2014 July

More than £1 billion of taxpayers’ money was allocated to the creative arts in England earlier this month.    That’s £340 million a year, for the three years 2015-2018, directly from our pockets.    £270 million a year comes from our taxes; £70 million a year from our bets on the Lottery.    Taxes for the arts – should this money be the first resort, the primary funding for people and organisations who wish to express themselves through performance of some kind?

The sum of money is patronage on a colossal scale. Not the patronage of emperors and popes, erecting monuments to themselves, not the patronage of aristocratic donors keeping poets, dramatists and painters for their own entertainment or to show off, not the patronage of businesses that wish to burnish their image; it’s the patronage of the people of England – more than £1 billion, funding 670 organisations of all shapes and sizes across the arts.

Inpress has benefited

Disclosure: I am Chairman of one of those organisations – Inpress Books Ltd, a national sales and distribution business, based in Newcastle, that supports 45 literary publishers who bring new and established writers, particularly poets, to commercial markets and direct to consumers.   I am new to the world of Arts Council funding.   After we have absorbed the fact that the Arts Council of England has awarded us (subject to final approval of business plans) funding, I ask myself and our board members, ‘what privileges, what responsibilities, does this money bring with it?’

The privilege of the taxpayer’s money

It is clearly a privilege to receive taxpayers’ money.   It is not a right in the way that British society has decided that healthcare free at the point of delivery is a universal right.   It is not a benefit, in the way that society has agreed that vulnerable citizens are granted benefits because their circumstances are difficult.    It is not an incentive, in the way that society has decided that tax breaks for investment in innovative companies are likely to deliver long-term benefits to the country.   It is a privilege that  taxpayers have entrusted us with some of their money, through the agency of Arts Council England, so that we can support poets, fiction writers, other authors and their publishers in their ambitions to express and reflect the people we are and the world in which we live.

The responsibilities that follow

We obviously have to use and account for the money carefully and accurately.    We have to try to ensure the work we do is good – whatever that may mean, as long as we define it, measure it, are consistent about it and always try to make it better.   We have to respond to the goals that the Arts Council sets out.    The exchange is not a hand-out, it’s a deal – we, the Arts Council, give you, Inpress, the taxpayers’ money; you agree to use that money actively to achieve what the Arts Council sets out to do.   In particular, says the Arts Council, we want you to pursue excellence in artistic output and to enable as many people as possible to experience it.

How to measure up

There are pitfalls here – such goals can be described in innumerable ways, ways which might be virtually impossible to measure.    But  that’s also a very English advantage that allows some discretion at all layers within the Arts Council administrative system as to whether a particular use of the taxpayers’ money has been worth while.    For organisations who have lost their funding, or had it reduced, the frustration that they cannot carry on in the same way as before, or that the beneficiaries of their services will find their lives diminished, means that the immediate discomfort and sadness is acute.

Funding as a bonus?

My sense is that Arts Council funding should be regarded as a bonus.   Any organisation that offers work to the public lives and dies by whether the public will pay for it – whether people buy the books, a theatre gets bums on seats, exhibitions attract visitors and so on.   If the public won’t pay for it, or pay for all of it, and if the people who make the work want to receive some sort of fee, wage, or living from it, then they have to find a patron.    It is a fine thing that in the United Kingdom our politics encourages artistic expression to the extent of £1 billion of taxpayers’ money over three years – but should this money be the first resort of the artist, or the last?

The taxpayer decides

If the work is good enough, and the artist or ensemble is savvy enough about selling it and capable enough to create a sustainable business out of it, then enough people will buy it.   If we at Inpress work hard enough at it, then should not the Arts Council funding be the extra money that goes to create further opportunity for our poets and other writers to reach a wider public?   We are not entitled to ask the taxpayer to give us money simply to exist and do whatever we like.  We may, I think, ask the taxpayer to fund us to go further, raise our game, reach more people who would not otherwise have the opportunity to choose to respond to what we offer.   And the taxpayer will look at what we do and say yes or no.

Paulina is the prime mover in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.   It is she who announces the death of Hermione, she who brings Leontes’ baby daughter to him, she who is brave enough to tell him he is insane to believe that Hermione and Polixenes have cuckolded him.   And it is Paulina who requires that all ‘awake your faith’ in the goodness of her magic that brings Hermione back to life and sets in motion the fairy tale dénouement.

Colin Gregory, director of the Garden Suburb Theatre’s production in the appropriately fairy-tale setting of Little Wood at the foot of Hampstead Heath, cast Paulina well.   Playing Paulina, Mary Groom grasped the production with both hands and in her key speeches in the first half, delivered with great clarity and emotional force, she gave Steven Maddocks, playing Leontes with assurance, something substantial to work with.    His response, as his self-generated jealousy moved through realisation of his terrible error to grief and the germ of repentance, grew in emotional depth.   In the second half Leontes was very clearly an older and wiser man, the character’s development fully conveyed.   Paulina’s authority continued into the final scene of the play.

