27.02.2025

Student drama class: ‘The taming of the shrew’

Three Rs and no arts

Rather than being trained to be wage slaves, Eddie Ford argues that we should demand the right to develop ourselves as fully rounded human beings

Anyone who still believes in the myth of a meritocracy should take a look at acting. Here is a profession that, in the UK, has been increasingly dominated, if not near monopolised, by privately educated individuals who have all the right connections. Doors tend to fly open for them, while remaining stubbornly closed for others regardless of potential talent.

Perhaps the best example is the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, who rose to prominence for the Sherlock TV series and has appeared in numerous movies - The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing; The Fifth Estate, in which he played Julian Assange; 12 Years a Slave, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, Star Trek into Darkness, Dr Strange, and so forth, not to mention a whole string of leading theatrical roles like Hamlet at the Barbican and Hedda Gabler in the West End. Cumberbatch, of course, attended boarding schools from the age of eight, and then Harrow - where he learnt his chops as a member of the Rattigan Society and made his acting debut aged 12 as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Apparently, his drama teacher at Harrow warned him against a career in acting because it was a “tough business”. After spending his gap year being a volunteer English teacher at a Tibetan monastery in Darjeeling, as you do, he then went to the illustrious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

What was true for Cumberbatch is also the case with many other well-known actors who went to various fee-paying private or ‘independent’ institutions, like Eddie Redmayne (Eton), Dominic West (Eton), Tom Hiddleston (Eton), Henry Cavil (Stowe), Tom Hardy (Reed), Rosamund Pike (Badminton), Juno Temple (Bedales), Imogen Poots (Latymer), Emily Blunt (Hurtwood House), Dan Stevens (Tonbridge), Andrew Garfield (City of London Freeman School) - just work your way down the list. This is seriously intimidating for anyone working class who wants to get a break in acting and in all likelihood will not even bother trying.

Empowered

Of course, there was a brief period of time in the 1950s and 1960s when working-class voices were seen and heard everywhere on stages and screens all over the country - Alec Guinness, Tom Courtenay, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, and so on. This was during the post-World War boom. Capitalism felt compelled to make concessions, especially when it came to restive working class youth, who were increasingly not content to live like their parents. As expectations rose, so did the crumbs. Hence, increasing numbers of young people from so-called ordinary backgrounds could get to college and university, or drama schools like LAMDA and even the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, thanks to the system of student grants - now gone and replaced by student fees.

Julie Walters, born into an Irish Catholic working class family in Birmingham, told The Guardian over 10 years ago that “people like me wouldn’t get a chance today” because she got a full grant - saying she “don’t know how you get into it now” and “kids write to me all the time and I think, I don’t know what to tell you”.¹ She also pointed out that her real opportunity came when she went to work at Liverpool’s Everyman theatre - “a fantastic time, alive with possibility and empowered working-class voices” with Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell writers in residence, both writing parts for her and for others with “explosive talent”, such as Pete Postlethwaite. “It felt like a revolution” to Walters, “like being on the frontline of something.”

Then jump forward for a revealing contrast to an actor like Christopher Eccleston, born in 1964 to a working class family from Salford. He gained wider recognition for being the ninth incarnation of Dr Who - whose companion, Rose (Billie Piper), was a young working-class woman who lived on a council estate - but for one season only, due to a chronic breakdown in relations with the show’s producers regarding the “work environment” and “poor management practices on set” that Eccleston did not want anything to do with (later saying that he had issues with the show’s “politics” rather than disliking the actual character he played). From an early age, though inspired by shows like Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff, he “had a sense acting wasn’t for me because I’m not educated”, feeling disadvantaged compared to the actors who went to fee-paying schools. He has said that he had to virtually beg for roles, something he resented, and that the women around him also seemed trapped - and his northern accent held him back when trying to get roles in Shakespearean productions. Something that would not have been an issue with Shakespeare’s original Globe Theatre in the 17th century, putting it mildly, as that would have been a smorgasbord of regional accents and backgrounds.

This has led to a dismal state of affairs where the chances for working-class actors have rapidly diminished, especially with the apparent bursting of the soap bubble that once gave them a route into the profession - with the disappearance of The Bill, Holby City, Doctors, and now Hollyoaks moving from five episodes a week to three. Meaning that there is no longer a way to go from being an ambitious newbie to someone experienced with a reputation - you either need extraordinarily good luck, or nothing. A situation that has been described as Benedict Cumberbatch or bust.²

Rigged

And what is true for acting is also true, unfortunately, for the creative arts in general, with a “rigged system” that stifles working class talent. This was the conclusion of a recent analysis by The Guardian and the Sutton Trust of artists, directors and actors, showing that almost a third of major arts leaders were educated privately and came from “upper middle-class backgrounds³. Not in the slightest bit surprising, of course, but still shocking nevertheless.

