Saturday 2 February 2013

Middle Class - Er, Not Sure What That Is

The Guardian is probably my natural newspaper. It's left of centre - although I get frustrated by the left's frequent posturing on behalf of a notional "working class" - and intelligent. It takes theatre seriously and has a couple of superb critics, Lyn Gardner and Michael Billington, whom I love and wish would just retire. Its commitment to the internet extends to opening discussions about its article, bespeaking a reflexive consciousness. And it has a rather interesting article by Billington about the content of scripted drama.

Billington once wrote a magisterial study of twentieth century  UK theatre which emphasises its relationship to the British political climate. He is aware of theatre's social role and context, and his latest article begins with a worry that it has become "inescapably middle-class." There's a hint of nostalgia when he looks back on a past that produced kitchen sink drama, and its "unpatronising portrayal of working-class life."

Billington's faith in the generation of writers who produced The Kitchen (Wesker) and A Taste of Honey comes from his belief that they included lives that has been excluded from earlier scripts. The "well-made play" and the popularity of Noel Coward had frequently been preoccupied with the wealthier spectrum of society and while the revolutionary moment of the Angry Young Men was not perhaps as sudden as it has been depicted (the now unfashionable George Bernard Shaw had been doing "issues" on stage since the 1890s), it certainly marked a new energy in theatre. 

There is also a very rich tradition of political theatre in Britain: Billington's book traces it. Even the wild authors of the neo-brutalist school (Kane et al) acknowledged the influence of the times on their scripts, which were often more violent versions of the European absurdist school. 

But surveying the current scene - quoting the Royal Court's Dominic Cooke - Billington concludes that theatre has lost "contact with those who exist below a certain income." Truth is, theatre never had contact with those below a certain income: unless it's Mischief La Bas and their policy of giving performances that are free at the point of performance, it costs cash to get a seat. Truth is, my income would not allow me to see most of the plays I review. 

There is an uneasy association in Billington's definition of "working class" between a cultural proletarianism and poverty, and he assumes that plays about the working class are a connection to the working class. One of the first comments beneath the article sets him straight.

MattB75
I'm always sceptical about how much the supposed explosion of kitchen sink drama in the 50s really was 'working class theatre' and how much it was poverty-porn...
I wonder if fringe theatre did, and continues, to do more to bring theatre to a different audience (regardless of the material) than putting on a play about poor people at a poncy theatre.

This is followed by a few cheeky slaps at the middle-class nature of critics and demands that Billington ought to spread his net further afield, while fellow Guardian contributor Andrew Hayden points out that his article on a similar topic quotes John McGrath (often seen as one of Scotland's most important political theatre-makers) on the failure of the 1950s generation to do much more than find a way to package working class drama for a bourgeois audience. 

Elsewhere on The Guardian site, Lyn Gardner discussed the rise of the political play: while it is not inevitable that plays about the working class are political (Mrs Brown's Boys?), it seems that there is plenty of material Billington could be enjoying. And while he complains that too many contemporary plays are about the financially comfortable, Shakespeare had a habit of filling his scripts with kings and princes - did these "exclude" the working classes?

In Scotland, there is one theatre that has always supported working class theatre: The Pavilion. It has a reputation for a pantomime in bad taste, shoddy production values and an obsession with incidents from Glasgow's recent history. It's also the place where Mrs Brown visited in Glasgow, before the bizarrely unfunny TV series was commissioned. There's plenty of working class theatre there, but it is largely ignored by the critics. This irony is summed up in the final comment on Billington's article.


Rodladder
I was recently accused of being patronising by saying that one of the aims of Red Ladder's work is to entice working class audiences back into the theatre by making work which - to quote John McGrath - is a 'good night out'. 
Last saturday night was the finale of our run of shows about a 60's kitchen sink family of strikers called Sex and Docks and Rock n Roll written by Boff Whalley... Several reviewers complained that the piece (described as an anarchist pantomime) wasn't "deep enough." To the 350 raucous people who sang along and shouted and heckled at us on Saturday night the evening was a good laugh with politics thrown in and an opportunity for me to tell a joke about ATOS deeming Mrs Thatcher fit for work.


Apart from making me reluctant to make grand pronouncements about "the nature of theatre," Billington's article is provocative, questioning the role of theatre in the twenty-first century in the context of a commitment to inclusion. While he admits that "middle class dilemmas" are always a fit subject for drama (although they are quite often quite boring to someone who hasn't eaten properly for two days), he seems to be longing for a return to a time when theatre had something to say about the conditions of the less advantaged. 

