Scottish Theatre: Back to Normal? That Train has left the Station. Time to get Real.

 

A lot of people in Scottish Theatre, as in the wider culture, are still behaving as if “getting back to normal” is some sort of option for our industry and our wider society.

There is no such place as “normal” any more, if indeed there ever was. What there was, an eternity and six months ago, was an amalgam of pragmatic, political and self interested arrangements and negotiating points with audiences, tax and lottery payers and local, national and Union governments.

The terms and dimensions of those arrangements and negotiations have been smashed to bits. The funding solutions that are predicated on there being a way back to what no longer exists are  fundamentally flawed and distract us from real possibility with a chimera.

The rules are going to be different. If people of good faith and public purpose, and not merely the usual set of sharp elbowed bastards, want to INFLUENCE those rules, they have no option but to start from the ground up, and from first principles. 

Our task, then, is to measure and analyse the ground, and work on the design for rebuilding…using the materials, human and otherwise, that we already have to build with. Evolution has always worked that way. We need to evolve CONCIOUSLY to fit the new environment. Because whether we want to live there or not, like the Dodo, that is where we are going to find ourselves.

The only way to steer our evolution is to be resolutely future facing and spend the next two years that it is likely going to take to get our audiences “back” to think about building audiences from a wholly new, and let’s be honest, devastated ground zero. If we merely try to restore the inequities and paralysis of the status quo ante virum we are going to lose the public and political support we have now. We have to EARN that support in the here and now by redesigning the offer of the future we are making to the people of this country. 

I believe strongly that the best way to serve the common good and our own place within it is to firstly accept that “the normal” is never coming back, and second, to replace the aspiration to return to it with the "future facing" aspiration to serve our our country and its comminities in the smartest, most passionate ways our collective creativity can surely devise. We need the organising idea of a better future, not a lost past, as an aiming point for the decisions we make to get us through these strange days.  

I believe passionately that if we take the principles that we already hold, the values that we have already espoused as a guide to where we start, and the “future theatre” of Scotland as our aiming point, we can get where the public needs us to go. A lot of the principles are already haunting our conversations. When we speak of “the place” agenda…of the aspiration to make each locality of this small country as good as we can for the most people to live in most of the time…we are tapping into how we might hope to deliver the “well being” model which is already culturally replacing the governing "economic growth" paragdigm of the past forty years.

To get down to what the specifics of what the "future facing paradogm" might look like, back in January, the Culture Strategy laid out five areas to guide thinking on cultural provision, its management, employment and delivery:  

Diversity (social and geographic as well as ethnic and ability focused)  

Infrastructure (in service of the wellness and place agendae, as well as the diverity agenda)

Skills (the educational application of drama skills across health and education, as well as education for the practice of the dramatic arts)

Sustainability (making it possible for career development and talent retention to take place in a small nation, and in the localities of a small nation…as well as create a lasting relationship with an audience)

International – fostering and creating an international presence and market for what we produce here, and, crucially, the WAY we produce it…

All the values we need to Face the Future already exist. But to deliver coherently and efficiently on these we need a deep change of emphasis towards a new theatre that is built upon those values, and a recognition that we CAN build from the ground up, because ON THE GROUND is where we are. I believe that the only way to survive the current crisis is to focus on being able to turn aspiration into management structure... with a clarity and economy that a largely reactive funding policy at national and local government levels has been less than agile at delivering up till now. 

At a local and national level, we are going need a much more positive sense of direction than the "hands off" principles we inherited from the dear, lost paternalist days of the founding of the Arts Councils in the wake of World War Two - that founding, of course, being ITSELF a response to the crises of the Great Depression and the First and Second wars...We need to do it again. Like Beveridge, we need to plan for after the war. 

For example, we speak ambitiously of a rights based provision of culture. How does that egalitarian vision fit with the current ownership and organisational structures which existed in March, and which it has been the aim of government funding to date, to PRESERVE? This is perhaps the heart of present controversy, and we haven’t got close to even looking at it yet.  

But just as with our wider economy and society, we are not going to get there painlessly.  We need to be prepared, in the name of the principles we have articulated, and of the future, to be just a little ruthless with the vested interests of the very past that we have lost.The clock, as has been pointed out in other political contexts, is ticking.

We need a Commission for the Arts, here in Scotland, with a five year remit to deliver a well being based, locality based, need and entitlement based structure of Arts provision, that envisages, for example, ensembles in Dumfries and Aberdeen and Tobermory. Let’s talk about regular touring and residencies, let’s talk about wellness and place. Let’s talk about a universal income for artists in exchange for serving our local and national communities...(and who might or might not qualify for it...gosh, that’ll be fun!)

It won't BE fun. We are going to have to confront a lot about the way we've done things up till now that simply won't do in the future. We need to compile a coherent, joined up vision of what that future is going to look like if we are to have any hope of getting there in any kind of decent shape.

And let's do it now. Because we are starting from ALMOST nothing. We are ALMOST nowhere. And that might just be a good place to start.