James Haddrell speaks on playwright diversity in education – South London News

A report released by Bloomsbury Publishing, and reported on by The Stage Newspaper, has drawn attention to the lack of diverse playwrights featured in the GCSE and A-level curriculum for literature in England and Wales.

With only 10 per cent of GCSE texts and four per cent of A-level texts written by playwrights from the global majority, there is clearly a disparity between what is being demanded by exam boards and what teachers and pupils are asking for – with a reported 93 per cent of teachers wishing to teach, and 65 per cent of pupils wishing to study, work by a more ethnically diverse range of writers.

Statistics of that nature feel damning, but actually, as well as offering some criticism for the exam boards, a report like this one should draw attention to the root cause – which, in this case, is surely a historic (though not solely historic) lack of opportunity for diverse writers.

Of course, if exam boards wanted to make changes to their reading lists, they could easily add work by a range of writers of colour – I am absolutely not denying the existence of great plays by non-white playwrights – but the statistics offer a distilled view of a cultural issue.

There are far more white than non-white playwrights in the canon, more productions of plays by white writers than not, and that is what needs to change.

So how do you change a canon of texts that has had a strangle-hold on educational practice for decades?

Who comes off the list in order for new playwrights to go on the list? Nobody is arguing that Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ibsen or Miller should no longer be studied, but that already reduces the flexibility availability to the exam boards in creating their lists.

The problem is the links between students and exam boards are cyclic and self-perpetuating.

Teaching Tennessee Williams to students now means that Williams will be a go-to playwright in 20 years’ time with nothing having changed.

Margaret Bartley, editorial director for Literary Drama at Bloomsbury, was right when she told The Stage that “publishers, theatre-makers, examiners and teachers need to work together to deliver change to the curriculum.”

We need to create a culture in theatre and education where modern drama, which reflects the lives and identities of the students studying that drama, is fast-tracked, granted a kind of establishment recognition quickly so that publication is financially viable, exam boards feel a stronger affinity with those texts, and teachers therefore have the opportunity to share them with the very audiences that theatres are striving to attract.

We have seen in the recent Arts Council funding decisions that companies with global majority leadership are set to be well supported in the coming years.

With that in place and new diverse work set to make the move from page to stage, we now just need the reverse links to be built, taking work back from the stage to the classroom and finding its way to the exam paper.

Perhaps we need to open up the Arts Council remit, and build links between producing venues, publishers and exam boards, with a remit to commission a certain number of new plays each year from global majority writers for immediate production and study.

We, at Greenwich, would certainly be excited by such a prospect.

 

Picture: Narek75/ Wikimedia Commons

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