Journal of the Plague Year

Max Stafford-Clark

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780013022
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

A truthful, personal and insightful exploration of the state of arts funding and carrying on in the face of adversity, by the renowned founder of Out of Joint.

One March morning, out of the blue, Max Stafford-Clark learned that the Arts Council had drastically cut their grant to his theatre company, Out of Joint, leaving it in danger of imminent collapse. Journal of the Plague Year is his account of what happened next, as he sets out to contest the cut, make the case for public funding of the arts, and continue producing the work for which he and his company are renowned.

Max's journal often takes on an autobiographical flavour, including the unexpectedly moving story of his two fathers, his surreal encounter with the New York theatre world, and the shocking details of what it is to suffer a massively debilitating stroke.

By turns funny, alarming and deeply personal, Journal of the Plague Year offers a fascinating exposé of the often Kafkaesque workings of arts subsidy in England, and the financial and artistic manoeuvrings which are a fact of life for every arts organisation today. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the state of our arts, from students to theatregoers, and from struggling arts workers right up to the Secretary of State for Culture.

'Fascinating... reads like an unpublished work by Franz Kafka... both horrifying and startling' British Theatre Guide

Journal of the Plague Year

On 30th March 2011, Arts Council England announced a round of funding cuts that were to have a deep and long-lasting effect on a number of theatre companies—my own company, Out of Joint, among them. We were shocked and dismayed to learn that our annual funding would be reduced by over £99,432. Together with the 10% cut suffered by all institutions the previous year, the total loss amounted to nearly £130,000. In other words, we were to lose 20% of our total funding. As I write, we are still struggling to put together a programme that minimises these traumatic effects.

Everyone knew hard times were coming to the theatre. The country was in an economic crisis and cuts in theatre grants had been widely predicted. The Conservative economic line at the time—that austerity was the way out of recession and that spending should be reduced across the board—had its most profound effects on welfare, healthcare, housing and the pillars of our society, but the arts were to be slashed as well. Arguments that the theatre industry as a whole made a net profit for the UK fell on deaf ears—it was to be hair shirts and pinched pennies all round. My wife, Stella Feehily, is writing a play about the NHS, and while researching the project we met Ken Clarke, former Conservative Minister for Health. He is the worst kind of Tory: personable, witty, charming and rather wise. At the end of our meeting we were chatting casually and I asked him what was going to happen to the theatre: ‘You’re going to be cut,’ he said with a huge grin. ‘Yes, you’re certainly going to be cut.’

Nevertheless, it was a huge shock to learn the scale of the cut imposed on Out of Joint. My own experience of Thatcher’s proposed cuts at the beginning of the eighties had taught me how rash it was to take state funding for granted, but Out of Joint had been sustained and supported by Arts Council England (ACE) for eighteen years. Our relationship with them had been the bedrock of all our artistic success, and now that relationship was thrown off-balance. There had been no sign or signal in any way that we had incurred their displeasure. Nor was there any immediate explanation forthcoming as to why we had been singled out for a cut. There was just a new financial reality in which our established production model, touring two new plays each year as widely as possible around the UK, was suddenly imperilled. This book is an attempt to come to terms with their decision, and to tell the story of our first hesitant steps into the perilous new world the Arts Council had defined.

At the time of the announcement, Out of Joint had an Arts Council grant of £525,000, and our turnover was just over £1,000,000 annually. In common with most other companies, including the National Theatre, Arts Council funding made up about 45% of our turnover. This compares with 70% or 75% for equivalent companies in Germany, France or Holland, but was, on the other hand, considerably more than the 10% in Federal funding which our colleagues in the United States could expect, while in Australia state funding can be as little as 7.5% of turnover. Our previous relationship with the Arts Council had been a harmonious and, I thought, mutually satisfactory one. We took new work to the regions, touring from ten to twenty-four weeks a year, playing in major cities such as Liverpool and Leeds as well as smaller county towns like Bury St Edmunds, Bolton and Salisbury. Mark Long of The People Show once said to me, ‘We’re a 60 people a night outfit—wherever we play, we get 60 people a night.’ By the same anecdotal criteria, I reckoned Out of Joint was a 200 people per night outfit. Sometimes we soared to 400 or even 500, and occasionally we dropped to under 100, but regional audiences had been built up consistently, or so I thought. But there was some evidence that regional audiences had peaked around 2005 and were becoming more wary and more circumspect in their theatrical choices. Price too was an increasing factor towards the end of the noughties—audiences began to peak in terms of numbers on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, when ticket offers were at their most plentiful, and thin out at the end of the week when concessions were not generally available. Of course, we had no control over the pricing policies of our host theatres; they determined their own ticket policies, but it had become clear that price resistance was growing. Out of Joint had had the odd succès fou—Shopping and Fucking, The PermanentWay, Feelgood—and several succès d’estime—Macbeth, The Big Fellah, Duck and A State Affair among them. We understood we were providing new work of a particular calibre and taste that was not covered by any other company. The work followed no specific political agenda but had a purposeful and inquisitive curiosity that poked into the unregarded corners of English life and society. Such plays as The PermanentWay, A State Affair and The Big Fellah depicted issues, lives and obsessions that were new to the stage. I had been lucky to have had a career during a period when the theatre was the medium for social debate and the medium through which we examined our history. Of course, this has not always been the case. Walpole’s Licensing Act of 1737 introduced the authority of the Lord Chamberlain as censor and effectively exiled the theatre from its native hinterland of sex and politics for over two hundred years. While in Australia, the novel is the medium of social examination—The GreatWorld (David Malouf), The Secret River and The Lieutenant (Kate Grenville), Out of Ireland (Christopher Koch) and indeed The Playmaker (Thomas Keneally) are all great novels that give Australians back their history—in England, the theatre continues to do that job.

