Reading Jennie Lee's White Paper of 1965 encouraging a vision of Britain in which arts and culture are central, accessible to everyone and celebrated and supported makes me want to say thank you. Thank you to Jennie Lee for your vision and your tenacity. And to everyone who has listened to the arguments since then for cultural funding, challenged them, refined them, campaigned for them and especially to everyone who ever wrote or approved a funding cheque, thank you.
But it also makes me want to say
"Aren't you tired?"
Last year I directed a new play by Alice Birch called "Revolt, She Said, Revolt Again". As the title suggests it is a call to action, a heartfelt plea to genuinely revolt, to grasp the issue of gender equality by the neck and actually make it happen. But in a tender moment a single voice says to the audience "Aren't you tired?". She means tired of the debate, tired of the same arguments, tired of the inequality, tired of talking. (She means many things, and isn't that the magic of art?)
When I think of the debate about arts funding, of our politicians and artists arguing over TINY amounts of money and begging for public investment or defending devastating cuts, I want to ask, "Aren't you tired?", "Aren't you sick of these questions and these answers? WHEN (sorry for shouting but really, WHEN) are we going to accept that our cultural life is to be celebrated and treasured and protected and nourished? That a really very wealthy country should support the arts in a mature, sustained way. That spending about the same on the arts as we spend on subsidising the license fee for our pensioners is, literally, the least we can do. That telling our stories, painting pictures, making music are an essential part of who we are, and making that unaffordable, or indeed impossible is the mark of an uncivilised people.
I am not suggesting that we shouldn't debate how much collective money (I mean really, tax, what a wonderful, democratic idea) should go to support the arts, or how we should spend that money. Those are proper questions, difficult questions, and questions which belong in the public arena, to be contested and argued by artists, audiences and purse-holders. No, what I lament, what I am heartily tired of, bubbling noisily away in the background, to be chuckled about on the Today programme, which lurks in all our political discourse about culture, and which gets under the skin of funders and artists alike, is this question;
"Do the arts and culture really matter? Or are you all just playing?"
A question which whether voiced or simply implied is wasting our energy. A question which suggests that things which matter must always have something to do with profit, or with actual life and death. And yet we don't ask this question about sport, for instance, even when it costs us money. And this question is notably absent from the public discourse in countries as different as South Africa, or Iran or Iceland or Ireland or France or Denmark or China or Russia or... I could of course go on. In these countries, for all their different reasons, arts and culture "occupy a central place" (Jennie Lee 1965)
So in honour of the anniversary of that bold White Paper, I put aside my fatigue with this condescending but persistent question and I answer YES. The arts do matter, for all of us. Not because they earn this country vast sums of money, attract inward investment and encourage trade relationships (although they do), not because they enable people to fulfil their educational and professional potential (although they do), and not because they can build community, regenerate a neighbourhood and transform landscapes (although they do). The arts matter because humans need to tell stories about our past and present in order to grasp our future, because we need to challenge beliefs, investigate our values, offend, irritate, tickle, entertain, surprise and celebrate one another.
A society which cannot imagine what it is to be another person, cannot trust others, and so cannot conceive of new ways of living in the world. Do we not need to do that as a matter of urgency? Great moments of ideological, political and economic upheaval and progress (Ancient Greece, or Elizabethan London to take just two theatrically memorable moments) inspire great storytelling, great culture, immense complexity of both ideas and feelings best captured by artistic expression. And interpreting great works of art and inventing new, perplexing experiments in art are surely as important as one another in allowing us to probe and poke the human condition and our evolving understanding of ourselves and one another.
And for the avoidance of doubt, we are not just playing, we are mainly fundraising of course, but when time allows we are thinking or making or asking or answering, or daring or dreaming or inventing or writing or building or drawing or composing or interpreting or dancing or doing. And if we didn't sometimes play what we did would be dry and you wouldn't want to see/hear/read it.
These days I work with Shakespeare, and with new plays inspired by Shakespeare's spirit, by his conviction that he could speak, through theatre, to everyone about almost anything. That this country produced an artist with such chutzpah, such a command of both the epic and the intimate, the poetic, the playful and the familiar is a proud fact which should inspire us to invest widely, deeply and imaginatively in our cultural future.
So can we stop asking IF the arts matter, can we begin to take for granted that we need enriching, diverse, memorable cultural experiences for everyone, throughout our lives, wherever we are and whatever we can afford? It is nothing less than short-sighted to suggest anything else. Enough already. If we could agree on that, perhaps then we really could honour Jennie Lee's vision of sustained, grown-up, local, regional and national investment in the arts.
Erica Whyman
(Deputy Artistic Director
Royal Shakespeare Company)
