An elitist artform for the privileged

Cats among pigeons, by Daniel Day-Lewis

Image: The Warehouse Studio Theatre, Brussels.

“Theatre is an elitist artform for privileged people.” Thus thrice-winning laureate of an acting Oscar, Mr Daniel Day-Lewis. The remarks are reported in an article in The Guardian newspaper. He means it of course. Mr Day-Lewis means everything he says, even if he knows he will thereby set cats among pigeons. And that is what he did when speaking at the London film festival. You can read the relevant piece here. And, if he can do it so can I: herewith cats among pigeons, Endless Chain-style.

Any paid subscribers to this blog who have been following my mother’s serialised mémoire (Tuesday’s Child Is Full of Grace), which appears here on Saturdays, may be aware of one free-time activity that my ma was passionate about: the theatre. It was a regular feature of special occasions like birthdays, her engagement, her honeymoon and visits by friends and family. Of this I knew nothing when I was growing up. She had abandoned much of her avid interest in the theatre in order to raise her family, and my father had more interest in sports than drama, so matrimonial patterns became established without theatre playing much of a part.

When I was 15, I had my first theatrical role, other than at junior school. My secondary school had decided to form a new house and I was to be transferred into it. The senior boys in the house wanted to put on a house play, in order to announce our arrival within the school’s organisation. It was a big success, and I was given the lead role, of Corporal Hill in Arnold Wesker’s Chips With Everything. We were then an all-boys school and there are no female roles in this play, which is about conscripts coming to terms with military life within an institution that bore striking similarities to our own as a boarding school: the Royal Air Force. My Saturday readers will know that the RAF was very important to my family, with both my father and my grandfather having served.

My next role was as Argan in Malleson’s English translation of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, and after that I was demoted to supporting roles at school in order to give other budding thespians a chance at the meaty stuff. As a result, I can conclude that school drama gave me a great learning opportunity on the stage, which was nevertheless tempered with an overwhelming aura of fairness, even though the school was a public school—what you might call an elitist institution.

I continued my theatrical interest at university and, when I was a young lawyer, I joined a local am-dram group in Bearsden, near Glasgow. Then I moved to the European continent and put aside my theatre because, I reasoned, in Belgium amateur dramatics would mean performing in Dutch or French, and I wasn’t confident enough to make that step. It wasn’t until twenty years after arriving in Belgium that an erstwhile colleague happened to mention theatre, and I sketched out my experience way back. She mentioned that someone she knew was casting a play in Brussels and would I be interested to audition? When I raised my usual objection as to the language barrier, she replied, wide-eyed, “Oh, but the production will be in English!”

She told me a date and a time and a place, and I duly turned up for audition at the Warehouse Theatre, and I got the part: that of the real-life character John Clarke in Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls. Unfortunately she didn’t get hers, and I never really learned why, although I was told “someone else was better suited”. But, over the course of the run, I established my credentials as a half-decent actor. On some nights, the audience was moved to spontaneous applause as I gave my dying monologue.

Of course, a director doesn’t want hopeless actors in their production. You have to be able to act. But a part of the amateur acting experience is learning. You don’t go to amateur dramatics as a dyed-in-the-wool professional—well, some do; more anon. You actually go, first and foremost, for the socialising. Whereas a repertory play will rehearse for maybe three weeks before going up, amateurs will work more like three months on their show, because it’s leisure time only, they have a job of work to do as well. But “finding someone better” is not, in my opinion, at the core of amateur dramatics. And that is where amdram within the Brussels English-language circle differs from drama at Woodhouse Grove School, and at Edinburgh University Theatre Company, and at the Glenview Players, because in Brussels amateur dramatics is elitist. Let me explain.

Brussels does not have English-language theatre for the good folk of Brussels. Not those of them who were born and bred there. The vast majority of the folk who are involved in English amateur theatre in the city are employed by the European institutions. Some of them are Russian, some are Lithuanian, there are Spaniards and Portuguese, a few Brits even, and plenty of Dutch, Irish, Americans, Germans, Hungarians, Swedes, you name it. Together with the lawyers and the corporate administrators, they form a corpus that is known as the expat community, and even that appellation is your first indication of the elitist nature of English Brussels drama, for in any other context with a lower pay grade, they would be called immigrants.

