British Theatre After Brexit One Year On
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British Theatre after Brexit One Year On Aleks Sierz Fetch me’ ammer. Edward Bond, Saved Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. Bertolt Brecht couple of years ago, our family got a new puppy. It was called Brexit. Like any new arrival, it completely changed our daily lives. Its acquisition A was, of course, an accident. Something done without much thought; a moment of instinctive action. And, at first, we were all fascinated by this romp- ing, tumbling, and joyfully barking creature. There was lots of tail-wagging, and some messy moments. A cross between a bulldog and a pit bull, it seemed to be such a fascinating beast. Early on, however, we spotted some problems: the little devil started to chew up any bank statements he could find. And he affected our finances in many other ways, too. After all, Brexit made our holidays more expen- sive. It was costly to feed him. So, I must admit that half the family have always been skeptical about what they ironically call “our independence day.” And it’s hard to see how he could have ever made our family great again. Still, over the years, the puppy has grown up a bit: most of us have remained fascinated with it, anxiously inquiring about its health and savoring news of its latest exploits. Observing it closely, and looking after it. But, by the same token, some of us are now getting a bit bored with hearing about it. For the rest of its life, Brexit seems fated to divide opinion—our family will just have to learn to live with it. British theatre has reacted to Brexit with a range of emotions. A couple of years after the Referendum of summer 2016, and about a year before the official leave date of March 29, 2019, cultural industries of all kinds are partly depressed, partly resigned, and partly angry. The issue of migration, which was central in 60 PAJ 120 (2018), pp. 60–70. © 2018 Aleks Sierz doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00437 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00437 by guest on 29 September 2021 the Referendum result, is clearly also a worry in any consideration of the future. For example, one arts agency, the Creative Industries Federation, has predicted a “major skills crisis” when freedom of movement between countries ends after the UK leaves the EU. In its Global Talent Report (October 2017) the CIF argues that since almost seven percent of the creative sector workforce nationwide is from the EU, any restrictions on free movement would have a significant impact. For theatre, particularly London theatre, the situation is even worse. About ten percent of staff is from Continental Europe. And the problem goes beyond recruitment: the state of London theatre drives live events across the country. Other reactions from important members of the theatre community are even more critical. For instance, Kwame Kwei-Armah, the incoming new artistic director of the Young Vic theatre in London, said at a Royal Society for the Arts symposium held in September 2017 that: “The challenge of Brexit to theatre in an increasingly borderless world is: do we want interdependence? I think theatre in Britain has practiced Brexit for as long as I can remember. I think we privilege the English word.” The implication is that British theatre has been insular before Brexit, and may become even more so in the future. He concluded: “I’m really interested to see how we integrate with Europe on the plays that we put on our stages and the plays we commission, and how we approach it in the way opera does. Opera isn’t afraid of internationalism, and we are.” Brexit might even be an opportunity to relate differently to the wider cultural world. By the law of unintended consequences, Brexit has already been good for some theatre sectors. The immediate effect of the Referendum was to reduce the value of the pound sterling by anything from one percent to twenty percent. This has not only delighted exporters of all kinds, but has also meant that London the- atres have enjoyed their most successful year ever—due to a post-Referendum tourist boom. The Society of London Theatre (SOLT) audience figures show that more than fifteen million theatre tickets were sold in 2017, which is the highest figure since records began more than thirty years ago. Figures from the Office of National Statistics also show a twenty-five-percent rise in visitors from the United States due to the UK becoming a cheaper tourist destination. SOLT figures detail how 8,755,590 people went to a musical in 2017, up eight percent on the year before, pulling in a revenue of £436,611,108. And 4,468,105 went to a play, up seven percent with a revenue of £176,436,089. There were 258 new productions in 2017, a slight fall from 276 in 2016. But if the commercial sector is enjoying an unprecedented Brexit boom, what about the UK’s subsidized flagship theatres? Rufus Norris, head of the National Theatre, responded immediately to the Refer- endum result by undertaking a large “listening exercise” in which theatremakers were sent around the country, interviewing so-called ordinary people about their SIERZ / British Theatre after Brexit 61 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00437 by guest on 29 September 2021 reactions to Brexit. As a deliberate provocation, strong Remain areas such as London were not included in the survey. However quick off the mark, Rufus’s project raises more questions than it answers: if those areas of the country which voted most strongly to Leave—North-East, South-West and Midlands—are the most socially and economically deprived, then simply listening to them will not solve their economic problems, nor will it lead to better representation of them in the theatre community. The more you think about it, the more the soft idea of “listening” actually starts to sound like a mealy-mouthed excuse for nothing very much thank you. It is, basically, nonsense. The result of this exercise was My Country; A Work in Progress, a verbatim play put together by Norris with the help of Britain’s poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. It was staged at the National Theatre in March 2017. And it has a good claim to be the worst new play of that year. My Country; A Work in Progress, whose text is made up of edited interviews with members of the great British public from all four corners of the land, starts with the figure of Britannia (how original), who summons the audience (how embar- rassing) and tells us to listen (how patronizing). Britannia is joined by Caledonia, South-West, Cymru, Northern Ireland, East Midlands and North-East. Together they express the verbatim opinions of ordinary people: some reasonable, some racist, some frankly stupid. Conflicting emotions of anger, despair, and disillusionment (and suspicion of foreigners, who are not given a voice and clearly don’t count as “British”) create a cacophony of disagreement. The effect is not only clichéd, lacking any theatrical imagination, but also mind-numbingly predictable. The metaphors are weak, the thinking absent, and the tone is unbelievably condescending. Norris also made My Country; A Work in Progress into a fifty-five-minute film broadcast on BBC 2 at 9:00 p.m. (peak time) on Saturday November 18, 2017. Like the stage play, it offered only familiar resentments and familiar opinions. Of course, both play and film show a picture of a divided nation: our country, as the title makes clear, is a work in progress, a place in transition from an imagined glorious past to a deeply uncertain future. But I think that we did all know that already. One good thing about new writing for the British theatre is its sensitivity to new sensibilities and new currents of feeling. Since June 2016, the idea of Brexit has already sneaked into a couple of recent plays: so far, the best post-Referendum play to mention some of the feelings that have surfaced about Brexit is Mike Bartlett’s Albion (Almeida, 2017). This family drama, set in an English garden, a traditional metaphor of national identity, has one character—Krystyna, a Polish migrant cleaner who through hard work has become a bit of an entrepreneur— and who is a walking advert for the idea of the good migrant. The problem is not so much the character as the way her speeches are written: 62 PAJ 120 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00437 by guest on 29 September 2021 I will never be British but I think the truth is that there is a respect for money and work here. And that’s all that matters. There is a long tradi- tion of immigrant communities arriving, being discriminated against, but working hard and within twenty years they are accepted. It is happening with the Polish. I think people like Polish builders, and workers now. This is writing that has one hand on its heart, and is annoyingly declamatory. Bartlett can sometimes be over-explicit. Another character in Albion is a novelist called Katherine, who explicitly hates Brexit: in one of her books, she attacks “the willfully ignorant people who seem to be full of hate, but whose voice seems to have grown increasingly loud in the last few years.” This is shorthand for Leavers, and clearly an articulation of the Remainers’ dismay about Brexit. As you would expect, plays about Brexit include plenty of humorous shows, most often put on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.