In a series of protests against the cuts culminating on Saturday, theatremakers are hoping to make our voices heard ? and in the most creative way possible
This coming Saturday will be a proud day. In the final performance of Theatre Uncut, over 75 groups from around the country will join a unique theatrical uprising. They will simultaneously perform, read aloud, read to themselves, discuss and respond to eight new plays written for us by some of the UK's leading dramatists in response to October's comprehensive spending review.
Mark Ravenhill, David Greig, Jack Thorne, Lucy Kirkwood, Clara Brennan, Laura Lomas, Dennis Kelly and Anders Lustgarten have written pieces that can be performed rights-free until midnight on 19 March. Nationwide, and indeed in New York, Chicago and Berlin, groups are preparing for Saturday night. In London, at our flagship event, directors, producers, actors and crew have donated their time, expertise and support to the project. Online link-ups will allow us to join our satellite groups, and see what they have been creating, hear why they care, and find out how they have responded. We now have upwards of 700 participants adding their voices to Theatre Uncut, and therefore the wider anti-cuts movement.
There has been much debate recently about how theatre and the arts could and should respond to government cutbacks. I believe there is no question that theatre should address the cuts, and not just as they relate to the arts, but in all that they mean. That includes directly questioning the morality of abolishing the disability mobility allowance to the larger question of whether our society is being pulled, magnet-like, towards a selfishness that sees bankers as impervious to criticism, and assumes that the fifth of 18-24 year olds who are out of work should volunteer for a big society that has forgotten them.
What marks theatre out from other art forms, I think, is that it's essentially a distilled form of empathy; we have a need to understand and probe the world around us, and create stories from what we see. In the same way that climate change is the subject of many new plays, and has seeped thematically into many others, I suspect theatre will respond to the cuts over and over again for many years. That is exactly how it should be.
Theatre Uncut began because I, like many others, was enraged by what was happening ? I set about Facebook with a fury, IM-ing "let's do something" like a maniac. Luckily for me, Mark Ravenhill was one of the first to answer my call.
Anger has manifested itself in the protest groups that have sprung up across the country and online. Contrary to what the Daily Mail might think, our young people are not sitting at home planning their next Justin Bieber stalk. They are planning their next protest. And it's not just the youth contingent. A huge number of people have been galvanised to do something, to make some form of stand. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have succeeded where many others have failed: they have made the political deeply personal. They have made choices that have deeply affected millions. Their policies are dismantling libraries, student hopes, arts budgets, and the welfare state. The cuts have inspired direct action, and a flexing of theatrical muscle.
We have seen that, across the country, theatre-makers of every persuasion want to show solidarity, to join the movement, respond, discuss, raise awareness and make a noise. My hope is that Theatre Uncut will continue to inspire collaboration, and provoke debate, thought and creativity. Theatre-makers are engaged, politically-minded and active, and if creatives ? from playwrights like Ravenhill, Greig and others, to student groups, am-dram societies and headline-grabbing theatres ? can come together, surely we're a force to be reckoned with.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/mar/17/theatre-uncut-grand-finale-anger
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