British theatre’s new secret weapon: you
As leading venues cast more amateur actors, Dominic Cavendish asks whether quality is being sacrificed on the altar of Arts Council ideology
It goes without saying that, as a country, we’re a bunch of amateurs. We love am-dram and thousands of amateur performances will get staged every year. What’s rather less remarked on is the way leading subsidised theatres are increasingly playing host to non-professionals. This growing “community theatre” offers conviviality plus stronger civic connotations; it reflects society, empowers its participants.
The biggest theatrical talking point of the week offers a prime example:
The Key Workers Cycle, newly opened at the Almeida. Some 80 participants, aged 16 to 96, are joining 19 professional actors in a nine-play cycle telling “the stories of those who keep our daily lives running”.
The plays are partly being performed by people drawn from these groups, be it refuse collectors or care workers. Indebted, conceptually, to the Medieval mystery plays, which saw tradespeople enact biblical stories, it recasts our oldest form of drama – which you can still find honoured at Easter at numerous locations.
Whereas the Almeida has recruited from London, the Royal Shakespeare Company has done so across England for Henry VI: Rebellion, opening next month. The scenes of Jack Cade’s uprising will draw from a pool of 74 adult participants from six partner theatres, from Cornwall to Blackpool, and 19 teenagers. The overall company tally is a mighty 118.
Erica Whyman, the RSC’S acting artistic director, helped pave the way for this with a 2016 staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that saw nationwide am-dram companies portray the mechanicals and a 2018 Romeo and Juliet that let groups of teenagers speak the opening chorus.
For her, this kind of co-option is the new normal: “This is profoundly how we might make theatre. It’s business as usual and something theatres of our scale need to be thinking about: how can we bring participants closer to the thinking and making of the work.” She believes it to be creatively enriching, citing the teenage input in particular as informing her approach to Romeo and Juliet. “They gave me clarity about the fact that if you don’t feel valued by adults in your life, you don’t want to live,” she says. As for Henry VI: “It’s one thing to say ‘These are state-of-thenation plays’, it’s another to head round the nation, hearing how they land.”
A third undertaking: in August, Cast, in Doncaster, premieres Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, as adapted by Chris Bush; the show has 80 community players, a colliery band, a church choir, a drag group, five professional actors, half a dozen musicians – 120 participants in all.
A cynic might argue that such inclusive work achieves a costly seeming spectacle without busting the budget, but even voluntary projects require considerable resource. For instance, the RSC says the Rebellion participation groups equate to an extra 25 per cent of the budget usual for such a play.
It’s the idealism that stands out. James Blakey, director of “The Doncastrian Chalk Circle”, as it’s being called, believes community shows accord with “the notion that everyone can be an artist” and the way they reflect “the world around us is an act of citizenship.” Kwame Kwei-armah began his tenure at the Young Vic with a Twelfth Night augmented by a 60-strong “community chorus”. Notably, the show was first staged in New York via the Public Theatre’s “Public Works” programme, which aims to blur “the line between professional artists and community members” and “put theatre at the heart of every community, and community at the heart of every theatre”.
Public Works, by the way, inspired the National to establish its “Public Acts” programme, which is enabling the Brecht production, and the first fruit of which was a Pericles in 2018 (also adapted by Chris Bush) that had a company of over 200, embodying melting-pot London. In his history of amateur dramatics (Questors, Jesters and Renegades), critic Michael Coveney said of a follow-up As You Like It: “By no stretch of goodwill could you claim that this was a production of the play worthy of a National Theatre. You could justly say, however, this was an occasion worthy of a national theatre.”
Which cuts to the heart of the matter. Does the “quality” matter, as with a standard production? Is it found in a different way? Or is the gesture of accessibility so huge as to leave qualms at the door?
The question is acute because a trickle of productions could become a flood. Community engagement accords with Arts Council England’s vision. Its latest strategy “Let’s Create” uses the word “communities” multiple times, and argues for “a country in which the creativity of everyone living here is celebrated and supported”.
In its defence, the work can be transfixingly more than the sum of its parts. I was rhapsodic about David Greig’s touring version of The Suppliant Women, by Aeschylus, which gave voice to a “chorus” of young women, recruited and trained-up at each stop-off. It felt up-to-date while honouring Greek drama’s civic and participatory origins.
This month, I’ve furthermore seen at first hand the transformative benefit for various participants. At the Almeida, Eula Harrison, 96, a former seamstress, “debuting” in the “care workers play”, enthused: “I feel so energised.”
Meanwhile, at a Henry VI workshop in Blackpool, I was introduced to Mickey Horrocks who told me: “This has been my dream since I was younger. Shakespeare helped me get through being bullied at school, I’d read the
‘By making everyone an artist you risk stripping the term of all meaning’
plays and act out the parts.”
In fact, the notion that the non-trained may well act and speak differently, and yes, whisper it, in a less markedly competent fashion than battle-hardened thesps, can be a counterintuitive plus. We can marvel at low expectations exceeded, at hurdles overcome, at unexpected resonances. Whyman is adamant about the issue of quality in verse-speaking: “The bar for me is: can you understand the words, can you understand the rhythm? If that’s happening, that’s crystalline clarity. I’m interested in it sounding like a real person, then we will hear why these plays have lasted so long.”
There are some hugely persuasive proselytisers for this brave new world, and they’re helping to shape the agenda. Tom Morris, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, advises: “The Arts Council and others are rightly excited about what might happen if we share creative opportunity more widely and radically. We can’t and shouldn’t pretend to know what might come out of that.” Fine, but, less willing to put their head above the parapet, another director privately cautions: “I worry that ‘art’ has become a dirty word. ‘Let’s create’ might mean ‘let’s destroy the individual artist’. By making everyone an artist don’t you render the term meaningless?” Used sparingly and sensitively, community theatre could be a priceless catalyst for re-energising our theatre culture and re-engaging the public. Allowed too much sway, and an affirmation of what ordinary people can do on stage might be a licence for mediocrity, dragging the art-form down. Last word to Blakey, though, confident that theatre can square the circle: “For me, the work has to be excellent because of the people involved, not in spite of them. And can be.”
‘The Key Workers Cycle’ runs at the Almeida, London N1 (020 7359 4404), Mar 9-12; almeida.co.uk; ‘Henry VI: Rebellion’ runs at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford (01789 331111), www.rsc.org.uk; April 1 – May 28; ‘The Doncastrian Chalk Circle’ runs at Cast, Doncaster (01302 303 959), Aug 27-29;