I am self-employed and, when I tried to direct a play in 2019, I encountered so many difficulties that I eventually threw in the towel, because I realised that the self-employed cannot direct plays, not when they require to be at the phone or computer to answer customer enquiries. As a self-employed person, you are not your own master and, if you want the work, you have to be available just about the whole time. I managed to do amateur dramatics in Brussels for about six years because I was engaged as an in-house freelancer in that time, with fixed hours. But when I started to work 100 per cent from home, the financial pressure excluded any creative input into even Shakespeare. But one kind of work is eminently suited to amateur dramatics: that of a bureaucrat.

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a bureaucrat, but it does give you a certain position and elevation, and it can be off-putting to hear foreign immigrant bureaucrats talking in derisory terms about their host country: the BELgians, and their strange habits and customs. When Britain withdrew from the European Union, many Brits living in Brussels applied for Belgian naturalisation, and I translated many of their birth and marriage certificates to help in that process. “So, you’ve decided that Belgium is to be your home for ever more?” I would ask them. “Oh, no, what a thought!” they would reply. “We’ll probably retire elsewhere, but we want to secure our place here until we take our pension.” When I naturalised, I talked to a former Belgian army colonel in my street about the decision he took to sign up for national service, to lay his life on the line for his country. It was part of the tough process I went through in deciding to give my allegiance and love to the country I’d lived in for 20 years, and, if called upon, to give my life for it. That is naturalisation. I didn’t approach it as a convenience store solution on my way to a comfortable retirement on the Sorrento Coast.

This dramatic expat community holds a summer garden party at which it hands out awards, like Oscars, but they’re called Butties, something to do with technicians originally. The people who vote for these awards are people who have been in plays over the previous year. Not the people who actually went and watched them, but the people who were in them. I don’t know if you’d call that elitist, but it is a tad incestuous.

I spoke at one of these gatherings to a gentleman on the more technical side of play production, who maintained vehemently that an amateur production must always seek to be run and played by the very best of contributors. I ventured a view that volunteering means doing your best, even if it ends up being below the supposed requisite standard, and mustering the spirit to take part, regardless of how poor the actual performance turns out to be. How disappointing it is to find someone so entrenched in amateur dramatics who rejects the idea of giving the beginner a leg up.

Occasionally, their plays get populated with people who have really worked in theatre and who know a great deal about how to put on a professional play, and they are also very good at putting on amateur plays. It’s wonderful, isn’t it, to have the good fortune of having such great acting acumen at your fingertips?

I was myself once rejected from an audition (the last one I attended, in fact) on the ground that I was … too good. Or too tall, too young or too old, or something.

Roles suitable for a man of your stature and physical presence, I felt, were absent. The cast I have ended up with are all short. Quite frankly, your physical magnificence and stentorian voice would outshine them too much and make it a Don Pedro Meets Some Villagers play, or Gandalf chez les Hobbits. As a result, I am heartily sorry to say I can’t offer you a role in this production. You are too young for an old man, and too old for a young man. etc etc.

Yes. Et cetera. Sometimes you’re rejected without any reason being given, so one has to be grateful, etc. The professional actor whom I alluded to above, and whom I cast in Henry V (after waiting to audition him an extra half hour because he was running late) quit the production after two rehearsals over directorial differences, which I didn’t entirely appreciate, since I was the director of that play and he was an actor, but quitting is quitting whatever the reason, just as much as rejection is rejection.

