The vultures are already picking over the carcass of British culture
The strange and disturbing thing about the era of coronavirus is both how interminable it feels and how multifaceted the crisis is. It is a true cat’s cradle we’re stuck in. Not only is there the enormous ongoing welter of medical horror and uncertainty, but it’s such a social and economic disaster that any casual observer on a London street can see how great a hit we’re taking – and will continue to take – until there is a vaccine. The City is empty during working hours. Boarded-up eateries in central London are starting to look flyblown. People mooch desultorily along, looking lost in the great shuttered metropolis. Pubs reopen on Saturday, but we may have to register to go. It’s not the same. Not even close.
But perhaps the biggest tragedy in the long term is culture. The ongoing failure to find a viable alternative to social distancing means that our pride and joy – our arts – remain closed, and may never reopen.
Last week saw the news that yet another regional theatre, Theatre Royal Plymouth (one of the best-attended outside of London), is to begin large-scale redundancy proceedings. Not only will our small theatres go, but our big ones are in dire straits. The same goes for our orchestras and opera houses, unsure whether they will be able to reopen – ever. As James Graham, the playwright, put it: “Our world-beating cultural landscape is in collapse.”
Ours is the best theatre in the world by a country mile, it brings millions of tourists to Britain, makes £1.3billion in annual ticket sales and employs 300,000 people. We have the best costume designers in the world. The craft runs deep here, in the land of Shakespeare, and it’s irreplaceable. Even so, a single malignant molecule has – for the foreseeable – trashed it all,
squashing one of Britain’s proudest arsenals of soft power. The reality is even more desperate. For as our cultural institutions are decimated by Covid, we are forced to confront a more profound vacuum. Indeed, as the virus struck, Britain – like America – was already in the throes of an intensifying culture war, whose front-line warriors want to gut our arts and rebuild them to the specifications of the diversity agenda. This was already yielding a strangely dull, strained cultural scene. I increasingly found myself sitting in theatres being constantly lectured about identity politics. Still, at least there was plenty going on.
But now, restive after months of lockdown, social justice warriors have redoubled their efforts and are busy toppling statues, demanding the erasure of classic films and comedy now deemed offensive, and restarting the drive to raze our entire culture to the floor. With our institutions in physical collapse, the mobs are piling in, picking over every last shred of what used to pass as culture. Welcome to the new normal: the void.
‘Our pride and joy – our arts – remain closed, and may never reopen’