All that we had achieved at Out of Joint was threatened by the cut. Graham Cowley, Out of Joint’s producer and my friend and colleague of forty years, responded to the new financial situation by slashing administrative costs wherever money could be saved, but we have never been a profligate organisation, and it was immediately clear that the foremost impact of our reduced funding would be a concomitant reduction in production capacity. With spending stripped back across the organisation, the only way to absorb the remaining reduction in income was to reduce the number of touring weeks; the number of weeks we employed actors and technical staff; the number of actors in our plays; even the number of plays we produced annually; or alternatively to programme work that appealed to a larger audience. The grim truth was that a reduction of 25% in fact threatened to halve our production output.

My first inclination in the wake of our own bad news was to try to humanise the faceless institution of the Arts Council and discover why Out of Joint had been singled out for a cut of such brutality that it threatened our continued existence. Graham Cowley and I sought an immediate meeting with Frank Endwright, our ‘Relationship Manager’, and George Darling, the Director of Drama for London. In answer to our questions at that meeting, much emphasis was placed on the high ‘subsidy per seat’ costs that Out of Joint incurred, and Darling actually said that other ‘providers’ could supply the Arts Council with new work at less cost. In other words, Out of Joint wasn’t cost efficient. We took this news back to our office in Finsbury Park, determined first to address our business model and see what savings could be made to ensure the company was able to keep producing, and secondly to illustrate why our work cost what it did and why we desperately needed the money that had been cut.

We had been and continued to be engaged in that most difficult and arcane of sciences, the discovery and development of new writers and new plays, and taking them beyond the metropolitan audiences of the London ‘new writing’ theatre scene to reach a national audience. Neither of these objectives can be achieved cheaply or easily, and we resolved to defend and underline our achievements as well as to find a way of continuing our work with decreased support. Many of the plays we produced needed time for research and development in workshop mode—this investment, the provision of time for the development and rehearsal of plays for which I have campaigned throughout my career, was a cornerstone of our work, and could not be stripped away without imperilling the creation of plays themselves. And although we had been successful in getting help for this vital aspect of our work from the National Theatre Studio and from other varied sources, it still made us expensive. In fact, in the course of 2012/13 we received help from the RSC, Bristol Old Vic, the National Theatre of Wales, the University of Hertfordshire, Bridgend College and LAMDA, as well as the National Theatre Studio. Although facilities and other help amounted to many thousands of pounds, it was, alas, not represented in our balance sheets as ‘fundraising’, as it did not pass through our accounts, and was therefore disregarded by the Arts Council when they made their crucial decision.

Both for Graham and for me it was important to establish the grounds for the cut. I wondered whether it had anything to do with age. An earlier assessment from the Arts Council had made some mention of the board needing to address the ‘problem’ of replacing the founder members of the company (Graham and me). Did the Arts Council think I was past my sell-by date? Were they endeavouring to make me fall on my sword and embrace one of the dreaded ‘R’ words? Resignation? Retirement? Indeed, they had imposed a form of Relegation, but we were bent upon Rebuttal, Resistence, Rejuvenation and Resurgence.

*

As well as being several years past national retirement age, I had suffered a major stroke in 2006 which had hospitalised me for six months. I got out of hospital in December 2006 and joyfully returned to the rehearsal room in January 2007. But, alas, it was too early and I wasn’t really very good. I would watch a runthrough of Alistair Beaton’s play, King of Hearts, with my co-director Ramin Gray, and see at once that it wasn’t particularly good, but could find no words to help or improve it. My analysis was in place but my imagination seemed sadly absent. Things got better in April 2007 when I directed a ‘Long Project’ with an excellent group of young actors at LAMDA. This was to become Mixed Up North a year later and marked a substantial step on my road to recovery (another ‘R’ word).

