theatreVOICE

First the good news. I’m just rounding off a quick visit to the Dublin Theatre Festival (you can read the Telegraph round-up here) and I can confirm that the Celtic Tiger, although lying prone on the floor and bleeding profusely, hasn’t quite given up the game yet in the face of the Credit Crunch’s daily slings and arrows. At a meeting yesterday with the Festival director Loughlin Deegan - there were smiles all round, as it was declared that the festival has been a sell-out success. It’s been an ambitious and canny programme this year - Deegan’s second as artistic director - what with the first chance Irish audiences have had to see Black Watch, the National Theatre visiting with Happy Days, Waves and The Year of Magical Thinking - all ‘bankers’ as they say; plus a smart number of restagings of proven ‘Irish’ hits - Gare St Lazare Players with Beckett’s First Love, and Rough Magic’s staging of David Greig’s Caligula. There were queues round the block to get to the box-office when the booking period first opened, Deegan told me; quite a reassuring contrast to the stampedes to withdraw money from unstable-looking banks we’re starting to see around the world.

So far, then, this year, so good. And in several other conversations I’ve had with producers and arts programmers in recent weeks, I’ve heard a similar strain of relief and optimism: things may be bad, the reasoning goes, but even if people are tightening their belts, they don’t want to stay indoors and mope, they want to be cheered up, entertained, taken out of themselves and if they can be given a 24-carat guarantee of something truly memorable into the bargain, even better. Matt Wolf reports on a similarly comforting bag of mixed signals in the Telegraph today, in his assessment of the state of the West End’s box-office receipts.

I wonder though, when some theatregoers might start to put two and two together and ask why they should pour more money into a system that has let them down so badly. Escapism is all very well - and in the case of La Clique, coming to the Hippodrome, it’s written into the fabric of the evening’s entertainment, like an ornate tattoo on a lap-dancer’s buttock. But where are the plays confronting the massive global meltdown now haunting the waking hours, and nightmares, of millions of people? Where, more to the point, WERE the plays that scented something seriously awry in the financial markets?

The crunch has been upon us for more than 12 months now, but I haven’t seen any play that has grappled with the intricacies of hedge funds, or subprime deals, or the City itself, in that time - nor can I see anything substantial on the horizon. Maybe I’m missing something; maybe I’ll be given a few tips by theatrevoice visitors, but I think it’s time to ask a few questions. Has there been a failure of will or understanding among artistic directors - and playwrights - to look hard at the age of apparent affluence we’ve been living through? If there has been complacency - is it because a centre-left government presided over the boom? Back in 1987, Caryl Churchill satirised the so-called ‘Big Bang’ with Serious Money; 20 years on, where was its equivalent?

Theatre offers an invaluable means by which a society holds a mirror up to its workings; it can show us whole worlds at work, lay bare and make simple complex actions, confront us with painful truths. In matters of economics, though, British theatre has been caught napping. Shouldn’t someone at the top admit they should have seen this coming?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 3:55 pm, by Dominic Cavendish and is filed under Audio 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.