The expat community of which English-language theatre is a small but vibrant part welcomes volunteers. In fact, it only welcomes volunteers (except the musicals bunch, who pay some musicians for their services, and learn to dance to their tune, as well). Volunteers work for nothing. They travel to rehearsals without being paid, because it’s a socialising opportunity, at which they’re told to shut up and listen and jolly well learn their lines. Sometimes. If they turn up, that is. Those who volunteer because theatre is a good “soash” soon learn that the socialising is somewhat restricted by the matter in hand, i.e. learning the damned play. And nothing quite gets in the way of both of these things like missions. Missions are EU-speak for business trips, and when the Union says you gotta go, then you gotta go, rehearsal or no. It’s therefore a common feature in Brussels English-speaking theatre circles, at some point or another during the process, to have to spend three months reacting to an empty space on the stage.

In one production for which, to my distaste, I was parachuted into the lead (the idea is actually that you should hold open auditions and then give everyone who wants to audition a chance at getting the part), I also needed to take over the job of actually telling people how to act, which is normally more the director’s domain. Not that that is a great burden to have to bear, but, in an amateur circle these are all services that naturally go unpaid. Even your petrol isn’t paid. Or your fines for being towed away because the rehearsal has overrun. Except that one costumier we engaged would submit several dozen receipts for costs incurred by laying them on a table and photographing them by seemingly, given their illegibility, hanging by her legs from the light fitting. Once she’d been paid her outlays and for her seamstress services, she then offered to sell the costumes she’d been engaged, and paid, to produce back to the theatre company. I was taken aback by the audacity of the idea, but was assured that it had been AGREED. I’m sure it had been.

When we sold tickets for school plays, the money went to funding extraneous expenses like new books or a display cabinet for the rugby trophies, something that all the school could appreciate. At uni and in Bearsden, the groups ran on shoestring budgets and all income was ploughed into the next production, and that is basically what happens in Brussels as well. The profits get redistributed for Christmas parties or summer fêtes or whatever. Except the profits are not really profits. They are made on the back of volunteer labour and, for groups that function on a community basis, the redistribution of the wealth they create is not, shall we say, founded on the best principles of the Rochdale cooperative movement. They want the best, and then don’t pay them. These elites operate in the best traditions of capitalism: taking something for nothing and pocketing the benefit.

No one pays an actor’s time, or their travel expenses to get to rehearsals. No one pays their childcare if they need a baby sitter. They don’t even pay for your script, or they bootleg photocopies whilst defending breach-of-copyright claims at their plush law offices. There is usually a cast party, and lots of laughter, but the profits that flow from volunteer-aided productions are for a large part generated on the generosity of the volunteers themselves. I live out of town and it’s about 30 km to Brussels, and 30 back. That’s 60 km of motoring for each rehearsal, of which there are three a week. Three each week over 12 weeks gives 2,160 km of travel in order to be able to give my services to a theatre company. But not once was I ever offered so much as a tank of petrol—and that is four tanks of petrol in my car.

It is one of the reasons I jacked acting in. You need to be in certain circles to even be aware of the opportunities that English amateur dramatics offers in Brussels. I spent 20 years getting to know the people who live and work in this city, and it took me those 20 years to even meet my first expat. But I met a whole bunch of immigrants in those 20 years, of which I was one. When I finally met the expats who told me the Belgians are funny, I thought I’d never seen anyone quite so funny as these worldly-wise immigrants, who know so little about the integration that they demand … of immigrants.

Then, you need to be in a regular job knowing you’ll be free at six p.m. every night—except when you’re away on mission, leaving your fellow actors to act to an empty space. Plus, you need to be the best, for if you volunteer as an also-ran, they won’t be interested in you. And you mustn’t be too good, or have directorial differences with anyone. In fact, professional actors, for all the skills they have that they can contribute, actually present a mismatch for the average volunteer cast. Their passive aggressivity (of course, you’re the director, just saying, like) doesn’t actually prevent them making their presence very known. I’ll put it no stronger than that.

Now, elitist is a relative term, but even if Day-Lewis’s remarks were limited just to amateur theatre, I don’t believe he would have been all that much off the mark. As for the professionals, well, daaalincks, I just cannot comment at all—I was only a professional once, and I learned more in that one experience than in all the productions I’d been in since I was 15. So, it’s fitting that it was my last.

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