For the third What If? interview I met with producer Matt Maltby. Matt is one half of new writing company Pint-Sized. He's produced for The Bush, The Royal Court and The Bunker, and facilitates anti-oppression work for Fearless Futures. We spoke about inclusive practice, theatre etiquette and ‘conservative’ performances.
This interview is condensed from a longer conversation.
T A nice easy topic for a Friday afternoon...
M A Good Friday afternoon too.
There isn't a theatre in the country that won't tell you that they prioritise inclusion. If someone told them that until their programming were truly representative of the UK and everyone in it, a bit of their building would fall off every day, I think they would move faster. The question is not, do we think it's good, as most people would broadly agree, my question is how importantdo you think it is, because if you thought it was, I think you would move faster.
It's not acceptable for somebody to be able to look at your theatre and feel that it's not somewhere they're welcome and where their stories are being told. Everything that I've learnt about inclusion I've learnt from a company called Fearless Futures and I should credit them constantly. With FF, we ask: who is designing the world? And if it's the same people who have always designed it then we will continue to get the same results.An inclusive theatre looks like a representative group of people making decisions.
T You're asking how do we make spaces inclusive, shall we talk about people who are doing it well?
M It's really easy to have this conversation and throw rocks, but there are loads of people who are prioritising inclusivity. Venues like Contact in Manchester, who work with Youth Boards and Youth Programmers and connect really deeply with their community.
Company Three are extraordinary; Ned Glasier who founded it talks about engaging with a community from the start and working with them to create and shape each project. There's a sense of creating with and for an audience.
Rachel Bagshaw’s The Shape of the Pain is wonderful because it is organically accessible for a huge rage of impairments. A deaf audience member feels as part of the audience as a hearing audience member. It's not using a ghettoised captioned performance or creating a space where some people are 'accommodated for' (which is a horrible phrase). Rachel says: this is theatre, everyone is welcome, I've made it so everyone can come and experience it. What she taught me was that all the other work I had been making was creating an exclusive space, night after night. I don't think we should be up for that.
T What you’ve described with The Shape of the Pain is quite special in that it makes a space which feels comfortable for so many different people. It's hard to create a space that caters for all, isn’t it?
M The answer to that is probably found in bringing creatives and audience members from different and seemingly quite polarised needs together into a room and asking them what they would design.
Again this comes from FF and design-thinking, which says we are always trying to solve problems imperfectly by imagining what the problem might be. The classic example is if I put a mirror up in my house, I would probably put it at my head height. I'm the shortest person in my house and that mirror would be totally useless to everyone else. I think a lot of the time we are putting up a mirror at our own height and assuming that it will work. Sometimes we’re told that other people are taller than us and we ask, how much taller? Instead of doing it with the taller person and finding something that works.
T Are there costs to creating a more inclusive space?
M The costs are fewer than we imagine but that's why we're using the word prioritise. We are asking, is it better that the people who are currently going continue to have that experience or is it better to allow a much larger percentage of people to enjoy something slightly different?
It is a part of asking who do we as a society value and who do we protect? If we're talking about how many Trans people feel welcome and feel safe in our average theatre, we know that getting on the tube is dangerous and that every glance on a train is a potential act of violence. 1 in 8 Trans people have been attacked in their place of work, and the suicide rates for young Trans people are horrific. We know all of those things and making Trans people feel more welcome in theatre won't erase any of it but it is a part of it. Some language from FF: safety, dignity, legitimacy, freedom. Who do we want to have those things? For me, nothing that we do in theatre is life or death apart from this; the impact that we have on society and who gets to feel included is life or death.
T There are so many different places where change needs to happen, but perhaps we can talk about the experience of seeing a show and how we make that experience more inclusive?
M At the moment, our default setting for theatre is an exclusive theatre, it's a theatre in which many people don't feel welcome or even that able to experience the show.
We could talk about the low rates of Trans attendance, but we could also talk about the low rates of Muslim attendance at the theatre, and the intrinsic association that many people have between theatre and a bar, and what that means for different groups of people.
For me, we just need to flip it so the default setting is inclusive. Instead of having a relaxed performance, captioned performance, audio-described performance (access around disability is sometimes the easiest way to frame this), what if every performance were those things, and that was all organic to the show.
We have a welcome that we read out in some of the inclusion workshops that I do with FF. It’s about 3 or 4 minutes long and it welcomes people explicitly from various backgrounds and experiences. What if that opening few minutes allowed people to feel like they could respond like they do at a Black majority audience at a spoken word night, or like an Indian audience when you go and do Shakespeare in India? What if people felt like they could be vocally engaged, and that they could also sit and be quiet and do nothing? What if those bonds got loosened? What if once in a run we had a conservative performance where all of the normal rules of theatre would be explicitly stated and we would see how ludicrous they are.
