The Stage

We need a classier system to harness real talent

Published Tuesday 2 February 2010 at 14:50 by Hilary Strong

In an article originally published in our November 26, 2009 print issue, Director of the National Council for Drama Training Hilary Strong discusses the changes that need to be made in order for a wider variety of youngsters to consider a career in theatre

Last month, Vikki Heywood, executive director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was reported bemoaning the fact that the theatre industry is still failing to attract a diverse workforce. She’s keen to promote the range of jobs on offer to school children in the hope that they may consider a career working backstage or in the many admin departments.

It’s always interesting to learn about a successful theatre manager’s background and I feel a great deal in common with Vikki, who started out as a stage manager (as I did) before shifting into administration. There’s a fair number of women occupying top jobs in the theatre who travelled the same route, but they tend to be in their fifties. Nowadays, the upper tier of theatre establishment is more likely to recruit from a very narrow gene pool and one which is almost exclusively white, middle class and highly educated.

It’s particularly evident when you Wikipedia the current crop of our most successful directors. Rupert Goold (Trinity College, Cambridge) was born in Highgate, his father was a management consultant and mother an author of children’s books. The parents of Thea Sharrock (Corpus Christi, Oxford) were both journalists. Katie Mitchell (Magdalen College, Oxford) was raised in Hermitage, Berkshire. Sam Mendes (Peterhouse, Cambridge) was born in Reading, his father was a university professor and his mother was also an author of children’s books.

I’m not suggesting for one minute that all theatre directors aged between 30 and 40 have studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but it does convey a sense of a theatre tribe that will inevitably have similar backgrounds.

These talented, clever (and yes, privileged) artists are responsible for the way that theatre will develop over the next 20 years. They are shaping our culture and inevitably it will reflect the influences they have been subject to at home, in school and at university. Great work has been done over the last 20 years to encourage diversity in performance and audiences, but I reckon you have to search hard to find a young working-class theatre director in Britain today.

Tony Travers, writing in the London Evening Standard last week, discussed working-class culture. “As recently as the early seventies, many on the left saw the working class as noble, expressing a culture to be celebrated,” he wrote.

“Actors such as Albert Finney and Michael Caine built careers on working-class chutzpah. Today, the left is often suspicious of such people, seeing them as a threatening, racist under-class.”

The worry is that the communities we are so eager to attract are frequently deterred by the mainstream cultural offer because it doesn’t reflect their lives. As Heywood says, they don’t encourage their kids to think about theatre and the arts as a potential career.

Research recently conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies in Education at London Metropolitan University found that gender, social class and ethnicity did not appear to have a bearing on young people’s aspirations to creative careers. However, social class did appear to affect their perception of how accessible these careers were for ‘someone like me’ and the risks they would have to negotiate in realising these aspirations.

To change this, we need to hire staff that haven’t just graduated from a top university with a first in English, but have life skills drawn from entirely different sectors. And now would be a good time to do this because the latest unemployment figures make for grim reading - 18% of 16 to 24-year-olds are out of work and there’s no likelihood the picture will improve in the next 12 months. As the competition for jobs build, the middle-class elite will inevitably secure the favoured arts jobs, making it harder for employers to establish a more diverse workforce.

But theatre is in a unique position. Despite the recession, the West End looks pretty certain to break box office figures for the fourth successive year. Currently sales are up by 4% over last year’s record take and regional theatres are also holding firm despite the recession. Young people continue doggedly to create their own fringe theatre and miraculously sometimes break even.

We should be more confident about our business acumen and the long-term employment potential of working in theatre. Perhaps as an industry we could come up with a national training scheme for junior managers, providing skills in finance, marketing, human resources and fund-raising.

One possible model is the Civil Service Fast Stream, an accelerated training graduate programme for people who have the potential to become the future leaders of the civil service. Most fast streamers begin their careers with a series of different jobs within their departments. They can expect each posting to last around 12 or 18 months, after which they’ll move on to another project and be encouraged to gain experience in a different career grouping. The theatre version could offer a two-year contract, with theatres bidding to be part of the scheme. Applicants would need to show experience in the retail, leisure or hospitality industries and the focus would be on acquiring management skills that are transferable across a range of creative industries.

Paul Collard, chief executive of Creative Culture and Education has said that “60% of all the jobs that young people in school today will do have not yet been invented and, more importantly, they are going to have to invent those jobs. We are growing up in a completely different world in which you no longer get training, learn some knowledge and go and take a job for the rest of your life. You are actually going to have to develop a set of complex skills and those skills you are going to have to use to constantly reinvent what you do for the rest of your life”.

Now would be a good time for the theatre industry to review its employment practices, open the doors to a much broader group of employees and help to establish a national training scheme that could create the arts leaders of the future.