Devoted and Disgruntled (D&D) is twenty. Imagine. A simple, bold proposition to come together, to work on a shared question – a question deliciously straightforward and yet wonderfully thorny: What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts?
As world orders fall like great cliffs into the sea, and our planet stubbornly continues to do what we have long known it would, the question may seem trivial. And yet it has never been more pressing.
In 2005, Improbable was a company that had already made an indelible mark with seriously playful work such as 70 Hill Lane, Lifegame and Shockheaded Peter. It was beginning to stand for compassionate practice, centred on improvisation, and had a brilliant, generous idea – to invite ‘us all’ to come together in a shared space, to talk, imagine, encourage, vent and try out some new answers.
As its co-founder Phelim McDermott said in a Guardian interview: “It was time to shut up and do something.”
A halcyon moment
What were we so concerned about? It seems a halcyon moment, only eight years after the Boyden Report, in the first flush of serious funding for the arts and regeneration for almost two decades.
Well, we were already worn thin by the cuts of the 80s and 90s and alarmed at the encroaching importance of the market, of product, of who you knew rather than what you made or how you made it.
At the Gate Theatre, we paid artists for the first time in 2003. Before that it was a coleslaw sandwich and a travelcard. Slunglow was only five years old, Fuel had just turned one, Torycore had never happened, there had been no Fun Palaces.
There had been no standout Olympic Opening Ceremony to remind us what storytelling could do to a nation’s sense of itself. The National Theatre had never produced a play written by a woman on a main stage, the RSC had never had a season entirely directed by women, or a Hamlet played by Paapa. We didn’t know we would need The Jungle, or Little Amal.
Not easy to survive as a theatre-maker
Regional producing theatres had funding, occasionally, to produce. Coney, Rash Dash, Secret Theatre, Shop Front Theatre, Hightide, Lung and, for that matter, Jerusalem, Red Velvet, Three Kingdoms, POSH, War Horse, Blackwatch, Enron, Matilda, Nine Night, Barber Shop Chronicles, Cowbois were just brilliant ideas about to happen.
We hadn’t yet lived through the bit where we argued whether we were too European or not European enough. Lyn Gardner and Fiona Mountford were still in secure tenure at major newspapers. Some people still read newspapers. It was a time before Indhu, Kwame, Lynette, Nadia, Amit, Natalie, Nancy had ever run a theatre – it was of course high time they did.
There had been no Brexit, no Occupy, we were reeling from 7/7, Northern Rock was trustworthy, and we had not begun to look in the eye the institutional racism, classism and misogyny of our theatres, or the persistent abusive behaviours of those in power.
While it was not easy to survive as a theatre-maker, the funding bloodbaths of 2010 and 2022 were unimaginable and a global pandemic was 15 years away. It has been quite the time.
Continues…
Photo: Chantal Guevara
Now we face our greatest test
Through all this, D&D has been quietly reminding us that ours is a communal practice, we cannot do it on our own. As an overdue reckoning rang through our rehearsal rooms, Improbable continued to open space.
It is the most democratic of offers; if you wish the conversation to be different, to include you, or your sister, to sharpen up, moan less and identify actions, you can say so, do so, you can call whatever session you believe is needed.
We get the D&D we deserve and yes, sometimes we have needed to wail and wring our hands, and sometimes we found solidarity in the gloom and exhaustion and invented a brilliant solution.
Now we face our greatest test. Running theatre companies is harder than ever, but not only because we have at least 30% less funding than two decades ago. Not only because arts subjects in schools and universities were systematically depopulated, and training is more unaffordable than ever.
No, it is harder because the gap – political, social, ethical – between donors, audiences, artists and funders has never been greater. I used to love the balancing act of gathering them in one foyer, a place of hospitality. But the willingness to hospitably disagree – to open ourselves to someone else’s lens on the world – is desperately diminished.
We need fire in our bellies
The world is wildly less democratic now and the wolf of fascism is at our door. When we reel at the news from The Kennedy Center, do not for a moment think it couldn’t happen here. It is happening here, just currently by different means.
The inexorable march of the market creates a curious paradox; theatre is in rude health with commercially successful new plays, even new musicals, exportable, frequently innovative and telling stories that matter (Prima Facie, Dear England, My Neighbour Totoro, Retrogade, The Years, Standing on the Sky’s Edge).
Yet we know this excellent work masks a difficult truth. It is much harder to get anything made if you cannot draw on celebrity of one kind or another, and harder still to make something that genuinely divides opinion, artistically or politically. In the last ten years we, like universities, have been manipulated into fighting amongst ourselves, policing one another, sometimes in hostile ways.
We need fire in our bellies if we are to create change but we must take care not to be boxed in. If artists are considered woke or hopelessly in thrall to the money then who is going to speak truth to power?
I am fearful they have us exactly where they want us. Devoted? Yes, absolutely. Disgruntled doesn’t come near how I feel twenty years on. I feel fearful, angry and full of a new question: What are we going to do with theatre and the performing arts? It is a weapon, those whose power is precarious want to control or ban it. We must use it for good, and we urgently need to figure out how.
