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Dear Jenny Randerson, Eyes bright with misunderstanding the Post-16 Education Committee has somehow managed to snatch a breathtaking defeat from the jaws of victory. Twenty-five years ago in 1975, a group of us young (then) theatre directors produced a document grandly called the 'Twenty Year Plan'. This then became the basis of a Green paper for the Labour Party's policy on the Arts. It viewed the Arts as a service; placed the artist at the centre of society, contributing politically, socially, aesthetically, morally to the life of the country; talked of the inalienable right of every man, woman and child to participate in, or be present at, events and activities that enrich both their lives and the life of a community; called for facilities and training to be available for all, be it music or macramé, across the length and breadth of Britain from primary school to institute of adult education; called for an expansion and involvement in grass roots activities of all shades and hues, motivating communities to motivate themselves. However, there is one major fundamental difference in the Paper of 25 years ago and "A Culture in Common". Proponents as we were of culture as a regenerative force and art as therapy we also knew that the Arts are not a branch of the Social Services; that without properly constituted professional outlets and a palpable career structure this plan would wither on the vine of amateur frustration. And so will "A Culture in Common" for, as it stands, it is only half a policy. What a wasted opportunity. We have a great capacity in Wales for shooting ourselves in both feet and the brain at the same time. None of the Arts community would quarrel with the admirable and fundamental aim of developing an educational and grass-roots approach across the length and breadth of Wales. But where in all this is the professional? Not developing and achieving excellence individually or collectively, in the particular art form of a chosen profession, but acting as 'facilitators or animators in the community'; in other words teaching. Or, as Cynog Dafis put it at the Press launch of the document - "Closing the gap between the amateur and the professional", "blurring the distinction", "learning from the amateurs". The section on Theatre is particularly insulting. If the Arts Council is to "revisit" (awful word) its Drama strategy in the light of the proposals to direct significant sums of money to education and grass-roots activity where does that leave the professional theatre companies and buildings? It was in an attempt to rationalise the paucity of funds in the first place that the Arts Council came up with its approach to "funding fewer better". We are back at the bottom of the slippery pole. There also seems to be a strange agenda surrounding text based Theatre as something non Welsh. (But Modern Dance is?). If Wales has a tradition at all apart from music it is an oral one for we are a story telling nation. Great preachers, great orators, great actors. The theatre a pulpit, a despatch box, a stage. Text, text, text. And the in-built paradox in the Paper is the push for a Welsh language Theatre - text based. Where does that leave the majority of the English speaking population? I bet nobody told Nye Bevan that he had to dance his speeches in Welsh. Simply because we are a communitarian nation with a passion for education does not mean that we should ignore the need for excellence at a professional level. Theatre is the most performed, attended, practiced and studied Art form in these islands. The amount of amateur activity in Wales at all levels - schools, clubs, pubs, colleges - is enormous. For Theatre is the means by which a nation can take its pulse, listen to its heart-beat. Theatre matters, it has a voice and people listen. Not just here, all over the world. Without centres where this can take place the national conscience is dissipated, fragmented, for political and social exploration in Art need a focus and national institutions often serve to provide a platform for the necessary investigatory, innovative and coalescing process. There also seems to be a perception that somehow Theatre is flawed, an "etiolated cultural form", elitist. It is none of these things, it is merely suffering from years of under-investment and neglect. The projected increase over the next three years will only return Arts funding to the pre 1995 level and much of this will be taken up by the extraordinary idea, copied from the English model, of Regional Arts Associations. For a country where four fifths of the population live in a narrow geographical band in the South? Will we have a North-West board for 200,000 people? Ditto North-East? And anyway a dose of elitism is sometimes necessary to ensure that the minority is catered for as well as the majority. I am a taxpayer and sometimes I want my money spent on things that otherwise would be unavailable to me. Not all the time but sometimes. It is anti-elitism that led to £800 million and more being spent on the Dome. The popular and the esoteric must be able to share a communal bed and not have to fight for a duvet that is too small to cover both sets of private parts. It is significant that in the world of sport here in Wales the word 'elite' is used with pride, being synonymous with excellence, achievement. There is even a fund for sports people called "Elite Cymru". There is no question, however, that theatre at the turn of the millennium has a problem. It is perceived as, and indeed sometimes is, old-fashioned. That is both its strength and its weakness. While the 21st century internet communications highway powers along its technological path into a digitalised sunset, theatre is all too often two planks and a soggy tissue. It cannot go forward, it cannot go back. It has nowhere to go, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. All roads return to the same point. Theatre was, is, continues to be, a ceremonial circle, lassooing language - the last custodian and the embodiment of an oral tradition now threatened by extinction from soft-ware, hard-ware, any old where. Not that there aren't attempts to evolve, adapt, even rival its computerised confederates. Where once we whistled the set, now we sing the hydraulics. And the problem is also social. Theatre hides in dark corners of old buildings or cozies up in new. It has unwillingly crawled up an intellectual fox-hole pursued by marketing hounds, refusing to come out even when attacked by ferocious terriers. The audience for it is perceived as finite, educated, middle-upper class, prescribed, and sometimes