Integration and Separation in Scottish Theatre – we need to get collectively organised to be individually effective.

I am one of the lucky ones.  At the end of March I was writing for/working with The Lyceum, Perth Rep, the Citz, the National Theatre of Scotland and Raw Material Arts on four different projects that ALL connect to each other.  I have also worked with Dundee Rep, the Traverse, the Playwrights’ Studio and Oran Mor in the last 12 months. So I have an immediate and ongoing connection with them all, but then so does almost everyone I know who works as a freelancer…actors, musicians, directors, designers...Again, like all of them, I know absolutely nothing about what comes next in the industry I work in even now, and have done for thirty six years.  So while I feel very much involved with what happens to any and each of them, while they constitute a unity in my working life, there is, as far as I know, as yet no common plan for performing arts in Scotland to get through the consequences of the pandemic, let alone emerge healthily on the other side.

I know that the Federation of Scottish Theatre and Creative Scotland each in their own way represent the sector as a whole…and are in constant conversation with each other and others…but neither is in a “leadership” position. They can’t (again, as far as I know) come up with a rationale let alone a plan…for each stage of our recovery, let alone a strategic approach that has an end goal in mind for where we would LIKE to end up in five years’ time.  The changes that surviving this pandemic will take, with or without an effective and universal vaccine, demand exactly the kind of strategic direction that reactive organisations like these are simply not set up to provide.

Again, I would be delighted to learn differently, but I know as little about my own industry as I do about the  question of a vaccine in the production of assisted or unassisted collective (rather than “herd”) immunity  that, of course, pre-occupies us all as crucial to every kind of employment and activity. But I am taking it as axiomatic that it will be quite impossible to envisage audiences voluntarily filling theatres or music venues the way they did before March for a very appreciable time to come. It is equally obvious, then, that if we want to sustain …and even develop…public performance as a National Cultural Asset in the period BEFORE such immunity is achieved (with or without a vaccine, over one year or five…or even ten) then we need a vision for the future around which we can coalesce as a culture.  We need a new deal for that future in order to justify and focus what we do IN THE MEANTIME for as long as that “mean” time lasts.

When the “new normal” arrives, we need to be organised to meet it with strength and decency. And with audiences made of voters, taxpayers and Lottery players on our side. If we imagine that will just arrive like the blessings of heaven, we had better think again.

I have elsewhere proposed a medical metaphor of three stages of recovery…convalescence, recuperation and “the new normal.”  My firm belief is that we need a plan to integrate all three stages together…that we will best organise and focus a prescriptive recovery if we agree in advance what we are recovering FOR.

What rather alarms me is a sense, probably exemplified in the UK by current plans to stage the World Snooker championships in the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield while the Crucible is still closed as a performance venue, that a chaotic and experimental paradigm is being imposed on the performing arts in the UK as a whole purely in the interests of commerce.  I don’t think in Scotland we should be gambling with the lives and health of performers (in this case, snooker players) or audiences (in this case, snooker fans).  I don’t think anyone I know “in the business” would want to do such a thing.  The only way I can see any cast in any theatre getting involved in anything like public performance except as part of  a collectively agreed plan, with, crucially, a sector wide, government sanctioned  sharing of risk, commercial and moral. Sharing of risk alone demands a collective strategy. Such a strategy cannot come from nowhere and it cannot start from nothing. I cannot see any theatre being able to hire the starriest of actors at the highest of wages to attract an audience paying the highest of ticket prices under any other conditions.

So as someone connected to all of the institutions of Scottish theatre, but representing no single one of them, I have taken it upon myself (partly to assuage my own fears and for the feeling of doing SOMETHING!! And not because anybody has actually asked for my opinions) to day dream a little, to communicate these daydreams to friends and colleagues in the form of these blogs.  To make suggestions about hybrid online and safe/live events for the period of what I have called convalescence…and how these might be expanded in a coordinated way during a period of recuperation very much involving audiences and the public services…all within a vision for the kind of theatre I think we may need in what will be, in economic terms, an extremely challenging economic environment for audiences and those public services, and for local and National and UK government.

I want to work on and develop and discuss these ideas with some sense of collective agency rather than my own individual therapy. I want to hold discussions with some sense of purpose. I am  happy about having my ideas shot down as part of these conversations…all I am doing is speculating in ways naturally conditioned by my own tastes and interests as both a maker and watcher of performances. I think, however, that a leadership role for the sector as a whole HAS to be assumed by SOMEONE in order to make these conversations productive of agreed, collective action. We need a policy involving broadcasters and government as well as theatres, and that demands, in turn, that we coalesce around a vision of the performing arts in Scotland as a declared and coherent public good. We need to accept that we to discipline and direct our ideas around serving that good. Forming this policy is urgent…but difficult, controversial, political…and, it may well be painful too. Hence, leadership is required…someone or other, collectively or institutionally or even individually has to be prepared to take the decisions and the blame the pelters that will follow.

Not easy or comfortable, like wearing a mask in Asda. But the alternative is chaos driven by purely commercial considerations and/or a political agenda imposed on our industry by forces and factors that do not meet what I believe to be its already shared values of public service and cultural ambition. In conditions of chaos, the bad guys win…and if we want to get through this and come out better and stronger and more efficient than how we went into it, then we have to get organised. And we need to do it now. We need a social audit…that is, we need to make a LIST of all the good we already do in schools, community groups, prisons, in care homes, in health care, and with those with special needs in the widest social and geographical sense.  We need to look at that list and make it bigger and better, and more coordinated with local and national government. We have the EARN the level of support we are going to need. We can’t sit like Andrew Lloyd Webber and just expect it. We don’t, most of us, go to dinner with the right people.

Second and possibly most urgently and importantly at this moment, we need to recognise the huge political journey we’ve already made between now, writing this at the end of July, and when I first started speculating about all this in public at the end of May. Political will is with us, and it is being expressed not just as good will, but in the form of money, both as Barnett Consequentials controlled by the Scottish Government as well as directly from the Scottish Government itself. We are in possession, here and now, of a moment quite possibly as unique and formative as the creation of the Scottish Arts Council and the Edinburgh Festival at the end of the 1940s.  To squander that now, to simply let things happen without some effort to intervene, will leave the field open to the sharpest elbowed, and put us back decades in terms of cultural and social progress.

If we end up with an industry trying to producing Shaftesbury Avenue shows for Shaftesbury Avenue ticket prices, we are not going to make it. And we won’t deserve to. So let’s do better.