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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Self Indulgent Meditation Part 47

I might have a habit of spamming Facebook everytime I write a new entry, but more personal entries like this tend to  be set to one side. I don't think they are interesting enough to boast about - the point of the blog is to alert potential audiences to stuff I think is cool, and my egotistical musings are more of a side-bar. Unfortunately, I do feel the need to add the odd meditation on my beliefs and intentions.

Hopefully, these interludes make sense of my idiosyncratic attitude to criticism. For the record, I call it Radical Subjectivity, which refuses the hope of an objective opinion and highlights the writer's own experience to give context to the review. I throw out the odd straight review, even here, because I want to prove I can still write them. And yes, I am looking for work.

I have a fundamental belief that everytime anyone goes to the theatre, the world becomes a marginally better place. That is because I believe that being part of an audience, and having a shared experience, and being presented with a version of reality, is an intrinsic good. This also applies to art galleries, film showings, music gigs, anything where the artist dictates the location and  time. Community performance is probably even better, but I am still grappling with that.

Combined with this blog's need to be fed (I can't keep the big readership without constant up-dating. That is the way of the web), I am willing to write about as much performance as press agents can provide. Within that, there are plays I can get very enthusiastic about, and others I am less inclined to push.

This is a matter of personal taste. I don't want to become a shrill side-show barker, supporting all of Scotland's theatre indiscriminately. Equally, I don't want to just bang on about experimental physical theatre and ignore anything more mainstream. Just because I am pretentious doesn't mean that there is a true hierarchy of art.

I am  hoping that posts like this one put my choices in context, and make it clearer why I favour certain artistic endeavours. I am trying to find a way to allow the reader to react to my opinion, and be aware of how I make them.

One trick I am trying is to insult myself. If a flame war begins, I have said far worse about myself.

Apathy for the Devil

It is unfair to judge Nick Kent against an ideal that exists only in my head – although his Apathy for the Devil is, amongst other things, an attempt to square the writer’s artistic ambitions against his critical discipline. Effectively a contemporary morality tale disguised as a memoir of 1970s’ rock’n’roll, Apathy is a catchy, compulsive reflection on a life dedicated not to making art but writing about it.

The critical autobiography is a logic step for the post-modern novel: it doesn’t allude to influences, rather names and analyses them, and weaves Kent’s life around the music and musicians that dominated his career on NME. And while he can be generous – his attitude towards Bob Dylan’s Christian conversion is temperate and respectful, and his descriptions of Bowie, Iggy Pop and Keith Richards stop just on the right side of awe – he is unsparing in nailing his own weaknesses and those whom he feels went beyond an artistic rebellion into sociopathy. If the final entries – a discography – tend to the sentimental, Kent is willing to attack undeserved reputations and point at the void, identifying the eyes that stare back and shaming them. Sid Vicious gets a well-deserved doing.

The tension in Apathy is between Kent’s realisation that the music he loved came from a crapsack world of vacuity, and that his heroes rarely lived up to their self-importance. Kent never makes it explicit, but the irony remains: he might reject Jagger and all his works, but without his ilk, his own role as critic is pointless. That’s the pain I recognise, and why I admire his attempt to critique from within an autobiographical context.

There are some odd failings – when he claims to have studied linguistics, he calls the course “the study of English language” (which it isn’t), before describing a course that sounds like English Literature. Whether he is setting himself up early as an unreliable narrator, or was on a course with an identity crisis is never clear: he does have a tendency to insist on his interpretations as accurate (Malcolm McLaren as an opportunist not a situationist, Vicious as a thug, Chrissie Hynde rewriting their early relationship), and even claims objectivity for his writing. Then again, he nails Jimmy Pursey (hooligan rocker deluding journalists that he has a hot-line to a notional group called “The Kids”) and his ability to trace punks emergence from earlier rock lineages is impressive.

Apathy for the Devil is a resource for the critic. Not so much for the portraits of the great, good and gibbous of the 1970s – Tony Parsons is not that interesting, and even Robert Plant seems to be little more than a generic rock decadent – but for his attempt to escape the dry limitations of the critic as reviewer. He presents a life rich in experience and examines the impact of art on his existence. It’s a shame that so much of the music has less ambition or integrity than Kent’s own work – frankly, Ted Nugent’s albums will never rescue him from being a Republican bigot – and it is a relief that Kent found his moment of spiritual redemption. He deserved it far more than Sid Vicious deserved his hagiography. And maybe this is a map towards the ideals I cherish – Radical Subjectivity and the Critical Art.

Mr Criticulous at The Arches

Having spent the last week in a box in The Arches' foyer - any more explanation than that tends to get complicated and loses the mystery of Critical Confessions, my solo show - I have had a great deal of time to think. Apart from being disappointed with the number of people not turning up after booking a slot, even though I give away a free gift to every punter who dares break the seal on my door, I've been excited by the experience, and can't thank LJ at The Arches enough for trusting me to do this.

Critical Confessions came out of my interest in crossing the line between performance and criticism. It's a bit like a confession booth at church, or Santa's Grotto, or a lap dance. It is unashamedly questioning and intellectual, although the latter depends more on the audience than the star turn.

Without giving out any names, two of the Glasgow performers whom I most admire came in to see me perform. That did frighten me, but this leaves a little message to the rest of the Live Art Young Team: what is keeping you away? Slots free on Tuesday.

Better Criticism Through Self Hatred

It's a timely reminder, in the run-up to the Fringe. Sometimes it is easy to forget why I continue to go to the theatre and refuse to buy a television. For my parents, throwing away my successful career as a Latin teacher to become a critic was senseless. Every time I queue up to get my brain-fixing medication prescription filled, I do wonder...

The cliché is that critics are failed artists. That isn’t true for me: I hate scripts too much to ever want to write one, and the only choreography I want to do with dancers would probably get me arrested if I put it between the proscenium arch. Criticism is a form of passive-aggression, though: it is my art, and like Woody Allen at the end of Annie Hall, I make it to repair the shit that my life has become.

The tiny things that hurt – the mentioned-in-passing boyfriend, the wound deep into my romantic soul, the job opportunity that disappears, the friend too drunk to talk, getting stopped by the police for jumping a stop sign, the days spent in an office when the Glasgow summer presents its one day of sunshine – all the little pieces of crap luck and miscommunication that add up to an imprecise melancholia. This fuels me as much as grave social injustice or the break-up of my once happy home. It keeps me going back to the theatre, hoping that this time there will be that moment of transcendence, that hope, that structural perfection that wipes away the flawed, incomprehensible reality that I inhabit.

And then to write about it, to lose myself in descending deeper into that maelstrom, to pretend that the stage is more real, more true, more authentic, clinging to the vague hope that there is a shape to the universe, that there is a God, and that in some way, some play will give me the secret code.

I’ve been told that my criticism denies the idea of a great meta-narrative to the universe. I think that means that I can’t see a big story behind everything.

I have said that my criticism isn’t a bunch of reviews, it’s a novel that can be read in any order. That means I am a pretentious arse.

When I was teaching, I told my pupils that art was a mirror in which we find ourselves. That means I really should not have worked in primary schools.

So getting mildly wounded, having to drag my battered emotions offstage while maintaining that Mr Darcy-meets-Jack Kerouac persona, pretending that I have to get the next train when all I am really doing to ending a conversation that makes me want to weep… that ought to get most of the previews I need to do done for the Fringe in the next two days.