Universities at Wolverhampton and Roehampton are ‘suspending’ performing arts courses for 2022/3.
They claim it’s through lack of demand by students.
Critics blame the government’s devaluing of arts programmes and the move to push students toward science, technology and engineering courses.
I even detect criticism in the voice of The Stage editor, Alistair Smith, that parents are responsible for believing Tory spin that performing arts courses, and by association jobs in the sector, are worthless.
Blame the government Alistair, not parents and especially not parents of working-class kids.
The truth is if your name is Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddlestone, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham-Carter, or the odious Laurence Fox you will always be able to follow your dream because you have money and well-off parents behind you.
Working-class kids, however talented, don’t have the luxury of privilege.
But the working class has produced some top-class actors; Pete Postlewaite, Julie Walters, Maxine Peake, and Daniel Mays to randomly name just a few.
The Tories (included in this are the Red Tories) don’t want actors from working-class backgrounds because our place is making profits for our betters in their businesses or a reserve of surplus labour for when required.
In any event, working-class creatives might want to tell their stories if they can prevent the middle-class guards for the elite from doctoring them in the first place.
The Tories wouldn’t want that now, would they?
But can creativity be kept under wraps?
I remember hearing the actor Simon Callow once say that you don’t act because you want to, but instead because you absolutely have to.
Reading the chapter in Tom Cornford’s book about Theatre Workshop I was reminded how Joan Littlewood recruited her actors often from the amateur sector and then turned them into household names; Harry H. Corbett is an example.
The Tories never understand history if they believe that you can squeeze the neck of creativity until it chokes; you simply force it to find other avenues of expression.
But as Joan Littlewood (a Marxist) understood if you create different material conditions lessons are learnt that are never forgotten and that the products of the circumstances that adversity creates come back to haunt those who in turn created the circumstances in the first instance.
A working-class battle for access to the arts is far from over.
Tony Church
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