Brief thoughts on Ed Vaizey's ramble

There's some truth in Ed Vaizey's observation that a decent majority of people working in the arts are left wing, but really, there's a surfeit of right-wing art. Andrew Lloyd-Webber does quite well, for example, and I expect Ed Vaizey has heard of him. Tom Stoppard does ok too. The Lion King is the most conservative thing I've ever seen and Billy Elliott is such an incredibly rare example of a West End musical with explicit leftist politics that I can't think of another one.

And his examples of plays whose failure to exist somehow proves his point that theatre is "relentlessly left-wing" are just weird. I don't know of a single anti-Brexit play either (not least because there hasn't been time), although I do know that the NT are planning a fence-sitting verbatim piece that will please either no-one or everyone. I must have been on paternity leave when all the pro-unionisation plays were on this year. And are there dozens of pro-Venezuela plays that I'm somehow missing?

​As a theatre-maker whose work actually *is* relentlessly left-wing, I resent the implication that everyone else is at it too. Most of the main stage work I see is politically horrible. I expect Vaizey would like it a great deal.