Jack Newsinger continues the series, jointly published on Culture Matters and the Morning Star, on the effects of the Covid-19 crisis on culture, sketching out what needs to change and why. Can artists, writers and other creatives form closer alliances with the labour movement? The accompanying image is by Jonpaul Kirvan.

Culture matters more than ever, as Mike Quille pointed out in the introduction to this series of articles. Yet  pandemic has completely shut down public arts and culture in the UK. Theatres, cinemas, libraries, music venues (including Glastonbury Festival’s 50^th anniversary) – all closed until further notice, and likely to be some of the last to be allowed to reopen, with enormous impacts on the people whose livelihoods depend upon functioning cultural and creative industries.

We are all used to the glamour of the film and television industries, or the pomp of the theatre and opera, but it is worth emphasising that many of these workers are precariously employed on short term contracts often with little security or savings – the arts and creative industries are disproportionately reliant on a highly skilled, dedicated and passionate, but precarious workforce.

The people who serve coffee in the cafes are very often also the people on the stages; the guitarist in the band has also lost her other income teaching music lessons in a school. This ability to quickly contract when income disappears is how cultural organisations have learnt to keep functioning in Britain’s competitive cultural economy, but it can be brutal for many of the people who actually make culture, just like the stresses and strains faced by workers in the NHS, care homes and other public services which have suffered years of exposure to austerity economics and the imposition of capitalist rationality.

As in the rest of society, the COVID-19 crisis has made visible the weaknesses and inequalities in the arts and creative industries that were already present under the surface if anyone cared to look hard enough. Unsurprisingly, the way that the crisis has so far played out has mirrored these inequalities. There is increasing evidence that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people are suffering a disproportionate financial and employment penalty due to the lockdown. These inequalities will intersect with class, age, disability and region to compound and deepen the already significant disparities that exist in access to the arts and culture, for both producers and audiences. The danger is that commissioners used to seeing ‘minority arts’ and working-class participation as something of a side endeavour will retreat into the ‘safe’ zone of the ‘old boys’ network’ with a resulting narrowing of participation, vitality and cultural diversity. 

The COVID-19 crisis has shown the cracks and weaknesses in the system. But it also might reveal ways to overcome them. ‘Lockdown culture’ is forcing makers and audiences to find new ways to connect with each other. Some of these seek to reproduce existing capitalist relationships of production remotely. For example, the Artists' Support Pledge, in which artists sell their work through Instagram, promising that once they reach £1000 of sales they will spend £200 on another artist’s work.

The crisis pushes to the forefront new ideas about how we should fund the arts. Do we want a precarious commercial model that mirrors the inequalities of the market, or can we find more egalitarian ways of providing stability for cultural producers? Can this be an opportunity to overcome the pathological elitism and lack of diversity of the arts and cultural establishment? The Arts Council moved relatively quickly to announce a package of £160m to support cultural organisations and individuals. This is an essential lifeline but it appears to be targeted at maintaining the existing cultural landscape, with larger, prestigious organisations that serve metropolitan middle-class tastes taking priority (as they always have).

In this vacuum of new ideas, it is the spirit of self-help and community organisation that offers the way forward. Debates around Universal Basic Income have become more relevant. As noted by the artist and activist Stephen Pritchard, “Is the time coming when art will finally embrace self-organised alternatives rooted in ethical practice, equitable living, commoning, fair pay, openness and hope? Can art help rebuild our lives and our communities? Can it reimagine ways of being and living together after a global pandemic that surely changes everything?”

Three things emerge from all this so far. Firstly, professional artists, filmmakers, writers, makers, and all cultural practitioners are also workers, ultimately, and need collective representation and a strong welfare state. There must surely be potential for closer links and mutual support between cultural practitioners and the labour movement, given their shared values and belief that the arts and culture generally can be a liberating force.

Secondly, the importance of looking to the people about how the arts and culture can change. People are showing that they will still put their creativity out there whether they get paid or not, which says something about the importance of the human capacity for connecting through culture beyond commercial relationships.

