On Friday, The Western Mail featured yet another profile on Dirty Protest in anticipation of its third night of new writing next week. Given that Dirty Protest has two ex-Western Mail journalists organising it, it’s fast becoming a regular fixture in the arts pages. There’s no doubt that Dirty Protest is “a good thing” in my view. While creating admirable energy, however, there’s a danger that this event is becoming over-hyped as a platform for emerging artists. The fact that it takes place in a yurt in the backgarden of a trendy bar and is advertised through Facebook, is commendably new; at least, for Cardiff. That said, three packed-out evenings does not make a rock-solid argument for the hunger of Cardiff audiences for new work, especially as the DP audience generally features a host of over-familiar faces from the media-scene. This is no out-of-the-box phenomenon then, but a group of friends getting together and making something happen. All power to their elbow, but it is no replacement for a vibrant culture of theatre in Cardiff.
This time, however, the profile featured “Doctor Who and Torchwood” writer Helen Raynor. I’ve known Helen for a long time and supported her as both writer and director in the past. Her interview is typically forthright – not to say bolshie – and, while I’m sympathetic to a point, I found her asides about theatre in Wales somewhat kneejerk.
The main focus for her animosity was lack of opportunity for writers and directors, compared to elsewhere, particularly Scotland. This is true enough, of course. But Helen talks scathingly about “bed-blocking” by existing directors with the implication they should stop being hypocritical about supporting emerging artists and, basically, get out of the way. As one of the few Artistic Directors to have stepped aside in the last year and a long-standing critic of people who hang around too long in their jobs, I think I’m qualified to argue that this misses the point. The point is that people will move on – if, and when, better opportunities are available for them. In Wales, no matter what point you are at in your career, there is a dearth of opportunity. Of course, some people are “committed” to working in a particular field or location but not all. Some people are excited and ambitious for new experiences. To ask people to simply step aside to allow a supposedly younger, more talented, more entitled generation to emerge sounds as self-serving in its interest as the original fault Helen seeks to criticise. The absurdity is that this will be heartily approved by the likes of young writers and directors who, if they are honest, would have no intention of vacating positions of opportunity or power themselves in the same circumstances. Indeed, why should they? As one cynical playwright put it to me a while ago, “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.”
The larger and more important point is that The Arts Council of Wales has no strategic idea in its head about what to do with artists, including directors, in bed-blocking mode. Like Helen, their focus is on the symptom, rather than the cause. As their current depressingly limp and underwhelming Theatre strategy makes clear:
And whilst some companies who have provided important ingredients in the theatre mix in recent years are dormant or have been wound up, there has to be room and resource for new entrants or fresh collaborations aiming at innovation and development of both material and audiences.
I’ll have more to say about the so-called Theatre and Drama strategy at a different point, but this statement, while self-evidently true, seems smugly serene about how experienced theatre-makers find themselves “dormant” through lack of opportunity. My argument is that this “wasteful process,” as a Senior Manager of ACW once complacently acknowledged it as, should be a discrimination made on the basis of talent and ability, not on the basis of age, but the ideological positioning around the words “youth” and “young people” in Welsh theatre mean that this notion is rarely considered seriously. Indeed, it is more often a heresy to do so.
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