‘We’re asked to console with each tremulous soul who steps out to be loudly applauded. Stars on opening nights weep when they see their names in lights. Though people who act, as a matter of fact, are financially amply rewarded, it seems while pursuing their calling their suffering is simply appalling.’
The mummers couldn’t deceive Noel Coward. The Master knew all their ways, for he lived among them, as dramatist, actor, director and — as we have seen — songwriter. What a shame he’s not still with us, for the furore surrounding the ‘savage cuts’ announced last week by the Arts Council of England might have prompted him to add a few more humorous verses about the vanity of certain thesps.
Not all; by no means. Most actors learn their lines, put on the greasepaint, and toddle off to their digs to see, in the time-honoured phrase, if the landlady’s daughter obliges. But some want us to know how much they suffer for their art, and they want us to suffer, too. Had he been around last week Coward would almost certainly have found much to chortle at in the absurd preening of Sam West, for whom the diminished Arts Council subsidy to theatre was not the result of Gordon Brown’s financial incontinence. Heavens no, it was all ‘ideologically motivated’.
He told the Guardian: ‘The Conservatives are frightened of anything that educates and enlightens people — such as theatre. They want to preserve the social distinctions that exist between the rich and poor.’ These are not, you may note, the words of a frothing teenager. They belong to a man of 44 who attended Alleyn’s School in Dulwich and Oxford University where, no doubt, he acquired that grand manner.
West is a perfectly good actor and, having met him a couple of times, I should add that he is a decent man. If you were looking for a well-spoken, public-school-educated performer to don a wing collar and deliver lines like ‘I say, old bean, what are you driving at?’ he’s just the chap. But, like all members of his tribe, he makes a poor spokesman for the oppressed; in this case those poor souls who, having been deprived of their cultural inheritance by the vile penny-pinching Tories, will never now see the curtain rise.
With a predictability that was almost comic in its righteousness, Guardian writers endorsed West’s daft remarks. Charlotte Higgins, the earnest lady on the arts beat, wrote of ‘the crude, unthinking vandalism to the English cultural landscape’. Yes, all over the land, hour by hour, theatres and concert halls have been put to the torch! Polly Toynbee, never one to be outblubbed, also used the V word. The Tories, she howled, peeling her daily onion, were undoing all the glorious work of Labour, whose years in office had brought ‘a golden era to the arts’.
And there, with a finality that is breathtaking in its arrogance, is the heart of this matter. In the world according to West, amplified by Toynbee, taking sides is easy-peasy. We are virtuous; they are selfish. We are altruistic; they couldn’t spell the word. We are progressive; they are reactionary. We open doors; they place guards outside, to keep out the riff-raff. We care; they couldn’t care less.
‘Brain-dead liberals’, David Mamet calls them, and you have to admit that phrase sums up West rather nicely. It would be wonderful if every town supported a theatre, and, for that matter, an art gallery and a concert hall. In Germany, where government is federal, and where people on the whole have a keener appreciation of the performing arts, that is often the case. But facts have a habit of tripping up the unwary. If the theatres of Exeter and Derby, two big losers in the latest Arts Council handout, go out of business, it may be because not enough people in those cities want the theatres to exist. You can’t compel folk to attend shows. On the other hand, if theatres do good work, and people turn up, there is every chance that they will prosper. The Theatre by the Lake in Keswick and the Arcola in north London were both handsomely rewarded by the ACE. So it can be done. West did it himself, when he ran the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.
The BDLs, as we may call them, give the game away with their choice of adjectives. They talk of programmes being bold, daring, innovative, edgy and, when they are feeling particularly naughty, seminal. This is not the language of the artist. It is drivel that falls from the mouths of social engineers. Toynbee more or less admits it when she claims that ‘the most avid consumers of conventional theatre and opera still look white, middle-aged and middle-class’. In other words they look much like Polly Toynbee of Clapham and Tuscany. A toothsome little wine, isn’t this, Polly? Oh, ra-ther!
Of course most people who attend the theatre and opera are, by any reasonable judgment, middle-class. That is no less true of audiences in continental Europe. If you think Covent Garden is posh, try the opera in Munich or Vienna! Most people who buy good books, eat decent grub, listen to Radios 3 and 4, or, for that matter, read the Guardian, are also ‘middle-class’. It is the middle class, by and large, that protects civilisation, however much its members are assailed by the barbs of self-haters like Toynbee and West. They should be praised, not denigrated.
Oh dear, little Sam, what have you done? When you were growing up in south London, the son of distinguished and much-loved actors, did you ever imagine you would play such a public role, and inhabit it in a way that brought so many guffaws?
The title of Mr Coward’s song, by the way, asked the age-old question: Why Must The Show Go On? But it did then, it does now, and it always will. So dress up, Master West — and then shut up.