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“Theatre unites, brings us together, communities, all sections of society, rich, poor, young, old. They are places that glamorise intellect, finer emotions, humanise us.”
In my play When Maggie Met Larry, recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4, there’s a scene in which I imagine Laurence Olivier using those words to defend arts funding to Margaret Thatcher.
Although generally regarded as an irredeemable philistine, Thatcher was in fact an occasional theatregoer. Derek Jacobi, who plays Olivier in my drama, recalls her going to see him in a 1991 revival of Jean Anouilh’s Becket and saying how much she’d enjoyed herself. I’d routinely see members of her Cabinet in the stalls.
Certainly, Thatcher was sufficiently appreciative of Olivier to turn to him to improve upon her initially limited presentational skills and this is the focus of the play. Their real-life correspondence shows these two larger-than-life characters came to have a genuine respect, even affection, for one another.
When Olivier turned 80, Thatcher told him: “Your work, in both cinema and theatre, has enhanced our civilisation.”
Keir Starmer’s Government doesn’t seem to have the first idea of how valuable the creative industries are to the mental wellbeing and spirit of the nation. For all the election promises to ‘turbocharge’ them, it turns out that much of the £60 million funding that has been announced is no more than existing money that has been repackaged.
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Nicholas Hytner, the former boss of the National Theatre, has come to the view that Labour is doing “more harm than good” to the arts – a damning assessment given how high hopes had been in the sector when the Government was elected.
Around the country, theatre managers I speak to say they are struggling and this has been borne out by a national report on the performing arts by Kate Varah, the National Theatre’s executive director, which says many organisations are now feeling as if they are at “breaking point”. A lot of those charged with running them are quitting.
Starmer hasn’t seen fit to appoint a full-time arts minister. Instead, Chris Bryant’s role is split between two ministries – data protection and telecoms; on top of being Minister for Media, Tourism and Creative Industries.
All the while, in state schools, the obsession with STEM subjects has meant fewer resources for music and art. It is easier these days for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for someone from a poor background to make it as an actor.
This neglect of theatre is costing the country dearly.
It has become a cliché to blame our political woes on a disaffected younger generation who can’t be bothered to turn out to vote, but too seldom is the question asked why.
I was a child of Thatcher’s Britain – coming up to London in the 1980s to work at the Observer – and theatre during her years in office helped to shape me as an individual. More than that, it made me feel involved and responsible for what was happening around me.
I’d got my first job on a local paper at 16 and hadn’t gone to university so it’s hard to underestimate the role theatre played in my belated education. It helped to give me, not just political but also emotional literacy, and it made me feel part of something bigger than myself.
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I’d hear people in the office canteen talking about Anthony Hopkins playing a demonic media mogul in David Hare’s Pravda or their excitement at seeing Antony Sher’s spidery Richard III. The Normal Heart, meanwhile, brought home the human cost of the AIDS epidemic.
I realised soon enough that, if I was to hold my own in these conversations, I needed to start going to the theatre a lot more.
Back then, theatre was angry and challenging. In the phrase Olivier used in real life, as well as in my play, it did indeed glamorise intellect. No matter what our backgrounds, we congregated in those great secular temples to laugh and cry and think together – giving us all a sense of unity and purpose.
What we saw on those stages informed the conversation of my generation, drew our attention to injustices, and made us understand that politics was something that impacted upon all of our lives, and, if we didn’t like it, we needed to get together to change it.
Funnily enough, Starmer was a jobbing libel lawyer on the Observer when I worked there and he would sometimes sit with the journalists during those lunches in the canteen. I don’t recall him talking about theatre – I don’t actually recall him talking about anything other than work, to the extent he talked at all.
So many of the things I hear him and his Government saying (and not saying) – the seemingly casual indifference to the suffering in Gaza, the obsessions with runway capacity, oil fields, and AI, not to mention the unctuousness to Donald Trump – speaks to me of a soullessness at the heart of government.
If the younger generation of today has somehow withdrawn into itself, I would say it’s necessary to factor into the equation a government that doesn’t seem to give a damn about that shared crucible of us humans to explore being humans: the theatre.
Tim Walker writes the ‘Mandrake’ column for the monthly Byline Times print edition. He was formerly a political commentator for The New European and the Telegraph