Also strong was Camillo, played by Amos Witztum, whose misery at his forced departure from Sicilia and his strong desire to return, after 16 years exile in Bohemia, were believable.    Jessica Lowery played Hermione, a difficult part, well.   She conveyed clearly the dignity of her heartfelt protestation of innocence at her trial and the warmth of her forgiveness of Leontes in the final scene of the play.   Geoff Prutton and John Colmans as Shepherd, son and father, got Bohemia off to a good start.

Too many voices were underpowered for the outdoor setting, coming from the throat rather than the diaphragm and tending to the higher registers, creating a thinness of tone.   There was a lack of variety in pace, giving a slightly heavy-footed rhythm to the performance.    The wide stage of Little Wood led to some unnecessary route marches to and fro when stillness and a concentration on the words and their meaning would have been preferable.   The music, essential to create the atmosphere of the sheep-shearing feast and the mystery of the unveiling of the statue, was too quiet.

The costuming was a delight,  well designed and made, forming coherent patterns of bright colour appropriate to the changing scenes.   The tableaux of characters were elegant and created charming stage pictures set against the deep green of the foliage and the trunks of the trees.   The choreography by Rachel Berg was good, the dancers well-practised, and a dance with tragic masks before the statue scene was particularly poignant.   Jessica Lowery’s statue of Hermione was still, well-lit and offered an elegant surprise as she came to life.

It was a lovely evening watching and hearing a strange story well told, the audience was closely attentive, held by the performances of the actors and by the visual and psychological magic of the production.

 

 

A distinguished critic wrote that ‘it is what it is’. A punter behind me in the theatre said that it was ‘total crap’. This is Peter Brook directing Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni.   Are these judgments reasonable?   Or are they missing the point?

The Valley of Astonishment, by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, is about synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which people experience sensations through an apparently unrelated other sense – words become colours, touch is experienced as smell and so on.    Brook and his company have explored the hidden and the unexpected in human behaviour for many years.    The plays derive from extensive research and the script, structure and performance emerge from lengthy rehearsal.    This performance was at the Young Vic, in London.

I saw Peter Brook in a platform discussion after a performance of 11 and 12 at the Barbican in 2009.    He sought, he said, those moments between actors and audience when the house knows that a connection has happened, that a moment of real experience has been made in the theatre.    He spoke of the tide that flows between stage and audience, communicating and receiving.    When the participants, through skill, concentration, expression, listening, behaving create a common understanding at a more than, deeper than intellectual level, that shared human experience is a priceless moment of communion.    It may last for just a few seconds.   It may happen, said Brook, only once or twice not in a performance, but in the whole run of a play.

James Joyce speaks of something similar, through one of his characters, which is apparent in his own writing – the epiphany, the ‘showing forth’ of a moment of experience.   Joyce creates such moments by gradually repeating images, lines, phrases through the course of a story or passage, so that an awareness or familiarity with an idea or sense or expression may develop between writer and reader.   At the moment of epiphany, the phrase or image is placed into the character or narrative context and if the connection is made a recognition, a subconscious nod or shiver of understanding, a communion is formed.

Did this happen in the performance of The Valley of Astonishment?    Perhaps, kind of, maybe not really.   Marcello Magni, in his various characters in the play, is real and creates belief and understanding.    There is a clear connection with the audience, but most strongly when he is playing an entertainer whose overt job is to contact the audience and ask for a response.    This is not communion.    Kathryn Hunter inhabits her character, the main protagonist who has the story, and we hear what it is to have a prodigious memory, in which words are seen in colours and pictures.  We hear and see the stress and anxiety caused by being unable to forget.   This was touching, full of images and believable but it was not communion.    The music was subtle and plangent and set a tone.   The third actor did not project well, and was inaudible to some members of the audience.

Did the audience come with inappropriate expectations?   This is Peter Brook at 85, exploring the human senses and what ‘mind’ means.    It is not Coriolanus or A View from the Bridge.      In his catalogue note, Brook writes that ‘as we explore the mountains and valleys of the brain, we will reach the valley of astonishment…..we will take the spectator into new and unknown territories through people whose secret lives are so intense, so drenched in music, colour, taste, images and memories that they can pass any instant from paradise to hell and back again’.    He did this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970, which left me in tears and scarcely able to breathe.    In this production, we reached some foothills of interest in the presence of two of our finest actors, performing beautifully.

It wasn’t total crap, and the punter who wanted to be taken on a journey with fully rounded characters had come unprepared, with the wrong expectations.    It was what it was, something like a chamber piece, carefully done with simplicity and elements of wonder and surprise.   It wasn’t what Brook wrote it was going to be, which was a puff, but it was ‘deeply human’ as in his description of the research and rehearsal process.

So that is what it was – human interest, humanely and carefully expressed in the theatre by fine actors.