Why was I not a particularly good director of King of Hearts? What is a bad director? I believe the answer to these questions is quite simple: a good director is one who is able to help the actors to their characters and to their performances. I had (temporarily, thank God) lost this ability, and so I was a Not-Very-Good-At-All Director. For the first professional play that I directed at the Edinburgh Traverse in 1966, I hadn’t been very good either. But that was largely inexperience. My first steps in directing were conducted by Susan Williamson, an actress in that play to whom I will be eternally grateful. I wasn’t very good, but I did have a beautiful MG TD, and I used to give Susan a lift back to her digs every night after rehearsal. In return, she would give me a fifteen-minute seminar on the basic points of direction: ‘If you want George to grow a moustache in that part then he has to start now’; ‘If you want Heather to dominate that scene you must get her out from behind the desk’; ‘If you want me to look really relaxed in the sofa scene I could put my feet up on the chair, but then I would have to be wearing trousers not a skirt.’ Above all she taught me the most fundamental lesson for a young director—which was, Don’t Be Scared of the Actors. Of course they know more than you, but they are a repository of wisdom and experience on which you can draw.

One of the best definitions of a director’s function came from my daughter, Kitty, when she was five years old. I used to drive her to nursery school every morning, and we would regularly do an improvisation together. On some occasions we would be an ambulance team, or I would be a train driver or policeman. On this particular occasion the role I was allocated was that of taxi driver. We had recently been on a journey with a female driver, and in a fit of inspiration Kitty insisted, ‘Be a lady taxi driver!’ Doing my best in my new role, I enquired why her parents weren’t available to take her to school. ‘Oh, they are in theat,’ said Kitty, as if this covered all laxness. ‘Are they actors?’ the taxi driver enquired. ‘Yes, actors,’ said Kitty firmly. ‘Really… your dad is an actor, is he?’ I countered. Kitty wavered. ‘Well no, he’s the watcher,’ she said. And that indeed is the major part of the role.

I am a cripple these days. We rather shrink from the ‘C’ word and prefer to say Disabled or ‘Person With Limited Mobility’, but I think often of my old friend, Ian Dury, who wrote the lyrics for four or five plays I directed in the late eighties, most notably A Jovial Crew at Stratford and Serious Money by Caryl Churchill. He was a hugely influential and original lyricist and had had a number-one hit with ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. He had had polio as a child and walked with a stick and a metal brace on one leg. He was a charismatic and fascinating companion until he’d had a few drinks—which, let’s face it, was every night—when he could turn feral. I recall one night in the Royal Court bar when he’d had a few. He whacked his metal calliper with his stick and said, ‘Do you know how often I think about this, mate? Every fucking morning, every fucking morning.’ So do I. Ian wasn’t reticent about his disability; a year earlier at Stratford with the RSC we had been rehearsing one Saturday morning. We had to stop at one o’lock to release actors who were in matinees that afternoon. After eight Saturday morning cups of coffee I was bursting for a pee, but the buses had already arrived full of matinee-goers and there was long queue. Ian passed me in the corridor. ‘You want to try the Raspberries’, mate,’ he said. ‘You meet a better class of person,’ and he gestured towards the disabled toilet. Twenty minutes later we were sitting outside The Dirty Duck enjoying the first pint of the weekend. ‘Raspberries?’I enquired. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Raspberry ripple, cripple.’ Since Ian’s death in 2000 and my stroke in 2006, Stella and I have been to more raspberry toilets than I care to remember. The National Theatre’s are the best whilst the Lyric Hammersmith’s need more regular attention, and non-disabled people trespass infuriatingly in the Royal Court’s, just as I had at Stratford.

For the first six months after I came out of hospital I travelled train-wise by wheelchair. GNER and South West Trains were very attentive, and First Great Western were usually very good. But there was one occasion when we arrived at an unmanned and unlit Thatcham station on a February evening to pick up my car. Stella and I stared disconcerted at the drop onto the platform as the electric doors slid open. We could do nothing, and would have departed helplessly squeaking to Newbury, Swindon and Points West had two hefty commuters not sprung to their feet, lifted up the wheelchair and swung it out onto the platform. ‘Be lucky, mate,’ said one as the doors slid shut. I can’t say it’s a huge compensation, but we raspberries do often bring out the best in people. Stella and I went to Cuba as part of the charismatic Elyse Dodgson’s mission to convert the world to ‘Royal Courtism’. The system of theatre in Cuba is essentially based on a Soviet model, where the director is auteur supreme. Her revolutionary work was to encourage the writer and director to work together. It would be fair to say that this was unprecedented in Cuban practice. Cuba is very fifties, not a ramp or disabled access anywhere, but whenever Stella and I approached a curb a burly brown arm from a passer-by or a fellow tourist would descend to assist us onto the pavement.

Since I came out of hospital at the end of 2006, I have had very vivid dreams. Three or four nights ago I dreamt I had mislaid my stick on the top of a bus, but hey presto, I could walk fine and didn’t need it. I often have driving dreams where I am driving any one of the variety of delicious cars I have owned over the years, from the 1932 Austin 7 once owned by my father Max, given to me on my seventeenth birthday, to the lovely Jensen Interceptor I o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Journal of the Plague Year
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• About the Author
• Copyright Information