In March, Arts Council England announced a sweeping range of cuts, with over 200 organisations losing their funding completely. ACE themselves had nearly 30% of their grant-in-aid from the government cut, and 15% of those were passed on to the arts as a whole, including the biggest national organisations like the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Exeter Northcott and Derby theatres completely lost their funding, while the Institute of Contemporary Arts took a 42% slash in its funding. Some criticised ACE, some said it was necessary and the fault of the coalition.
That was just one of many events shaking the arts industry this summer, and across the last 12 months. From education cuts to the hacking scandal, inspiration for writers has been rife.
“One of Damian Cruden [YTR’s Artistic Director]’s maxims,” says Alexander Wright, one of the directors of York Theatre Royal’s resident company Belt Up Theatre, “which he’s drilled into us is that all theatre is political and all theatre is physical. Obviously not all theatre is political in terms of dealing with specific politics but all theatre is sociopolitical. I wouldn’t say I’m a political writer at all, apart from that.”
The theatre and arts scene has changed dramatically from the outright political writing of years gone by. That’s not to say that current writing is definitively unpolitical in its themes, but the process of creating and putting together a performance has changed. Many theatres, both smaller local ones and larger nationals, have been forced into collaboration with independent companies or have opted to do so. Director of Programming at East London’s Barbican Centre, Louise Jeffreys, notes that, “collaboration is the big word in the Arts Council right now.”
For the Barbican, productions in partnership or collaboration with new and established theatre companies is a key source of artistic direction. But the York Theatre Royal’s Chief Executive, Liz Wilson says that’s something “we’ve been doing at YTR for years.” For regional theatre, it seems, and especially YTR, there is little more important than collaboration, and its ability to increase accessibility for theatre. They have two resident companies – Pilot and Belt Up – both of whom originally formed out of educational institutions. The Theatre provides a space for them to develop new work before it is toured around the country or to Edinburgh.
“Places like YTR are such a wonderful example of people who look after people,” notes Wright, who became resident at the Theatre Royal after graduating from the University in 2009. “They’re so generous with time and space and expertise because they have the space and expertise to give, if not the time.”
“We are not the holders of all great ideas in this city,” says Wilson, “We commission work, we collaborate with people who want to work with us when we can.” The TakeOver Festival is an example of this, running two three-week seasons over two years, entirely put together by under 26 year olds. Similarly, the Christmas Pantomime has a children’s chorus, and recent production 40 Years On features parts held by university students. Wilson says that all this helps to widen the community aspect of the theatre.
Leading Guardian critic Lyn Gardner says the issue is wider: “It’s a question for access of audiences and access into the profession. And a lot of the things the government are doing is not going to help that at all. A humanities degree is likely to become the preserve of the reasonably affluent and middle class, and those are exactly the kind of people who will then go into theatre.”
The 20th century saw a whole series of movements both sociopolitically and artistically, Theatrically, this not only included productions directly addressing events like the Irish Troubles or Vietnam, but also different forms of theatre rising in prominence. In the 1980s, for example, many plays did not immediately deal head-on with the public dissatisfaction around Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government,
“I think Mark Ravenhill once made a rather interesting comment,” says Gardner, “about why there was not a huge amount of playwriting going on in the 1980s that seemed to respond to the then-Tory government. One of the points he made was that was the time that you saw a rise of visual and physical theatre, almost perhaps that people thought their voices weren’t enough.”
In 2011, with sweeping cuts, the biggest financial crisis the world has seen and the phone hacking scandal reaching a furore, what will the arts do now?
“I think what you won’t see is anything that is equivalent to the 1980s,” continues Gardner, “I think people are much more driven, and I think theatre is a much more diverse industry than it used to be.” But throughout the last few years, companies like Punchdrunk and Belt Up have pioneered a revival of immersive and interactive theatre, especially in the month-long Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
“People love that immersive experience,” says Jeffreys, “As people have less money to spend they spend their money on something that has real impact.”
Others share this sentiment, and immersive theatre has the power, Wright says, to affect the non-conscious reactions – muscular and emotional rather than simply cognitive – that simply sitting and watching a play rarely does. Jeffreys notes that “It’s about the audience also really working hard at something and finding their bespoke route through something,” and at Edinburgh many groups took well-known pieces – like Godspell – that simply wouldn’t work without the audience’s involvement.
Form may well change, but the tone and political slant of much of the arts seems not to be. “I think you’d be hard-pushed to work in the arts and agree with what the Tories are doing,” says Wright, “‘cos otherwise you’d just be agreeing to pissing on yourself. And I don’t know many people that would do that, I think. I’m sure there are Tories in the arts but I don’t know them, never met them. I don’t intend to.”
Taking a leaf out of modernity’s book, many productions are also choosing to have a bigger online presence. The National Theatre appointed a Head of Digital Media, David Sabel, a few years ago to pioneer much of this. “The thing which I think in our current political socioeconomic climate is interesting with digital is that modes of performance are changing,” he says, “So you have companies not doing things on stage but promenade performances where you would wear a headset, or have something with the GPS. I think people are also experiencing ways that theatre doesn’t happen on the stage: you might discover more of a story online or on a blog, you might have characters on Facebook.”
But rather than simply changing performances, the main role of digital seems to be opening up the process of creating theatre. “What’s interesting now with digital is that information travels faster than it ever has before. So, through Twitter, through social media, in every what that our lives are being lived more virtually, you see that’s something that crops up, not in lots of work. Multimedia and video have been a part of contemporary theatre for a while, certainly since the 70s, and you see how that affects stage design, but now you’re seeing how digital and live performance have a relationship.” Indeed, much of the NT’s work has been in providing online resources – whether they are in the form of interviews and blogs or simply, as through the theatre’s iTunesU account, providing warm-up exercises for budding actors and directors.
Digital also helps to get the message out, and increase interest in theatre, pulling in collaborative experiences with other artists as well as opening up the theatre world to those who aren’t necessarily avid fans. Rather than simply a marketing tactic, the NT’s Maya Gabrielle notes that it’s much more about enhancing and amplifying the experiences people are already enjoying.
Whether simply bringing together different people’s views or collaborating with new artists, the arts scene has found itself needing to change, and continue to evolve as always. New writers are on the rise, and even if we don’t yet have a revolution in recognisable terms, perhaps only future generations will be able to fully assess just what the voices of today have said about everything going on around us.