What if we accepted that the model we currently work with is white, middle-class and based on male non-disabled Judeo-Christian values and that what we are asking people to do is behave like white people in the 1920s behaved in Church or in their offices. This isn't how it's always been. In regency theatres or in the court of Charles II, people were having sex in the boxes. In the Greek amphitheatres people were actively participating. All this stuff which purports to be tradition has been imposed on us, and more recently than we often think.
I think a lot of it has to do with our relationship with the sacred. That’s part of why there's the big red velvet curtain and the proscenium arch, it's about creating the spectacle of the sacred. If we want to be truly inclusive maybe to a degree we have to abandon or find some flex in the sacred.
T I like this word 'contract'. What is the spoken or unspoken contract?
M It feels like maybe the next step is not explaining the contract but performing the contract with the audience. If you do a workshop, you set up an agreement of how you're going to be working together, a facilitator doesn't say 'this is how we are going to work' you ask 'what do you think we might need in order for this workshop to be successful?' I don't know how you crowdsource and contract a new set of theatre etiquette but we need to find a way of re-negotiating that.
The interim step is to be explicit about ripping up the old one. We need far fewer rules that we think. It's probably not good to get up on stage and punch one of the performers, but maybe within the confines of safety it's fine to get up on stage. We've been straitjacketed for a really long time accepting certain things can only exist within specific genres, in immersive or interactive work. We've shut ourselves off to the possibility of what could be. In an age where lots of other forms and sectors are moving fast towards creating the future, we are still in thrall to the past.
T A challenge of theatre is the spaces that already exist. Short of knocking them down, how do we work with those spaces to make them more inclusive?
M That's a massive challenge for the commercial sector in particular. There’s a distinction between equality, equity and justice to talk about here. Equality being if we treat everyone the same then they should have the same experience - imagining that everyone reacts to being in one of those buildings the same way, but they don't. Some people can't physically get in, some people don't feel welcome because the buildings are deliberately imposing class statements. Equity is I imagine the next step for those theatres, noting that not everyone is having the same experience, and asking what equitable step can we take in order to correct that? In justice, there are no barriers, either those buildings have been knocked down and rebuilt or nobody has any preconceptions about what entering that building would be like. I don't know how we get to a place of justice with these buildings, and generally, I don't think we ever achieve justice within the existing structures, whether physical or theoretical.
T And it's difficult for inclusivity to be an implicit gesture in these buildings. The traditional structures are visible, and you're always in conversation with that. Inclusivity becomes more pronounced.
M Some audience members will hate what feels like virtue signalling, and others need that welcome through the door, whereas others will want to go somewhere they already feel really comfortable.
At the moment there's an anxiety that programming beyond what the core audience is used to means they won’t stay. We're talking mainly about middle-aged upper middle-class people, predominantly white. There are people who will see a face that's not white on a poster and not go. There are people who go to a show where someone stands up and says 'You can do whatever you want and all of this etiquette stuff is nonsense' and will never come back. That's OK, that's their choice to opt out. Sometimes inclusion is about prioritising people who have been most marginalised.
What that means though is huge financial risk. At no level are people not worried about income. There's a fear and anxiety about whether or not these new audiences will adequately replace these old audiences we might lose. We just need to be braver and work harder. That comes back to prioritising - are we going to stake ourselves on this?
In order to shape society you have to take the path of most resistance. That is really uncomfortable and scary and sometimes will lead to financial failure, but less often than we think. We need to re-evaluate how we quantify risk. Why did Black Panthertake decades to be made? Because it looked like a risk. What was it? The biggest individual superhero success, making over 1.2 billion dollars. Hamilton.The biggest successes in our media at the moment have taken a risk on particular audiences showing up for them, or traditional audiences being interested in non-traditional narratives.
I worry about ticket sales all the time and I'm producing an individual show; when you're running a building, the stakes are high. So that's why it's an issue of priority. Are we going to re-evaluate what we think risk is and once we've done that are we prepared to take the small risk in front of us or are we going to head for safety?
One of the key problems is that people in privilege often think that their perspective is objective and true. Any experience outside of that is seen as in some way exceptional and that allows it to be labelled at the best, interesting, and at the worst, abnormal. We can disrupt that and say, actually your view is subjective and here's an opportunity to be opened up to new ways of being. If instead of seeing inclusivity as oppositional - we're pushing you out in order to allow other people in, we talk about it as allowing a new set of stories and experiences to exist, and you will be really lucky to be a part of that. Then we might get somewhere.