professional theatre has not helped -running into the only arms open to it in order to find comfort - aided and abetted by an in-built philistinism and a chronic lack of funding. Push down on the jelly from the top and it all runs out the side. Still plenty of jelly but, where it once had a structure (a bit wobbly maybe but recognisable nonetheless), now it is a formless, generalised mess. So what does Theatre have to offer? Two planks and a passion. The first plank the stage, the second the ideology on which to build the passion. The passion is to spread that ideology. All art is political. It is protest. At its highest point it is a powerful instrument of social change. The position of theatre within society, makes it ideally placed to aid that change and we, the artists, the theatre practitioners, have a duty to fulfil our chosen role as purveyors and vendors of truth as we see it. This can change daily and the theatre responds accordingly, altering its perspective. Why not television or film? It is the live contact of an audience, the instant response to what is said. We want an audience to stand up and be counted. To shout Yes, to shout No, to cheer, to boo, to laugh, to cry, to walk out, to fight, to argue - anything to indicate that what has happened during a performance has moved that audience to feel something and motivated them to go out into the street and do something about that feeling. Two people meet. One tells a story. Then that same person tells the story again and again and again, each time varying the delivery and each time receiving a different response. One day s/he tells it to one person, the next day to a thousand. There are some people to whom it is told who think up suggestions about how it can be changed. Maybe four or five people can tell it better. Or a thousand. The story changes. Each person, each generation, each century adapts it to particular circumstances. Some use costumes to illustrate it, others use settings. Some illustrate it literally, others use fantasy and imagination. Some use images, some use technology. The core of the story has remained the same but around it peoples and cultures have woven a fabric of artifice and artistry, colour and magic, movement and words, light and sound. And it has remained an uniquely live experience, happening only at one moment in time, conferring on the group of people telling and the group listening a very special status. They, and only they at that moment and in that place, are participating, whether in a basement in Brixton, a quarry in Avignon, a dustbowl in Africa or a stadium in Sydney. They are the really privileged, sharing an unique communal experience. That's theatre. And yet it is something much, much more. If theatre were merely the expression of fantasy it would only paint abstract pictures with words; but words and sounds combine to communicate a story. The king is dead - the child is sleeping - the boy is hungry. As we become more sophisticated, so we need to express feelings about ourselves, about society, the world. Words by extension become debate and theatre becomes a debating platform, the natural outlet for all the hopes, wishes, anger, despairs of a community. It becomes that instrument of social change. There are some still telling the original story. There are others now who have turned the story into a moral fable. Some others still want a change of leader and are using the story as an illustration. Theatre is being put to the service of the community. Some stay with Aristotle's version of the story in this debate about leadership, purging their emotions through guilt and through catharsis. Others follow Brecht and calmly debate the possibility of change. Another group over in the corner has collectively decided that the story needs a real ending and have gone out into the streets to gather support for a deposition. There's another group who have set the whole thing to music, as the way to interest people in the subject. There is an excitement in the air. The Story has released limitless possibilities of form and action. The whole population is being mobilised to tell the story their way, throw out the politicians, stop the madness, change the world. But wait a minute. There's a group who don't want change and they make the laws and control the capital. They don't believe in this collective rubbish. People are not intelligent enough to use theatre in this way. Give them picture newspapers to read and game-shows to play. Dump them in the Dome. Leave the question of what theatre should do and be about to those that know. This group clamps down on this radical form of theatre, channelling their vision into a narrow, sophisticated, literary form of words, attempting to suffocate the wild anarchic child at birth. But it's tough, this child. It will survive when they are long gone. For it is through Theatre that the itch to be alive is most powerfully focused. Under-investment in Theatre as an Art form will leave Wales bereft of the very people we need to scratch that itch, and if the tension is not held between the community and the centre, Wales will always limp culturally through the twenty-first century. Ireland provides an interesting parallel. The Abbey Theatre was the first western subsidised theatre, growing out of a nationalist movement - the Gaelic League - a desire on the part of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in particular to promote all things culturally Irish after centuries of English domination. Ninety years later the Theatre in Ireland is a major debating force on the world platform, a voice of a nation confident in itself, writing and performing almost exclusively in the English language. The policy document talks of being proud of the world class actors, directors, writers that Wales possesses. The trouble is they all train and work elsewhere, their voices are not heard in their native land. I am Welsh. I live here with my family. At the moment I have three productions running elsewhere in the world; Troilus & Cressida at the Sydney Opera House, which was part of the Olympic Arts Festival, my own adaptation of Goethe's poem Reineke Fuchs at the Burg Theater, Vienna and Verdi's Otello in Koeln. I am off to New York to do a workshop of a new musical on Broadway. I want the opportunity to work in Wales at the above level and not always have to go abroad. "A Culture in Common" ignores those artists like myself who have built their beliefs and lives around professional theatre. Somebody please listen. |
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Wednesday, November 22, 2000 |
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