Diversity recognised

We read the McMaster report with a growing sense of relief. As the call for ‘excellence’ has grown louder over the last few years, and since Hytner made his comments about being judged more for the composition of the National’s audience than for the work on stage, there has been suspicion that ‘diversity’ was being viewed as a red herring – prescriptive, and inextricably bound up with art that has been, allegedly, harnessed and hijacked for social engineering purposes.

Oval House Theatre long ago made it part of its policy and philosophy that, as McMaster says, art must have relevance to our society, and that means the full range of voices and experiences in our society. We are looking for perspectives from the less visited corners of life, and in particular those that will resonate in our edgy, creative, diverse, globalised London life in all its glory – and occasional disaster. We are looking for artists who bring newness of form to their work – not for the gimmicky sake of it, but for the extra dimension that a well-used medium can bring to our cerebral, emotional and imaginative reception of theatre.

To denigrate art that reaches more than one sector of society as ‘social engineering’ not only assumes that only one sector of society needs art to interpret their lives, but also ignores the fact that great art digs at society’s fault-lines. Like Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Orton or Shaw, great artists of our generation respond to the sensitive areas of the body politic. The novels of Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith, the paintings of Chris Ofili, and the plays of Roy Williams, Mark Ravenhill or Kwame Kwei Armah are not to be celebrated for the diversity they represent, but rather for the radical interpretation of Britain they hold up for examination.

Diversity runs through the heart of that exploration. Baldly and simply, we do not believe in the validity of art unless it reflects and explores our society as a whole, through the mazes and matrixes of all social and cultural circumstances such as race, sex and class. Although our policy is often believed to be specifically targeted at ethnicity, or ‘gay-themed’, our chosen function is simply the artistic and professional development of new work. We long ago ceased tick-box monitoring, but we are accurately reputed to have a most representative and inclusive audience.

But this brings us to the nitty gritty that those of us who aspire to the celebratory vision of McMaster must continue to address – and the report does not, perhaps, give a signpost towards possible solutions. Diversity is linked to issues of equity. Without reference to the twin issues of power and race, backed up by a practical equal opportunities policy, talk of ‘artistic diversity’ becomes meaningless. Many organisations understandably still struggle with the marketing conjuring trick needed to turn a ‘black play for black audiences’ (to put it crudely) into a ‘brilliant new play for audiences interested in good theatre’ in some less demographically mixed areas.

The success of artistic diversity depends on ‘teeth at the top’ – artistic directors, programmers, and producers having the knowledge and openness to appreciate a widely inclusive canon of work, and to trust it to be great on its own cultural terms. That still requires some targeted work – as the very existence and recommendations of the Sustained Theatre Report show. And that still means that some measurement and monitoring may be required to ensure that artistic diversity plays its part in
excellence.