Towards a Civic Theatre

By Dan Hutton

It’s easy to blame the difficulties theatre now faces on the longest shutdown of stages since the mid-seventeenth century. But these problems began some time before a global pandemic. Decades of free market ideas, ten years of austerity, and the slow encroachment of private space have all worked together to create an industry struggling to define its purpose. The virus was a symptom, not the cause.

In Towards A Civic Theatre, director Dan Hutton argues that a theatre which isn’t civic in outlook is not worth fighting for. Full of ideas and provocations from a range of theatre practitioners, and drawing on examples from inside and outside of the performing arts, it makes the case for a new kind of theatre fit for purpose in an already tumultuous twenty-first century. It is a toolkit, a guide, an offer to audiences and a call to arms for artistic leaders of tomorrow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Salamander Street Ltd.
• Release date: Jun 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913630935

Book preview

A CIVIC(S) LESSON

Theater, at its core, is about bringing people together in order to do a civic duty. And that civic duty is about engaging with some piece of culture that shifts or reframes how you see the world that you interact with every day. So possibly, you can be a better citizen.

Jeremy O. Harris¹

When we think of civic, we often think of other nouns appended to it. Civic centres. Civic leaders. Civic buildings. It describes things which belong or are attached to a specific municipality, and denotes something, in theory, owned by everyone who lives there. We might also attach it to more amorphous concepts. Civic pride. Civic duty. Civic responsibility. When it is singular, it is an adjective, and speaks to what it means to be a human being living within a certain place.

If we pluralise the word, however, and think of civics, we get those strange lessons at school, which broadly sit in the same space as PSHE. The idea of civics makes us think of the study of public life and what it means to be a good member of a community.

The Latin root of these terms, civis, also gives us city, citizen and civil. Emerging from a paradigm of city rather than nation states, all of these words originally related to relationships between individuals in their specific locale. Which puts it in tension with our modern use of the word citizen, which has been brandished as a weapon to legally recognise subjects of a state, conferring specific rights on some but not others. All citizens, in the original etymology, are civil.² Even if the Home Secretary isn’t.

But the civic is also something bigger than that, something a simple dictionary definition and its etymology doesn’t quite do justice to. The idea of the civic permeates every aspect of our lives. The interactions between neighbours, the council collection of bins, the busy-ness of the school run. Taking a book out from the library, volunteering at a local charity, going out to vote in council elections at the community hall around the corner. These are all civic moments, built by a shared sense of space and belonging. The difficulty in defining what ‘civic’ means to us today, then, stems from the fact that it is everywhere and everything. It is a simple idea with wide-ranging consequences, which is hard to tack down in exactitude, even if we instinctively understand its meaning: as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964 on the subject of pornography, I know it when I see it.

According to Google, use of the word in English reached its peak in 1945. There was then a steady decline which bottomed out in the early 1980s. This is no surprise. The politics of the West at this time, led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, left no allowance for the idea that people could be connected to one another without a selfish motive. In the eighties, the individual was all. There was no such thing as society.

And after a slow growth in the word’s usage until the midnoughties, it again began falling after the financial crash of 2008. In the last ten years, we’ve seen an assault on the idea of civic life. Those things we might closely associate with ‘the civic’ – libraries, community centres, youth groups – have been decimated by governments intent on cutting budgets and encouraging private enterprise, depriving populations of places to meet, work, and play. The word ‘civic’ might now sound a little fusty, a yawn-inducing memory of a bygone era. That’s no