The Audition Question 2021 Version

Ever since I opened The MTA back in 2009 there's always been a rumbling of grievance around the fact that drama colleges charge for auditions. It's one of the regular 'hot topics' that pop up from time to time.

Before I opened the college I remember reading somewhat aghast as one of the main drama colleges unwittingly (I suspect) informed the members of The Stage Forum that it auditioned X amount of students/year, leading a whole load of us to do the sums. They easily made in excess of £105K/year in audition fees alone. 

If you're unfamiliar with the drama school/conservatoire model you pay for the privilege of getting seen, and probably rejected (as the odds are really stacked against the majority of people due to (back then) the numbers of students that they could accept/year). Auditions back then varied from £25-£75, plus you have to factor in travel expenses, possibly overnight accommodation etc. Now if you're getting an amazing workshop for that money maybe you could argue a case for the cost - but at some colleges, applicants are getting 10mins of somebody's time, at other colleges applicants get cut before being able to show the panels their full skillset, at some colleges you're seen in groups of over 100 people! Years later I discovered that at some colleges if you were successful during their first-round you were gifted the right to pay some more to get your next round audition?

I'm not blameless, we charged a nominal fee for years, as at first it was felt that if we charged nothing we would be underselling our course, so in order to 'fit in' we should value ourselves with a fee in order for people to take us seriously.

We often spoke about scrapping it, but as our policy was to only audition a small number of people each day we were despairing with the number of no-shows, so we not only kept the fee but increased it in order to deter people from wasting our audition places.  Yet still, we discussed it as it just didn't really fit with what we wanted to represent.

Susan Elkin from The Stage used to regularly call this out, and indeed I had many a conversation with her as I grappled with how we could manage the no shows whilst still placing a value on the course. I salved my own conscience by proudly seeing on every single anonymous feedback form since we opened that applicants felt that we had given them value for money. We had spent the day with them, we knew their names, we had workshopped, we had chatted, we had attempted to be helpful whatever the outcome was, and we would always give each applicant written feedback. We only have one round, but then we only audition a maximum of 15 on any one day, so we got the opportunity to see everything that we needed to see on that day, thereby minimizing the cost of a recall. 

Then back in 2017, we introduced #auditionfromhome. A self-tape first round really. Applicants could send us their self-tape and we'd advise them whether we thought that we'd a good fit for each other just based on the skill set. It meant that we were able to save people the additional expense of travel and accommodation if it was clear from the tape that we wouldn't be the best college for them. Interestingly when The Stage ran our press release I had a bit of flack on the old Twitter - people calling us out for making it too easy for applicants, "audition from home" they said, "how lazy". Ironic right now don't you think?

Whilst this certainly saved people some money it still didn't fit well with me.  As I bang on and on about I'm from a council estate in Swansea. My family would not have been able to afford for me to apply for lots of colleges, yet here I was - suddenly on the side of the establishment all because we couldn't grapple enough with how to solve the problem of how to place value on our time (even though the applicant's time was valuable too), and how to stop the annoying no-shows, leaving people waiting longer than they needed to in order to audition for us. I mean it was all rather arse about tit, wasn't it? 

So eventually we scrapped our fee. The compromise was to ask people to pay a refundable deposit in order to secure their place. They'd get it back if they turned up for the audition. We kept the day the same, a whole day audition like we'd done from the beginning, no cuts throughout the day, feedback to all applicants, we also threw in some comp tickets to watch one of our shows if applicants wanted to see us in action. Our audition panel was the same as when we started - the senior faculty. The people that the applicants would work with if they'd been successful.

When the pandemic hit we (like the rest of the world) moved straight to zoom. In fact, we were the first drama college to move our auditions to zoom. Obviously, that was just timing as opposed to us attempting to be a 'first', we already had auditions booked in for the first week of lockdown. We had a few practice runs at it and found a way that we felt worked for us, and hoped that it would work for the applicants.

In truth, we were shocked. The interactive online audition told us everything that we needed to know, and seemingly the applicants were leaving satisfied too. We'd changed the day to a half-day in order to avoid zoom fatigue, and we stopped the feedback as by moving it online we committed to only seeing 6-7 students at a time.  

