Because they can do no more. Because the mindset of our subsidised theatre companies is that putting on a show is only ever a cost, and never an opportunity to make money and grow the sector. "No successful theatre culture works this way. If you look – for example – to the National in London, to the RSC in Stratford, it is a routine part of their strategy that some shows will cost money, some shows will break even, and some shows will go on to generate income for the company, often for many years into the future. “Is it, then, that as a small nation, we don’t have the talent? But of course, we do. We have writers, directors and actors doing incredible and much-loved work in the theatre, all over the world. “There’s no incentive for an ambitious artistic director to do the far riskier work of building an audience here and growing the sector. In fact there’s considerable incentive for artistic directors to pour vast resources into a show in hopes that it be a critical hit, and ignore the fact that the huge costs of that show mean it will lose money even if it sells every single ticket to every single performance. And so very often, even our theatre successes are actually failures, from the perspective of building the sector. “Major Welsh theatres: there is no-one on the board who has ever themselves run a major theatre. And this lack of knowledge of the detail of running a theatre and of the wider theatre world means that boards tend to accept the curious state of Welsh theatre is more or less the best we can expect from the sector. When it really is not. “Theatre academics are not interested in the mainstream theatre that thousands of Welsh people pay good money to see...They often are also performance artists and run the two careers side by side. But that means they never have to earn a living from their art. They’re insulated from the need to find and serve an audience that can sustain their art form...They dismiss putting on popular plays as “just getting bums on seats” – as if serving the people whose taxes pay for whole subsidised sector was somehow dishonourable.”* Owen compared the treatments of Alan Ayckbourn and Frank Vickery: “Ayckbourn was awarded with honorary doctorates by a number of universities, and in 1992 was made Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford. Frank’s work was dismissed and often simply ignored by critics and academics in Wales. “A country that likes to imagine it holds literature and the arts in high esteem, snubbed one of the most vital writers we’ve ever produced. We should hang our heads in shame. “We have the talent to make theatre, in abundance. Now our artistic directors need to take up the challenge of making work that will serve bigger audiences, and allow us to grow the sector. And if they can’t, or won’t, then we need our politicians to finally see the curious, cruel, wasteful state of Welsh theatre, and insist that it changes for the better.” The full article is at: https://nation.cymru/opinion/the-success-of-welsh-theatre-makers-and-the-failure-of-welsh-theatre/ * * * * In October Gary Owen followed the article with an interview in Wales Arts Review. It continued in the same vein as in this extract: “When I go to the Wales Millennium Centre and see a show like "Everybody’s Talking About Jamie", the audience are there. And we’ve got so many good writers in Wales, but it almost always happens that when one of us gets a show on in England, or in Edinburgh, or something like that, people act like it’s an amazing new writer that’s never been seen before. “Except, we have seen them before in Wales, but we haven’t given them that platform that they needed and the attention they deserved. So those people end up wandering along doing tiny fringe productions for years and not getting the attention. “So where do we start? We have a lot of problems, we have a lot of things that are against us, one of which has to be that we’re sort of falling down a vicious spiral into things being worse and worse. But the joy of a vicious spiral is if you can stop and turn around, you’ll start escalating again. “Whenever people complain to National Theatre Wales, which I do on a near weekly basis, they will come back to me and say – but we only get this much money, we can only do this many shows. “No other major theatre thinks like that, no other major theatre goes, here’s our subsidy here are the shows. Instead, they say here’s our subsidy, here are the three shows we’re going to do that are going to bring in a tonne of money and enable us to do far more work.”** “It needs somebody at the Arts Council of Wales to just, you know, say quite seriously to these companies – you are gone, if you don’t put yourself together, and it needs that. I think that’s what it would take.” The full interview at: https://www.walesartsreview.org/in-conversation-with-gary-owen/ * * * * In November Gary Raymond's response to “Galwad” was headed “Deafening Silence: The Weakness of Wales”. It runs to 1644 words and should be read in full. Its essence is contained in these extracts: “...Galwad, if you are one of those who didn’t get to see it, or, even more likely, if you’re one of those who’ve never heard of it, was the Welsh iteration of the UK-wide Unboxed festival...a largely incomprehensible timeline spread across so many spaces it was close to impossible to keep up with what was happening when. “The week-long roll out of “content” was so discombobulating you could be forgiven for thinking it was done on purpose to throw people off the trail. How can you review something if you can’t figure out how to watch it. “...What I saw were actors doing their best with dialogue not fit for the cutting room floor of a CBeebies pilot. What I saw included some yoofs sitting around a dystopian campfire in the year 2052 saying things like “Turns out climate change was bad after all…”, “Yeah, if only humans had listened, maaaaan.” What I saw was embarrassing. But out there… amidst the grumbling gears of the medialand that never sleeps… silence. “...But the most damning part of this catastrophe is not so much that a lot of people got paid a great deal of money to make something so dreadful, but that almost nobody in Wales has said anything about it publicly. Instead, cloistered corners of Wales’s cultural moneypit are patting themselves on the back over this artistic Bog of Eternal Stench they put up. The creators of Galwad haven’t even had the common decency to respect the silence they inspired and slip off gently into that good night. No; they are apparently pretending they hit it out the park.” “...Praise criticism...where writers feel to criticise a Welsh thing is to undermine the nationhood project (or damage their future career prospects), is now a minority sport. Critics are more honest, and for the right reasons. But what has emerged in its place is the criticism of the deafening silence. If it’s bad, say nothing’s best.” “...when something is bad and nobody will admit it, what you end up with is a country of people who have no idea what “good” is, even when the rest of the world is looking in and laughing at us. It is a lack of honest cultural criticism that makes Wales seem parochial. “The longstanding problem of the Welsh critical landscape has been one of timidity dressed as seriousness....honest, mature debate about the arts and culture of Wales has rarely been platformed with true rigour and depth...the cultural organisations of Wales, and the people who populate their offices, are at odds with the artists they serve.” https://www.walesartsreview.org/critics-are-important/ * * * * Editorial note: A fruitful, vibrant constitutional state is rooted in strong independent institutions. A state of affairs where members of institutions are melded in mutual support, and friendship, with one another has results: feebleness, myopia, prickliness, ineffectiveness. The perspective of these two writers is also mine. By way of disclaimer I have exchanged views with Gary Raymond seven times, the occasions public literary events. I have been once in the company of Gary Owen. That conjunction of time and place occurred in the year 2000. References * The decay of scholarship in universities is the subject of previous articles; for example, 15th January 2019 in the sequence of comment on national theatre. ** The subject of shows that yield no money is addressed in the article in this sequence, below 10 February, 2020 starts: “Wales doesn't export enough to the world.” And “Theatre of Wales suffering a balance of payments deficit..this ought to be at the heart of discussion of cultural policy; somehow I doubt whether it gets onto an agenda.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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