The BBC’s recent collaboration with Battersea Arts Centre and Arts Council England, Live from Television Centre, a broadcast of four independent theatre shows, was rightly praised, not least for the fact that it engaged with some of the varied kinds of work that represent British theatre today.
The broadcast was part of the BBC’s On Stage season, which has also included a strand of programmes about regional theatres that offers a well-meaning but significantly more backwards look at British theatre. The series places an emphasis on nostalgia, with star names bemoaning the disappearance of the rep system as a training ground (which it was but for a very different kind of theatre), and plucky theatres clinging on by their fingertips despite austerity cuts.
It’s not necessarily the theatres’ fault. The Curve in Leicester must be delighted with what was essentially a 30-minute advertorial. The programmes were made by individual production companies and designed to be broadcast in each of the BBC regions rather than binge-watched as I did on the iPlayer. I guess that explains why so many of them follow a narrative in which catastrophe is (mostly) narrowly averted.
Might the Theatre Royal York face financial ruin if can’t stage its annual panto? Indeed it might. But nobody is going to be convinced that the future of the Northcott in Exeter hangs in the balance if it fails to find somewhere to relocate the ice-cream freezer. Or that if teenager Dani fails to remember her lines then there will be cuts to the Coventry Belgrade’s community project for young people. That decision is going to be made in the theatre boardroom, whether Dani remembers her lines or not, and in setting up a false sense of drama the programme only makes the theatre look heartless, short-sighted and self-serving.
Watching one of the programmes after the other you’d be left with the impression that British theatre likes making a drama out of a crisis, is intent on ensuring its own survival above all else, only ever takes place in buildings that are continually rebuilt or in need of refurbishment, and wishes it could return to a golden era of rep theatre. Mind you I did enjoy Jonathan Pryce recalling his time at the Everyman in the 1970s, saying that everyone joked it was called the Everyman because once on stage it was everyone for themselves.
The programme about Liverpool’s Everyman and Playhouse is one of the best, not least because of the down to earth approaches of artistic director Gemma Bodinetz and executive director Deborah Aydon, and the fact that it entwines rehearsals for Simon Armitage’s Homer rewrite The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead with glimpses of the theatre’s community work. It gives a sense of what the theatre once meant to Liverpool but also a glimpse of where it’s heading.
Taken as a group, however, it’s clear that those who commissioned the programmes and those who made them have little grasp of what is really going on in regional theatre. Why not concentrate on Kaleider and the Bike Shed in Exeter, organisations crucial to the ecology of UK theatre, rather than the Northcott? Or give a glimpse into a very different kind of building such as Contact in Manchester? Or regional theatre companies whose work exists outside buildings?
Often what we saw suggested that regional theatre is mostly lots of elderly people watching Alan Ayckbourn plays or musicals and drinking wine, that it almost entirely lacks diversity, and that Rupert Goold may indeed have had a point when he suggested that there is a growing gap between what is being presented in London and the regions, that will leave the latter moribund.
I don’t think he’s right, but anyone watching these documentaries couldn’t be blamed for thinking that British regional theatre is stuck in some kind of time warp. When, at its best, every day it’s finding new ways to make different kinds of work and collaborations, is reimagining what we mean by theatre, and is increasingly embedded and connected with the communities it serves.