The zoom auditions worked so well we announced back in August 2020 that we would be keeping them post-pandemic. It was a great way to see people without them having to pay a penny (other than the refundable deposit). Finally, it had all fallen into place. We started this academic year giving students the option of a half-day virtual audition or a whole day in-person audition, and that's the way that it's going to stay now I think. I mean who knows what will be thrown at us next. Having recently been bought an Oculus it's not that hard to envisage a VR audition room within the next few years, and I can't wait to embrace it (if only because I love a gadget).

Our auditions cost us money, I have to pay for staff to be in the room, not all of them are on salaries, and even for those that are, I need to pay for staff to cover their classes that day. We lose the potential of a room hire in the audition space - a much-missed source of income at the moment, as it's those rehearsal room hires that pay into our Hardship Fund. The admin takes time, and of course in business time always equates to cost. However, it is our cost to absorb. I got that wrong in the beginning. I just wanted to 'fit into the establishment'. For those of you that have followed The MTA's journey, you'll know how dumb that thought was given that we are forever the course on the outside of the establishment, doing things our way, from the 2 year model to a whole school approach to mental health.

Of course, what's prompted this blog is the social media call to arms to abolish audition fees at a time when a lot of colleges are just doing self-tapes. The irony of somebody calling this out as wrong whilst simultaneously starting a Go Fund Me in order to help people who are financially struggling sums up the disconnect in our industry. 

We shout about what's not right, we celebrate and indeed laud any of the established colleges that knock a couple of quid off their audition fees in the name of 'opening up the room', yet fail to see the systemic failure in the way that we operate. 

Next time you're at an audition, or indeed sat in a lecture theatre on the first day of your course, or see a college online telling you how 'lucky' you are to be offered a place because they've auditioned thousands of people - do the math.  Due to how many people we'd audition on one day we never made money on our auditions. I'm not that sure how many other colleges can say the same with their hand on their heart.

Auditions should be free. . . we got it wrong for really poor reasons actually, however, we've corrected it. Maybe the rest should too, and maybe if you're advocating for a charity or fundraiser trying to help the underprivileged pay those fees, you're inadvertently endorsing the business model.

The Working Class privilege

 It's struck me over the past few days about how we view 'other work' in order to survive. Somebody private messaged me off a tweet that I'd put out about the reality of working-class life, to say that they were currently working in a supermarket but they'd be too embarrassed to put that out on social media as they are considered a success in our industry. They weren't ashamed to be working, they just couldn't deal with people's reaction to the fact that they were working.

We know that our industry is dominated by the middle classes. We also sort of understand why - classes are a luxury and whilst they enhance a child's life, they are not as essential as food and water. Therefore in many families, they don't get privileged.

I remember a family member of mine telling their parent in front of me that they wanted to work on stage, and they were shot down in the flames of Welsh reality. "Our sort of people don't live that sort of life, get real, and get a proper job. Stop living with your head in the clouds". That desire was crushed and dismissed as quickly as the sentence was over. The family member went on to have a secure career - who's to say if they're actually happy or not, or whether they secretly still wish that they'd given their dream a chance. In our family, it just wasn't an option. I was the lucky one - my mum believed that we only had one life so we should go for broke from the off. 

For months now I've read how people have been struggling, how people have been petitioning to get more help from the government as, after all, they SHOULD be supporting the arts and our freelancers. Today the hospitality businesses are shouting the same. Where is the help? Indeed at the moment where are ANY jobs to be found. With even the reliable bar work suddenly disappearing under our COVID noses.

Here's the difference though - some people have never expected this to be easy. They've always been grafting away at various jobs in order to make ends meet. They've done that because they've been brought up to understand that that is how you survive in this world. They've understood that nothing in life is free. You put your head down and get on with it. Eventually, things might change, but for now, to survive you have to live in the moment. 

