Arts Council England unleashed fury in February when an update to its policies warned arts companies, and those who work for them, against making “overtly political or activist” statements. Here was confirmation of what many in the arts already knew, which is that – whether by scrutineers from the left or the right – limits are being erected around what we can say and do in our work. This week, the Arcola theatre in Dalston, east London, addresses this phenomenon on stage, with Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art, a collection of short plays (written in a month, rehearsed in a fortnight) in response to warnings that artists shouldn’t be political.
In practice, that response takes two forms. I expected the evening’s focus to be, as billed, on freedom of speech and the artist’s right (obligation?) to be political. Sure enough, that’s the focus of some of the evening’s vignettes. There’s a farcical sketch, spliced between the short plays, about a frantic theatre manager (Joel Samuels) chasing politics off his stage. Two plays show cautious programmers rejecting too-hot-to-handle scripts (“Send me the play: we might have a one-day reading in the basement”).
