Skills for Theatre (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, having braced myself to declare my own humility in the presence of such luminaries and experts, not only not being a member of the committee but not being a member of the theatrical world at all, I am delighted now to be on my feet among such distinguished company, although the note of gloom that has just been cast upon us will possibly be the note that we all go away with.

My only interests to declare are that I was a student of English literature, that for many years I taught an undergraduate class on the origins of English drama, and that I am a customer of the theatre as often as I can afford it, which in London is not very often.

Just two days ago, in the concluding stages of the Data Protection Bill, I sat through an impassioned debate which pitted those insisting on maintaining the freedoms of investigatory and innovative journalism against others who depicted the way that journalists had only too frequently abused those freedoms, inflicting serious financial and reputational damage on a wide range of people. Again and again in that debate, I heard speakers—on both sides of the argument, as it happens—declare their conviction that a free press is a vital component of any democracy. It speaks truth to power and holds us all to account.

I want to hold on to the memory of Monday’s debate as I put forward my own argument for the health and well-being of our creative industries in general and for a vibrant theatre sector in particular. I believe that this dimension of our national life plays its own part in keeping individuals and our institutions in check. It was our supreme dramatist—the only one who does not have to be mentioned by name—who gave us not only the fruits of his wisdom in the plays he wrote but the theatrical device of a “play within the play”, as if to second his own motion, or seal his own conviction, about the capacity of drama to get to the heart of things. “The play’s the thing”,

he wrote,

“Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”.


If the press can pass as the fourth estate of the realm, why not, with Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, David Hare, James Graham and so many others in mind, consider the theatre as the fifth?

It is a matter of regret that, as we have heard, the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications could not complete its study of the subject before us today. It was cut short in its deliberations by the suddenly announced general election, which, as we now know, brought parliamentary death into the land, with all our woe and loss of Europe. We are now left on the brink of uncertainty about how the future will play out, and there seems no point in hoping that one greater man, or woman, will restore us, or regain our blissful seat.

The report, truncated as it is, highlights two areas of concern echoed widely in so many of the briefing materials I have seen and in so many of the speeches made, as well as voiced passionately by various individuals I have been speaking to. I shall limit my remarks to just two of the concerns raised.

The first repeats material that has been said. I always wonder, when I make speeches and bring in points that have been made, whether to omit my mention of them because they have been made or to increase the passion levels—the Welsh hwyl—in making them to emphasise their importance. The Government’s stated target of entering at least 90% of pupils in mainstream education for the English baccalaureate by 2025 will pose problems for the “pipeline of talent”, the success of which we desire. The emphasis placed in schools on a narrowly defined set of core academic subjects will leave little room in the curriculum for pupils to study creative, artistic and musical subjects. They will remain “cabined, cribbed, confined” in the STEM thicket.

Indeed, the danger is being run of a situation foreseen by CP Snow all those years ago—he called it the two cultures—of recreating the dynamic we all regretted then and have been seeking to put right ever since. The Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Barbican, which have been my neighbours for many years, fear that this will lead to the marginalisation of music and arts, including drama, in schools, despite the fundamental importance of those subjects. At this point, it is not a question of money. I chair the trustees of the Central Foundation Schools of London—a boys’ school in Islington and a girls’ school in Tower Hamlets. The boys’ school is situated just up the road from the Barbican. Even when we make decent grants out of our endowment—and they are decent grants—to help our schools with creative subjects, we know that we will find ourselves up against the curriculum constraints that will inevitably come our way.

Some 85% of the pupils at our girls’ school wear the hijab in class. It was with some apprehension that I went to see them perform Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in a school competition. It is a very macho play, and I feared that Muslim sensitivities would make it difficult for them. I could not have been more mistaken. The porter, the courtiers, Macbeth and Banquo, as well as the witches and Lady Macbeth, were all played with energy and commitment. I was sitting among the performers’ parents and I enjoyed the whooping and the laughter, the enthusiasm and the pride of those Muslim parents all around me. I learned how theatre can make its own contribution to community cohesion and the breaking down of cultural barriers. Will the Minister give us an assurance—no, a passionate assurance—that his colleagues in the Department for Education will take this important lesson on board? The education we offer in our schools will be deficient without due attention paid to the proper space needed on the curriculum for the fostering of the creative arts in general and drama in particular.

The second concern we should all concentrate on—the great albatross around our necks just now—is, of course, Brexit, shrouded as it is in uncertainty and sounding a note of potential doom from the wings. The Corporation of the City of London believes that Brexit poses considerable potential challenges to the continued recruitment of talented EU nationals to the creative sector, including to higher education institutions. Twenty per cent of the students at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama are recruited from the EU. They bring around £2 million of income annually and, well beyond mere finance, help to create a culturally diverse, international and outward-facing student body of great benefit to its members. It is vital that we make every effort to continue this.

Unless alternative agreements are negotiated, it is possible that all non-UK students will be charged the same full-cost fees and will be subject to the same visa requirements after Brexit. These measures will inevitably present significant new barriers to EU nationals on grounds of cost and immigration status. The reputational consequences will be alarming, and the world-class standing of our institutions, as well as the supply of skilled students from other traditions and cultural backgrounds, will be diminished. There is already a perceptible lessening of demand from EU countries for places in our drama schools.

People of my generation have been fortunate to have known the flourishing of provincial theatres in many parts of the country. I courted a girl from Newcastle-under-Lyme and was introduced to the work of Peter Cheeseman at the Victoria Hall theatre in Stoke-on-Trent. Not everybody had that pleasure—I mean the pleasure of the theatre, not of courting my wife. At the annual conferences that I went to in Scarborough, which were inevitably filled with duller moments, there was also the opportunity to slip off and celebrate and Alan Ayckbourn’s links with that city. The former chairman of the committee has mentioned his links with York. So we are fortunate to have had, but the “having had” is threatened by the “will it happen any longer?”, or at least with the same quality and the same levels of creativity. We must give this our closest attention.

I have fostered a number of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds with aspirations to enter the pipeline that figures in today’s debate. One of them comes to mind now, as I conclude these remarks. A graduate of the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, he joined a community group that toured schools in south London to engage in a discussion with sixth-formers about the big questions they were faced with on the street. Drugs, knives, gangs, relationships and guns all figured in these exchanges. The company then went back and wrote these concerns into bespoke pieces of theatre, which they then took back to the very schools whose views they had canvassed. Once again, in interactive settings, the players allowed their young audiences to objectify the questions they had posed and consider various ways of dealing with the problems they faced in their daily lives on the streets of inner London. More policemen on the beat may be one way of addressing the problem of knife-crime and gang-warfare; more and better theatre is, from what I have seen, certainly another.

We need a copper-bottomed assurance from the noble Lord that he will engage passionately on our behalf in a discussion with the Schools Minister about easing up the curriculum to allow more space for the creative arts, and that he will do so too with the likes of David Davis and Jacob Rees-Mogg about a Brexit agreement that will allow the world of theatre to face the future not only with equanimity but with rabid optimism. We count on him for no less; otherwise, our tale today will have been told by idiots full of sound and fury, signifying pretty much next to nothing.