I'm proudly from a working-class background. The bank of mum and dad saved hard and made massive sacrifices to allow me to follow my 'dreams'.  Our holidays were spent for the most part growing up in some random caravan about 30 minutes from where we lived so that my dad could come down after work to join us. As life got a bit easier we upgraded to Butlins where my dad couldn't join us but there was more for the children to do (for free).  Other than those holidays I can't remember a time where as children we went to restaurants. It was only when my father was made redundant did my parents suddenly have a bit more cash to go out and about. Sadly also by this time, my mum was gradually getting ill, so those well-earned outings didn't last that long. I think that they managed about 3 foreign holidays in their lifetime. A tragedy when I think how much enjoyment they both had from them.

However, this upbringing has definitely contributed to my work ethic. You get nothing for nothing in this life. I've never signed on (when that was a thing) because I always had another skill to fall back on, which excluded me from getting a handout. I've cleaned houses, worked a bar, done so many desk jobs I've lost count, and my worse by far - cucumber packing. In other words, I was taught to do whatever I needed to do to survive. I knew that I had rent to pay and I knew that I wanted to eat - so those were my priority. 

Now for the past 20 years or so, I've been really lucky, I haven't had to do those jobs, but psychologically I'm always ready to go back to any of them (well . . . except the cucumber packing, I hated that the most). Even now that I'm a grown-up with children, I don't manage to save. Don't get me wrong we now (usually) manage a holiday once a year, but it literally takes us all year to pay for it. 

My children are no doubt bored of me going on about not expecting to have everything in life. I worry that my grown-up middle-class world will ill prepare them for the realities of life. So I probably go on about it a bit too much.

We all think that we're hard done by. I guess even more now with social media showing us everybody's edited snapshot of life. I'm forever baffled by how many people eat out so regularly or manage to get in at least one holiday a year whilst also proclaiming that they're skint. How the person one day online is proclaiming poverty then the next day they're pictured with their Starbucks? Then I remember the student that once asked for financial support at a college where I was working, only to find out years later that their parents had a couple of properties. They considered themselves skint because they were shelling out for both properties. They didn't think for one moment to sell off an asset in order to support the student. That's probably why that family will always have money and my family won't. I understand that my home is a luxury - let alone if I were in the position to have more than one property.  Or what about the friend that told me that they were so skint they were going to go on holiday to feel better? They weren't lying to me when they proclaimed themselves as skint, they thought that they were. They didn't understand that skint meant no holiday.

Right now the people breathing sighs of relief overseas. They've earned that break and that cocktail because they've been living through the pandemic. They're not being ironic, they believe it. Who am I to begrudge them a break? Then again that's not the point of this blog - it's to remind you that there are socio-economic groups far below you who also need a break, but they don't have the luxury of a holiday (or even an M&S cocktail).  How many times do we hear 'oh but I didn't pay for the holiday, it was gifted to me' so it hasn't cost me a penny? Of course, people say that to alleviate their own well-meaning guilt, but again the reality for the other classes is that they can't afford the break from work. Even if they were offered an all-expenses holiday they couldn't afford to lose the week's wages to go.

As I look around the timelines and see people struggling I also see the survivors. The people that will work through the pandemic, doing whatever/whenever to stay afloat. Their priority is to keep the roof over their head and food on the table. I also see the faux survivors - drowning their woes with a Prosecco or two whilst Instagramming their designer plates. They will be OK regardless as their safety net is strong. There are people though with no safety net. They are the ones that we need to try and help.

Our industry needs a reality check. We've been shouting at audiences for not behaving the way that we want them to behave, yet now we haven't got that audience at all, we're clinging onto their bootlegs in the hope of recapturing a moment of glory. We had started to think that the audience should be grateful to us for performing for them, whereas all the time we needed them a lot more. 

Every year at the college I bang on about the audience member who's chosen to spend their hard-earned cash on coming to see our show. They had chosen us as their luxury item, therefore we owed it to them to give them everything we had (not mark it cos we were coming up to the end of the run and were slowly getting pissed off with the management). I give that chat as I'm from that family. That is my heritage.

