This sort of leads on from everything, but links with life no longer being linear and also with my search for a language to describe the social value of the arts.
This section is about ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’.
In a foreword that was added to his published diaries in 1999, Sir Peter Hall says:
“If I had continued to keep the diaries during the eighties and nineties, the scene would have become darker and darker, as I recorded missed opportunities, philistinism endorsed, or politicians uninterested in the arts because they can see no votes in them. Stupidity has now become confused with egalitarianism, and elitism with proper standards.
“Governments now dare not support the arts for fear of appearing high-brow. England is still the only European country where ‘intellectual’ is a term of abuse.”
This high-brow thing: there is a way to appreciate art without accessing it emotionally. (And it’s called Being British.)
We see low-brow as good because it’s real. But panto is low-brow, and it’s seen as good, and it is real: real storytelling. Proper old fairy tales, good vs evil and all that. I mean, for fuck’s sake, isn’t that what Shakespeare was doing? Adapting old tales for a new audience who wanted to boo the villain and cheer the hero?
This low-brow thing can just mean accessible, but accessible doesn’t get funded.
We must start teaching craft. To make work accessible. But this would happen in a theatre company without the need to fund teaching.
What if we had a company of actors, the same ones, and the same small group of directors, and we chose some writers to write ten minute pieces, and we made that be a company for a season?
Peter: “And the concern [about the arts] seems always to be popularity – not creativity.”
But if you teach craft, creativity becomes accessible, which makes it popular.
There are other sections prompted by the intro to Peter Hall's Diaries:
- a section about the appeal of the ‘old’ arts to the young.
- a section about freedom.
- a section that links into teaching the craft.
- a section about the social value of the arts.
