The Covid crisis has revealed our true cultural leaders
This may not be a moment to pass categorical judgment, but at least a question can be asked: at this point, who is passing the Covid-test, and who is failing it? The root meaning of the Ancient Greek word “crisis” can be translated as “turning point”. This is something we should all bear in mind as we negotiate the pandemic, and the arts in particular should take heed. New directions must be taken. This is no time to cling to models that no longer obtain. The more flexibly responsive one can be, the better.
Fortune favours the bold, and the arts are used to living on their wits – their stock is rich in imagination and ingenuity. Those that seize windows of opportunity and stretch the rules are already proving winners; those that have stayed cautiously close to the wall are getting left behind.
So who is leading the pack? Generally one notices that smaller organisations have been lighter on their feet and quicker to experiment; larger ones have been hobbled with the Arts Council’s requirement to observe diversity and inclusion – that dreary cliché – as well as meeting the fiercer challenge of Black Lives Matter. It’s really important now that we stop fussing about quotas and percentages: there’s a fight for survival on, and it’s in nobody’s interest to nitpick or wag fingers.
In the theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company was slow off the mark, and wearisomely politicised: it’s good to see it recently getting back to basics with its outdoor pop-up shows in the Dell Gardens in Stratford. The National Theatre has the advantage of a back catalogue of recorded performances that has attracted 15 million online views (alas, that amazing figure doesn’t seem to have translated into commensurate donations). Not all the hard work goes on under the public gaze: the impassioned lobbying of Rufus Norris, the NT’S director, is said to have opened the culture ministry’s eyes to the gravity of the situation and its potential consequences.
The Royal Court has looked lost for ideas and, like Shakespeare’s Globe, it seems so hampered by anxiety to prove its woke credentials that it’s forgotten that the world is full of other urgent issues and fascinating dramas too, and that one of theatre’s greatest gifts is its ability to tell or show us things we don’t know already.
Much more exciting initiatives have come out of the Donmar Warehouse, thinking out of the box with its sound installation Blindness, and the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, where Timothy Sheader’s concert version of
Jesus Christ Superstar is by all accounts a wow. Outside London, my spies tell me great things are afoot at Tom Morris’s Bristol Old Vic, and the tiny Barn Theatre, Cirencester. Are the arts in the South more on their toes than they are in the North?
Fighting the corner for everyone in the sector with proper pugnacity are Julian Bird, of the industry body Society of London Theatre, and the exceptionally eloquent, cogent and clear-sighted playwright James Graham. Andrew Lloyd Webber has been outspoken too, most recently proposing that his former colleague Tim Rice could amend the controversial lyrics to Rule, Britannia.
Cameron Mackintosh has made drastic job cuts in his empire, but it’s hard to see what else he can do when there is little prospect of raising the curtain on shows such as
Hamilton and Les Misérables until Easter next year.
Galleries and museums are now mostly functioning, even if at half-cock. It was a magical moment for me to revisit the National Gallery, the first major institution to reopen, and heaven to be able to contemplate the Old Masters without crowds. In contrast, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last weekend seemed just joylessly empty and over-supervised. Try the absolutely lovely and slightly dotty Garden Museum, hard by Lambeth Palace, if you want to feel truly welcomed. The British Museum is back in business today: it will be interesting to see how it navigates visitors through the building. Obviously the likes of the BM will weather the crisis, albeit on straitened budgets. But one worries for the viability of independent institutions such as the Design Museum.
In music, Wigmore Hall’s partnership with the BBC for a month of live concerts in June came like manna in the wilderness, and this autumn they will build on that achievement by admitting some human audience. Bravo, the Wigmore’s dogged CEO John Gilhooly – and if only the BBC had made a better fist of the Proms. As John Allison reported here earlier this week, Snape Maltings, adroitly managed by the previous Proms supremo Roger Wright, has done brilliantly, programming a richly varied series of weekend concerts.
Opera is a trickier proposition, given scientific wariness about the transmission risks in singing, but the summer festivals have distinguished themselves in adapting to restrictive circumstances – my personal gold star goes to Grange Park Opera, led by the indomitable Wasfi Kani. The Royal Opera House has been disappointingly unadventurous so far, and would be well advised to announce something bold for the autumn; English National Opera is bravely embarking on a drive-in production of La Bohème in the car park at Alexandra Palace: it’s a high-risk enterprise but worth trying.
If there’s one big player that looks seriously vulnerable, it’s the Southbank Centre – a behemoth that’s been losing its way for years, looking shabbily opportunistic and overcommercialised in comparison to its more focused rival over the river at the Barbican. The alarming scale of the proposed redundancies – more than two thirds of its staff – is very telling. By the time we reach the other side of the pandemic, a substantial number of arts organisations could have tanked – and that might not be altogether a bad thing for the overall ecology. So let’s dare to ask another question: why do we need the Southbank Centre?
‘There’s a fight for survival on – this is no time for woke quotas’