Theatre & Class

I recently worked with the director Chris Haydon, supervising a piece of research he carried out as part of his Clore Fellowship. He was interested in the problem of class in British theatre; the exclusion of working class audiences and the privileging of the middle class.

Chris worked through a mixture of reading and interviews, conducting some site visits to some really innovative theatres across England and Wales. The report is excellent, I think, and makes a series of really strong and powerful recommendations for making theatres more inclusive, welcoming places that speak to working-class audiences in a way they mostly don't do now.

The final report is called Where are the Workers? An investigation into the class diversity of British theatre audiences and you can read it on the Clore website:

• Where are the workers?

If you have the attention span of a mollusc and can't read the full thing, you absolute shower of a person, he's written a much shorter piece for The Stage about the same thing.

• The Stage.