Skills for Theatre (Communications Committee Report)

Viscount Chandos Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Grand Committee

[Viscount Chandos (Lab)]

My Lords, as the first speaker this afternoon who was not a member of the committee, I extend my thanks on behalf of the guests to not just the noble Lord, Lord Best, but all the previous speakers for their work as members of the committee. The 2017 general election truncated not just the Conservative Party’s more grandiose ambitions for political dominance but more regrettably, perhaps for me at least, the work of the committee on this report. Despite that, it has come to five very important and clear conclusions, which I unequivocally endorse.

Listening to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talk about her husband’s formative experience at school made me think about my performance as Macbeth, aged 12, which my father—a very kind but an even more honest man—described as the most monumental piece of miscasting he had ever seen. That has perhaps spared me from the need to declare interests that are rooted in real knowledge and experience of the theatre. But among my interests in the register are two particular ones to which I should, perhaps, draw your Lordships’ attention: first, as a trustee and past chair of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, which funds a number of theatres and theatrical ventures and is referred to by National Theatre Wales in giving evidence; and, secondly, as a newly appointed trustee and vice-chair of the London Academy for Music and Dramatic Art, which is better known as LAMDA.

The first section of the report talks about the importance of the theatre industry, both in its own cultural and economic right and, as noble Lords have already stressed, as the seed from which other more recent industries, including film, television and digital, have grown and flourished. I thought there was a striking, if not revelatory, quotation from Julian Bird, the chief executive of UK Theatre and the Society of London Theatre, when he said:

“Hollywood is packed with British technical and creative skills, 90% of which have come through regional theatre”.


Although the report is about developing the pipeline of talent—implicitly, I think—into professional theatre, it is important to recognise that developing that pipeline in schools and at school age will also drive the stimulation of cultural, social, educational and communication benefits and skills for many times more people than will ultimately enter the profession.

There has already been discussion this afternoon of the education environment, the trends in schools on EBacc, the emphasis on STEM and the horrifying divergence in the provision of drama and theatre between state and independent schools. It is important to emphasise that this is not just in terms of the curriculum but, almost more importantly, in terms of extra-curricular, external theatre visits, for which there may not be funding even if the regional theatre is within travelling distance.

On higher education—I suspect because the committee’s deliberations were cut off in their prime—there is relatively little discussion of the role of the drama schools and conservatoires. Given the interests that I have declared, I would like to spend a little time talking about them. One of the challenges is how best to describe them. I guess that, in the era of fervent Brexiters, the term “conservatoire” sounds altogether too foreign and too French. However, the more technical description of them as small, specialist higher education institutions seems rather dull so, with your Lordships’ permission, I shall continue to refer to them as conservatoires. The conservatoires are at the top of the tree, but they are not and should not be elitist. When Nicholas Hytner attended the ground breaking ceremony at LAMDA for its wonderful new building with the Sainsbury Theatre, long before I was a trustee, he said: “Without LAMDA, there would be no National Theatre”.

In looking at what the committee discussed in relation to drama schools and conservatoires, I was a little concerned by the quote from Sue Emmas of the Young Vic when she said:

“We are not getting the diversity of talent that we need through … the drama schools, which is a blockage in the talent pipeline”.


Without being complacent or saying that there is not still room for improvement, I was looking at the statistics for the past couple of years at LAMDA. In the current academic year, 23% of undergraduate students are from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background. It was 20% in the previous year. Before there is a boorish intervention by the dyspeptic theatre critic of the Daily Mail, I should say that I do not believe that this reflects primarily the efforts of LAMDA to make access as good as possible. It really reflects the intensity of talent that exists in those communities. Twelve per cent of students have a declared disability; 38% of BA acting students come from households with an income of less than £26,000 a year. LAMDA gives bursaries or scholarships to 20% of all students. The disparity between that 20% and the 38% of students who come from households with income levels that low is a constant reminder of how much we at LAMDA still need to do to increase funding for bursaries and scholarships.

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[Viscount Chandos]

If I may have a couple of minutes’ grace, I want to give one other statistic from LAMDA because it confirms one of the points made by the committee relating to careers advice for technical and stage management. LAMDA graduates from technical and stage management courses have a 100% employment rate in the first year, yet the applications are proportionately massively lower for that course than for the acting course. While the glamour of acting might account for some of that, there is strong evidence that career advice could be more helpful in that respect.

Where does this point? I think of the educational side as a pyramid, with the specialist conservatoires at the top then, in other higher education, the universities’ drama departments and then the schools. Then there is the theatre sector itself and the creative industries. Not to make this the Venn diagram from hell, but these have to intersect. One of the challenges is to get all the different parties to pull in the same direction. That, of course, requires money at every level: government money, central and local—I totally endorse the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, about ring-fencing local authorities’ arts budgets—philanthropic funding, which can never replace yet can complement government funding, and commercial funding.

To conclude, if this is not a guest being more outspoken than he should be, I find it extraordinary that, a year after the publication of the report—quite a slim one, for the reasons discussed—there has been no government response. It is very hard not to draw the conclusion, for all the distractions that other unmentionable events pose, that that is an implicit statement of priorities. I very much hope that the Minister, in winding up, will do something—perhaps more than something; a lot—to reassure your Lordships that this is a priority for the Government.