Getting bums on seats is key for survival
Shakespeare embraced populist theatre, says Dominic Cavendish, so why look down on punters who just want a good night out?
Amid a spasm of panicky gloom for British theatre, as concern about the impact of the coronavirus mounts, we have just received a spot of very welcome news. Whatever the shortterm crises facing the sector, a brighter future beckons.
Why? Because in unveiling his unashamedly populist inaugural season as the artistic director of the Birmingham Rep, which will include a new musical based on Patrick Mccabe’s novel Breakfast on Pluto and the spoof Shakespeare-era musical comedy Something Rotten!, Sean Foley has declared he’s trying to appeal to “people who just want a good night out”.
You might think that this was an uncontroversial statement. And yet in the current cultural climate, it represents an act of swimming against the tide. A lot hangs on Foley’s success: not just the stability of the Rep, but a way forward for regional theatre itself, which has never looked more imperilled by the pressures it’s under.
Over the past decade, subsidised theatre in the regions has had to contend with declining funding (a corollary of the austerity era). But other fundamental problems – aside from finance – have been growing. At the end of 2018, the Liverpool Everyman was forced to scrap an ambitious rep “ensemble”, having reached a crisis point trying to balance the books. Most regional theatres are only a few flops away from being on life-support; how they obtain their “hits” is the vexed question.
The imperative – nobly enough – has been to be as inclusive as possible, given the UK’S changing demographic, and to justify public money by putting innovation centre-stage. Yet the progressive mission doesn’t always sit comfortably with the art form’s pleasure principle – the age-old clamour from audiences to “show us a good time”. It doesn’t take much in the way of newfangled experimentation for locals to stay away in droves. The Rep itself is a difficult case; it had a particularly dire time 20 years ago – the innovative The Ramayana in 2001 sold at just 33 per cent capacity. The challenges are pronounced at the moment, but they have their roots in the contradictory post-war vision of bringing art “to the masses” – where large state-supported theatres were opened in the expectation of “edifying” the crowds.
Back at the dawn of British theatre’s cultural pre-eminence – and the golden age of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwriting, populism was woven into the fabric of the art form. Shakespeare strove to please his monarch and the court; yet commercial hustle – and the ability to woo all and sundry – was integral to theatrical fortunes.
The revolution of the Fifties, led by Look Back in Anger, galvanised the playwriting culture, at the time afflicted by too much middlebrow fodder. But soon, the subsidised sector started to rely on the commercial sector (centring on the West End) to do, in effect, the “dirty” work.
Snobbish condescension to shows that speak to the many not the few has arguably become ever more entrenched in the mindset of the profession. In a terrific new book, Good Nights Out, the critic Aleks Sierz flies the flag for a strand of work he feels has been consistently undervalued despite – or rather because of – its box office success, from The Mousetrap to One Man, Two
Guvnors. “The public just wants to have fun, to enjoy a good night out,” he writes. This doesn’t have to mean dumbing down. “Like all other forms of popular culture, popular theatre provides content for dreams about who we are as a people, how we feel as a society, and what we might become in the future.”
Of course, there’s no sure-fire way of crowd-pleasing. But when the Arts Council talks of removing funding from those organisations that don’t do enough to promote diversity rather than hailing the examples of those buildings that most succeed in getting “bums on seats”, you realise that ideological wishful thinking has got in the way of inconvenient reality: that a lot of people will only go to the theatre if they can be sure of being taken out of themselves.
Foley – whose career has taken him from fringey comic experimentation to success in the West End, most recently directing The Upstart Crow, has a strong claim to be listened to. He aims to unite diversity and creativity with broad accessibility. “It behoves us to put on shows for ordinary people who perhaps don’t even think theatre is for them.” It may sound obvious but without those “ordinary” punters, the regions are doomed.
‘It behoves us to put on shows for ordinary people who perhaps don’t even think theatre is for them’