Here's the rub though - I'm from a privileged working-class family. A family that could save. From parents who were able to work in order to get us the things that we needed. There's a whole other level out there of families living hand to mouth, relying on food banks to get by.  How do we hear their voices in our industry, how do we support them? 

We need to hear more reality stories and less edited lifestyle posts. Keeping it real online would eventually allow more people to live the dream offline. 

So the pandemic continues . . . 

The 7 Stages of Grief - Covid style

Over the past few days, my timeline appears to be flooded with people in our industry genuinely struggling and feeling afraid for their future. The human cost of COVID is heartbreaking, the emotional cost of the pandemic though would have changed the lives of millions forever.

In many ways COVID was the great equaliser, regardless of our careers to date in the industry this microscopic germ floored us all from producers to runners, from the established stars to the new graduates, suddenly the playing field was level. However, that in itself has transpired to be unsettling.

1) SHOCK AND DISBELIEF

For the first few weeks, we were all in shock and huddled indoors reeling at the fact that our lives had turned into a SciFi movie, suddenly we were all extras in Russell T Davies' Years and Years, a programme that we'd all admired for its exceptional writing and exquisite performances by top-rate performers, yet suddenly like all of the people involved in that show, we too were all suddenly at ground zero.

I don't think that anybody in their wildest dreams could have envisaged a time when every theatre in the world would go dark?  It's no wonder we survived the first month. We were too numb to do anything else

2) DENIAL

Then came the posts where people declared cheerfully that this was almost a good thing as it would allow all of us to stop being defined by our careers after all this was an industry that had been bleeding us dry for years anyway, so we'd been given the opportunity to reboot 'life'.  A few people put out content, but the majority either stayed silent or felt the need to explain to everybody why they weren't able to put out content. Of course, in reality, we were all attempting to deal with the reality in whatever way we could. It was actually called survival, not creation.  Shows started to stream and we all bathed in the reflected glory of our friends in these shows. There were beginning to be some pluses to this mess after all. Free theatre to the masses - it was the socialist dream realised, and as we all know, most of our industry love the idea of a free theatre (even if we've failed to make it a viable concern as we've also all wanted a fair salary for the work that we do too). 

3) GUILT

However as the weeks turned to months and things slowly restarted our industry, the industry that we all believed was so vital to the health of our nation suddenly didn't matter.  Our fans appetite was being sufficiently sated by the online streaming going on, yet as Joe Public sat and enjoyed the performances, the performers and technicians were just stuck at home, not earning and not even hearing the applause that was no doubt going on in various places around the country. That same applause that actually seems to lift us up regardless of our mood, the sound that generally speaking makes us feel worthy. Self-validation is vital but the sound of applause is something different isn't it? The joy of watching our friends had somehow turned hollow and we were simply being reminded of what we had lost. We don't talk about this much but let's face it, the sound of strangers appreciating our work is the greatest drug of all. A drug that lifts us up when we feel like life is hard, that gives us an adrenaline rush so massive that many performers feel the need to artificially recreate its effects long after the curtain has come down. Well, times were certainly hard, and our 'drug of choice' just wasn't available anywhere, more than that it was now against the guidance of the government to partake in it.

4) ANGER AND BARGAINING 

As 1 month turned into 3 months and there was still no real sign of recovery for our sector, and with so many people financially struggling having fallen down the massive cracks that the treasury had created in its DIY fix of the economic crises that was the secondary disease that the country was attempting to fight, you could see people on social media losing themselves more and more.

An appallingly unjust death in the States provided the release that everybody needed.  Finally, there was a worthwhile cause to utilise all the anger and feelings of injustice that we had all been feeling. Of course, we couldn't get that angry for our own issues, as part of the problem with a global pandemic is everybody understands on one level that we actually don't know where to place the blame that we're so desperate to park up. Where do you locate the anger? We were finally able to truly bargain an explanation out of this mess. We might have felt like we were lost, but some much needed social change could grow from this anger.  This was our chance to turn the nightmare into something positive. It was like releasing the steam from a pressure cooker for a cause that most people had no doubt believed in over the years (as that is the white privileged position of choosing when to get involved in the fight for equality)

Suddenly years of niggles about everything rather unfairly in many ways diluted the main fight, relegating it some 4 months on to a well-intentioned occasional social media post again as we all got swept away into a tsunami of what felt like validated pain. 

