Last week saw the launch of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, an evocatively named theatre company with a unique mission and an unusually, even for theatre, collaborative process of working. Giving diverse community groups the opportunity to engage creatively with the classics through the prism of their own life experiences is its mission. It is both the means to the final artistic product - the play - and an end in itself.
In its first production, Pandora, Jennie Buckman, the artistic director of the company, wove the reflections and stories of women who attend the Haringey University of the Third Age and a group of Year 9 children from Gladesmore Community school into five cleverly interlinked mini-plays on fear, death, prejudice and old age - the plagues that escape Pandora's jar - which are partly mitigated by the ineffectuality of hope. For one of the contributors, 72-year-old Ruth Hutchinson, "Hope is the opposite of rejection, not despair". This line makes the final cut, as do many others - to the delight of the older women who feel a surge of pride and ownership when they spot their pearls of wisdom.
This is diversity in the theatre at its best - reaching out across age, race, gender and class. Although many initiatives to encourage diversity have been put into place by major funders like the Arts Council, there is still a long way to go. As in television, such interventions have been successful at the lowest level - an increase in opportunities for actors and broadcasters - so we are beguiled by the visible diversity while the power structures remain largely unchanged. The majority of decision-makers continue to be white, middle-class and male. Whilst more black and minority companies are coming into existence, their infrastructure remains small and fragile.
On paper, the Arts Council's initiatives are impressive - all their regularly funded clients must have race equality and disability action plans in place or lose their funding. However, in practice there are many get-out clauses. And when action is taken, it seems to show greater respect for the letter rather than the spirit of the law.
Funding is only one arm of the pincer currently squeezing companies attempting to produce new work and reach new audiences. The other is an absence of dedicated venues. Venues are not prepared to take risks: they want productions that cater to the audiences that they have already built up. An ACE commissioned report in 2006, Sustained Theatre, recommended, among other things, the development of four gold-standard spaces to which such work could be toured. This is yet to happen.
The funding equation is a tough one. Theatre Royal Stratford East, for example, which has done a lot to develop new-to-theatre local audiences, cannot break even on musicals, even if it fills all its 400 seats. Patricia Cumper, artistic director of Talawa, says that because theatre is expensive to produce, "it is like an oil-tanker which can only turn around slowly, and theatre hasn't turned the corner on diversity yet".
Giants is currently standing on the shoulders of Talawa - which has provided guidance, office and rehearsal space - but is hoping soon to stand on its own two feet. So far the work of Giants has seen the light of day because of the generosity of friends, some of them across the Atlantic. Let's hope that shames some funders closer to home into reaching deep inside their pockets.
