Back of the Class: How Theatre has Become a Game of Youth and Privilege

“I’ve been working as an artist for twenty years and I have noticed there’s less and less representation of people like me,” says Shane Shambu from the computer-desk of a Birmingham house he obtained his first mortgage on at the age of forty-seven. 

Shambu is a British-Asian dance artist and writer now in his fifties, who has carved a niche in UK theatre without the cultural buoying of a university education. “It’s hard to tell [backgrounds] in the arts,” he says, “In the studio, everyone speaks in the same language with the same quality of investigation, and if you don’t, it’s very easy to be dismissed in those settings.”

It is difficult to articulate the sharp intersection of factors that have pushed so many experienced performers, directors and producers from lower income or ‘working-class’ backgrounds out of the industry over the last twenty years. When speaking to those who remain into mid and later life, challenging working conditions and an inept social security system lie at the heart of subsistence issues that make talented people give up.

Lynda Rooke, President of Equity, and an actor from a working-class household in Lancashire, echoes the experiences of her union members – “There’s been this narrowing of people in work and employment,” she says. “Since Covid hit, it’s safe options of whatever is being done on stage or screen…and a lot of that casting comes from higher and middle-class backgrounds.”

In the wake of Covid, piling on top of austerity and the lingering effects of 2008’s financial crisis, the fragile situation faced by creative industries freelancers in the UK was exposed. Many of Equity’s members didn’t have the ‘baseline’ income required to qualify for extra government support. Rooke says: “When you work in this industry, you don’t build-up savings, so when something happens, it’s catastrophic.”

Now, with steady inflation and housing rates at a record high, the exits stage-left from artists who rely on wages continue. Of the more permanent roles within the sector, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reported 35,000 positions in music, performing and visual arts were cut between 2021 and 2023.

The idea that it takes a village to make an artist has never felt truer, as the economics of partnership and cohabitation has proven to be the saving grace of many. Rooke says: “Sadly, what you do find is that one [partner] leaves the industry, and it’s so often the woman, and they go and train as a teacher or occupational therapist, then the focus is on the career of one person.”

And what of theatre makers who remain single into their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, I ask. “They don’t survive”, says Rooke.

While gender and race identity politics dominate new British theatre, spurred on by 2020’s Black Lives Matter watershed, the relationship between age and class is seldom explored by the industry itself or within new shows.

A scan of off-West-End listings, covering the past five years, will yield a healthy bill of plays by young writers reflecting on racial tensions, the narratives of the LGBTQAI+ movement, and to an extent, disability. Although, age and class are often tackled as sub-themes in these cultural products.

Remembering the peers he made early shows with, Shambu says: “The drop off points I’d say are late thirties, forties…they go into psychotherapy, psychologists. It’s using the art in a different way. Family and priorities, my son is the most important thing and if worst comes to worst, I will work in an Amazon Warehouse to get him what he needs.”

Guleraana Mir, a theatre writer (41) who is neurodivergent, describes her childhood, raised by a computer programmer father and arts enthusiast mother as comfortable. However, she emphasises the time it can take to make headway in such a cliquish community and asserts that setting-up a family and mortgage is “impossible.” She says: “It took years to be taken seriously; even to get work in education departments… and even then, it felt like I was too old, I was coming up to twenty-seven, twenty-eight.”

In a marketplace that has long been in lust with that potent combination of youth and talent, questioning this obsession is commonplace among those who have matured beyond ‘early career’ and feel out of place in open-call development schemes. “There’s more exploitation of younger people in terms of the resource of time they give, venues know, either consciously or unconsciously that older artists have boundaries,” Shambu says, while noting that venues are also under pressure to develop audiences of eighteen to thirty-five-year-olds. 

The nature of time as a precious commodity is central to the inequalities between makers/performers with residual incomes, family wealth and savings, and those whose creativity is broken-up by necessary periods of unrelated labour or the ‘gig economy,’ and this pressure is doubled for those who can’t simply ‘live at home.’

Adding to the stress of seeking casual work between jobs, is an evident, possibly endemic, culture of unpreparedness that can have serious financial and emotional repercussions. Mir relays the devastating impacts of venues changing performance dates, creating a disjointed domino-effect on funding timelines, contingency funds and the need to re-rehearse. On this point, Rooke uses the Japanese car industry as an apt analogy:

“They get their components ‘just in time’,’ she says, “there seems to be too much of that so that decisions and the green lighting of things comes too late, so then people are under too much pressure…” Of the Scottish government’s flip-flopping over delivering open funding through Creative Scotland, Rooke says: “They’ve been back and forth, what a mess – long term planning? I don’t think so!”

And this unpreparedness can be observed at different levels. Mir says: “Everybody works to the last minute. We talk about access and wellbeing – it’s giving the time not to have to run at 120% for six weeks repeatedly…You can’t sustain that as you get older.”

Arts Council England data for the period January 2020-January 2024, shows that while the percentage of total applications from the over 35s declines across the older age-brackets, it drops to approximately 16% after the age of 50 and to minus 1% in the 64+ age-groups. 

The idea that people want to ‘slow down’ in the decade before retirement is still somewhat credible, but people over fifty constitute 38% of our ageing population and more people than ever are working into retirement, with artists perhaps even more motivated to do so.

At the root of the issue is the basic and complex mission of the arts, to enrich all people with stories reflecting the breadth of the human experience, an ambition shared unilaterally by funding bodies, unions and artist-led companies. A spokesperson from Arts Council England said: 

“We’re encouraging more applicants from lower socio-economic backgrounds to apply for our funding, and we ask the organisations we fund to tell us the socio-economic background of their audiences.”

The sentiment is shared in Labour’s manifesto for access to arts, music and sport, which includes: “With Labour, the arts and music will no longer be the preserve of a privileged few.”

But what can be done to keep skilled creatives from lower income backgrounds in the industry throughout their life cycle? “Universal Credit doesn’t work, we want to abolish it,” says Rooke.

She refers instead to Ireland’s Basic Income for Artists (BIA) programme as one to watch. The pilot scheme, which started in 2022, provides an unconditional weekly income of €325 to means-tested participants, and presents as an antidote to percentage-based Universal Credit, which partially covers housing and subsistence costs and is subject to harsh sanctioning.

Financial security and wellbeing have seemed ever more elusive to the UK performing arts community since what Rooke calls “the golden age” of the late nineties/early noughties, when performers registered without shame for Job Seekers Allowance and schedule D tax, and Greg Dyke ushered new voices into the BBC. 

The artists’ way has always been challenging, but the question of whether skilled creatives must choose between poverty and dignity well into middle and later life, is one a Labour government should answer.