Now that the anger was being released we got angry about literally everything and we made sure that everybody heard us (all with the hashtag #bekind). We were angry at people putting content out, we got angry at people putting positive messages out, we were angry at people saying that they were struggling, we were angry at the other industries starting back, we turned on each other as we couldn't actually scream at patient zero, the person who unwittingly started off this catastrophic chain reaction. We couldn't sit with the anger of a pandemic as that was too huge, so we turned to the minutiae of life and suddenly shouted about all the little (but important) things that have impacted us during our lives. Things that under normal circumstances we would have brushed off by now, but with nothing else to focus on for months it was time to revisit them and shout about it. We couldn't get positive strokes from an audience, but we could get a social media validation for our feelings online.

5) DEPRESSION

We've shouted and screamed albeit it virtually, in a bid to be seen and remind people that we exist as an industry, yet we've wept when we've seen the outside of the theatres converted into outside dining areas for a hospitality trade that had been suffering every bit as hard as us, but who were already permitted to go back to work. Talk about salt in the wounds.

The inevitable loss of jobs has been hard-hitting, literally every day an announcement about a theatre or a company that has had no choice but to make sweeping redundancies in the hope that this will save their business from going under. We've wept for the buildings and our memories in them, and we've wept for the people that are left stranded out in the street, weaponised with an enviable skill set but for an industry that doesn't exist.

We hear a lot about people thinking that they should retrain and move onto something else. I mean the industry has never been easy anyway, you could be waiting years for a job (literally). However, that was manageable (just) when there were clearly jobs happening. You could see the 'dream' happening for others every single day, and for many, that's enough to keep going for. If it could happen for 'them' it could happen for 'you', you've just got to hold tight and survive until it was your turn. Now though it was nobody's turn. We weren't even seeing 'what we could have won'. 

We hit the depression stage with a thud. This is different to clinical depression, it's a feeling of abject loneliness looking into an abyss, even when you're surrounded by your loved ones.  Suddenly this all feels far too big, and we are all left feeling so small and insignificant. The public are getting on with things and we've turned into Mr Cellophane. 

There are very few people in our industry that have not been told by somebody in their lives that what we do is just a hobby. I've been a professional musician for 36 years and my father still wants me to get a proper job. Suddenly the government's response to our sector has felt like every bad taxi ride conversation we've ever had.

6) RECONSTRUCTION AND WORKING THROUGH

Some 4 months later we were permitted to do outside performances. Producers and performers alike were quick to seize on this glimmer of hope. Would people want to come back to the theatre again? Had they missed us? Shows were slowly emerging, filming had restarted, jobs were appearing. Finally, theatres could open again, of course not like before, but open to try and work out how to survive this mid pandemic limbo that we find ourselves in. 

So I guess that's where lots of people are right now, which is why it's particularly tough. In order to work through this period, we're all going to have to adjust what our plans were. A temporary career to financially see us through this period? Possibly retraining in something to build up a skillset in another area. Of course, lots of us have said for years that this would have been a good idea, suddenly though it's the only idea. That's rather scary when you know that you're only really good at the one thing. . . our industry.

We are a vocational industry, our work defines us just like we define our work. That's not to say that the industry is driving us to early graves and abusing us along the way, for so many of us this is our hobby as well as our career. I don't know much about civvy street, maybe bankers feel the same about their job - though I suspect not.

We've always been the outsiders that somehow found our 'tribes'. This alone made us feel safe and contained even without putting a show into the mix. It's hard to feel the benefit of that tribe when everyone is struggling at the same time. You see it online - who's going to pick who up today?

7) ACCEPTANCE 

Well right now this is the aim I guess. We get on with doing whatever we need to do to survive, breathe and just know that in time theatre will return. Fast forward a few years and we might be able to look back on this disaster as a catalyst for real meaningful change in the world, and if we can't then I guess we just have to accept the fact that we tried, and we tried whilst surviving the most bizarre thing imaginable.

