Civic Theatres: A Place for Towns

On June 24 2016 the news that a majority had voted to leave the European Union shook the UK arts establishment. Rufus Norris, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre (NT), described it as a 'wake-up call' that revealed profound anti-London sentiments and a fragmented society. Described by Pippa Norris as a 'cultural backlash' (2019), the Brexit vote prompted a period of reflection in the arts community, leading major city-based theatres to reassess their relationship with neighbouring towns and build new programmes to extend their local and national reach.

In April 2019 Arts Council England (ACE) called for 'relevance' as well high quality in their future strategy, with the intention to engage a public that, according to ACE's deputy chief executive Simon Mellor, 'has lost all confidence in what they view as an out-of-touch establishment'. One response has been to re-examine the civic role of the arts, described by The Gulbenkian Foundation as 'the sociopolitical impact that organisations make on a place and its people through programmes of activity' (2016).

Theatre depends on the live event, bringing people together to share experience, and is particularly well-placed to open pressing questions about new forms of civic equality. This research is timely, but it also looks beyond the current moment to ask deeper questions about the ideal of an inclusive civic theatre today.

The theatre has long been a place for citizens to debate, to meet and learn, and, historically, the ideal of a civic theatre has resurfaced in times of instability and social reform. Civic theatres represented civic pride in Victorian England and newly-built theatres were symbols of hope in the era of post-war reconstruction. Yet traditional ideas of the civic dropped out of favour with arts organisations and cultural policy-makers in the second half of the twentieth century, not least because they carried associations with the arts as 'civilising' that were inherently hierarchical.

The ideal of community replaced the notion of civil society, leading publicly funded theatres to establish community programmes that encourage participation. This research will draw on the past to inform the present, and with our Project Partners and Collaborating Organisation, analyse how barriers to creating an inclusive theatre today might be overcome.

This research aims to prompt a national conversation about the civic role of theatre in the twenty-first century. Despite considerable research on theatre in cities, there has been no systematic research on theatres in towns. Towns receive considerably less public subsidy for the arts than cities, and townspeople have fewer opportunities to contribute to the creative economy, despite often supporting a thriving amateur theatre scene.

This risks leaving people living in towns feeling disenfranchised and excluded, perpetuating the perception that cities are edgy and forward-looking whereas towns are conservative backwaters. To redress this balance, the research brings together amateur, professional and community theatres from different types of towns (e.g. seaside, market, post-industrial and new towns).

It will examine the programmes of two major city-based producing house theatres that take place in towns and with diverse communities, the NT's Public Acts and Manchester Royal Exchange's Local Exchange programme. The research seeks to understand how barriers to participating in theatre might be removed, how diverse voices might be better represented, and how a practical approach to civic engagement in theatre might transcend entrenched social, cultural and economic divisions as well as open fresh ways of thinking about institutional cultures across the theatre sector.