Theatre under threat

I will talk feelings not statistics. My immediate prompt is the year-long attrition, cuts and ‘restructuring’ of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University. But with their own distinctiveness, the Universities of Portsmouth, De Montfort and Wolverhampton are also experiencing challenges. This is our disciplinary ‘ecology’, and it is being razed.

That is, the ‘ecological’ connectedness between seven decades of university theatre and performance study – non-vocational yet complementary to the great UK conservatoire tradition – is under threat. Ecology sounds like a freighted term, but it is the only word that describes the co-dependency of a discipline that has fought for recognition in the university under the stern literary gaze of the traditions of ‘English’. 

Innate suspicion has been teased and turned over by just three generations of theatre scholarship since Glynne Wickham kicked off the Drama Department at Bristol University in 1948. It is wholly characteristic that – parallel with such established universities as early-adopters Glasgow, Manchester and Hull – theatre and performance have always been at the heart of the teacher-training tradition, in the Art School Foundation movement and in exceptional sites of creativity such as my own alma mater Dartington College of Arts. 

Imagining an alternative theatre industry

Before I arrived at Roehampton, and after I left a decade later, there was always a critically nuanced approach to understanding and engaging with current artistic practices, including those of the ‘industry’. Meanwhile we were supporting our students to imagine another theatre industry, one that responded to their diverse backgrounds, including class backgrounds, that Russell Group universities barely touched. Oxbridge wasn’t even in the game, and remarkably still isn’t, having failed for eight centuries to recognise the disciplinary claims for performance in its own right, write and rite.

I’ve got previous and should declare an interest. Thanks to my irreverent grandmother, I always suspected my father died before I was born because he was teacher-trained at St Mary’s, Twickenham. Everyone else in my Southend-on-Sea Catholic home had been to Digby Stuart College, Roehampton Institute (where I presumed the auguries were better). My mother had been evacuated with them during the war, my sister had studied there, my niece followed. And at the outset of the 20th century, that grandmother had been educated by the same order of nuns and, presumably by not concentrating sufficiently on the curriculum, had become a wonderful milliner in the East End.

My mother missed my inaugural lecture at Roehampton. By a couple of weeks. I was appointed their first Professor of Theatre in 1997. It is the nature of inaugurals that they take a while to set up so, in February 2001, I found myself addressing a packed room in the gorgeous lake-side Froebel College, with my sister sitting in the back row, where she would have wanted to be. She was touched and amused by my “inevitable return” to the place everyone else had gone. Despite my being long lapsed. And I was proud to be there, talking to the esoteric title: Prodigious Performance: Infants, Animals & Other Anomalies. 

Towards an 'intelligence of feeling’

I was proud of my long family history in the ‘Wide Open Spaces’ as they had started to refer to the rolling campus bordered by Alton East and West Estates, but especially so as I had been appointed by some of the most innovative, pedagogically brilliant colleagues. Maggie Pittard, Susan Painter, Peter Reynolds, Susanne Greenhalgh and Peter Majer put me through my paces, followed by questions from Joe Kelleher and Adrian Kear that were incisive, inclusive, generative. And this was just the job interview. 

Four years directing the Talks programme at the Institute of Contemporary Arts with Derrida, Butler, Bhabha, hooks and Gilroy had not prepared me for this. Here were humans who drew you out, not told you what they thought.

Shortly after I arrived, under the scrupulous principalship of Dr Bernie Porter and then Professor Paul O’Prey, Roehampton Institute had formed an uneasy alliance with Surrey University and then became Roehampton University. It was a trajectory followed by the whole post-1992 UK college sector in response to successive government initiatives to increase student numbers from the derisory 7% of my own generation, to the 50% benchmark they sought.

Widening Participation and Access at Roehampton did not mean box-ticking, it meant working day by day on the floor of one of the beautifully ragged studios towards an intelligence of feeling (as Robert Witkin would have said), a capacity not just to interpret the world, but to change it (as Marx said of our sister subject Philosophy).

An exceptional university community

But how can I have the time to write this, while colleagues at Roehampton University are losing their jobs, encouraged to take redundancy packages, told to apply for redefined roles on diminished terms? A finely tuned, internationally research-led and inclusive teaching department is currently suffering that fate – on the morrow of excellent REF submissions, and multiple monographs and impact case studies. Unlike others, immured from such tawdriness, Roehampton has had a genuine impact on many hundreds of young peoples’ disenfranchised lives.

I can, and have to, write this because Professor Ann Thompson, a long-standing Roehampton teacher, and then Dean of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London, encouraged me in 2006 to apply for the first Chair in Theatre in King’s 175-year history. I thought hard when offered the job. I needed to think the offer through. 

And I don’t mean the salary: people from my background don’t negotiate a higher salary for a secure job – it was a lot more than my grandfather ever dreamed of earning. Rather, what deserved my careful thought was leaving that exceptional community of undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, researchers, teachers and friends at Roehampton.

Less wide-open spaces, but incredibly open minds

Of course, I accepted. When you are as critical of reactionary government policies as I am, and you have others to care for, you do. And Strand is lovely, with its own less wide-open spaces, but incredibly open minds. Like Roehampton, but with one critical difference. 

As a Russell Group university, in the golden triangle bounded by UCL and LSE, at the heart of theatreland, we benefit from the monarchical privilege of 1829 when King George IV gifted King’s College its land, its legacy and its secure future. We have enjoyed historic freeholds where Roehampton and others suffer leases against debt and future precarity.

And we have recently ‘enjoyed’ a perhaps surprising mid-pandemic upswing in student numbers. The removal of the student cap has cut to shreds the longstanding ecology of our field. On arrival at King’s, I resisted establishing a separate Drama, Theatre or Performance Department, I was happy to work within a fine, progressive, image-conscious English Department. 

I had no appetite to compete with those I had left at Roehampton who now, alongside their students, are left protesting their predicament, standing in those ‘Wide Open Spaces’. I hope they don’t feel alone. Solidarity.

Alan Read is Professor of Theatre at King’s College London.
@readalanread