During a recent radio interview about the National Theatre’s forthcoming season, its director, Nicholas Hytner, said that one thing he would really like to see there, in the future, would be a “good, mischievous, right-wing play”.
Listeners on the political right, theatregoers or not, were doubtless nodding in agreement, if not some astonishment. While they might welcome such an event, the underlying implication in Hytner’s intriguing statement — that such a production would be an unusual occurrence — would certainly have also confirmed them in their traditionally held conviction that the contemporary arts, in general, stand firmly behind enemy lines. Creative types, whether novelists, film directors, TV producers or playwrights, are invariably — goes the argument — on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Arty people are leftie people (you only have to look in the jobs pages of The Guardian), so the stuff they produce is leftie too.
What kind of play did Hytner have in mind, I asked. He’s unsure how you’d define it. “I don’t know what a mischievous left-wing play is any more,” he says. Would he, for example, welcome the appearance of a play that questioned the basic tenets of multiculturalism? “Totally,” he says. He could, then, imagine a play that questioned prevailing orthodoxies about such matters? “I could only imagine a play that questioned the prevailing orthodoxies.”
The National’s most recent political dramas have been by authors from the liberal-left tradition. But, says Hytner, the polemical theatre of the 1970s and 1980s no longer holds much sway, and he wouldn’t categorise David Edgar’s Playing with Fire, which depicted racial tensions in a northern town, as a particularly left-wing play at all. It’s certainly true that the play included a monologue on government race policies, by a sympathetic character, that one could see going down well with sections of the Tory rank and file. Similarly, David Hare’s anti-war play, Stuff Happens, contained two eloquent pro-war speeches, which caused a palpably uncomfortable silence in an audience that had come, seemingly, to hear its views echoed on stage. And the effect of those speeches was to elevate the play from the pool of otherwise predictable exercises in left-wing anti-American agitprop.
There’s also an important distinction to be made between a hypothetical right-wing play with a big R, and one that is conservative with a small c. “Our biggest hit, since I took over as director, has been an unequivocally small-c conservative play,” says Hytner. “Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is a conservative play, in a way that a great deal of art is conservative. It’s specifically concerned with the preservation of that which is culturally enriching from the past. It ends on the message: ‘Pass it on, boys... pass it on.’”
Hytner adds that the theatre has always been sceptical of authority, whatever its political complexion. Does that mean that those bemoaning a lack of right-wing art are barking up the wrong tree? “If there is a right wing that is thin-skinned about the preservation of the status quo,” he says, “then the theatre and many of the arts are always going to appear to be in opposition to that.” The political right shouldn’t be worried, he says, by the perception that artists tend to be on the left, something that is, in fact, more a tendency to be unusually empathetic. “I don’t think unusual, universal empathy is the preserve of the left,” he adds.
Yet all this doesn’t explain the apparent absence of creative voices with specifically right-wing assumptions, especially at a time when that status quo, and the orthodoxies surrounding it, could hardly be called conservative in the traditional sense.
“The criticism of the Labour establishment in the arts world is quite muted,” says Hugo Swire, the Conservative shadow minister for culture, “but, in so much as it exists at all, it tends to come from old Labour, from the Harold Pinters of this world. This government has become very prescriptive and rather Cromwellian in its diktats and control-freakery, and you would have thought that writers and musicians and film-makers would pick up on that and at least be rattling the gilded cage.”
So, where are the right-wing artists? Do conservatives not do these kinds of things? You could agree with the view put in these pages by AA Gill, some weeks back, that, broadly speaking, the right conserves and the left creates, or with the belief that the most enduring art tends to be subversive. However, where that leaves such figures as Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward, Graham Greene and Edward Elgar becomes a matter for debate.
“Conservatives do write plays, are film producers and do write music,” says Swire, “but I think there’s a small left-leaning club who sort of feed off each other. A lot of them still behave as though we’re in 1983.”
Whether or not you agree with that, it’s hard to deny that if there are right-wing artists or writers out there now, they are certainly keeping a low profile. It’s fair to say one will look in vain, through the listings pages, for a film about an African dictator who uses western aid to fund his lavish lifestyle, or a TV drama centring on the loss of the social moorings of a sympathetically portrayed white couple in an area of mass immigration. Other than genre writers, such as the famously right-wing Frederick Forsyth and George McDonald Fraser, you’ll have difficulty finding a voguish “serious” novelist who, like Michel Houellebecq in France, has his characters blast Islam as backward. And, although much visual art has become so concerned with self-expression as to be almost irrelevant in terms of a wider political debate, public art, which has undergone something of a renaissance in the past decade, has been co-opted for social uses, often to make a point, along liberal lines, about social inclusion and prejudice; the most famous example, perhaps, being Alison Lapper Pregnant, on Trafalgar Square.
There’s another way of looking at all this, however, which is that with the ascent of political correctness, any kind of real dissent is currently at a low ebb in the arts. “The terms right wing and left wing are not helpful in politics today,” says Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas think-tank. “The issue is not the lack of right-wing playwrights, but rather that certain orthodoxies are espoused by everyone, with little critical engagement. From diversity and identity politics to environmentalism, Tories, Labour and Lib Dems are indistinguishable. Nobody is going against these orthodoxies.”
She largely agrees with the notion that if the right won the economic arguments, the left won the culture wars. “In the sphere of culture, cultural relativism and political correctness dominate most institutions. This is not because those institutions are full of ‘lefties’, but rather that these ideas are rarely challenged by anyone.” Perhaps, when it finally comes along, Hytner’s mischievous right-wing play will set the ball rolling.