However, his suggestion that the current content of scripts - which could be expanded to include the way that more experimental performance frames their format - is responsible for the exclusion of a certain class fails to acknowledge that the real barrier to entry is probably financial.  
























twishbuilder


28 January 2013 10:55pmLink to this commentRecommend
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I wonder, Michael, if it's worth looking at the class background of our front line critics, as well as recent theatre output? Just that it's not the most diverse group of people, is it? Maybe having the critical establishment be quite so homogenous actively encourages theatre away from depicting the lives of the less well off?
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Guardian contributor
AndrewHaydon


29 January 2013 12:01pmLink to this commentRecommend
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I've written a piece about much the same thing, quoting John McGrath on the Royal Court of the 50s and 60s:


"Its greatest claim to social significance is that it produced a new ‘working-class’ art, that it somehow stormed the Winter Palace of bourgeois culture and threw out the old regime and turned the place into a temple of workers’ art. Of course it did nothing of the kind. What Osborne and his clever director Tony Richardson achieved was a method of translating some areas of non-middle-class life in Britain into a form of entertainment that could be sold to the middle classes."



Riverman


29 January 2013 4:15pmLink to this commentRecommend
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@AndrewHayden - many thanks for the link to your excellent blogpost. I was about to write a response to Michael's article, but you've framed the terms of the debate far more clearly than I would have and altered the way I was going to express myself.

I can fairly be accused of verging on (!) the solipsistic when posting on here sometimes, but in this case it's inevitable, as I knew John McGrath back in the early '80s when I wrote a play for 7:84. He was an inspirational artist who taught me a lot and helped me make sense of my own rather chaotic political views. The play I wrote was, rightly, never performed - it wasn't much good. But I also found I had problems with some elements of his artistic philosophy - perhaps because I come from the Southern working class, and had been exposed to bourgeois culture, through school, at an earlier age than most people were, I didn't find that culture intimidating so much as a challenge, and it certainly never occurred to me to reject it altogether. There was a long-running debate in the New Statesman at this time about whether radical theatre would best succeed by infiltrating and gradually overturning bourgeois hegemony (god, the lingo still sticks like stale cigarette smoke!) or whether the creation of a wholly new type of theatre should be fought for. Although the debate ended in a draw, the arts council ultimately won on penalties, of course, and notions of a truly radical new theatre were expunged.

It's interesting that you quote Mike Bradwell in your piece, too, since I was also working with Mike at that time, and have continued to do so. Although the original Hull Truck Theatre Co's work was miles away from 7:84's, both companies had the phrase "a good night out" hard-wired into their thinking, and that's what made them popular and accessible to a non-bourgeois audience. I've tried to stick to that principle ever since - no matter how bleak or upsetting the events in my plays, I try my best never to let the audience go home feeling they've been lectured or harangued, or to feel that their intelligence has been belittled or insulted. And this is a problem that our theatre's been struggling with for years now: I accepted early on that a 'working class' theatre was never going to come into existence in the way McGrath and others envisioned it - as other posters have pointed out, there's too much competition from films/tv etc and then there's the sheer careerist middle-classness of our arts establishment to contend with. And as Bradwell's pointed out, the carpet-bagging admin types have colonised the arts, and theatre in particular since it was marketised, and created a managerial top-heavy beast that's very careful about who it will and won't let in (the usual disclaimer about honourable exceptions being made). So if, like some of us, you believe that British history consists to a large degree of class war, fought to varying levels of ferocity, depending on the times, then you're forced to concede that for now at least, we lost. And, interestingly considering how passionate I am about education, I think the explosion of playwriting and theatre studies courses has played a part in this. We're now producing hundreds of people every year who see the logical outcome of their degree to be a career in the theatre, or writing for tv, or both, and we see a whole new layer of bureacratic intervention to facilitate this. And the standardisation and group-think inherent in this situation, with its carefully chosen canon and set of rules, has become just another stifling brake on the radicalism and spontaneity which are vital to any art form, not to mention the debate of bigger questions such as this one. How many playwrights under the age of forty or so currently performed in our theatres haven't taught, or been taught, or both, playwriting? Is that because they're better than those who haven't done a course? Or because the gatekeepers adhere to the rules of academic theatre just as firmly as the administrators adhere to the iron rules of the market? When you hear these people describe their creative output as 'the product' you must surely know something's wrong.

One other element of the debate is the obvious one that what is 'working class' today is a dystopian mile away from what working class was in the post-war years until the '90s. In a sense, McGrath's point about the National, Court etc presenting working people's lives for the entertainment of the bourgeoisie is truer today than when he first pointed it out. But today's atomised, fragmented section of society previously known as working class deserves its own genuine voices speaking the truth about their lives, not some sentimental, faux-liberal depiction of a whole class of victims. As Trevor Griffiths wrote in his contribution to the Guardian's obituary: "John McGrath was the luck we had, all of us, whether we know it or not. And while his life may be over, I get the feeling his work is just beginning".
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