Hence the survey of 50 organisations that receive the most Arts Council England funding revealed a disproportionate number went to either Oxford or Cambridge, 17.5% of artistic directors and more than a quarter (26%) of chief executives compared with less than 1% of the general population. Of these artistic directors and other creative leaders, almost a third (30%) were educated privately, despite a national average of only 7% going to such institutions. The same goes for the organisations’ chief executives or other executive directors, with more than a third of them (36%) going to private schools. Meanwhile, 43% of Britain’s best-selling classical musicians and 35% of Bafta-nominated actors were alumni of private schools; and among classical musicians, 58% had attended university, as well as 64% of top actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, who studied drama at the Victoria University of Manchester. Unsurprisingly, researchers found a less stark divide in pop music, where only 8% of artists were educated privately and 20% university-educated, getting close to the national averages.

Furthermore, the number of UK students taking arts subjects has also plummeted in recent years leading to a “creativity crisis” in state schools. Since 2010, enrolment in arts GCSEs has fallen by 40% and the number of arts teachers has declined by 23%. About half of all A-level students took at least one humanities subject a decade ago, but by 2021-22 that had fallen to 38%, with the proportion taking arts subjects such as music, design and media studies dropping to 24%.

In other words, working in the arts is an unobtainable goal for more and more people - the projects and venues that once existed have vanished from so many places. Michael Socha, who recently starred in The Gallows Pole and started acting via the Television Workshop on Nottingham, told the Guardian that the middle-class environment of film and TV could be difficult to navigate with a “lot of impostor syndrome sometimes” - admitting that even when he got a big job, he was often “quite intimidated by how elitist it is”. Happy Valley’s showrunner, Huddersfield born Sally Wainwright - who has previously worked on soaps like Emmerdale and Coronation Street - remembers as a child her farther saying to her, “People like us don’t become writers”. And he was a senior lecturer at a polytechnic! As for the award-winning playwright, Beth Steel, she was able to get a foothold in the world of theatre by securing a place at a live-in property in London where her rent, including bills, was £135 a month - now an unimaginably low sum - that allowed her to work on her breakthrough play, Wonderland, about the mining community in Nottinghamshire where she was raised - maybe a very familiar story for some readers of the Weekly Worker.

However, recent research by Netflix - based on interviews with 500 National Youth Theatre participants and 2,000 parents and carers - found that nine in 10 working-class parents would discourage their children from pursuing a career in film and television as they did not see it as a viable career.⁴ One in four respondents also said their parents or carers were unsupportive of their creative endeavours and just under 75% said their potential career choice was viewed as a waste of their education. Instead, they would prefer their offspring to go into “traditional” professions such as law, medicine and finance, as they are seen as safer bets for aspirational young people.

Not for nothing has Equity, the actors’ union, been campaigning against the unfolding “arts apocalypse” - one of the clearest signs of what has gone wrong with our entire system - arguing that a “commitment to arts education is essential to arrest the decline and to build an education system fit for the 21st century”.⁵ It goes on to say the arts are “essential to human fulfilment”, yet in education “what is recognised in principle is often denied in practice” in an underfunded system. Thus the decimation of arts education in schools as they are forced to “make impossible decisions on an ever-dwindling budget” that has a “damaging focus” on an incredibly narrow, soul-destroying, curriculum.

Gradgrind

Of course, the idea that the Arts Council will make a difference with its tick box approach is risible. For that we need a strong, highly organised counterpower which is committed to the total transformation of society. Rather that settling for an education system that trains us to be docile wage slaves, sights can be lifted and young individuals given the opportunity to develop all their talents and potentialities.

Without that the emphasis will remain on exam results and preparation for the jobs market. Once that was summed up by the ‘three Rs’ (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic). Under the last Tory government and Rishi Sunak that was reduced to arithmetic. He waged a Gradgrind, a war, against the “anti-maths mindset” - trying to make it compulsory for all pupils in England up to age 18 to study maths. Our Rishi complained that only half of all 16-19 year-olds study any maths at all even though we live “in a world where data is everywhere and statistics underpin every job”, and therefore “require more analytical skills than ever before”. Yes, mastering basic maths is essential, but what about those pupils who also want to play the violin, paint, dance or read poetry? Form a band? But artistic and genuine spiritual development has next to no place in the philistine void that constitutes so much of formal education today.