“Theatre eh? Bloody hell.” – David Lockwood.

Threescore and twelve years ago yesterday, an idea was brought into action by polemical Welshman and absolute smoke-show Aneurin Bevan (pictured) to fix an industry that was a mess. The part-privately, part-publicly funded healthcare industry had no shortage of brilliant staff and good intentions, but it had deep-seated structural problems. Some service providers were simply unaffordable to ordinary people, and many that weren’t teetered on the brink of financial collapse. Commercially-oriented management led to huge gaps in provision, underpaid frontline workers, and a system frequently stratified along class lines. Sound familiar?

Out of this mayhem, despite a global crisis and a drastically weakened economy, came a new, unified service, one free at the point of use for every man, woman and child. One that would transform our perception of hospitals from places of dread to places of safety, from pits of last resort to national assets. And fuck knows, it wasn’t perfect then and isn’t perfect now, but we still swing-dance around beds to celebrate it to this day. 

Most people would probably be hesitant to draw analogies between the performing arts industry and the NHS. On one level, there will never be parity between the people that ventilate your gran and people like me who potter around their spare room drafting concept albums about cartoon bears. But on another, they both receive public funding, so the gulf of public esteem between them has something to do with how that money is spent, and what we get for it.

In 2001, when a different Labour government made museums and galleries free at the point of use, public perception of them was similarly transformed, and attendance at them both skyrocketed and diversified. Theatres, however, weren’t coming along for the ride, sitting as they did in a separate, more commercial tradition going back to good old bear-baiting, paper-stacking, nicking-the-theatre-to-pay-less-rent Shakespeare himself, and likely beyond. They were different, right? They could make their own way in the big wide market. No need for public funding to get involved. Except that’s not how it’s worked out.

Theatre is the most-funded genre by Arts Council England (whose founder Keynes was, ironically enough, the chair of a failed theatre), yet all of its funded organisations charge for entry for the majority of their programme. Some, like the Royal Opera House, charge hundreds of pounds, a practice that would create outrage if it happened at a library, museum or gallery. The fact that their funding from ACE is ring-fenced for administrative and “core” costs, rather than artistic spending, grants the ability for most of these organisations to pursue commercial agendas while still banking public funds, all the while casualising and undervaluing the labour of their frontline staff. This is a big part of why there is widespread public apathy, or even resentment, for the theatre establishment, a thing we who are in it often don’t see or want to see: public money goes into a thing that much of the public can’t or don’t want to use.  I wouldn’t hate on anyone for applying to this bailout to safeguard their businesses and livelihoods, but those who wish to defend it ideologically must do the same for the bailouts of the airplane and car industries. An arty veneer of respectability can’t obscure the fact that both are filled with private companies who keep their surpluses when they succeed, beg for handouts when they fail, and pay top dollar to their executives throughout.

But if the Conservative Party can pull a u-turn on decades of entrenched thinking about public spending, so can we. Rather than pickle the established order in a jar for when this all passes over, we could do previously unthought-of things if theatres were transformed into public assets, unshackled by the profit motive. We could put a young company in every school, touring shows in every community hall, have salaried theatre makers delivering engagement programmes measured in years instead of days. We could open up programming to local residents, democratising and rejuvenating what people see at their local venues in the way many rural touring schemes have done. Publicly funded theatres wouldn’t have to compete with West End shows anymore, because they’d be offering something wholly different. It wouldn’t be cheap, but it would finally make theatre publicly owned, not just publicly funded, and if another crisis rolls around, it wouldn’t need an additional penny to keep functioning. And maybe at the 2076 Olympics we can baffle the world with scenes of ushers twerking over a lighting desk as giant glowing letters commemorate the National Arts Service. Just a thought.

Jack’s views are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Jack Dean & Company. He’s also no angel, so if you want to indulge his own reckless commercial impulses, check out the “Services” tab in the top bar.

Today is the day of the week, in the parallel universe that we’ve slipped into, that I head down to Sainsbury’s, stand in the one-in-one-out nightclub-style queue, then head in to pick up groceries. Every week, I head to the aisle where the vegan milks are stocked in search of my favourite by far, Oatly Whole. Every week I stare at the empty cardboard containers where it once stood. Of the many things this trash-fire of a situation has thrown into sharp relief is the law of supply and demand. Not just with products, like toilet paper and dense, creamy Swedish plant goo, but also of course, with labour. I would hazard that many are now experiencing what many artists have known all along, that, as the late great Jeremy Hardy put it “unless you’re a nurse or a bin man, chances are your job is utterly pointless”.

Theatre makers are continuously evaluated on the quality and saleability of their product. If your oat milk isn’t flying off the shelves, better get back to the lab and start squishing out a new blend, the logic goes. One could make a justification for this in a world where theatres are similarly dependent on commercial returns, as existed in the before times. But now the supermarkets of theatre are closed, kept in business only through the largest arts council bailout in history (one paid for, incidentally, by draining Project Grants, a fund mostly used for artist fees), and yet the suppliers are still made to bid for contracts they will struggle to fulfil. And so comes the spate of “Digital Commissions” where those who have worked mostly or exclusively in a live medium are asked, while navigating the rest of the chaos likely to have entered their lives, to generate ideas and source equipment for podcasts, videos, and other online media where an established and competitive market already exists. For some, this may be an easy pivot. But those are not likely to be the ones most needing support. This might seem like adaptation, but it seems to me much more like the opposite of that: an stubborn attempt to square the circle of the twin facts that a) theatre artists have value and b) that value cannot currently be properly shared with the world. Theatre administrators’ and theatre artists’ jobs are made equally pointless by the pandemic. Only one group is being asked by the other to change their entire output to suit the circumstances.

I often deploy a crude measure I call Fox’s Law (named after the poet Kate Fox who I first saw making use of it) to find out whether a thing being asked of an artist is normal. To do so, the law states, simply ask the question “Would you ask a plumber to do this?”. So in this case, the question is “Would you ask a plumber for a creative response to Coronavirus?”, or if you want to be stricter in the analogy “would you ask a plumber for a plumbing response to Coronavirus?”. To which the answer is pretty clearly no: you would expect them to carry on as much as possible, doing what they can when they can and accepting when that is nothing.

There’s no doubt these commissions are well-intentioned. Many of those issuing them could easily get away with simply cancelling their entire programme and leaving it at that. The instinct to distribute money to artists is correct. The instinct to push them to create a product they’re not suited to making is more questionable. Although creativity comes in different conditions for everyone, a rushed and hectic race to leave the comfort zone will suit few. Normality is over. Can we, as an industry, leave behind the urge to force business as usual? Nick Cave put it beautifully in his recent blog:  “For me, this is not a time to be buried in the business of creating. It is a time to take a backseat and use this opportunity to reflect on exactly what our function is — what we, as artists, are for.” If there is going to be a future for theatre, now is the time to start thinking of artists as valuable not just for what you can buy from them right now, but how you’d feel if the milk was off the shelves forever.