Soft Target? Preview piece for Noises Off 2011

If you look at the first page of your Festival program, you'll find a welcoming note from the Festival's patron Sir Alan Ayckbourn, former Artistic Director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre (by the train station, don't worry, you'll get to know it).

As well as welcoming us all to Scarborough for the week, he tells us that "publicly funded theatre is in crisis." He says this is because "inevitably the arts are a soft target" in times of financial cutbacks.

In a way he's got a point; it's easy to decide that the arts have limited practical value when you're struggling to fund the nation's schools, hospitals and defence. I'm not going to go back over the arguments about the arts being more than the sum of their parts, and a value greater than its up-front cost. At a National Student Drama Festival, rehearsing those arguments would (I hope) be preaching to the choir. (Anyway, Sir Alan goes through some of the points in his welcome - go read it).

But is Sir Alan in danger of writing off the arts as unable to defend themselves? Is he right to say that they (and by extension the artists) are undefended? Are our artists push-overs, so reliant on the dripfeeding of public subsidy that they'll all wither away once that invigorating nectar is withdrawn? Are we really Samson once Deliah had cut his hair off ?

If anything, the arts is the area of society that is most able to speak up for itself. We're the ones with the public stage to speak from (literally, in the case of theatre organisations). The Southwark Playhouse's Theatre Uncut performances have demonstrated that theatre - even if not the rest of the arts world - can become organised in anti-cuts activity that raises our voices in opposition.

Recently, Alexander Wright from Belt Up Theatre (NSDF selected company in 2008, NSDF visiting artists 2010) wrote a blog in which he says that "The very act of [...] putting on a show like The Beggar's Opera [...] is for me, an act of protest" - he wants the show to say: ''Look at what we are doing. We are young and able to do this because all the people around us have made it possible. And you, Mr Cameron, and you, Mr Clegg, are going to slowly burn us to the ground.

Well, if you do, we're are going to go down kicking and screaming and making a bloody big fuss."

That's not an arts scene withering away when the tap of the public funding is turned off. Wright says that it will be "very, very sad" if spending cuts kill off upcoming artists. He's right, but spending cuts will be so much more damaging if we as artists allow that attitude of "it's very sad" to take hold.

I want to see young theatre companies, young dance companies, young artists doing more than bemoaning their undersubsidised fate. Let's not see the whole "ConDem" thing as a problem, but as an opportunity. Now is the time for young companies to show off their great strengths: imagination, adaptability, resilience, flexibility, vigour.

Reduced funding should make us try harder for other types of funding, and should force us to

use our imaginations for that as well as in our art. Keep costs down (easier for us than for bigger, older organisations) and stay nimble financially We have something to make us angry (instead of sad, please), something to respond to, something to fire us up - and we've got the imaginative and artistic firepower to say something about it.

I agree when Sir Alan says that "theatre is important" and perhaps I even agree when he says "publicly funded theatre is in crisis" - but he shouldn't write off the arts as defenceless quite so easily.

Whitehouse Institute at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

When a vicar stands up to give a sermon to a congregation, it doesn't usually get classed as drama. The drama lies outside of what the vicar says and outside of where it's said; out in the supernatural world.

When a tour rep stands up to greet their latest batch of tourists, it doesn't usually get classed as drama. The drama lies in the proposed holiday, the land waiting to be explored – the world outside of the tour rep's speech.

Both vicar and tour rep have learnt a set of words, ready to present to those listening to them. Their listeners hope to gain something from what they hear. The crowd has gathered to listen to them, and though the division between them is more informal than a theatre's normal fourth wall, there is still a noticeable degree of separation between them. It's not any different to a guided tour in an art gallery – like the one on offer at the Holbeck recently. As drama or theatre, the speeches given by curator Neil Bailey-Jones are barely different to those given by a vicar in church.

Such people are also less keen on witholding the secrets of their craft; in fact, conveying information is vital to their occupations. But the Manchester team behind Whitehouse Institute have been trying – with varying degrees of success – to impose a blanket of silence over their show. There's a big twist, that they'd like to keep from the Fest-going body – us lot, their audience. How they expect people not to talk about the show – at NSDF – is hard to grasp. By the way, the twist is the new artwork being replaced by a stark naked woman.

