LUNCH WITH CECILY
When needing to bounce ideas off someone, discuss bigger pictures, context, history, case studies and the state of the world, who better than Cecily O’Neill.
She hates (and I don’t think she’ll mind me saying this), the term ‘Applied Theatre’. It’s like - something wrong? Apply a bit a theatre … like a sticking plaster … and everything will be alright.
Which let’s face it - is exactly what’s happening. As part of the government’s agenda to improve health, they are encouraging the NHS to prescribe drama classes to combat loneliness, or social anxiety, boost confidence, or support mental health and physical well-being - while simultaneously cutting arts budgets!
Here’s a radical idea! How about instead of ‘applying some theatre’, we build theatre and drama into our social fabric?
Actually, that’s not a radical idea at all.
It’s a concept everyone in theatre and education has been saying ever since I started working in this profession … even BEFORE I started working in this profession, and it’s likely to be an argument that will continue long after I’ve left it!
It makes no sense to ignore the benefits and yet, theatre and drama is always having to fight for its place in society.
The Have's and the Have-Nots
Why is it - genuine question here - when Eton boasts that “There are around 20 theatrical productions staged in a typical year, ranging from full scale musicals and Jacobean classics,” and “There are three different theatre spaces, staffed by professional theatre practitioners. This includes a resident designer as well as a Theatre Director and Filmmaker-in-Residence, who are appointed every year to bring the most up-to-date perspectives into the department.” that the provision for us plebs is FUCK ALL.
I am - for the first time, working with a generation of young people who don’t know how to play. Who struggle to embrace mistakes. Who are fixated on ‘how to get it right’. Yet ironically enough, the jobs market - in particular the corporate sector - are crying out for people who have the skills to do just that … ‘think outside the box’ at they put it!
Now I know that in addition to the cuts within council budgets and the lack of drama provision in the (particularly primary) education system, not to mention the subject’s constant fight for survival, we are also working with a generation of young people who are navigating an online world. Social media may well have a part to play in all of this - but I personally think that blaming social media for young people’s desire to ‘get it right’ just shifts the focus away from the real culprit - the lack of arts provision in state education, and the lack of respect drama has in society.
My daughter is currently studying GSCE drama (I didn’t push her to do it - honest - but I’m not surprised she values it, having grown up in the theatre from the age of 6 weeks old when I first brought her into a workshop with me). Her frustration is with pupils who have taken drama because they think it’s an easy subject. One they can just mess about in. Why? Because they’ve never been introduced to it properly in primary school. Because it’s never had the status it deserves in the system. And what’s even more upsetting … is I remember the exact same frustrations when I was studying the subject in the 1980’s!
I do get tired of the struggle - and it’s a very real struggle. I recently attended a morning session entitled “What’s the point of theatre anyway?” - hosted by Brighton People’s Theatre and facilitated by Tim Crouch in which I left re-enthused to fight for the place of theatre in the world, faced with the very real predicament it currently finds itself in. But there will come a time, when I no longer have that energy or that drive. I’m 52 - and the world is changing, and theatre needs to as well … I have no doubt to its relevance, but I do think the industry needs a radical rethink on how we make it and where it sits in society - but again, not a new idea … thank you Joan Littlewood … and thank you too for the surprise I found on the inside page when I opened a second-hand copy of your autobiography.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Books I'm reading this month:
Joan’s Book, Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History As She Tells It
by Joan Littlewood
Theatre Games
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