It's important to go through a process to survive this period as best that we can. We were right to be numb, sad, angry, bitter, remorseful, optimistic . . . just 'being' right now is enough. Suddenly we are all survivors

An Industry Under Attack

Whilst I've always understood the notion of an echo chamber it's really hit home this week in the most depressing of ways.

As the Tories went into overdrive to publicise their support for the arts via a £1.5billion investment I ventured outside of my personal chamber to see what the rest of the world felt about this. I had assumed that the whole of the UK was rejoicing, but boy was I surprised. My idea of the arts is now so far removed from civvy street I don't think that I've ever felt quite so 'cocooned' in my life. Seemingly we'd been fighting to save something that nobody else wanted or valued. More than that when I read what people's priorities were I had a stark understanding of how far I had traveled from my own start in life.

I whizzed back into my echo chamber wanting to be enveloped in the celebration that I'd left only to find that the celebration had already ended and now people were angry that the government had done so little so late. People who had literally posted an hour earlier about their relief were now angry.
More than that 'we' were self-policing exactly what people could and couldn't say and do. How dare some people thank the government, how dare some people not thank the government, the posts were being shot out like machine-gun fire, maybe indicative of how attacked everybody had been feeling prior to the announcement, whatever the reason I really couldn't keep up, nor did I want to. I imagined the same people that I'd virtually met outside my echo chamber the same night visiting mine. Admittedly a few people attempted to drag them in but always chastising them with a self-righteousness that's become the norm of social media during the lockdown.

We didn't stop there though - we started shouting about how we needed to build the system up in a different way when we returned. Even within our own echo chamber people and organisations that had been so scared for their future were instantly confronted with revolution without so much as a heartbeat between the announcement, relief and cries.  More this, more that all with brilliant intentions sure, but actually it's really easy to have those intentions when you yourself are cocooned. I noted the most ferocious advocates for immediate change and noted how they were very often the most privileged. 

There was no understanding of organisations losing millions and needing to break even quickly, it was all idealisms of what we should and shouldn't be doing. As if a major theatre that's been closed for 6 months is going to put on a cutting edge new work, by a new writer and cast a load of unknowns. Let's keep in mind that our understanding is that people are afraid to return to the theatre right now, so anything 'familiar' that can entice an audience back (and back quickly) will no doubt be produced. Only once we've got the confidence back of our audience can we entice them with all the brand new stuff that we've been concocting in our lockdown lives. Do I like this reality - absolutely not. I am a composer, a lyricist, I want to create new work and want somebody to put it on, however I am also pragmatic, I understand that some of these much-needed changes take a little while to implement.  More than that I understand that right now we don't have any sort of theatre so arguing between ourselves about what it should be when it returns is a middle-class fantasy. 

The theatre needs to be thoughtful with how it moves forward, somehow we need to be getting stuff on somewhere, somehow before our audiences forget what was so brilliant about us. The drive-in solution is great for some shows - at least it will remind people of what live entertainment is. Sitting resolutely with 'we won't open until the theatre is full' I fear could be part of our downfall. Being inventive and creative (which after all should be playing to our strengths) could be a quicker rebuilding of our industry.

Trust me I get the annoyance of the money going to the same old places. I've worked outside of the 'establishment' for 11 years now and believe me when I say it's bloody cold and lonely on the outside. All the funding goes to the people that have already got money. We cry out that we need more working-class actors at drama colleges, we demand greater diversity, we demand that they're more accessible but who's paying the bills for all of these ideals? It's been heartbreaking recently reading all the stories around racism during training, made harder to read when a lot of the colleges that have been called out for it have been actively attempting to entice a more diverse student group and have had the private financial resources to fund that target too - only to discover that when the more diverse group end up at these colleges they are being mistreated. 

