Serving which community?

Soundbites. They’re everywhere these days, or so it seems. Indeed, enter a regional theatre nowadays and it’s almost impossible to avoid the never-ending promises of liberté, égalité and fraternité. One leading theatre for example vows to “dismantle barriers to participation, creation and enjoyment”. Another claims to be a hub for the city and beyond, a place where it is further claimed “people and communities come to tell and share stories”. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport meanwhile claims the arts has the power to “strengthen communities, bring people together and remove social barriers”.

Stirring stuff indeed. But could not the same be said of pubs and clubs or football stadia? The point to note here is the pervasive idea of community. The arts, they would have us believe, is a catalyst for social cohesion. Over the last decade this utopian vision of the arts has not only come to inform public funding policy of the arts, but to dominate it. Like it or not, theatres are now charged with actively engaging with their local communities. Producing plays is not enough. Elitism is out, community is in.

A youth theatre and occasional disability and alcoholism initiatives seem a pretty narrow definition of community and inclusion

Inclusion is all well and good, but is there such a thing as being too inclusive? Because when the real business of theatre gets under way – when theatre gets serious – it is not unusual for the community to find itself sidelined or marginalised completely. A recent, much-hyped production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Merseyside is a fairly typical example. The production could so easily have tapped into local talent to portray the quartet of fickle Athenian lovers. But it didn’t. Instead, it chose to seek out graduates from some of the UK’s most prestigious acting schools. A great pity, because there are numerous excellent young actors on Merseyside (members of the local community), all of whom would have benefitted enormously from an association with such a high-profile production. But it was not to be. When the lights went up on this production, community was conspicuous only by its absence.

It’s one thing to produce stirring messages of inclusion aimed at appeasing those who hold the purse strings, but another altogether to put those words into any meaningful sort of practice. One could be forgiven for concluding that community is largely a means to an end – more than useful when securing funding, less so when actually engaged in the business of producing theatre.

Liverpool’s lavishly refurbished Everyman Theatre may well be adorned with five floors of writers’ rooms and rehearsal spaces, not to mention a sumptuous performance space with jaw-dropping technical resources, but it’s a sure-fire bet that, even if they live to be a 100, the vast majority of the city’s creatives will never sample these delights first hand. Tickets can always be purchased for shows, but isn’t this is a wilfully restrictive interpretation of the concepts of inclusion and community? By the same token, the multiplex cinema chain could also claim to be a community resource. After all, I purchase my ticket, take my seat and watch the show. Multiplex cinemas have thus included me. I am part of the multiplex community. Should they therefore be in receipt of public money too? It’s a question that has obviously worried those who fund our theatres.

The solution has largely lain in rhetoric, specifically in the panacea of widening participation. All theatres have had to do is to create a narrative of egalitarianism and opportunity, convincing the powers-that-be (and themselves) that they are no longer the exclusive territory of a small band of arts professionals. Hence, the emergence of the ubiquitous education and community officers – arguably a superficial as well as wholly inadequate response to the inclusion conundrum. With an education officer in place, theatres often seem to feel they have somehow paid their dues to their community.

But if publicly funded theatre truly wants to become communal – more than just a collection of soundbites – it must genuinely embrace its community, not merely tolerate it. Theatre could and should go much further. It must become radical. In a truly communal vision of the arts, there would be no place for gatekeepers; few if any places for the full-time, permanent, salaried variety. And certainly no place for executives, associates or acolytes. In their place, regional theatres could transform into places of change and diversity, places that would welcome all local creatives enabling them to enhance and develop their skills aided by world-class facilities and back-up.

In order to achieve this invigorating state of affairs, the old would inevitably have to give way to the new. Artistic directors would have to come and go, as would their associates, because in this vision of the arts, regional theatre would virtually become a republic, a theatrical Place de la Concorde. Consider the enormous benefits of such a co-operative model of regional theatre. Ten years could see artistic input from just as many artistic directors, each presenting completely fresh visions, each engaging with a truly diverse range of experiences. Consider too the benefits to other community creatives, who would be able, possibly for the first time, to enhance their artistic practice in a professional arena.

Such a version of the arts, one that truly engages the wider population and where the reality matches the rhetoric, seems to be a no-brainer. Who could possibly argue with the notion of as many creatives as possible benefiting from a region’s resources? “We believe in giving everyone the opportunity to experience and take part in theatre and the arts”, reads the blurb of another regional heavyweight. Hmmm. A youth theatre and occasional disability and alcoholism initiatives seem a pretty narrow definition of community and inclusion. Disability and youth initiatives may well equate to boxes ticked and cash secured, but for the vast majority of community creatives (those not falling into such highly stratified groups), regional theatres continue to be anything but artistic utopias. The language might have changed, but little else.

Theatre has long since strived to create illusion. Indeed, it’s always been rather adept at blurring the gap between reality and illusion, but in attempting to convince us that publicly funded theatres are places where people really do gather to share and tell stories, where barriers to participation are dismantled, it has surely surpassed itself.

David Sedgwick is a university lecturer and theatre reviewer working on Merseyside.
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