Extra Long Blog, Swingeing Arts Cuts, Austerity and Happiness: Director's Blog 31

Good morning Dear Readers.

Yesterday I watched the first  Cinderella schools performance of the day. Poor Barbara Jaeson  (Rubella Hardup) was not  well and had virtually no voice, but like any stalwart actor she insisted on a visit to Dr.Theatre and a commitment to that old adage "The Show Must Go on". I think its possibly in our thespian tribal DNA! 

So in my absence first thing Phil sorted out the cutting of her Rubella song and managed the logistics of the changes needed. Thanks to Phil for that. Its a shame because Barbara's song "I'm So Bad"  is a real highlight of the show. But lets hope with a couple of days of cutting it she will be back on form for Press Night on Friday!

Yesterday morning The Broadway Theatre Barking was jam packed with excited 7-11 year olds from local schools eager for their annual trip to the panto.

Denise, the Front of House Manager told me that some of the children from these schools have never been to the theatre before. I refer you to my earlier blog about this in which I talked about the weight of responsibility we have as theatre makers to make it the best first experience of live theatre that we can. Many of you will be able to pin point you own first live performance experience. I talked about mine in that blog too.

These early experiences are touchstones and reference points for life and manifest themselves in many interesting and surprising ways later. That's the real purpose of fairy tales, they carry our rich history and culture embedded in their narratives and characters.

So its always with this in mind that I watch the show.

In fact as I know pretty much every inch, emotion, song, dance and moment of the show I now love to watch the audience reaction closely. It shows me how much they are engaged, and points out the moments when we lose them just a little perhaps.

Phil and I spent some intensive time today talking through the finer detail of the possible nips and tucks we can make to tighten any moments that maybe still a little flabby. I am not sure that the audience necessarily notices these specifically and in most cases they are minor, but  Olly, Phil, Owen and I do.

I fear its time for the old surgical scalpel  to come out, again, do a bit of disection and God forbid a bit more murdering my darlings. Never easy but oh so obvious after a week of watching the show with audiences. These moments  stand out like a sore thumb. They may only be fifteen seconds, but the Creative team will never settle for that.

A show is a living, breathing entity of its own! And it really only become complete with the arrival, agreement and suspension of disbelief of the audience.

Children, even if they have never been to live theatre before, know precisely what is expected of them. Its amazing to watch them take on the panto audience role. They instinctively know when to join in, when to boo, hiss, be afraid, be sad and get loved up with the romance of Prince Charming and Cinderella. They gasp at the transformation of the carriage and Cinderella's dress, which is working quite well, but still not perfectly enough for me!. Its taken ages to get it there!

Most of all I love watching this magical transformation through the eyes of the children in the audience, young and old, but especially young! Truly what more of a privilege could a director want?

To turn to something I find curious. Over the past couple of days I have been having some good conversations with Anna Arthur who has been brought in by Chris Mellor (Interim Creative Producer at the Broadway) to pick up the PR for the theatre.  

We quickly moved on in our discussion from the fact that reviews of pantos are hard to come by, because there are so many pantos around the country all happening in the space of a month. Of course, good reviews are clearly always very welcome, and we are holding our breath for press night on Friday. But they are not the whole picture. ( Am I in danger of annoying a critic?  - I hope not, they know what I mean I know!)

Its almost certainly the case that Panto lovers and aficianados may hate our Cinderella. But as Joe, one of the lovely team of Broadway volunteers (and a traditionalist)  said to me yesterday by way of feedback, "At first I wasn't really sure about the show. Its a bit similar but then again entirely different from the previous pantos I've seen" of which there are many. Joe is clearly a theatre connoisseur.

I was curious about Joe's response and wanted to understand what he thought. In response to my further delving he smiled and said this panto had really grown on him over the 6 performances he had seen, and that now he loves it. He like me enjoys watching the kids in the audience. He said that there was absolutely no denying that they love it and are totally engrossed. He particularly commented on the 10 - 11 year olds, and how he was really surprised at how full of it they were. Joe added that he always noticed in the past that this was a difficult  in-between age group to engage. 

Thanks Joe for the feedback. Its great to hear how it is for everyone involved. This helps me enormously in my quest for magic!

And so I turn momentarily to the discussion with Anna. The question is always important and not always easy to answer - but for me it is, what is the underlying power of panto? Why do we love and hate it? Why do we carry prejudices that it is low brow or just for kids?  Or why do people only come to theatre once a year to a panto? I

 know all too well the discussions that go on behind artistic closed doors. I have often been part of them. We "artists" can sometimes become so infatuated with our own art that we forget who we make it for. We can be guilty of over intellectualising, and sometimes demonstrating a slight snobbery or distaste for something that is considered a lesser art form, and panto sadly is one of those,

As such we are always marginally in danger of telling people what they need or want. I actually hate that approach. In my book (blog!) its a kind of blinkered arrogance at worst and maybe a well intentioned naivety at best. 

Of course its wonderful  and important to introduce people to different artists and art forms and invite them to participate. However the artist should never feel that they are the holy grail on content. Many of the most wonderful stories and experiences that I have shared in with community theatre and film groups, is the amazing and different takes people have of their lives and the bigger worlds they inhabit.

I realise that today's blog is actually a kind of soft rant. What I have been getting to and what I flagged up to Anna, is that there is potentially something bigger for our panto audiences in participating in the show.

