Commanding performance ... Genet's play The Blacks at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Photograph: Jake Green
In his thought-provoking piece on Friday, longstanding blogger Andy Field offered a veritable call-to-arms, envisaging community-based, site-sympathetic theatre as means to "empower the disenfranchised and prompt political growth," which "can encourage audiences to take the initiative; forming communities, sharing information and working together to forge solutions." All very laudable. The question is, who's going to fund it?
Last weekend I curated a discussion on Political Theatre at the Institute of Ideas' annual Battle of Ideas event. The discussion itself had a slightly experimental format - as well as a panel of speakers, we also had a number of actors performing short extracts from key texts. Of course, choosing a small number of excerpts from five or six plays to illustrate what political theatre is would have been impossible, so the selection that I and actor/director Jon Spooner of Unlimited Theatre arrived at was a personal, subjective response to what constituted Political Theatre, ranging from Forced Entertainment's Decade to Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution.
Similarly, the panel outlined wildly divergent theories: actor and director Chris Jury rehearsed the notion that everything is political, and that the apolitical is implicitly an endorsement of the status quo, while critic Patrick Marmion made a brilliant case for the power of a play to alter irrevocably the way an audience sees the world.
The most interesting exchange, however, came in a discussion of the ideas raised by Barker's Scenes From an Execution. The play deals with an artist who is commissioned to create a painting celebrating the Venetian victory in the naval battle of Lepanto. Rather than the usual glorification, the work she creates is a horrific piece that depicts the bloody carnage and catastrophe of war. She is thrown into prison, until the city's doge, Urgentino, realises that he can gain more glory for himself and for the city by allowing the painting to go on display: "It offends today, but we look harder and know that it will not offend tomorrow ... we find, on digestion, it nourishes us!" Alan Cox's excellent performance of the part briefly suggested Tony Blair making the case for, say, Gilbert and George's recent Six Bomb Pictures. The play subtly questions the futility of art in the face of state acceptance, or, worse, state patronage and sponsorship.
A representative of the organisation Arts and Business, which fosters relationships between businesses and theatres, then raised the example of Coutts' sponsorship of the Almeida theatre in Islington. It was an unfortunate example, since Coutts is popular with millionaires and the Almeida - ironically the theatre where Scenes From an Execution was first staged - is an attractive and fashionable theatre in Islington. Perhaps, it was suggested, it might be more impressive if Coutts were to sponsor, say, the Theatre Royal in Stratford East, with its predominantly black audience and strikingly less affluent catchment area. But that's missing the point, slightly.
The most recent play at Theatre Royal was Jean Genet's deliberately troubling work about race and violence, The Blacks. And, interestingly, Theatre Royal Stratford East is in fact sponsored by the investment bank UBS. As part of its vast art collection, UBS also own three Gilbert and George pictures, both of which facts make the point rather better.
In other words, why create "dangerous," "subversive" or "anti-establishment" art if it is going to be bought by an investment bank? A bank that says: "The UBS Art Collection reflects the many paths our business has taken as we have grown to become one of the world's largest financial institutions"? If art is being bankrolled by an organisation which has a direct interest in maintaining the status quo, if it is smiled upon by precisely those whom it seeks to challenge, how can it stand the faintest hope of changing anything?