In some ways, it's a tired and worn-out idea that modern art as a movement is pointless and/or pretentious while its artists are too far up themselves to know anything of the outside world. Whitehouse Institute exposes this truism by parading it with glee. The curators of modern galleries also get gently satirised as people stuffed full of commonplace fact – this one leads a tour of the bleedingly obvious around the Uni campus – but that's another shallow idea, one that loses its humour value after being used more than twice. So at over an hour, that joke wore very thin.

Whitehouse Institute almost goes one better than these tired old art debates by giving protesters a voice – but absolutely no attempt at giving a clear, unified reason for the protest. It manages to expose that those oppose modern art as having no valid alternative to that which so aggravates them. There isn't exactly any original or interesting insight on these themes; merely a presentation of them that claims to be drama but fails to scale any such heights.

In fact, any audience member (and, yes, we punters were 'audience members', not 'gallery viewers' or any other such term) who wanted some drama out of their National Student Drama Festival's offering would have had more luck attending happenings outside of the event to which their paid-for ticket entitles them entry. By far the most interesting things happened outside of the gallery (protesters rattling the doors) and indeed outside of the event itself (the protests staged outside of the SJT). The Manchester team is to be commended on their marketing and publicity campaign (including articles – tying into the fiction of Tracey Hutcheson – in our own NOFF), which has become bigger than the performance itself. Or, then again, has the publicity become (part of?) the event?

On the down-side, such hype meant that the only way that Whitehouse Institute could have not been an anti-climax was if the protesters had burnt the gallery to the ground. Now that would have been a twist worth keeping hidden.

Treasure Island @ The SJT [for thepublicreviews.co.uk]

The Northern Broadsides' production of Treasure Island, adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson and on tour until January.

http://www.thepublicreviews.co.uk/

Sizwe Banzi is Dead @ the Stephen Joseph Theatre

With scare stories about identity theft rampant, it's interesting to see a case in which the theft is not only portrayed positively as a crime that harms no one, but also offers one man's only hope of a future worth living.

In our more enlightened, liberal times it's hard to understand how – or rather, why – a system like South Africa's Apartheid worked. The restrictions imposed on the nation's black population by the white minority back in the seventies (when this play is set, though the restrictions go back decades) seemed to ignore the basic fact that black people were, in fact, people.

They are treated instead like children or common property of the white man – shown especially in moments when black adult men in Sizwe Banzi is Dead are called 'boy' by white children. Every movement of Banzi himself and other black South Africans is carefully monitored and logged in their all-important reference book – which is like a passport but much more restrictive. Banzi is banned from leaving his home town for more than three days unless he has a work permit elsewhere, and having failed to return to his dump of a home in time will be in trouble with the authorities whatever he does. On the evidence of this play, Apartheid (specifically the reference book system) seems to have been set up purely to cause more problems for South Africa's black population. Thinking about it, that probably was the plan.

The difficulties are effectively, if comically, explained here by Buntu – a curiously camp South African played by Louis Emerick (of Brookside fame) – when he runs through the tortuous steps Banzi will need to take in order to work in the town Buntu lives in. Emerick's other character, photographer Styles, spends the play's first half setting a context for the later privations. He tells of his past in a Ford car factory which was clearly no Equal Opportunities employer, instead using black men as cheap, abusable labour while the white men stayed in management. It's a vividly performed monologue, but Emerick takes his time to get warmed up.

There's a certain anger this piece keeps bottled up and repressed until Emerick finally unleashes it all in a furious speech persuading Banzi into an illegal choice, but the only one that offers him a future. It is in Banzi's 'death' and subsequent re-birth as another man that writers Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona raise their key issues. What's in a name? as has been asked before. Or rather, what's the value of that name? Is it worth keeping if it can be exchanged to feed a man's children? What does a man own that he can take with him? In the case of the black South African of the early seventies, not very much at all. In fact, even the freedom Styles' father fought for in WWII looks pretty suspect. Bunto's father was left without even his dignity every time a white man passed him in the street.

Thankfully, this play avoids laying into the white population of South Africa – and indeed of everywhere else for not intervening – for Apartheid. Instead, it concentrates on how that system restricted the lives of countless black people for the decades it was in force. The two-man cast brilliantly convey the sheer hopelessness of the situation, the desperation that leads a man to steal the identity of a corpse.

What the Stephen Joseph Theatre presents is a rousing appeal to the individual to react against state oppression, to not knuckle under and drown. It urges circumvention of measures set up to restrict individual dignity, humanity and freedom. Every individual has to fight a system like apartheid, that way – as the production's final seconds highlight – one of them might just get himself out of prison and elected President.