You would think that six years after being widely attacked for programming a 50th anniversary celebration featuring only one play by a woman, three years after committing to equal representation of living female playwrights, and a year after its Artistic Director argued in The Stage that theatres should be publicly named and shamed for gender imbalance in their programming, the National Theatre would have learned to check its public announcements for gender parity. Well think again. This week it announced part of its 2019 season. Here’s the data:
6 plays
21 key creative roles (if you include the novelists whose work is being adapted)
17 men
4 women (1 novelist, 1 director, 2 actors)
This has been called out by lots of folks on twitter, including me.
An open letter was written to the National Theatre here, which called for the National to take account of its privileged position with the UK theatre, and to shoulder greater responsibility for the work of equal representation. I signed the letter and I’m grateful to the women who wrote and publicised it. It was also welcomed by Rufus Norris and Lisa Burger, the National’s joint chief executives, who responded that it ‘rightly holds [them] to account’ and respond — justifiably — that three of the four plays they announced in January were by women, that many of the directors working at the National this year are female, and that they have invested in ‘more new plays on commission by a greater breadth of artists than ever before’.
The Australian writer Jane Howard has challenged this account in a tweet-thread, pointing out that — across the whole of the National’s current productions — women represent just 29% of playwrights and 43% of directors and under a quarter of lighting and sound designers and composers.
But even if Norris and Burger’s account stood up better to scrutiny, I don’t think the question of representation can be so easily resolved. As the playwright Winsome Pinnock tweeted, the culture of an institution that has treated women with disrespect for decades won’t change overnight: ‘I’ll even hazard a guess that some of the people named in their letter as examples of success have stories to tell’, she said.
In short, representation is more than just a numbers game, but both the open letter and Norris/Burger’s response were nonetheless underpinned by that logic. The open letter pointed out that if 51% of the nation is female, half of the theatre that bears the nation’s name should be too. Likewise, Norris/Burger assert their seriousness ‘about reflecting the nation on our stages’, and have set targets for doing so. Although those targets are held within a policy that also aims to ‘support the performing arts sector’ in engaging with diversity and ‘develop a culture where diversity is hard-wired into everything we do, is understood by all of us, and where we all have an opportunity to be a part of this ongoing conversation’, ultimately, those targets boil down to numbers.
By March 2021:
- 50% of living writers for our stages will be female
- 50% of directors working on our stages will be female
- As an average, there will be 50:50 gender balance on stage
- 20% of writers for our stages will be people of colour
- 20% of directors working on our stages will be people of colour
- At least 25% of performers will be people of colour
But can the work of ‘reflecting the nation’ be judged by success or failure in achieving proportional ratios? To answer that question, we might consider the racial balance represented by the National’s announcement last week. Of those 21 creative roles, 3 are people of colour. That’s 14%, which is short of the national’s 20% target, but it does ‘reflect the nation’, which is currently about 13% BAME (not my term, it’s the one used in gathering these statistics).
So that’s good, right? Well, actually, even if we accept the numbers game, no, it’s not. In this announcement, the three people of colour are all men (Hammed Animashaun, Lucian Msamati and Roy Alexander Weise). It would be quite possible for the National to meet the targets above by employing more white women and more black men, and that is what it did in 2016, when two high profile productions about race, Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs and August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, offered overwhelmingly more opportunities for male actors of colour than female. This is a classic problem of intersectional failure, just like the case of non-employment of women of colour in a car plant in the late nineteen-eighties that led legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to coin the term intersectionality in the first place. White women were employed in the plant’s front office and black men on its assembly lines but black women were excluded from the former because of their race and from the latter because of their gender. The lesson is simple: if we measure representation in this way, women of colour are more or less guaranteed to lose out.
Then there is the question of narrative. Anyone who’s worked in the theatre in this country knows that ‘story’ is always top of the artistic director’s priority list, and sure enough in 2016, Rufus Norris told Rachel Cooke in The Guardian that ‘I’ve always been a rich fantasist, seeing things in terms of story’. Seeing this season announcement in terms of story is revealing. It features six stories. Two of them are about race and racism, but not only are they set in the past, they take place not in Brixton or Handsworth or Bradford, but in Australia and South Africa. Racism, in these narratives, happens on the other side of the world, beyond the reaches, even, of the British Empire. What’s more, these are stories about settler colonialism (the furthest kind of colonialism, that is, from our national consciousness), and apartheid. Despite the fact that, as debbie tucker green’s ear for eye made clear last year, British slave codes enacted de facto apartheid, as far as the British cultural imagination is concerned, apartheid is something we opposed. Even the Tories, who branded Mandela a ‘terrorist’, now routinely claim his fight as their own.
And who is telling these stories about race at our National Theatre? White people. The (white) Australian novelist Kate Grenville’s The Secret River has been adapted by (white) playwright Andrew Bovell and directed by Neil Armfield (he’s white too). We’re told that the production is ‘hauntingly poetic’ (which sounds like a pretty racialised description to me) and ‘was conceived in collaboration with Aboriginal artists’ though they are not named. The exception to this white-wash is Weise, who’s directing Master Harold and the Boys, but the play is by Athol Fugard, who is, of course, white, and whose status as a writer among white audiences cannot be irrelevant to the decision to programme the play. Therefore, even if these productions are both brilliant, their position in the National Theatre’s programme reflects truths about our national consciousness of race that should be very uncomfortable both within that institution and beyond it. Racial narratives, this programme says, remain available for white people to shape; racism, it suggests, happens in the past, and somewhere else, in places that are not like here. What is more, that National Theatre can keep saying all of this while meeting its diversity targets.
So what is the purpose of those targets? Who are they really for? Do they genuinely give women and people of colour an opportunity to shape our national conversation about representation and power? Or are they really about protecting the privilege of the people who set them? The American sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes that contemporary racism is mostly ‘subtle, institutional and apparently non-racial’. I’ve drawn on his work recently to argue that diversity initiatives are not merely a fig-leaf for the ‘color-blind racism’ that Bonilla-Silva describes, but a breeding-ground for it. Too often, they work at two levels: placating on the surface and reinforcing marginalisation beneath. If we’re going to work seriously to address representation in the theatre, targets for diversity are not going to help. We need targets for the redistribution of power, and they’re not going to come from the people who’ve got it.