Let's face it the establishment is as strong as always but we're the ones that are lifting it up. Individuals trying to work their way into the major buildings as opposed to creating art outside of those buildings,
well meaning campaigns and organisations that fail to celebrate the people & organisations that want to engage with them as they're too busy trying to put the 'other' (socio-economic, diversity, disability) into one of the big boys. 

These organisations be they colleges or buildings or companies will take years to change for the simple reason that they don't have to when everybody is knocking on their doors trying to be a part of it. If you want grassroots change in our industry then start supporting the grassroots companies, colleges, ensembles, and buildings that are already doing things differently. Create the change and let it spread, stop trying to turn the wheel the other way.

The middle class entitled cries from the left are not even penetrating the real issue. Be as worthy as you like but I'm sorry as a working class girl I can tell you that you're not even close to hitting the issues here. The bubble is losing oxygen and we're creating a vacuum. Reading somebody extolling the virtues of a theatre back in Wales whilst I know for a fact that that theatre is struggling as the locals have slowly become disenfranchised after years of Tory rule and decades of poverty. Your well-meaning post is not going to entice that town to support their theatre. They are being fed from food banks. We should be taking theatre TO them, not asking them to support us.

Where are the youth groups, where's the real community work that needs to be going on? Theatre and the arts saved so many and now the so many have no place to go. This isn't about the worthy opening up their doors, it's about the worthy getting out into those communities and understanding them. We have an amazing ability to think that we're listening but instead, we're nodding too soon saying that we understand.

Our industry is under attack, but I fear that most of the shots are actually coming from within (albeit unwittingly) We are fighting each other in the echo chamber and those bullets are going to ricochet off and hurt us. 

The only ones shouting about us are us. We haven't made a strong case to explain to people that 'we' are the music that they're streaming or the channels that they're hopping.  If we want to come back stronger than ever we need to step outside the safety of our own timelines for a moment and read how vilified we've become. We've stopped being arts for all, and have imploded into arts for us. 

Shouting into an echo chamber

When discussing the current unrest in the world somebody said to me the other week that things would definitely change this time because we now have social media raising awareness. It was said with utter belief and optimism that our timelines could change the world.  

If the current crises in our industry has taught me anything it's reaffirmed my long-held belief that we're all happy shouting about things in our own echo chambers. We don't actually want to be challenged on our beliefs and ideologies, do we? We want to put our thoughts out into the ether and have our 'followers' agree with us. What would a controversial posting be without people liking it and reposting it? The feeling of self-righteousness when we're reposted with a comment that supports our original idea can't be beaten. At that moment we've won the internet . . . well for an hour at least. 

It's not real though is it? We've been lulled into a false sense of security by choosing to follow like-minded people. My political views easily lean more towards the left than the right, and therefore my timeline is littered with like-minded people. Is that skewing my view of the world though, as I'm left thinking that everybody thinks the same as me, which is clearly incorrect, as Trump got elected and Brexit happened, both of which looked impossible given my timelines? 

The day that the results from the Brexit referendum came out my Facebook timeline was saturated with angry, sad people all reeling in disbelief. We (virtually) consoled each other and questioned how such a thing could have happened. Yet step outside your own timeline for a moment and you'll quickly discover that a parallel world has been running alongside it the whole time.

When the unthinkable happens and these two worlds cross paths (I've let go of the geometry analogy for a moment - don't judge me) we tend not to debate with the 'other side'. We shoot from the hip and attempt to shut them down adamant that we're right and they're wrong. They do exactly the same. We've lost the art of gentle persuasion and instead opted for shaming the difference. Then to compound this our mates all pile on thereby suffocating the argument whilst not actually changing their minds.

My timeline screams Black Lives Matter at the moment. I'm bombarded with graphic images of a world that I don't recognise, but a world that I'm determined to understand and attempt to change.  I read the threads of stories of personal experiences that leave me incredulous that friends and colleagues have had to experience such bias all because of their skin pigmentation (with centuries of oppression thrown in too of course), whilst I attempt to educate myself about their lives and their life experiences, lives very different to the world that I've inhabited. Yet I don't stop to think that for every one of 'us' there's one of 'them'. Somebody who is also reading those threads but seeing no wrong in them. I've attempted to chat to some of them online, but their side like ours simply shut down the debate with insults and hyperbole.

