BWW:UK Discusses: The Future Of British Theatre Education?

Making music and making theatre have much in common - both excite the passions of youth, both promise a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow (for the lucky few) and both require time and effort to be expended in the learning of the craft.

Both, of course, figure prominently in education, but the two ancient arts diverge when it comes to opportunities to progress from the talented youngster to the professional adult. In music, there's the queue-jumping X-Factor route for a handful each year (though the importance of kids seeing the dream of success played out before their eyes cannot be overstated in motivating the otherwise unmotivateable) but the hard slog of demoing, gigging and (I suppose these days) Myspacing still pays off for those with musical talent and original things to play and sing.

Another group of talented youngsters will attend the great hothouses of classical music education, drilling in the disciplines of formal music training to go on to populate the concert halls and opera houses here and abroad.

In theatre, things are rather different, as a glance at any production's programme will confirm. Almost every person involved in professional theatre will have come through the educational route, training in universities and theatre schools, learning through practice under the eyes of teachers. Sure there's a handful of actors who by-pass such establishments through making it as stand-ups or by catching a break as a child-star and sustaining standards through adolescence into adulthood, but there are few of them and even they tend to take three years off to get a solid theatrical education.

Does this de facto requirement to complete a training in theatre matter, so long as the talent comes through, the theatres are full (or fullish) and there's applause at the curtain call? I argue that it does matter and it matters more than ever, as post-compulsory education faces its biggest challenge for two generations. Here's why.

Drama (and related subjects) is taught at many British universities, the vast majority of which will be charging £9000 for a year's tuition from 2012 (on top of the withdrawal of the Educational Maintenance Allowance that had kept so many 16 year-olds in education). With the chances of making a decent living from theatre work so slim and with the constant shrieking of a right-wing press relentlessly disparaging the value of arts education, who is going to invest their one shot at a degree in anything theatre related? The answer is those who can afford it - and those who luck out with a scholarship offered by the likes of Andrew Lloyd-Webber who, though a Tory, can see the writing on the wall for talented kids who will feel the pressure to reject theatre to study economics or law (like we need more accountants and lawyers).

There's more at stake than the diversity of talent that British theatre requires to keep pulling in the tourist dollar and the renewal of the cultural industries that contribute so much to GDP without ever being too big to fail. Schools, particularly those outside local authority accountability - "free" if you must - will drop drama as an option at GCSE and A-level, as the double whammy of teenagers needing to get a bang for their 27000 bucks and selective universities blacklisting arts A-levels in favour of soi disant academic subjects like Maths, Science and Modern Languages, really kicks in. Once drama is off a school's curriculum, it will never be re-introduced: it takes up too much staff time, too much space and it's too difficult to benchmark in the dry league tables that drive so much educational decision-making. Drama will become like Latin - an enclave in a few chosen schools, a quaint reminder of a time when education was more about the formation of a rounded person and less about the hypodermic injection of skills to be assessed, recognised and rewarded.

All of which is happening at exactly the moment that the stuff that drama teaches has never been more needed by young people and society at large. Drama demonstrates immediately and continually the value of empathy, the means by which teams work together to achieve collective goals, the way individual talent shines brighter within a disciplined environment in which leadership is both acknowledged (in the director) and distributed (through all members of the cast and crew in their roles). Naturally, The Big Society's well-meaning am-drams in church halls will be called upon to backfill the absence of proper education, but nobody is buying that surely?

Though it sounds like special pleading, there's an economic, social and educational case for drama to be given the kind ringfenced protection in schools and universities that has been afforded to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM subjects). It's trite to believe the Hollywood bullshit of actors like Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn in their world-saving mode, but it's not trite to believe that education in theatre can save at least some lives from going off the rails and help build a culture in which empathy, and not greed, is good. 

 

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