Finally, quarantine has demonstrated the importance of internet connectivity, and culture is flourishing online, whether it be watching a concert on Instagram live, learning how to paint on Facebook, or home art-schooling your children using the Tate’s online galleries. This is surely to be celebrated. If only we had a government that would guarantee free broadband for all…..

Jack Newsinger reviews the documentary film The Acting Class, by Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne, which gives voice to the struggles of actors of working-class origin as they try to make it in an increasingly middle-class profession.

In 2014 Julie Walters worried that "Soon the only actors are going to be privileged kids whose parents can afford to send them to drama school. That’s not right. It feels like we are going backwards.” The response from some was less than positive. Lewis star Laurence Fox, for example, said that Julie Walters should “shut up”. Fox was educated at Harrow public school, as was Benedict Cumberbatch. Damien Lewis, Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston and Dominic West all went to Eton. The 'poshification' of acting has been a topic of public debate, alongside movements to improve BAME and gender representation in the cultural and creative industries, for a number of years. These issues have been forced high onto the agendas of some of our leading cultural institutions such as Arts Council England and the British Film Institute, and many now have official policies and guidelines designed to address the clear unfairness of access to different jobs in the cultural sector. But these initiatives, while potentially signalling a change in the mindset and practices of cultural institutions, are often top-down. There is little to suggest that there has been a transformation (so far) in the social composition of the people who make the decisions about what culture we get to see and hear.

That’s where films like The Acting Class come in. Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne’s documentary follows Tom Stocks as he builds a campaign to improve the opportunities for working class actors. Actor Awareness started online in 2015 and grew like a snowball into a fully-fledged movement, highlighting the difficulties and barriers faced by actors from working-class backgrounds as they enter the profession and providing support and solidarity. The film uses this platform to take a broad look at the barriers built into the system such as the prohibitive costs of drama school education, the scandal of audition fees, the expectations of working for free to build a career, the typecasting that working-class actors suffer, particularly those of colour. (If you wanted to build a system that kept working-class people out, it would be hard to think of a better one.) O’Neill and Wayne have put together a powerful film that represents the experiences of working-class actors at all stages of their careers, from new talent like Andrew Ellis and Amy Stout to well-established stars including Julie Hesmondhalgh, Maxine Peake and Christopher Ecclestone, to dissect the problems, common across much of the cultural sector, that prevent genuine working-class participation.

The stories of raising money for travel to London and audition fees, the feelings of insecurity engendered by entering the rarefied middle-class environment of the London cultural elite, the thrill of being offered a place, then all for nothing as the realisation that drama school is simply unaffordable to those who don’t have parents with enough money to pay for it (around £13,000 per year) are genuinely heart breaking. Dreams dashed. Tom Stocks himself had to twice turn down a place through lack of money. Andrew Ellis describes being recognised for his role in Shane Meadows’ film This is England while working on the check-out at Asda. Presumably this never happened to Fox.

Why is it important that working-class people become actors? As well as an issue of basic fairness – why should the upper-middle classes be able to buy their children a place at the front of the queue for all the exciting opportunities? – the problem is well articulated by Hesmondhalgh: ‘if art is coming from one very narrow part of society, then the stories and the conversations are only going to be coming from that place and they are only going to be about that place.’ Art and self-expression are as important to working-class people as they are to middle-class people. Perhaps more important. As Scott Berry, Artistic Director of Salford Arts Theatre says, ‘when you’ve got nothing else, dreams are what you live on.’

And this is the real power of the film: working-class people telling their own stories, in their own accents. The decision to mix together those at the beginning of their careers with the established stars, to show that working-class people have something worth saying and it can’t be dismissed as a few diamonds in the rough. The Acting Class is as good a dissection of the profound class inequality that we have in the cultural sector as any industry or academic report. And I say that as someone who has worked on a few.

You can find a screening of The Acting Class here. Follow Actor Awareness here.