Coronavirus leaves British theatre 'in danger of losing its Marcus Rashfords'
British theatre is at risk of losing its Marcus Rashford equivalents from the devastation caused by coronavirus, the actor Prasanna Puwanarajah has warned. Puwanarajah, who starred in the TV hits Doctor Foster and Patrick Melrose, drew a parallel with the Manchester United striker when considering research that suggests young, diverse talent may have to abandon the sector and seek employment elsewhere.
Puwanarajah said that UK theatre stands to lose a lot of hard-fought ground in diversity as a result of the crisis and that there could be “a significant erosion of the most vulnerable parts of theatre’s workforce”. Routes to Recovery, a recently published study of theatre’s freelancers (who make up 70% of the industry’s workforce), concludes that Covid-19 has left the industry at risk of losing “a diverse generation of unique promise that was to power the next phase of our growth and to play a crucial role in the Arts Council’s Let’s Create strategy”. The report states that early career workers are in immediate jeopardy, that people of colour have been worse affected than the white workforce, and that deaf and disabled workers have suffered disproportionately.
Routes to Recovery, which was created by an unaffiliated group of analysts and theatre freelancers, gave the example of British Asian actor Bally Gill, who won critical acclaim and an award for his portrayal of Romeo for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2018. The study says Gill is now living with his parents in Coventry and retraining as a TEFL teacher. Past RSC Romeos include Ian McKellen, David Tennant and Sean Bean. Puwanarajah said Gill was among “so many emerging performers who you might call the sector’s Marcus Rashfords. They will need to leave and they won’t be able to come back. If he and his colleagues aren’t theatre’s ‘crown jewels’ then I don’t know what we’re saving.”
The arts and heritage sectors’ “crown jewels”, according to culture secretary Oliver Dowden, would be preserved by the government’s rescue package of £1.57bn, announced earlier this month. How those funds are to be distributed has not yet been made clear and Puwanarajah said that it is essential to recognise individuals as well as the institutions and big theatre buildings. Puwanarajah, who had a medical career before concentrating on acting, said: “A hospital is just a building until it is staffed with NHS workers. I’m interested to see how the money gets activated to genuinely maintain the muscle mass of organisations beyond just the bricks and mortar. The danger is that you end up [saving] just buildings.” The argument had been robustly made for theatre’s economic value, he said, but theatre also has an essential social function beyond entertainment. “The challenge will be how does that stimulus money lead to activity rather than mothballing?”
According to the Routes to Recovery report, one in three of the freelance theatre workforce received no support from the government’s self-employment income support scheme or the coronavirus job retention scheme. In recent weeks, many have drawn attention to those freelancers, including the very newly self-employed, who have slipped between the cracks in such schemes. “It’s no longer possible to call them cracks – they really are chasms,” said Puwanarajah. “Those schemes were all set up quite rapidly – they were built quickly and therefore there were going to be faults in them. But it’s been so long now that it’s not possible to claim that there weren’t opportunities to fix it at the political level.”
Puwanarajah is an ambassador for the Theatrical Guild charity, which has a fundraising appeal launched by Ian McKellen – with a £40,000 donation from his 80th-birthday theatre tour – to support backstage and front-of-house workers during the crisis. The Good Exchange platform, which hosts the fundraiser, is offering match funding to double each donation to raise a total of £80,000 for the guild to distribute to those most in need.
The guild is one of a number of benevolent funds that have come to the assistance of theatre workers and Puwanarajah said many in the industry were either unaware of them or had been reluctant to approach them. Earlier this month, the director Sam Mendes launched the Theatre Artists Fund, with cash from Netflix and other organisations, which has so far raised more than £1.6m. The fund gives £1,000 grants to individuals from underrepresented groups disproportionately affected by the crisis who may be considering leaving the profession.
At an all-party parliamentary group this week, discussing theatre’s recovery, Amanda Huxtable, the artistic director and CEO of Eclipse theatre company, said that if BAME talent was forced to leave the sector then the nation would “lose the chance to know itself better in order to do better”.
