The arts are ignoring their number one duty: to entertain
Last week, theatre director Rupert Goold called for musical theatre to receive public funding. Goold, whose credits include the musical stage version of Made in Dagenham, said that there was “a bit of snobbery” in the UK around this theatrical subgenre, and that leaving it purely in the hands of the commercial sector means that new, more experimental works would get overlooked; that we would never be able to make a UK equivalent of Hamilton.
While I am not wholly in agreement with Goold (subsidised companies such as the RSC, who staged Matilda, and Sheffield Crucible, who developed Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, have been given the money to develop musicals), he went on to make a very fair point. While snobbery surrounding musical theatre is nothing new, it is part of a very current crisis in the arts. As Goold said: “People want to feel joy and there’s a real gap at the moment.”
It’s true. As a regular theatregoer, I don’t particularly enjoy being heckled, lectured or preached at after a hard day at work. But at the moment, too many theatres do exactly that due to a misguided assumption that serious
plays about marginal issues will bring in new, non middle-class audiences. Theatre should be for all, of course, but it can be accessible just by being excellent, and worries about ticking diversity boxes or striving to fit a woke agenda seem, often, to produce an end result that is overworked and joyless. And isn’t it horribly patronising to think that working-class people want to see exclusively working-class stories; that women are obsessed with the female condition; that black Britons only want to see their own experiences represented on stage? Theatre is a communal experience and limiting your audience (and thereby alienating some) dramatically dissolves its power.
I witnessed this recently when I attended Fairview at the Young Vic in London in which all audience members who identified as white were invited on to the stage so that they could experience the scrutiny of the white gaze upon black people. The idea was that anyone remaining in their seats would be non-white and so the tables would be turned. However, as I stood there on the half-lit stage, I realised how horribly this supposed coup de théâtre had backfired. Half of the audience stayed in their seats and none, as far as I could tell, was black. This wasn’t agenda-setting – it felt like Seventies agitprop.
And it isn’t only on our stages where the mission to entertain has disappeared. Television drama often ditches excitement in favour of making wider, spurious points regarding the way we feel about the world. For example, Doctor Who, a show that has entertained generations of kids, is now straitjacketed by right-on agendas.
In our concert halls, there is a similar problem. Think how glorious it is to watch a top-notch orchestra play Beethoven’s Fifth, and let music, that most psychologically liberating of art forms, spirit you away to somewhere ineffable. Now think of the trend of having every concert fight for its space by having to represent an ideology or a modish topic. I am put in mind of a piece of work by the excellent young composer Laurence Osborn a few years ago, Ctrl, which aimed to explore “toxic masculinity”. How different from those big Enlightenment themes in Beethoven, and how sad for a young man at the beginning of his career to feel he had to follow such a joyless path.
I am not saying that art shouldn’t be challenging, but there needs to be variety, and frivolity should be unlicensed. The most recent Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, suddenly turned that romp-like film franchise into something horribly worthy.
The greatest work is that which challenges while making us giddy with excitement. In series two of Fleabag, the unfashionable subject of religious faith was dealt with both effortlessly and cogently. And then, just as audiences were compelled to question their own religious identity, Phoebe Waller-Bridge accidentally smashed a glass ornament that was meant to be being awarded to the best “Woman in Business” and, on a pin, provided the most brilliant cultural moment of 2019. Now that’s entertainment.
As a regular theatregoer, I don’t enjoy being heckled, lectured or preached at after a hard day at work