Currently, my timeline is also screaming with the cries of an industry going under. COVID didn't only target the vulnerable it targetted a number of industries - the arts being one of those. Shows closed, theatres went dark (except for the fabled Ghostlight), and an entire industry went into hibernation overnight. Nearly 4 months later there is no indication of that hibernation ending. Worse than that nobody except us seems to be talking about it. Yesterday the culture secretary made the first real public statement to mention us in passing. Rather alarmingly he was noting that he'd start to look at how he could help as he wouldn't let our culture just disappear, missing the fact that with each day we were slowly shedding our culture like a goose sheds its feathers, both of us grounded in time. Today a theatre goes dark, tomorrow a company folds, with each passing hour another person decides to leave the industry as their previously unsustainable world suddenly passes the threshold which renders it impossible. We're seeing major companies declaring that they've been forced into streamlining their operations in order to survive. 

I'm old enough to remember Thatcher's Britain. I lived through the coal strikes, the pit closures, the end of the steelworks, communities left in tatters by their hubs being dismantled seemingly before their very eyes. I'm the proud daughter of a steelworker. I saw first hand what those decisions did to families and communities. Fast forward a couple of decades and suddenly there's another cull. It might not have been politics that started it this time, rather a random global pandemic, however, it's politics that could save it, and right now it's not really being discussed.

We scream into our echo chambers that we're dying, that the arts are being dismantled and we hear the cries of our peers shouting straight back at us in agreement. We're not really weeping for the producers allegedly forced into these decisions, we're weeping for us. For the actors and stagehands, the wardrobe departments and casting directors, the agencies and creatives, and entire infrastructure from FOH to partner businesses that nobody but us really understands.

Then I nip across to that parallel universe and nobody cares. They don't think that it's 'their world'. They have no interest in the posh person's theatre world. They haven't made the correlation that 'this world' is also their world. It's the films that they're streaming, the music that they're listening to, the jokes that they're laughing at, the TV programmes that they religiously follow. To 'them' we've always been an elitist institution. 'They' have never stepped foot in the theatre and perceive it to be 'high art', 'hoity toity' if you like. 

Nobody has really joined the two worlds. The basic infrastructure and history of the UK theatre scene has unwittingly nurtured this divide. The government subsidises organisations like the National, the RSC, major ballet and opera companies, but what of the grassroots theatre scene? How much money really goes out to the provinces and the villages in order to create cultural hubs there? To build a sense of community, hell to contribute to communities.  For sure there's ACE money getting distributed but there's a certain language needed to fill out those forms, and the people and organisations that could really do with some of that money don't speak that language - they don't teach form filling in local comps.

When we speak about our industry we only talk in terms of the establishment. There's lots of talk around opening up our industry to a greater diversity, both of ethnicity and different social classes, yet when you check the various schemes that have started up to support this worthy cause, we're still telling people that the establishment should be the aim of the game - we the worthy can help you the needy reach the end goal . . . the heart of the establishment?  The monied give donations to the already heavily subsidised organisations. If the government does decide to support us who'll get first dibs at the recovery fund? I can tell you who won't be getting it, the small scale touring companies that truly do attempt to reach the masses and expand our audience base, the TIE companies who visit the schools in an attempt to squeeze theatre and theatre arts into the curriculum somehow, the youth groups that are transforming lives with their work. 

This could be the perfect opportunity for our industry to regroup and truthfully look at what's working and what's not. We won't though. We're crying into our echo chambers for the government to maintain the status quo, so that we can pick up where we left off. The brutal truth though is that we didn't leave it in a good place. The recent disclosures around institutionalised racism have really hit that point home over the past few weeks. Will we look at different companies and organisations to make the change? Not a chance, we'll spend our energy attempting to change the dinosaurs, grateful that the pandemic didn't wipe them out.

Our echo chambers facilitated Trump and Brexit, maybe it's time to open up the conversations to find out how we truly make our industry come back stronger and more diverse than ever?