We all know how stressful Christmas is for most people. It certainly puts inordinate pressure on families, particularly those who are unemployed and or struggle to make ends meet. We all live with our own childlike desire for a perfect day, filled with joy, smiling children around the tree and family togetherness. Don't we?

And how disappointing it can be that by the end of boxing day family feuds have reared their heads and in the mist of Baileys, turkey, mince pies and far too many chocolates someone has dutch courage to say out loud what they have been harbouring all year or longer! As the bells ring out for Christmas day  - I bet if you were to listen closely they would be followed swiftly by the music of slamming doors up and down the country. I do love Christmas though, don't get me wrong. It always promises to be magical and sometimes it just brings all our pains and joys to the surface. May it is actually a safety valve for the rest of the year that so many of us experience this, however secretly!
Maybe it just is that Christmas is the best form of collective therapy known to man!



 We all place so much emphasis on belonging on this day that the pain it causes those who are homeless or have no family and scant friends polarises our society too at this supposedly happy time. You only have to go for a walk on Christmas day and peek into people's windows to see the same ritual enactment going on every where. And because Christmas has become a largely secular festival in spite of its Christian domain, it has really become something that intends at best to unite but sadly for some just makes the divide temporarily much bigger.

I promise I am now getting to my point, honest!

David Cameron, in his infinite wisdom has picked up on this old happiness thing, whilst at the same time decimating the public sector. There seems to be an essential dissonance here. Maybe it comes from a world and political view that everyone needs to just "Get on their bike" in the famous Tebbit manner and become a self-made man or woman.

I have no argument with the belief that we are all masters of our own fate. But the fate of some of us is tougher to circumnavigate than for others. Being stuck as a single mother on benefits may add to the perception of scrounger Britain. But one thing i am sure about is that if we don't look out for the weakest members of our society in the end we all suffer. The forthcoming cuts to the Universal Credit may satisfy the concerns of Middle England, but you wait until the revolution errupts again in our streets and crime soars because of people's desperation, and we follow the example of Greece, Italy, Ireland and others.

So in the middle of all this Cameron's introduction of the Happiness Index means exactly what?

In 1991, the author Michael Frayn wrote a book, A Landing on the Sun, about a British prime minister who tasked his advisers with looking into happiness and what the government could do to promote it. The prize proved elusive, the advisers went mad and died.

Despite the fable, politicians aren't so gloomy about the prospect of knowing what makes us happy – but substitute "happy" with the compound noun "wellbeing". So much so that David Cameron is trying to get the concept up and running even in the midst of public service cuts and soaring living costs.

He is sticking to a policy commitment he made before the economic crash when growth figures were still rosy. He said: "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money and it's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing."

Speaking at the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference, he added: "Wellbeing can't be measured by money or traded in markets. It's about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times."

Our times, and previous ones too. Aristotle talked about "eudaimonia" – happiness as human flourishing and purpose to life – rather than the modern hedonistic concept. John Maynard Keynes talked about the "art of life" in 1930, and in 1968 Bobby Kennedy told a student audience in Kansas: "We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones average, nor national achievement by the gross domestic product."

A few years later, psychologist Richard Easterlin showed that after a certain point, rises in national wealth are not matched by increases in happiness.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has done a lot of work in this area, but as a politician, French president Nicolas Sarkozy has led the way. One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, he launched an inquiry into happiness, commissioning Nobel prize-winning academics Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to look at how the relentless search for a rise in GDP sometimes trampled over a government's other goals, such as sustainability and work-life balance.

Kennedy raged against the felling of Redwood trees. Now a Downing Street aide says: "GDP doesn't measure lots of things. The BP oil spill was, for instance, associated with activity that increases GDP but we need a measure that would reflect the actual cost of it if things like cleaning up the mess and damage to the environment are factored in."

Canadian statistician John Helliwell says that the national governments pay scant attention to the stats. For the time being, that wouldn't be true of this government. One government source said: "If you want to know things – Should I live in Exeter rather than London? What will it do to my quality of life? – you need a large enough sample size and if you have a big sample, and have more than one a year, then people can make proper analysis on what to do with their life.

"And next time we have a comprehensive spending review, let's not just guess what effect various policies will have on people's wellbeing. Let's actually know."

There is currently academic work looking into, for instance, whether people's wellbeing is improved or damaged by living near windfarms.

If it can be shown either way that could, officials say, go on to affect national policy decisions.

If the data sets are detailed enough then another use could be a comparison of whether people are more satisfied living in their old age at home or in care homes.

How happy are you?

Questions used by the independent national statistician are likely to focus on "evaluation", "experience" and "purpose" and could include:

1 How satisfied are you with your life these days, on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is "not at all" and 10 is "completely satisfied"?

2 Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?

3 How much purpose does your life have?

4 Are men and women treated fairly in the workplace and home?

And finally to our modest panto Cinderella at a small theatre in Barking on the borders between East London and Essex, Why is it that the Pantomime achieves the biggest ticket sales annually for the Broadway Theatre?

Perhaps it indicates anecdotally that in some small way people know that in going to a panto they will for two hours travel beyond the pain and grim financial landscape and once again believe in the power of magic and transformation.

Its a small contribution to Cameron's Happiness Index, but significent nontheless I believe. Short moments of relief from the grind, offer us hope, love and a sense of possibility and for a brief second a belief in a better future for  all of us and for the coming generations.

So that's me done out for today.

its been long and a bit unstructured today. I took rather too long to get to my point really. But in the absence of an editor to murder my darlings I am just going to stick with it for now.