Who Needs This ?

“When I started art, my first question was: who needs this?”

Rory Pilgrim

This week a number of things happened that have zigged my zag.

Arts Council Wales pulled its funding from National Theatre Wales. An audacious cliff edge move and a political one, of course. I was part of the blessed team who founded that National Theatre in 2009; they were the most magical years of my career and the best theatre I have ever made. The decline of that company is an act of collective vandalism.

At my current theatre we announced a stellar cast and sold loads of tickets. These sales keep us afloat.

I had a Board meeting and a Development Board meeting - reporting and performing to those to whom I am accountable.

Someone felled the Sycamore Gap tree in a storm in the night.

Michael Gambon died.

I went to a one-day conference on making theatre in a climate crisis in the Olivier Theatre. It made me heavy.

At the climate conference a panellist said: “We are in an extinction event. Our audiences are extinct.”

I had a long hilarious restorative phone call with a writer.

I went to the Turner Prize exhibition at the Towner Eastbourne.

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The Turner exhibition is extremely strong, and brilliantly curated. All four artists are true artists, making work with deep and wide conceptual ideas, entirely of the world now. Vulnerable, epic, emotional, human, questioning works.

Rory Pilgrim, one of the Turner artists says: “When I started art, my first question was: who needs this?”

Jesse Darling, another of the Turner artists says: “The apocalypse is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

These two statements helped me locate my zig zag. I have felt more emotional this week than I knew. I’m a thinker, but this week I have been a feeler. I have been upset; it’s been disorienting.

Who needs the Sycamore Gap tree? We saw who.

I gathered by email and phone with the fellow pilgrims of NTW, as if around a felled stump.

If we are in a corner, financially and ecologically, this question : who needs this? is the only question to guide us. If we wish our organisations and art form to sustain themselves, this question is everything.

“Purpose” is one way of seeing it. But need, and demand, is slightly different from purpose. Meeting our audiences, the world, the nation, putting them at the centre.

We sold a lot of tickets and these tickets suggest people want - if not need - the art we are offering. It is not a tree to shelter, scatter, propose marriage beneath, but it might give comfort and distraction on a winter night. The income keeps my theatre and all who sail in her afloat. I can live with this.

The apocalypse will eventually distribute evenly, make no mistake. Please may artists and leaders and Boards ask themselves, always and only: who needs this? Or else, the cliff edge. Play or be played.