“Soon the only actors are going to be privileged kids whose parents can afford to send them to drama school. That’s not right. It feels like we are going backwards” – Julie Walters
Growing up, like any spoiled child, I had a slew of hobbies: swimming, horse-riding, Brownies, netball, but the one I looked forward to every week was Stagecoach. The now deceased institution (telling in itself), was a school which fostered love for the performing arts, each week we would sing, dance and act with like-minded peers. As a shy child, I can wholeheartedly say that sending my sister and I there every week was the best decision my parents made; on a Saturday afternoon I escaped judgement, bullies and outside anxieties, allowed to sashay around the sanctum of Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form with some of my closest friends. I never realised that when I quit (or retired) at age ten this would be one of the worst decisions of my life and I would likely never see the stage again.
As a working-class girl from the North East, when I sheepishly told my parents that I didn’t want to go to university despite receiving some of the best results in my sixth form because I instead wanted to audition for theatre schools, I was obviously scoffed at. What I didn’t realise was that I didn’t have the endless do-overs and ‘gap-years’ like the southern middle class to endlessly audition and endlessly be rejected, my time and resources were finite. While I do resent my parents’ reaction to their seventeen year-old’s heart-baring, I now understand it. Typically, applicants are accepted to drama schools or conservatoires (if they are accepted at all) after their third run of auditions, this is three years devoted to voice and dance lessons as well as acting coaches, headshots and ‘building a resume.’ The individuals that provide these services are typically theatre graduates themselves so of course they are charging a pretty penny for their experience and the mass amount of debt they are in. On top of this, audition fees exist, ranging from £20-40 a pop, and of course, if you’re only getting one opportunity a year you need to audition for as many schools as possible. Finally, most of these schools are situated down south or, if you’re lucky, in Manchester, so you’ll have to fund travel costs and potentially accommodation. Suddenly, the dream is not looking so attainable.
Often when you hear actors talk about their ‘struggle’, they discuss working multiple jobs, going years without artistic employment and ‘fighting’ for their chance. What they fail to mention is that most of these struggling artists are white, middle-class and armed with an RP accent ready to go. The working-class (especially the northern working-class) has a tradition of being erased from the artistic sector until the middle-classes fancy navel-gazing at their ‘grubby’ lifestyles, but even this representation is disappearing. Social Mobility and ‘Openness’ in Creative Occupations since the 1970s (2022) reports that the quota of working-class actors, musicians and writers has halved since the 1970s while another in 2024 shows that less than one in ten arts workers possessed working-class roots. This, of course, stems back to the economic stability of the middle and upper classes which allows them to float around London listlessly until an agent snaps them up, but it also touches upon another, much more troubling notion: the suppression and degradation of the northern working-class.
So, when did class become ‘everyone’s least favourite diversity and representation category?’ After spending a year at the University of Edinburgh, I’m still not sure. Hoping to meet fellow-minded academics and hopefully get involved with Footlights and the Edinburgh Fringe, I was instead gawped at and then ignored once the novelty had worn off, supposedly hailing from every northern land from Aberdeen to Liverpool. The largely southern student body were externally fascinated while being internally disgusted at my northern ‘no’s’ and lack of private schooling, therefore I did not feel emboldened to try and break the class ceiling of the university’s performing arts societies. The suppression of the working-class through financial, prejudicial barriers means that British audiences are not seeing creatives that make up most of their nation; this means that southern populations only see the north as an amalgamated ‘other’ while the north are forced to watch privately educated southerners struggle through Yorkshire accents.
‘Michael Gambon on elitism with the acting industry: ”The more Old Etonians the better, I think!” in reference to the prestigious alma mater of Prince Harry and William that costs over £34,000 a year to attend, well over the British average yearly salary.’
It’s impossible not to be discouraged by the downward trajectory of northern artistic input, the closure of youth theatre institutes such as Stagecoach alongside the ever-growing elitism of higher artistic education poses the question, what hope is there for creative hopefuls from the north east? Acclaimed northern actors Christopher Eccleston and Julie Walters have said that their success would not be possible today and unfortunately, they seem to be right. If you have a favourite British actor from this generation, the likelihood is they went to private school and then straight onto a prestigious drama institute that has become a prerequisite for any professional artist. If you are not born into an artistically advantageous family or area, you must be a generational talent with bullet-proof resilience and drive even to wedge open the stage door whereas the middle-class are free to be blissfully mediocre while earning a tidy profit. With all of this in mind, where do we go from here? I’m not a politician, but I don’t think it’s wrong to say that working-class people, northern people, deserve to have dreams and that these should be achievable, not just ephemeral whimsies. Some of the best art, film, theatre and music comes from the demographic the elites now paradoxically tokenise and repress; sixty-seven percent of British Oscar winners have been privately educated, so the dream is real, just not for you.
Sources
The MacTaggart Lecture: James Graham | Edinburgh TV Festival – YouTube
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385221129953
