I have just read one of the most shocking and scandalous sentences in recent newspaper and theatre history.

It occurs in today’s edition of the Guardian’s jobs section, where the RSC announces the vacancy created by commercial director Kate Horton’s departure to the Royal Court as its new executive director.

“The challenge for her successor will be to lead a team of 75….”

At this point I pinched myself to make sure I was awake, or even alive. A team of seventy-five people — not even actors, mind you, or cleaning staff — to do what, exactly?

Four bullet points itemise “maximising earned income potential”; “developing the widest possible audience”; “strategically managing the RSC’s brand”; and “joining a team” to open the new RST in 2010. 

Nothing could demonstrate more clearly than this disgraceful document what has gone wrong with the subsidised arts in this country or how rotten to the core is its cavalier, jobsworth mentality of curruption, connivance and self-serving indolence.

The RSC’s History season has been playing to half empty houses in the Courtyard, and that vast army of under-employed actors is retained on contract until the cycle fetches up at the Roundhouse next spring.

No-one knows whether that lot is the real RSC, or whether the RSC is the Trevor Nunn company in Los Angeles, or the touring company in Salford, or Greg Doran’s mob revving up for next summer.

Since leaving the Barbican, the RSC executive hires expensive offices in Covent Garden and takes on ever increasing numbers of people to work in them.

What do these 75 people in the commercial and marketing departments actually do? Why are there 75 of them? To paraphrase King Lear, why not 45; why 25? Why the hell not five?

And what is the RSC brand, exactly? A style of bad over-acting, or a coffee mug?

The other day I took part in an ICA debate about the death of criticism. More serious is the death of self-criticism in institutions like the RSC and the BBC; at least in the latter place we are hearing at last voices within raised against the managerial culture that dictates news dissemination and creative policies.

It’s high time someone did the same at the RSC and blew the whistle on this endless campaign to transform the company by business and marketing intiatives instead of realistic creative innovations more substantial than the payment of feeble lip service to something that died there many years ago, “ensemble theatre making.”

In some ways Michael Boyd is doing a good job in impossible circumstances. But this advert, proclaimed as an “attractive package,” is a sure indicator that he won’t be able to succeeed in the long term until the whole operation is stripped down, dismantled and reconsidered from the bottom up.

The trouble is, that will now be impossible, with American donations pouring into the rebuilding fund and unalterable, calamitous expansionist policies in full flow regardless of the work itself.
 

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 8:55 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.