Lyn Gardner's theatre roundup: interns need a fairer deal – and playwrights limber up

Monday 9 July 2012

London's Old Vic closes its internship scheme under pressure from the Arts Council, Clay Shirky reveals a dark theatrical past – plus Samuel Beckett gets active on Twitter

Muscular dialogue ... Harold Pinter in rehearsals with director Robin Lefevre at the Gate theatre, Dublin. Which other playwright athletes could you name? Photograph: John Haynes/EPO

Fairer deals for interns

The widespread use of internships in the arts and theatre has been discussed extensively, not least in the thread following this piece from 2010 and in another late last year. One organisation which has come under increasing pressure from unions and Arts Council England is London's Old Vic. This week it bowed to that pressure and suspended its intern programme.
Barbara Matthews, theatre director of the Arts Council, is right when she says: "If we don't create fairer entry routes into the arts workforce, we risk closing the door on a new generation of talented leaders from a range of backgrounds, and the arts will suffer." The crucial phrase is "fairer entry routes". A well-run, properly funded internship programme can provide real opportunities for those wanting to work in the arts. It's no victory if institutions like the Old Vic just close their internship schemes when they are subject to criticism; the pressure must be to get them to reform those schemes so that they provide a genuine paid opportunity for all. We don't need fewer internships in the arts, we need more – and better – internships.

New ways of funding?

Many arts institutions in the US are facing uncertain futures and closing at an alarming rate, and that makes the search for new funding models a hot topic. As Adam Huttler has suggested in his Fractured Atlas blog, "artists and administrators feel in their bones that something is broken", and "it's not always easy to tease apart the effects of the current economic crisis from the long-term social and economic trends that are changing the world". There is much talk in the US about whether artists' interests are always best served by large institutions. It's a crucial debate, and one that it is also worth having in a British context.
Not, as Diane Ragsdale points out in this piece on the Arts Journal website, in order to point fingers of blame, but simply to understand where we are and where we might go. Ragsdale quotes Clay Shirky saying that "institutions hate being told they are obstacles, and that when an institution is told it is an obstacle it generally goes through something like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief".
Shirky was also talking good sense via Skype at Shift Happens, an arts and converging technologies meeting, at the Theatre Royal York on 5 July. "The presence of process is harder to change than the absence of resources," he noted, pointing out that it is the biggest obstacle to change. "Organisations prefer predictability, but they need to sacrifice predictability for effective change." I was interested to hear that Shirky comes from a radical theatre background. He worked with the Wooster Group, and was at one point a lighting designer for Elevator Repair Service, who are nearing the end of their London run of Gatz. "I'm in awe of their work," he said.
Actor and director Sam West was also in full cry at Shift Happens. "Let's fight the pragmatic fight and pick our battles. Let's not whine," he said about arts funding, adding that what was really needed was not "art for art's sake" but "arts for our sake".

Big theatre, big society

I've quoted Gavin Stride of the Maltings Arts Centre in Farnham before. He's the man who never calls himself "an artist", but says that what he does is "help people live longer and be happier". Stride understands that the community is at the heart of all he does. Here's a good read from the US about why taking part in educational work is not an add-on for an arts organisation but should be part of its core mission.

A body of work

British Olympic hopefuls revealed in the Guardian on 7 July the training regimes and diet that it takes to develop a medal-winning body.
All this led playwright and performer Tim Crouch (@Timcrouch1964) and others to ponder on Twitter a parallel feature on #playwrightathletes. Some of my favourite suggestions include "we don't appreciate how sculpted our bodies are as playwrights ... we don't write 32 hours a week just to have a nice body" and Samuel Beckett ("On average I write 100 to 120 sentences a week. Naturally that has an impact. I'm pushing my body to the absolute limit.") Or what about Harold Pinter? "The training emphasis can be as much on what I don't do as it is on what I do. Do." And who says Twitter's not an art form?

The Guardian