After the rage comes new resolution

Post Comprehensive Spending Review, Alan Lane of arts organisation Slung Low reminds us of the strength of both the arts and our sector.

It had been a while since I had felt such impotent, infant-like rage. I sat listening to the Comprehensive Spending Review, screaming pointless obscenities. I watched Alan Davey, the head of the Arts Council, being interviewed by the House of Commons Culture Committee and threw tantrums, shouting at the computer screen: ‘Stop accepting the premise of the argument!’ Then came Late Night Review and I was throwing things at the TV screen. On Facebook, on Twitter, at an event for the National Student Drama Festival – the rage went on and on.

Beyond the cuts themselves, I was angry at the people I thought were leading my industry for doing such a dreadful job. Not dreadful because they lost the funding review (that was inevitable), but dreadful because they couldn’t seem to articulate with any skill why they should have won it.

I was angry at the endless bickering I found within the artistic world, with each and every line of defence against the cuts contested by different sections – it was just like an arts sector re-run of the Labour Party in the 1980s. I was angry at the fact that no single line of defence seemed to hold ground for 10 seconds before being drowned out by new and noisier contestants.

And when someone said, ‘Then make something people want to pay to see,’ all of a sudden I was stumped. Out of my mouth came… nothing. I was raged out. Explained out. Exhausted by it all.

In the face of all that had passed, I felt utterly, completely irrelevant. Forgotten was each and every reason for doing what I do. I had forgotten its value and worth.

In all that had come before – the lack of money, the warehouse shifts, the long days and endless travel, the mountain of rejection letters – it had never occurred to me that what I was doing was not an important part of society. Yet for a few days, I lost sight of the point, the rationale behind being an artist.

It took Anthology, the production I was working on at that time, to bring me back. Here were people coming, night after night, for story, for adventure, for experience; trying in their own way to make sense of the world, and using the things we had created to do that; to cry, smile, imagine and remember. Anthology was a collaboration with Liverpool Everyman, and the local papers liked to characterise Everyman as the Monolith, and Slung Low as the band of Anarchists. Anyone who knows either group of people and their endeavours will immediately appreciate the silliness of those titles.

I am absolutely certain that we are at a tipping point where, soon, such labels – however loosely held – will be utterly meaningless. If the large-scale institutions are to survive, they will do so as wide-open, collaborative buildings; the beating heart of a city’s theatre community. By being the village hall.

Equally, the alternative sector will have to appreciate that there isn’t the resource to have competing organisations in the same city, only collaborating ones. If the camps remain, I am certain that, in the future, both sides will sink. Fast, and with little mourning from the public, who neither understand nor care about the semantics or organisational positioning. We will weather the immediate future as a community, a village, selfsupporting. Or we will not weather it. If what looks at the moment like an inevitable stream of cuts becomes a reality, then there will be nothing left but the absolutely determined, the absolutely relentless, the absolutely exciting, the absolutely open.

Now is the time for daring, for hoop shots and visionary leadership, for bloody-mindedness and adventure. Now it is the time for those who can make miracles out of nothing, with sheer fury and energy. Now it is the time for cockroaches.

Because when they’ve finished cutting support to the young, the poor, the old and the ill; when they’ve finished giving what might have been all of ours to the chosen few; once they’ve got rid of the hand-up and the stepping stones to a better life, all that might be left to many is the desire to go out of an evening – to hear a story, to have an adventure, to try in their own way to make sense of the world. They will want and need to use the things that we create to do that.

And we should absolutely be ready for them when they do.

The feeling of fury is still very much present. It’s the feeling of irrelevance that has gone away.