The Gamblers’ Den

Abstract

It all starts in 1979 with a General Election, the result of which has had a significance for British political, economic and cultural life only rivalled by that of the very coming to power of the Labour Party in 1945. Indeed, this comparison is particularly apt, for in both instances the assumption of power was accompanied by a conscious intent of change that would challenge the otherwise largely consensual nature of post-war government. In many ways, the programme initiated by that first Thatcher administration, and continued waywardly but insistently ever since, was based on the deconstruction of that post-1945 structure that has largely shaped, for better or worse, the subsequent state of the nation. Very little has been the same since, and the British theatre is no exception. The roots of the theatrical crisis and the direct cause of its continuing malaise must be seen as a direct result of wider government monetarist policy, as must the particular ways in which it has developed.

If you are drowning in a large municipal swimming-pool, should you question the motives of the life-saver or the kind of life jacket he throws you? Is a national lottery, which might provide a few of the many millions needed to bring the great cultural stock of theatres, museums and galleries up to standard, the answer for the arts? The news that John Major has asked the Treasury to draw up proposals for such a lottery indicates that culture is on the Government’s agenda — as a problem which it wants to dispose of in a massive national flutter. There could not be a better example of the cynicism to which we have sunk than that this device should be hailed as a panacea. ‘What is aught but as ‘tis valued?’ … The answer is that culture is valued as a commodity whose survival should be ensured not through the national conscious will but the lurch to the gamblers’ den.

(Nicholas de Jongh, 1991)²

Parts of this chapter are based on my ‘Left to Right: English Theatre in the 1980s’, Englisch Amerikanische Studien. Zeitschrift für Untererricht, Wissenschaft & Politik, 3 (April 1986), 401–10, and on a lecture given at Loughborough University the same year.